The AHF Eight Dollar Discount™️

“Nichole just texted and said she was trying to get tickets today too, waiting for hours, and didn’t get any,” Sue texted me. “I told her we did – Whoo hoo!”

“You tell her that I’ll give her The AHF Discount™!”

Now is the moment in the film where we abruptly flash back to a scene in early autumn almost twenty-five years ago. I’m perspiring in a brightly lit high school gymnasium while chatting with the two guys who will define my teens. Moore is incapable of sinking a single shot but rebounds as ferociously as a sober Dennis Rodman. Josh never breaks a sweat so I joke that he could sport a three-piece suit with a cummerbund and drain free throws. He secretly questions who designed his fantasy get-up because it will impact what cologne and cufflinks he dons during our next nonchalant game of Around the World. (Okay, maybe I imagined the final part.)

We reveal bits and pieces about one another, mostly the shared pop culture that will assist in bonding us forever. There will be the late morning lunch when Josh insists the cafeteria pepperoni and cheese sandwich tastes like real prosciutto or the day Moore begins a lifetime of detailing the particulars of Deep Space Ninecameos, yet today is the day I’m making my mark. Upon learning that Moore is a Green Bay Packers fan, I disclose that I taped a copy of the Super Bowl XXXI broadcast, an act of archivism inherited from my father.

Having lived without his presence for twenty-six years, it’s startling how much of the man I became, especially as it concerns his fondness for alphabetization, physical media, and the peaceful solitude the previous two subjects joyously provide. While his preferences aligned with taping movies and TV cartoons, my career began the first time my mother allowed me to order a wrestling pay-per-view. SummerSlam 1994 may have been underwhelming aside from the Bret Hart/Owen Hart steel cage match, but it became the linchpin of my VHS library. In addition to wrestling, I also catalogued major (real) sporting events and filed them separately. If Dad, a man I don’t recall being hateful about much other than my stepbrothers’ laziness, had found out they were mixed he likely would’ve been remembered as Videocassette George Wallace.

“Can I borrow that tape?” Moore asks me.

“Sure,” I tell him. “Or I could sell it to you.”

“How much?”

“Eight dollars.” 

Moore agrees to pay the paltry sum to relive the only championship won by any of his favorite teams during his lifetime (the Islanders Stanley Cup victory in 1983 doesn’t count because his prefrontal cortex was literally weeks old). As a devout ad fan, he’s as thrilled by re-living Pepsi’s dancing bears commercial as he is by Desmond Howard’s MVP performance. It will only occur to me in adulthood that the most important peer I will ever know grew closer via rugged, if reduced, capitalism. Talk about an all-American coming of age tale.

A month later, wrestling is back on our brains. While Josh alarmingly details an inconsequential episode of Monday Night Raw with such unashamed specificity that Moore and I are left aghast, we have another deal to broker over the hard stuff. Having lost interest in the WrestleMania box set I own, I offer it to Moore at a significantly discounted forty-eight dollars. As you can guess, the box has been maintained in immaculate condition yet I nonetheless refuse to keep it in my masterfully organized locker in advance of transacting, insisting my mother drive the pearl to our school and bring Moore and I to his home with it in hand to collect my sequential one and five dollar bills (while Harry likely recalls that she spent a hundred bucks on said box set the previous Christmas).

Moore remembers riding in the black Mercury Topaz I’d eventually inherit, its memory still burning due to the radiator's maple scent that often made passengers yearn for a Denny's detour. Encountering construction in an area of town unfamiliar to her, my mother announced that it felt like we’d exited the woods to find ourselves in 1850, asking Moore if he lived in ye olde village fifteen miles east. (The only atlas ever written by a Rand that my mother can read ends in Shrugged. Your turn, Dennis Miller.) Did I use a large chunk of the money gained by selling thirteen wrestling events to buy just one for thirty dollars on cable? Did I tip my mother eight dollars for chauffeuring the collection? Come on, are those serious questions?

Although my father didn’t watch it with us, the first pay-per-view I recall seeing as it aired was the Survivor Series in 1990. Upon returning from my grandparents’ house on Thanksgiving night, a friendly neighbor invited my stepbrothers and I to his apartment to watch the event being broadcast from the Hartford Civic Center. It marked the debut of The Undertaker, a wrestler beloved by nearly every fan except me. (I later rooted for the Fake Undertaker to win the SummerSlam 1994 main event against his namesake nemesis. Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s contrarianism.) However, the supercard is largely remembered for the debut/lone appearance of the Gobbeldy Gooker, a turkey mascot who was instantly mocked and reviled by the fans in attendance (and those paying to view it from their furniture).

As Moore and I wound our way through the ups and downs of our favorite homoerotic pastime—it would be years before we created a new one by sharing a pickle in the parking lot outside a Jewish deli (I failed to realize a second half sour was buried in the brown paper bag until we’d nearly completed our alternating bites)—he mentioned how he’d never been able to track down a copy of Survivor Series 1987. Our hometown had multiple video stores teeming with old Coliseum videos (the then-WWF’s distribution imprint), but the inaugural event eluded their shelves. That's where your faithful correspondent stepped in.

We were trading factoids in a three-way AOL chat with a wrestling fan I’d befriended named Matt, a kid our age who lived in Miami, when I divulged that the golden goose was housed in my collection.

Kman3838: Holy shit! Will you do it for $8?

ButtHead50: That tape sells for at least $10 anywhere you look online. But yes, I’ll give you my personal $8 discount.

Moore recalls that I then invited an anonymous user to the chat so I could provide online retail pricing advice. The user’s handle? xJBezos1994x.

The AHF $8 Discount™️ became the default price for any secondhand item I sold Moore, including a Leonard Maltin video guide, a couple other wrestling tapes, and probably half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich plus no more than eight mini pretzels the day he forgot his lunch money (I generously waved the hourly interest usually incurred because, as you may recall, this was my best friend and my ruthlessness knew some bounds).

So, why did I wait two decades to offer this discount to Sue’s best friend? Along with my consumer-friendly tape trading business acumen, I’ve developed a knack for buying excellent concert tickets at face value. When Taylor Swift announced her upcoming tour, Sue and I both submitted our personal accounts in hopes of receiving codes that permitted accessing the on sale; only I received one. In addition to the three company accounts I was assigned at work, I logged in to mine and waited before seeing I was in approximately 15,600th place. Assuming the worst, I watched it slink steadily forward in line while the other three accounts stalled.

Ticketmaster would later reveal how they had three-and-a-half billion unique site visits that Tuesday, leading to paused queues, server reboots (that likely ruined the purchasing chances of those ahead of me in the virtual line), and checkout errors. My account was 750th in line when the site froze. As I listened to Hungarian jazz and completed other work tasks eighty minutes later, the magical ding lit up my lobes alerting me that it was my turn to access the Gillette Stadium seat map.

Heading straight for the primo seats, I snagged a pair of tickets in the section nearest the stage plus an adjacent four-pack. As I landed on the checkout page, I couldn’t believe I was about to spend twenty-two hundred dollars on six face value tickets. Luckily for me, I was hip to the irate, ticketless Twitter users who made me giddily (and disgustedly) aware that a single ticket was worth more than twenty-two hundred should I list it for sale. Upon posting a screenshot in our work Slack chat, my boss called it a thing of beauty whereas others deemed it the TayTay pull of the dayday. (Apologies, geez.)

Moore’s reaction to the news was comparable to his learning about that long-lost Survivor Series tape while a largely forgotten Floridian silently observed. Of course, Sue didn’t offer the tickets to Nichole at an inflated discount; that would’ve been too generous in the current resale ticketing climate. Still, Moore had one offer he’d probably kept loaded in the (elimination) chamber since he'd begun feeding me the leather pumpkin for sure-to-be-missed jump shots in gym class many moons prior.

“If I die before you, feel free to leave $8 in my shirt pocket.”

Nice try, bud, but that’s a little over my budget.