NATIONWIDE — Within ninety minutes of Hulk Hogan’s death being announced Thursday, an estimated 38 million American men aged 45 to 67 began independently and without coordination recalling the specific time their Uncle Frank, Uncle Tony, or Uncle Dale ran into the wrestler at a Sunoco off I-75, where Hogan was, by all accounts, the nicest guy you’d ever meet, brother.
The stories share suspicious structural similarities. Hogan was always ‘bigger in person.’ He always paid for somebody’s coffee. He always called a stranger’s six-year-old ‘little hulkster’ and ruffled hair in a way that the now-grown child remembers as ‘spiritually formative.’ The gas station is always the kind of gas station that no longer exists.
‘What we’re seeing is a national folk-memory event,’ said Eldon Marris, a cultural anthropologist at the Heartland Institute for American Mythology, who spent the morning logging variants. ‘The Uncle Frank story is not a memory. It is a load-bearing American fiction. Every man requires one functional Hulk Hogan anecdote to access grief, and the brain will manufacture the Sunoco if no Sunoco is available.’
Cracker Barrels in twelve states reported a 400 percent surge in men sitting alone in window booths holding phones they were not looking at. A Bob Evans in Findlay, Ohio briefly ran out of biscuits after a ‘group of guys named Steve’ sat down and ordered without speaking.
Attempts to verify the encounters with the actual uncles in question have produced uneven results. Reached at his home in Macomb County, Frank Pulaski, 71, declined to specify which Sunoco, said the year ‘might’ve been ’88, could’ve been ’86,’ and then became, per his nephew, ‘uncharacteristically misty for a man who has not previously demonstrated weather.’
His wife, Linda Pulaski, gently noted from the kitchen that Frank has never knowingly been in the same county as Hulk Hogan, but did once see what he believed to be Randy Savage’s Cadillac in the parking lot of a Ponderosa in 1991, an event she suspects has been ‘narratively upgraded’ across four decades of cookouts.
WWE has not responded to requests for an exhaustive list of every gas station Hogan ever visited, a document that, if it existed, would still come up several million Sunocos short.
By press time, a 52-year-old structural engineer in Tulsa had begun the story with the words ‘so my Uncle Dale,’ and four men at the adjacent table, none of whom he knew, had nodded slowly in advance, already aware of how it ended.