Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

In my household growing up, we watched Saturday morning cartoons. Scooby Doo, Fat Albert, Super Friends, Schoolhouse Rock! My favorite was The Jackson 5ive. The animated iconic Jackson brothers and their classic songs and choreography set the stage for Soul Train, which brought us the latest dance crazes and fashion.

My friends and I were shaped by the worst and best kitsch of the 1980s including World Wide Wrestling, which came on after the cartoons and the dancing. We imitated the wrestlers' fake slaps, sleeper holds, and ring tosses, violence that made us laugh, that toughened us. Then, something magical happened, something that upended our expectations in the world as boys becoming men.

Today’s poem honors how popular culture made room for a different kind of masculinity in the most unlikely of shows, the World Wrestling Federation with Chief Jay Strongbow, André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair and “Adorable” Adrian Adonis.

Ode to the Pink Cowboy Hat
by Quinn Carver Johnson

& in the summer of 1986,
“I Wanna Be a Cowboy”
was No. 12 on the charts

& the music video featured
a man, a best of the bad type, 
buck naked except his hat,
smoking a blunt in the bath

& MTV hated the video—
said it wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll—
but the song was a smash hit
so they had no choice

& that’s how it found me
two decades later: a child
discovering the last remnants 
of VHS tapes in their room

as the cartoon thought bubble 
begins to expand, learning
that a fantasy looks like
a naked cowboy in his bathtub

& that was the summer of 2006
but in the summer of 1986
Boys Don’t Cry released
their only major hit song

& during that same summer,
& that summer only,
Bob Orton wore a pink hat
when he came to the ring
alongside the adorable one,
when visiting Adrian Adonis
in the Flower Shop, when 
bludgeoning his old friend
Roddy Piper in the ring

& it’s telling that Lemmy Kilmister
plays a spaghetti western cowboy
in the video for “I Wanna Be a Cowboy”
& I watched those old westerns
in the boxes of VHS tapes

& it’s telling that in those films
the hero wears the white hat,
rides into town on a white stallion
to gun down the villain beneath
the midnight brim

& I don’t need to tell you
what it means that “Cowboy”
Bob Orton came to the ring
in a pink hat, paired with
Adonis’s lace & eye shadow

& I don’t need to tell you 
who the villain of the story was
or who was gunned down 
when Roddy Piper decided
that a town wasn’t big enough
for two men

but what I need to tell you is
I can make a town or a home
big enough for two men

All it takes is a small garden
in the windowsill—here,
take this spade, gather me
a handful of soil from the park
& I could plant seeds in the ground,
beg rain from the clouds, turn 
Piper’s Pit into the Flower Shop

I would tug at lavender leaves &
draw you a bath, roll the herb tight,
& add mint to your tea

if you’re going to be a cowboy 
then I wanna be a cowboy too
& I want to wear the pink hat

“Ode to the Pink Cowboy Hat" by Quinn Carver Johnson from THE PERFECT BASTARD © 2023 by Northwestern University. Published 2023 by Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press.