Gator Wrestlin' Nun
July 10, 1998

My thoughts often travel back to my first grade years at Starkansaw Parochial School and Sister Regina Del Fuego. You know her. Sister's picture is in the dictionary next to the words punishment, degradation, and humiliation.

Picture little Raiford in a starch-white dress-shirt, navy blue tie and maroon sweater - that was the girls' uniform Sister Del Fuego made me wear when I disrupted class one day by raising my hand and asking to go to the bathroom. She excelled in gender torture to enforce rules, such as making me walk in the girls' lines to chapel or tying a dainty pink ribbon in my hair. Real troublemakers were called "mister" and made to stand all day wearing one of Sister's low-cut black evening gowns that we suspected she wore on her vacations.

"Mis-ter Starke. Thank you for the spitball demonstration. Now PUT ON THE GOWN!"

Though she was a small woman, no one messed with Sister Regina. Legend had it that she once jumped in a canal and beat up an alligator that had swallowed her dog. "Scars and pain haunt my life," she used to tell us, "but I've learned how to live and I've learned to survive."

Like I said, we would do just about anything to avoid Sister Regina's reign of terror, and we would constantly try to appease her like the sycophantic lemmings that we were. One kid, Sean Rowe, was particularly adept at this. He became the teacher's pet. He would go to great lengths to lie, cheat and snitch his way into Sister Regina's favor.

He was always ratting everybody out, ofttimes making stuff up as he went along, so everybody would look bad and he would look good. Years later, Sean was convicted of mail fraud and sent to prison for a couple of years, where he was bought and sold into white slavery for so many cartons of cigarettes to whomever would give him the most protection from the larger, fiercer inmates. I kind of lost track of ol' Sean for a while after that.

But what goes around comes around.

So here I was playing blues at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, recently, about as far away from Starkansaw as you can possibly get. Because of its notoriously strict measures on crime (death penalty for drug traffickers, cane lashings for graffiti, orange bibs for litter bugs) there is very little crime, drugs or trash to be found on the streets. And the people are generally very educated, polite and cheerful. "Wow!" I thought, "This is kind of like Starkansaw!"

About the time I started singing that old Starke hit "Gator Wrestlin' Nun," three jack-booted uniformed men took my guitar away and started handcuffing me. "Hey what's going on? What'd I do?" I said.

The head officer spoke. "Sir, you can't perform any songs with the words 'nun' and 'alligator' in the same line. And that chewin'gum holding your strap on your guitar is not allowed either. We do not promote that kind of behavior here. You must come with us."

They took me inside a building down a long corridor through some steel double doors that slowly opened, revealing an old woman in a black habit, hands folded, sitting behind a desk. There was a big silver star on her habit and a gun holstered where her rosary beads used to hang.

"Sister Regina?" I said blinking my eyes. "In Singapore?"

She walked from behind the desk with that old yardstick toying in her hands. "Old habits die hard, eh Mr. Starke," she said running the end of the yardstick up my belly to my Adam's apple.

"You know, we take the law very seriously here, Mr. Starke. Normally, your little 'jive' performance would have earned you five lashings of the cane, but I've decided to give this one my own personal touch!"

She snapped her fingers and the guards doused my backside with antiseptic. She got behind me and wound up that yardstick ready to strike. "Just like old times, eh Mr. Starke?!" She broke out in this maniacal laugh that reverberated off the steel walls. I passed out and never felt a thing.

Somehow I woke up back in the U-S-S-A, in the office of the Seminole Tribune. I was sitting in front of a computer, wondering if this was all a bad dream, when in comes Thomas Storm the alligator wrestler, ranting and raving about a New Times article about his recent trip to Singapore.

"Let me see that article," I said. I couldn't believe it when I saw the writer's name. Sean Rowe! The same compulsive liar I knew back in parochial school. No wonder Thomas was stormin'! It was just loaded with untruths and inaccuracies about not only the whole Singapore trip but about Storm's own personal history as well. "Can you believe that?" the burly gator wrestler said. "This guy's trying to ruin me!"

I sat Tom down in front of a keyboard. "This is how we fight back," I said. I shoved a disc in the A-drive. It made that familiar click to let me know it was loaded. "We hit them with the truth, Tom ol' buddy. A letter to the editor!"

"Yeah," he said with a devilish grin, "and if none of this works, we take 'em to the alligator pit!"

I broke out in a cold sweat and looked all around. "None" and "alligator" in the same line. My backside started to ache. Guilt was killing me. Please forgive me, Sister.Del Fuego. I will never sing "Gator Wrestling Nun" again. YEE-OUCH!

-- Note: The opinions of Raiford Starke are not necessarily those of the Seminole Tribune or the Seminole Tribe of Florida

© July 10, 1998, The Seminole Tribune