“I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me… Doesn’t seem to want to.” Atreus spoke those words to his deceased mother, Faye, about his father, Kratos, back in God of War (2018) during her wake.––I felt them on a visceral level. Fifteen years ago, after my mother left her body behind with me in the hospital room, I said the same thing of my own father. We don’t communicate well. I try to talk with him. He only talks at me. Now, we don’t talk at all. But this isn’t about that. Not yet. This story takes place 6 years earlier in 2005, at a slam poetry competition on Livingston Campus at Rutgers University. A competition I lost badly because I did a poem that the audience did not find funny, at all. It was bad yall. So bad, that I stayed in bed for 2 weeks. So bad, that 21 years later, I can still recount every face not laughing in the audience.
After the slam, as I try to slink away, I’m stopped by one of the performers. A bald 6′ foot tall white dude with a level 35 dad bod belly, who (ironically enough) in the slam, referred to himself as a sexy ass bitch. Which had the room shaking with laughter, and that tracks since this man was on HBO Def Poetry Jam. He tells me two things. That my poem was funny and his name. Big Mike. I thank him and as we give each other dap, I am unaware of how much of an impact Big Mike will have over the next 21 years of my life. A few months later, he’ll invite my friends and I to perform with him, then to perform at the school where he teaches. I will be invited to Big Mike’s home to meet his wife, Madelyn. A blunt but caring Puerto Rican woman. Big Mike will tell me the secret to his success. “I know a poem is funny if Madelyn doesn’t like it. Dude if she doesn’t laugh. I know it’s solid.” I recall Madelyn smiling and nodding along to the fact of this. I will meet their children (there’s a lot of them). In time, his youngest son will call me his hero. Over the years, any poetry related flyer, shirt, or picture I’m on will be hung on Big Mike’s wall alongside his and his peer’s accomplishments.
To Configure of a Father Figure
Big Mike’s home will become a save point for me as I enter manhood. Any time I visit, it becomes clock work. I enter, say hello to Madelyn then see Big Mike. After a break-up, my mom once scolded me for being hungover at Mike’s. “His son looks up to you, and you’re getting drunk there?” to which I responded, “I didn’t drink in front of him. I was hung over in front of him— Then he and his sister sat on me to watch cartoons.” Madelyn, on the other hand, made me a sandwich for the drive home. No scolding, judgement, or head shake. Just, “Here, take this.” Over the next few years, my respect and admiration for Big Mike will lead me on a quest to do the impossible: to try and out funny him in a slam. A coach once used Big Mike as an example of a poet/performer whose game you don’t play. “You can’t out funny Big Mike. It’s impossible. You have to go serious or sad.” Me being who I am, I heard that and wanted to do the impossible. I wanted to go funny-for-funny with Big Mike. A few years later, I’ll get my first chance. Big Mike and I are competing against each other in a slam hosted by Gemineye, one of Big Mike’s closest friends who has also seen me grow up. Big Mike and I promise each other to only do funny poems. We tie in the third and final round. Which forced a 4th round.
At this point, I am feeling myself. I am on the verge of doing something I waited years to do. I love a good fight, and to me there is no one funnier than Big Mike. I’ve always known him to be nonchalant in his demeanor. I’ve seen Big Mike slam for fun, I had never seen Big Mike compete for real until that night. Gemineye comes up to me ecstatic, “Look at him pacing and squeezing the water bottle! YOU BROUGHT PRIME BIG MIKE OUT! I HAVEN’T SEEN THIS BIG MIKE SINCE THE 2001. ITS BOUT TO BE DIFFERENT.” And Gemineye was right. The Big Mike I was witnessing that night was Kratos reaching under the floorboards to put the blades of chaos back on. The focus, the bravado, the crowd control. It was in that moment I realized this man was a Spartan forged in humor. Big Mike walks off stage, and all 5 judges throw up tens. A perfect score. Back to back, again.
I was afraid–– but I wasn’t afraid–– because I ain’t one to back down. I perform and match his score, pushing us to a fifth round. I see Big Mike going through his poems, and I tell him that I’ll go first because I don’t want any excuses. I will take the harder route to solidify the victory. He was chuckling at my eagerness. When Big Mike goes up, he’s does a poem called “Big Mike for President.” A classic that he knows by heart, but it’s been years. As he starts to stumble, I’m thinking that I have the slam won until Big Mike says, in a stroke of genius, “It seems I need to refer to my presidential speech,” as he pulls the paper from his back pocket to read the rest of the poem. To this day, it’s the smoothest recovery I’ve ever seen. Now in slam you have 5 judges. You drop the high score, drop the low score, and add up what remains. We both got a perfect score again (30) but since one of the 5 judges threw up one 9 for Big Mike, the organizer decided that I won since I had 5 tens. To this day, Big Mike will randomly bring up how bullshit of a call that was.
The next time we’d compete against each other is after my mom died. Big Mike wins after the show, he gives me the prize money. Telling me this slam doesn’t count because my heart wasn’t in it. After my mother died, I’m reminded how death felt neighborly again. How I grew up with it constantly knocking to “borrow” family members, memories and glimpses of mom. Yet, the grasp of grief’s autumn loosened when Big Mike figured my mother is who I pray to now. Eight years later, we face each other a third time, and it will take place at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I do a series of wrestling style promos taunting Big Mike (while also promoting his book). Saying that Mr. B, the school teacher, isn’t enough to beat me. Big Mike responds, and I do one final promo channeling the essence of Ric Flair. After I post it, I get a call from Big Mike saying, “Omar… what the hell. Madelyn woke me up this morning shouting, ‘MICHAEL! MICHAEL! LOOK WHAT OMAR POSTED!” Big Mike tells me when he watched the video he was speechless. Madelyn told him, “You gotta respond!” Now, if Big Mike is nonchalant then Madelyn is M.O.P. cold as ice. Nothing, and I mean nothing, shakes or phases this woman. So for her to wake her husband up and tell him he better not let this shit stand is huge.
Big Mike then tells me, “Yeah, I can’t top that.” I tell him, “Yeah you can. Just act like you’re being interviewed about my statements, and you’ll address them at a press conference. Simple.” Little did I know that I sealed my own fate as Big Mike’s next promo co-starred Madelyn as the reporter interviewing him for the slam that night. Not only were her ad libs amazing but as soon as she said, “Mr. B formally known as Big Mike will be facing Omar Ho-moan…. What’s his name?” I promise you it did not matter what Big Mike said after that. It was a wrap! Madelyn has known me for 21 years and genuinely had no idea what my last name was. Which made it even funnier. I knew Big Mike was going to win this encounter, and he did (had to break every rule in slam to do it). That’s the day I learned on a good day, I might be able to out-funny Big Mike; however, I could not out-funny Madelyn and Big Mike together. That was actually impossible.
In God of War: Ragnarök, an older Atreus believes in prophecy but becomes fearful of fate, especially his father’s preordained death. Kratos reminds his son that, “We take action because it is necessary, not because it is written”. Kratos doesn’t want his son living in fear of death. As a Spartan, it is something he doesn’t fear as he tells his ally Freya, “Death can have me when it’s earned me.” That quote is hard but also assume death plays fair when we know otherwise. We say we “cheat death,” because death is always the dirtiest player in the game of life. Death is a thief, I think to myself as I finish a message from Big Mike informing me that Madelyn, his wife, died. Over the next couple of days, I watch the grasp of grief’s autumn was upon Big Mike and his family. His youngest son reads a book I wrote about my mother’s passing for my nephew for comfort. Losing a parent makes death easier to speak about but the words are still jumbled as a sorrow of sorrys waterfall out of me. It wasn’t supposed to be like this for him, for his siblings. He’s two years younger than I was when I lost my mom. I have been child without parent, I have been husband grieving wife but not like this; our losses are on two different sides of life.
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?
I see the way loss changes my friend. The only thing I can think to do is listen to him and try to make him laugh between. Same as he has done for me over all these years. After a few months, we talk, and Big Mike says, “I know she’s gone but I keep expecting her to be at the door, to just walk back in.” I tell him this is, as I know it, an expectation of grief. A belief that somehow, someway, the person you lost is on the other side of life trying to get back to you. I then tell Big Mike about the God of War series. How in the reboot we see Kratos on a journey with Atreus, his son, to spread the ashes of his wife Faye. Now in a spin off, we’re seeing what happened to Faye after her body was lit aflame on a pyre. How she seemed to cheat death and found herself in the Everywhen, the after life of the gods. We fulfilled the journey she sent her husband and son on. Now, we’re seeing Faye in the afterlife trying to get back to her family.
That is exactly the feeling. We’ve never seen anything like this before in my eyes. Closest I can think of is the movie What Dreams May Come (1998) but that was a husband trying to get his wife out of hell. Only other thing I can think of is the song “Drops of Jupiter” by Train. My friend Jordan Calhoun LOVES that song. I always thought it was a love song until the frontman of the band revealed it was about his mom that died, and then it all clicked. Especially, the lines, “Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded and that Heaven is overrated? Tell me, did you fall for a shooting star? One without a permanent scar? And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?” The 5 stages of grief get you to a place of accepting loss; however, I don’t know if the expectation of grief, of hoping to see your wife/mom/loved on again ever goes away. If you ever stop seeing them or quick glimpses of them in strangers, those lines from Train sum it up so well. This hope of seeing your love back in front of you, telling you about where they’ve been, what they saw, and the journey back to tell you everything.
It is an expectation that we know won’t come to pass. However, I always go to media to make sense of moments in life, and as I watch Big Mike sit with the weight of this grief, I’m reminded of Faye preparing Kratos for her death. Kratos tells Faye, that when she leaves, a part of him will die as well. He is unraveling at the mentioning of feeling her absence until Faye comes to him to tell him that, “the culmination of love is grief“. I’ve described grief as an autumn bit it can be a winter frost, a spring bloom, a summer wind, a weight, a hurt, an ache, all these different things for so many different people. Yet, in all it’s forms. It is a reverberation of love. Faye makes Kratos promise to spread her ashes then tells him “to grieve deeply is to have loved fully”. I have been grieving a life altered while Big Mike is grieving a loss of time robbed from his wife. Though, grief is such an all consuming thing and feels like such a grueling labor.
However, the weight of grief can also serve as proof of how much loved you held for someone else.
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