Fred Aiken Writing

I don’t know why people call him El Tigre. I think it might have something to do with when he was a kid and every Halloween his mother would paint Randall in orange and black body paint and pin an orange and black tail to his black gym shorts and he would go around the neighborhood roaring at adults that handed him candy. His mother was obsessed with Winnie the Pooh when she was growing up, and she most identified with Tigger and his boundless, imaginary energy that she suspected, in retrospect, and after years of psychology training and study, was due to her undiagnosed adolescent ADHD. A neighbor of Randall’s, a Guatemalan husband and wife that had fled the country during the mass genocides of the 1980’s thought Randall was adorable and began calling him El Tigre whenever they saw him walking and playing around the cul-de-sac, and the nickname sort of stuck.

So, I guess that is to say, I do kinda know why they call him El Tigre. At least, I knew how he got the name. Why and how the nickname stuck into Randall’s adulthood, well, I guess that’s more of a mystery.

When Randall turned 16, he began to workout furiously. He obsessed over becoming muscular and tough and strong. He needed to be the strongest kid in his class. He did not have the usual reasons, such as being bullied when he was younger and wanting to exact some amount of revenge on his torturers, nor did Randall play any sports that required him to be in such physical shape. But rather, Randall got it in his head one day that in order to go from being a child to a young adult to a one day full-fledged adult, he would need to have muscles in order to do so.

His mother blamed television for such an influence, but due to the serotonin release he received when working out and how happy and well-rounded he became as a result of his muscular obsession and improvement, she did not stop him. Rather, her tacitness became passive approval of her son’s change in mood and behavior.

Despite not searching to join or become a part of a school team sport, the wrestling coach at Randall’s school sought him out after witnessing his pupil’s sudden change in stature and form. Coach Bilsby approached Randall one day after gym class and told Randall that he would be perfect for wrestling.

In Randall’s mind, he instinctively went to WWE-style wrestling, and thus he agreed to come to the team’s next practice. He would declare to his teammates that his wrestling name was El Tigre.

But alas, traditional wrestling was not what Randall expected. He watched as the other boys in spandex and sweat tussled on the ground. To Randall, the other boys looked to be having a seizure while hugging one another in outfits that left little to the imagination. The gym smelled like adolescent sweat and dirty sneakers. The entire ambiance of wrestling lost its allure for Randall pretty quickly, and he declined Coach Bilsby’s offer to join the wrestling team.

Randall sought grander aspirations. So, as any teenager that watched grownups in colorful spandex getups and made-up names and personas, Randall took his childhood nickname, El Tigre, and made his own wrestling persona from it. That’s how we got El Tigre. It’s how I came to know him, coming up at the same time in the amateur wrestling circuit. It’s how I ended up in the hospital after El Tigre taped a pair of ham spirals to his hands and beat me mercilessly until I was unconscious during our matchup. As I lay bleeding from multiple orifices, fellow amateur wrestlers and promoters had to pull El Tigre off of me as the crowd cheered and screeched their approval. El Tigre! El Tigre! I heard. And that’s the last I remembered.