The Man in the New Boots

It was about an hour before rider check-in when I realized I didn’t have a cup. This was a problem because my old buddy Joshua was fond of telling me about how he had watched a hoof strike between his legs and seen the fate of countless future generations pass before his eyes. My wife was already worried about the microplastics in my balls, so I knew I had to take precautions. The problem was that my mom had somehow forgotten to save my old jockstrap from high school.

“We could stop by Dick’s,” my sister suggested. “So you can protect your nuts.”

But we were already several weeks deep into the local Little League season, and Dick’s was fresh out. We headed instead to the Walmart off the 101 and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard. The sun hung high on a late winter afternoon in Phoenix.

“You know, you had an uncle who was a bull rider,” my mom said, staring out the windshield.

Nobody knew why I was doing this, so there was a felt need to make sense of things.

“Which side?”

“My mom’s side.”

“Her father’s side were all rodeo clowns,” my dad said.

“Doesn’t make a difference,” my sister said flatly. She looked out at the blue glow of the McDowells, still wet from the weekend rain. “Mom’s adopted. You don’t have any of those excuses in you.”

***

Here’s one way I might explain all this: there are these cave paintings of bulls, in shades of apricot, tallow, and flint, that I look at on my phone when I have trouble falling asleep. Usually the artists gather the animals together in rows and herds, “flowing in long strides down some run of time through the silence of the mountain’s hollow,” as Guy Davenport once described the paintings. Occasionally, though, one creature is pared off from the rest, and it is only in these situations that man enters the picture. In what is likely the earliest image of a man and a bull, in the Chauvet cave paintings, the head of a bison merges fluidly into the lower body of a woman, as though the two beings had for a moment melded wills, or come together in a perfect ride.

Seventeen thousand years later, at a cave in Lascaux, France, Paleolithic man painted a bull—an auroch, extinct now, that had shoulders as tall as a shooting guard—with its flank speared and a gash pouring blood. Directly in front of it, lying on the ground, is a man with his arms out and his legs stiff. The man is pretty clearly dead. The angle of the spear indicates that he attacked the bull from behind, yet somehow he wound up in front of the bull’s horns.

How does a man who approaches a bull from behind wind up dead on the opposite side of it? Ask an archaeologist, and you’re bound to get some fustian explanation of the origins of Greek fertility rituals. Ask any rodeo fan, though, and you’ll get a straighter answer: Seventeen thousand years ago, man discovered bull riding. And man got bucked.

***

At Walmart they were all out of cups, but they did sell adult-size jockstraps and children’s shin guards, in hot pink. I took a chance.

“Put this in your purse,” I told my mom, reaching toward the back seat to hand her what was in my estimation not only a passable but in fact superior model of protective equipment. She recoiled from this new perversion of all sense and meaning.

“I don’t want to hold that.”

“Just until I get inside and can get changed.”

“Why don’t you put it in your pocket?”

“I don’t want the bouncer to pat me down and think I’m some kind of pervert.”

“Well, what’s he gonna think of me?”

We drove north up Pima Road. When my grandparents moved the family here in the sixties, they lived not far from Pima’s south end, which ran like a mullion between the reservation and the suburbs. In Phoenix my grandfather traded in the habits of an Indiana farm boy for pearl-snap shirts and string ties and a pair of oxblood cowboy boots, which I donned for the occasion. My dad wore green ostrich-skin boots that were still too big for me.

***

On either side of Pima today, the desert tolerates hutches of country clubs built atop sagebrush and greasewood, but as we drove farther north into the small enclave of Carefree, the developments broke up and the sun came busting through through like a lost dog. At the Buffalo Chip Saloon and Steakhouse, I signed a legal waiver releasing the Mercer Rodeo Co. of any liability upon my injury or death. I was told to return to the ring in an hour, at which time I could be suited in the helmet and vest they peeled off the corpse of the previous rider. I was told I could not know my place in the lineup in advance because “we can’t control what the steers do.” I was told I could not drink until after my ride.

I walked over to the bar and sat there with a club soda and watched a looping highlight reel of bull riders getting their shit rocked not fifty yards from where I was sitting. A man nearby saw me watching the TV and said: “Are you going to do that?”

“I am.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you must be.”

“Yeah.”

“I think you must be crazy to do that.”

“I guess so.”

He asked if he could buy me a drink. I told him I couldn’t drink right now. He said: “Did you lose some kind of bet?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you trying to get laid?”

“No, sir.”

“You must be crazy then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” he said. “Don’t break a leg.”

***

The first bull riders in North America were vaqueros: mestizo ranch hands hired to work the haciendas of the Spanish aristocracy. The vaqueros transformed traditional Spanish fiestas into charreadas, which showcased their flair in horsemanship. Among the games they played was the puerta de la muerte, in which a rider leapt from a saddled horse onto a wild one, still celebrated in Mexico to this day; the carrera de gallos, in which one rider lassoed a rooster, then attempted to evade other riders who chased him, now unfortunately an artifact of antiquity; and the jaripeo, in which the vaqueros took the Spanish tradition of bullfighting and elevated it from the foreplay of teasing a bull with capes and swords to the passion of riding one bareback until it either got tired and threw you off, fainted, or died.

When the American cattleman Richard King assembled his famous King Ranch in Corpus Christi, Texas, he imported vaqueros for their unmatched expertise. With them came the jaripeo. It traveled north with the cowboys, until it reached Colonel William Frederick Cody on the North Platte River. Cody incorporated bull riding into a show he described as “America’s National Entertainment, the Real Thing! No Imitation About It, All True! All Honest!” The bucking competitions were probably the only truly authentic element of the show.

For some reason the lowly jaripeo, never the main event of Mexican roundups, became a fixation for Americans. Maybe it had something to do with a Puritan lust for self-sacrifice. Maybe it was the superego of Manifest Destiny, reminding us that we might bridle the country but will never tame it. Maybe it’s that it’s goddamned insane to ride a bull, and America is full of crazy people who for no earthly reason see that sort of thing and want to try it themselves.

***

In the bathroom stall the sound of my belt buckle hitting the tile floor announced to all present that there was a pervert in the room. I slung on my shin guards and jockstrap and did a few squats. I gave my groin a few good knocks and was satisfied.

Outside, the sun had begun to settle behind the hilltop that cradled the ring. This whole saloon burned down ten years ago in a fire that the local paper described as “suspicious.” The only thing that survived were the clapboard stage flats that line the south side of the ring and give the place its Old West charm. These were now slightly obscured by posters from the rodeo’s sponsors: Cowboy Channel, RFD-TV (“Rural America’s Most Important Network”), and a conservative political action group with the slogan BUCK BIG GOV. The crowd gathered on the bleachers was a mix of North Valley libertarian types—less Wranglers and a Colt .45 and more stretch denim and a Glock—and bachelorette parties that took costly Ubers up from Scottsdale. By nightfall all five hundred seats were filled.

Behind the bucking chutes, I got acquainted with the rodeo clowns—beautiful men who distract bulls with their torn denim skirts, oversize suspenders, and jeweled belts—and a gruff bunch of steer handlers. The only other novice rider was a twenty-year-old from Miami named Raúl. Raúl had a thick mustache and a racing hat and looked like he knew a thing or two about cheap thrills.

“They say to me to tuck your chin, straight back, and just ride that thing,” he told me, swirling his hips. “Ride it till you can’t no more.”

The other riders were all cowboys, men with the bark on. This was not a sanctioned event in the Professional Bull Riding circuit, so they were relieved from the mandate to wear protective headgear. There was $2,500 on the line and a rowdy Tennessee blonde in row no. 3, and these guys weren’t trying to hide face. In Minoan society, the horns of a bull were thought to be potent reservoirs of fertility, and men and women sought favor by attempting to throw themselves between the horns of a wild bull. At the end of the festival, the king, dressed in the hide of a bull, made love to his queen in a field surrounded by his subjects. The cowboys were jonesing to know which steer they were gonna pull in the lineup. Sidewinder. Tornado. 2 Beers. Freebird. High Deductible.

I was given a Bauer hockey helmet and a thick leather vest and told to suit up. When a good-hearted handler saw me struggling with my chin strap, he stepped over to give me a hand.

“Let these pussies tighten their own helmets,” someone shouted from near the chute.

“Remember when it was my first time?” the handler called back. “You did it for me.”

“I was too nice to you,” the voice said, softly.

We trotted out into the ring for prayer and the national anthem. We took a knee in the freshly turned dirt. The cowboys removed their hats and bowed their heads. The preacher commended us athletes to Christ, and a woman named Jan from Wyoming sang about the land of the free and the home of the brave. Then it was rodeo time.

***

At least twenty people have died in bull-riding competitions since the early twentieth century. The first man killed was in Arizona in 1922. That was back when cowboys poured a bisulfate of carbon they called High Life on their steers to elicit a good buck. When a radio announcer asked the crowd for a volunteer steer rider, twenty-five-year-old Frank Stephens of the Big Sandy River Valley raised his hand. Nobody asked him why. He shortly found his skull fractured beneath the weight of his mount and died in the ring.

The most notorious incident in the history of the sport was in 1989, when the legendary Lane Frost rode Takin’ Care of Business at the Cheyenne Frontier Days, the biggest stage in rodeo. Frost, twenty-five, successfully rode the bull for eight seconds, but after dismounting, the animal turned on him and drove him face down into the mud with the iron stump of its horn. Frost died of massive internal bleeding before his body left the ring. Nobody knows why the bull did that, but it earned him an early retirement. Public health researchers have since found evidence suggesting that protective equipment may mitigate the harmful effects of bull riding.

As the first few riders got bucked and rolled on the ground, dodging successive mortar rounds of hooves, I reached down into my pants and tugged my sagging jock up from between my legs till it fit snug. I cinched my belt a couple of notches tighter to hold everything in place and felt a sharp pain in my abdomen, then belched.

On Friday I ate a stick of beef jerky while waiting for my flight to Phoenix to take off from JFK. Saturday morning I ate a machaca burro. Sunday I grilled six steaks at my in-laws. Monday was Saint Paddy’s, so I had the obligatory corned beef, sourced from a Kroger syndicate that plastic wraps its meat on Styrofoam so it looks like an organ donation. Tuesday my dad smoked a whole brisket (beef). The average yield a butcher can expect from a well-fed steer is around five hundred pounds of boneless, trimmed beef. I had the keen realization, standing beside the cattle in the lineup, that after a lifetime of wanton consumption, it was only fair to give the victim a chance at payback.

The earliest indication that man felt guilt for killing and consuming bulls is the ancient Greek ceremony known as Buphonia. The ritual involved a member of a royal family killing a bull while it fed on grain, then throwing his ax aside and fleeing the scene with a face haunted by remorse. According to the philosopher Porphyry, the ax was then carried to a court and charged with murder, whereupon it was thrown into the sea. The crowd would then consume the meat of the slain bull to absolve the murderer’s conscience by taking on his guilt.

My steer’s name was Babyface. He was a stocky thing with gentle eyes and a hide like black velvet. A patch just above his tail was pale as charcoal ash, and his horns, blackened at the tips, looked like cauterized ivory. Despite his complexion, his sleepy features reminded me of Watteau’s Pierrot. He flipped his tail pleasantly as Raúl was thrown between his own steer’s horns face-first into the mud.

***

I can’t tell you why I wanted to do this, but I can tell you exactly when I made the decision to do it. I was filling up my mother-in-law’s Hummer at the Shell right off the Piestewa Highway a few days after the ocotillos bloomed. My wife and I had just decided we were going to try to have kids. I know what you’re thinking, but that’s not exactly it. I don’t want to ride a bull before I have a kid. I want to make a bunch of money and buy a house and a Subaru before I have a kid.

But I was standing there pumping midgrade octane into the H3 and staring at the McDowells and thinking about how I knew the pump number where I was standing, knew the name of the mountains I was looking at, knew the hard smell of the gasoline and the flaming blue of a passing attendant’s uniform—knew these things exactly, the way I had always determined to know the world—and suddenly I thought I should probably ride a bull. Or, more accurately, I suddenly found that I was going to ride a bull, as I had already reached for my phone and called Buffalo Chip and got my name on the list before any normative notion of whether I should do this crossed my mind. It was a kind of fait accompli accomplished by my unconscious, the type of action one associates with creatures of lesser intelligence. It cost forty dollars, and I signed a waiver—anyone can do it. At least, anyone can try.

***

I heard the loudspeakers announce that our next athlete was “the man in the new boots.” I was immediately handed a frayed polypropylene rope with a bell at the end of it and hurried across a catwalk toward the opposite bucking chute. The chute boss was roughly my age and had a silky voice and glass-prism earrings and a leather rodeo jacket with white stitching over the heart that spelled out 2023 FINALIST. I gave him my rope, and he looped it under Babyface’s torso, then helped me lower myself onto the steer. Smell of pine and cedar coming off that rosin-smeared rope as the chute boss heated it up. Babyface’s hide shirred where the handhold pressed into his back, and golden manure poured out of his ass. I put my gloved right hand under the stiffened lace and let it rest on the matted wool padding while the chute boss shook down the bell between the steer’s legs. Smell of asafetida and ammonia rising from the floor of that chute. “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox” (Proverbs 14:4). Babyface pinned my left leg hard against the steel cage.

Announcer said, “You can always tell them new riders by their new boots.”

Chute boss said, “Put your legs under his shoulders. That’s it. Boots forward.”

ZZ Top on the loudspeakers said, “Cuz every girl’s crazy ’bout a sharp-dressed man.”

God to Job said, “Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Will he spend the night at your manger?”

“He’s gonna go left, then he’s gonna do a one-eighty,” a cowboy said. “He does it every time.”

“Who wants an eight-second ride?” the announcer asked.

“WAAAAAAA!!!!” the crowd said.

A perversion is a turn from a previous path to meaning. It is the betrayal of an exact course.

“Left, then one-eighty,” the cowboy said. He held out his hands and clenched them like, If I could bend your body to this fate, I would.

“You’re gonna nod when you’re ready, okay?” the chute boss told me.

Why did the hunter at Lascaux ride the bull?

“Okay?”

Why did the artist paint him?

“All right, we gotta go,” a clown said.

“Time’s up,” my wife said.

“Hold it,” the chute boss said, looking at my grip. “Move your dick up.”

“What?”

He reached his hands between the steer’s horns.

“I said scoot your dick up. Closer to your hand.”

I shifted my groin forward, and the friction against the hide caused a telltale shine of pink to pop out of my pants. I looked at the chute boss, and his face said, Pervert. I nodded my head.

Chandler Fritz is a contributing writer for County Highway. He works at The New York Review of Books.