It's the Best of Times for Team Old Guy. It Was the Worst of Times for Team Old Guy.
The Mike Tyson shanda of the other night and the MMA PPV of last night was enough to make you wonder how much of no country could old men claim these days.
It was an Internet sensation at the point where “Internet sensations” were not punchlines. When I heard about it, curiously enough, I was sitting in the living room of a woman who had claimed she was his PR agent.
“Oh my G-d…” She had walked off to the bathroom, after her phone had rung, and through the door I could hear the rush of conversation on and around damage control. I sat on the couch sipping a glass of water and being much more than glad that it wasn’t me who was presently in need of damage control.
But my phone started going nuts too and before she returned from the restroom I had been made aware of what the hubbub was about, bub: Glenn Danzig had been knocked out by Danny Marianino. Backstage at a show in Arizona. And there was video.
The PR agent emerged from behind her bathroom door and she ran the first line of defense out for me. Danzig had been assaulted by a “fortune hunter” and rather than run the risk of a lengthy court battle Danzig, himself, decided it was the better part of valor to take the shot, the knockout and keep his very deep pockets intact.
At first I smiled. Then I laughed.
“Fuck that shit, bro…” Harley was not relenting. “Danzig is fucking 60 years old. Think about that.”
She drove me to the airport, largely in silence. I hadn’t bought it and moreover, was never going to buy it. But due diligence, I later track Marianino down and interview him, leaving me much more than sure that Danzig got what was coming to him.
But then two things happened.
One of the guys who ran the record label I was on at that time called me and put it to me, simple and plain: “hey…would it fuck up your bad ass narrative overly much if YOU were to get knocked out like Danzig did?”
“HAH! Why/how?” I answered. “I mean I’m not selling myself as the ultimate bad ass. In fact I wrote a book on fighting where I spend chapters talking very specifically about getting my ass all kinds of kicked.” The chasm of what had happened to Danzig and what hadn’t happened to me had started to loom larger. “No. My ‘brand’ if that’s what you’re talking about is not about that. In my world it rains on the just and the unjust alike.”
This satisfied him so much so that when chatting later with Harley Flanagan, founder of the Cro-Mags and Renzo Gracie Jiu Jitsu black belt, I started to re-tell it. Only Harley was having none of it, and was quick to say so.
“Fuck that shit, bro…” Harley was not relenting. “Danzig is fucking 60 years old. Think about that.”
See, I had forgotten that his personal connections with the man go back at least as long as his personal connections to me, while Danzig had had no real personhood for me. His was just a name and it was just a story and I considered it as such. But Harley’s counter killed me as it reminded me that deals with the devil or not, no one was free from the shackles of time.
More proof, actually much more proof than I ever thought I needed, was dragged up in front of me this past weekend, virtue of a boxing “exhibition”. I’m only a partial boxing fan these days but not seeing a generational compatriot and Brooklyn native, Mike Tyson, fight a social media influencer Jake Paul, was not in the cards.
Which was ridiculous. I mean whether I go into the bear’s cave or get dragged in, the outcome will still always be a mauling that will leave you sad. So whether Tyson wins or loses I had already factored, I was going to be miserable. If he won, I’d be sad that he was “reduced” to playing to a stadium of suckers to pay the rent. If he lost, well, he lost to a social media influencer…a sentence that can conclude without much further explanation.
Spoiler alert: Tyson lost.
Yeah, ok, losing a match he got paid $20 mil for is not the same as watching your entire family get vaporized but that’s a difference and not a distinction.
And he didn’t just lose. Like Robert DeNiro in The Irishman, where he singlehandedly proved that de-aging technology doesn’t work, Tyson’s giveaway that this wasn’t the Tyson of old, told in how he moved his body. He moved like an old man. Which carried us up from his legs to his ass hanging out of his truss to a face that seemed much more suited to a chair in front of a fire.
It was the face of regretful sorrow and when I worked at the Lost Battalion in Queens where the clientele was largely composed of elderly Holocaust survivors, I thought I’d never bathe in a sadness so deep. Seeing Tyson’s face this was all I could see though.
Yeah, ok, losing a match he got paid $20 mil for is not the same as watching your entire family get vaporized but that’s a difference and not a distinction. Certainly not when you realize that he actually chose to do this.
I also chose, as illustrated in the above photo, to fight Cain Velasquez, former heavyweight champion. It was for an article but I knew the deal and in the middle of the fight when Velasquez realized I was not just a journalist, he turned it on and up. Later I stood on the sidewalk blinking against the sun while calling Harley on the phone. He understood the game. He was so…so sane…when it came to Danzig, of course he would understand my plight as it was laid out for him, my voice choking with emotion.
“What the FUCK did you expect?!?” He laughed. Bro, I’m an old man too, you know? “Fuck THAT. If you didn’t know what you were walking into, that’s your dumbass fault.”
In this he was right. And I shook it off, or as every gym coach ever has advised, I walked it off.
Moreover this last Saturday, an elderly gentleman, name of Jon Jones, fought another middle-aged man, Stipe Miocic. Jones won, in savage fashion, his marshmallowy soft body bludgeoning Miocic into first broken, then done, by the third round. Jones then, unexpectedly, broke out into a Donald Trump dance shuffle.
The same dance Trump must have done when he dispatched first, the elderly Joe Biden, and then his erstwhile Vice President. But Trump is old, however even as old as he is, he seems not at all troubled by existential concerns connected to aging. And at the very least not at all concerned about the existential concerns he’s causing some portion of the rest of us to have.
So as I stagger around the house today, my right knee out of sorts, and see the division yawning big and wide, I wonder about this walking in versus dragged in deal. Trump and Jones? Walking in. Tyson, Miocic? Dragged in. Is that now our position on aging? Should it be?
A friend of a friend though was sitting at a bar with boxing champ Jake La Motta. La Motta and his much younger girlfriend, a singer, chatted with him. She had wanted a karaoke machine. He had one. He told her, in front of La Motta, that he’d bring it by. La Motta leaned out from his barstool and fixed him with a look: “you go through me with that.”
It wasn’t a question and I could feel his tone in the retelling so I had to ask: “did he think he could take on the 80-year-old La Motta?”
“Absolutely not.”
So there it is. The win, perhaps, is in going out as you’ve lived. Trump, the unqualified? Now slated to be the most powerful man in the material world. Jones, with not a scratch on him, is still being called The Baddest Man On the Planet. Danny Marianino is a published author.
Those riven with doubt, concern and uncertainty? Biden, Miocic, Danzig and…um…yeah, me, I guess. Well you have to learn how to be dragged before you can learn how to walk. Into caves, and other places. Meaning it’s probably less about winning, and therefore losing, and much more about being able to walk out like you came in.
Something we all need to endeavor to do. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a nap to take.
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 70 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps, if everyone helps. Or so they tell me.
If you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.
And FINALLY the new BUNUEL is creeping out….be about it. ON SALE DATE is OCTOBER 25, 2024. For digital. Vinyl, CD and cassette? November 22.
And now THIS…the monster live. For starters. This February. Be there.
Ah yes - getting old. What fun. I think one of the ways I'm trying to be smarter about it is recognizing facts. If I'm out riding my bike and get that little thought "I *should* be able to climb this hill way faster, I useta be able to..." I can push it back with reality: that was then; this is now.
Doesn't stop me from doing my best, though, and I'm still out there doing it.