A Fork to the Head

Sunny loves wrestling. Guy occasionally shows him Youtube clips of the pro wrestling stars he remembers from the 1980s, and whenever Guy and Sunny play-wrestle, Sunny always wants me to call the matches. I'm supposed to yell in Vince McMahon style, "AND IN THIS CORNER, THE UNDERTAKER!"

Once we heard that the Decatur Book Festival would be featuring a "literary wrestling match", we had to go check it out.

The Decatur Book Festival has built on partnerships with artistic, educational, business, and governmental organizations from Atlanta and all over the nation, and is now the largest independent book festival in the country and the fourth largest overall.

At this point, we could just keep doing what we’ve been doing and call that “good enough,” but where’s the fun in that? Here are some of the new and unique programs we’ve added to this year’s festival:

Wrestling Match: Is the pen mightier than the sword? Novelist, writer, and journalist Michael Muhammad Knight and legendary professional wrestler Abdullah the Butcher face off for the first time. Abdullah is widely known for his brutal fighting style.

The match was short but intense.  First introduced, the young Michael Muhammad Knight danced around the ring wearing a fancy cape embroidered with his initials.  He sounds like an interesting writer -- I think he's pioneering a sort of "avant-garde American Islamic" genre.

Then Abdullah the Butcher was introduced. He's a local hero, even though he always played the villain as a pro wrestler. In his heyday he was billed as the "Madman from the Sudan" but was actually born in Canada. He semi-retired to Atlanta, where he runs "Abdullah the Butcher's House of Ribs and Chinese Food".

It took a while for Abdullah to walk up to the ring. Once he reached the ring, I had serious doubts as to whether he would be able to climb up into it, due to age and weight considerations.

Before he could attempt the climb, MMK attacked him from inside the ring, and tried to kick him in the head. Abdullah grabbed MMK's foot, dragged him out of the ring and onto the ground, got him in a headlock, threw him to the ground again and bashed him on the head with a chair.  Then he bashed MMK with the chair a couple more times.  Then he stabbed him in the head with a fork.  Copious amounts of bright red blood covered MMK.  At this point, disregarding Dekalb Medical's sponsorship of the event, all the onlookers began screaming, "CALL GRADY!  CALL GRADY!"  I reassured Sunny that the blood was fake.  Abdullah wrapped up the short but intense match by bashing the prone MMK with a large water cooler jug, then turned around and headed back to his House of Ribs van.  I think the whole thing lasted about five minutes.

When I told Ojiichan about the event, he immediately recognized who Abdullah the Butcher was.  "He is very popular in Japan," he said.  Apparently the fork to the head is a classic schtick.

Sunny did have a nightmare last night that someone stabbed him in the head with a fork, but he said it wasn't too bad, because he was OK afterwards in the dream.  I hope I haven't scarred him too permanently.