Living the Gimmick

  “Wandering Wildman,” he chanted. “‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.’”

  “Shit,” I chuckled. “Who the hell said that?”

  Triumphantly, he whipped out his copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s book and opened it to the first page. It was the opening quote by someone identified as Dr. Johnson. “Cool,” I said lightly. Bryan gave a derisive laugh.

  I looked from Bryan to Marty, trying to remember us all working out together. Both had obviously stopped; Marty looked to be harboring the prolonged effects of the “freshman fifteen.” Bryan, on the other hand, was shrinking. An Izod shirt he had filled out our senior year of high school now hung loosely over his attenuated body like a collapsed tent. After another half hour of strained conversation I left, promising to call them as soon as I got a permanent residence.

  That night I sat in my old room, staring listlessly at an old wrestling tape playing on the VCR. The room had an unfamiliar scent that irritated me, but it took several minutes before I finally determined what it was: cleanliness. After months of living in cars and changing in locker rooms crammed with other sweaty bodies, I no longer identified with a room that didn’t smell.

  A number ran through my head. Although I had memorized it long ago, I hadn’t yet called. Before I could ponder it too much, I snatched up the phone and dialed. She picked up on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Shawna?” I ventured. “That’s you, right?”

  “Well, well . . . ,” she said in a tone that triggered a vision of her knowing smile. “What is it you go by these days . . . Wildman?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then howled quietly. Her laughter spilled through the receiver, and I laughed as well; my first genuine laughter since being back home. “Is it too late to be calling?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “It’s an all right time.”

  I tried to think of something to say to the silence lurking on the other end of the line. An unpleasant image of Meredith Perkins galloped out of my memories. She had been a curly-haired beauty in my eighth grade class, and I had once called her on the same cream colored phone I was using now. I had been so nervous I had used index cards to ask her to see a movie with me. She had turned me down.

  “I got your card,” Shawna was saying, pulling me back to the present. “I would’ve sent one back but it didn’t have a return address. Figured you must be living in your car.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “That’s what most people do their first couple months in the SWA. That’s what—” She lapsed into a coughing spell. After she recovered she continued, “That’s what most people do.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been there,” I said.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got all night.”

  “Some other time.”

  “Shawna—” I began, taking a nervous breath and inhaling the smell of the receiver. It was laced with pine cleaner. “I wish I was there with you,” I announced abruptly.

  “I think you wish you were anywhere but there.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “You’re probably involved with someone anyway.”

  “Just myself,” she replied, “like you said.”

  “I’m surprised you remember that,” I smiled.

  “How come?”

  “I guess I didn’t think you were really listening to me.” I shrugged. “I’m under the suspicion that most people I know never really listen to me.”

  “I listened,” she insisted. “I’ll listen anytime. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks for calling, Michael,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I echoed. As I replaced the receiver in its cradle, my eyes landed on an old drawing pen that lay next to the phone. Its tip pointed accusingly at me. I inhaled, recalling Shawna’s throaty voice, and this urged all my senses to life as they began to unify in a memory so complete that the sterile stink of my room was driven away, replaced by beer and the light trace of perfume she had been wearing that first night we had talked. Patches of her body began appearing in teasing phases: her sinewy neck, alert breasts, and those gray eyes whose irises thickened like an increasingly dense sky as they closed in on their respective pupils.

  I picked up the pen along with a small pad of paper. I held the pen against the sheet, but the paper’s intimidating whiteness broke through my hazy picture of Shawna. I sighed and looked up at the wrestlers flickering across the television; its screen cast out a bluish glow that blanketed both me and the wall I was leaning against. When I awoke the next morning, my palm had an indentation from the pen that I had evidently been clutching all night.

  When I left that morning for Memphis, I took my entire drawing kit with me. My mom’s Christmas present, a book titled 10 Ways to Prioritize Your Life, I left standing on the mantle.

  After a few more months, B.J. and I finally received a raise to seventy-five dollars a night.

  “Joy,” B.J. drawled later that night, as we nursed beers in the back booth of a small honky-tonk just off Interstate 65. We had wrestled in the southern tip of Indiana that night, and were due to work in Tennessee the next day.

  “It’s something,” I said, shrugging. With careful motions, I moved my fake moustache and took a long sip of beer. The promotion was very strict about keeping up kay fabe, and since B.J. was a face and I was a heel, we weren’t even supposed to be seen out in public together. Even an activity as simple as grabbing a beer together required a certain degree of espionage; in addition to the fake moustache, I was also wearing a blond wig and glasses.

  “Are you really happy with that raise?” B.J. asked.

  “Sure. Last time I checked, seventy-five was more than fifty.”

  “But look at Rampart. Living in a million dollar mansion while every other wrestler scrapes by.”

  “He’s the prince,” I said.

  “He’s an arrogant sonofabitch.”

  B.J. and Rampart had already clashed once. Rampart had insisted that B.J. throw at least two head-butts a match. “It can be your secret weapon,” Rampart had implored.

  “It’s no secret that everyone in pro wrestling assumes black people have hard heads,” B.J. had said mildly, and refused to do it. Although Rampart had accepted this, he hadn’t been giving B.J. much of a push. While I was wrestling semi-main events, B.J. was still working mostly preliminaries.

  “We should unionize,” B.J. was saying now. At the bar, a group of three drunken men were firing coins at the floor.

  “Dance you fuckers, dance!” one of them shouted. I could only assume he was talking to the roaches I had seen skittering across the tobacco-stained hardwood.

  “Unionize?” I frowned. “If we threatened to do that, you know how many people would be waiting to take our place for . . . hell, twenty bucks a night?”

  “Damn, doc,” B.J. broke into an amazed smile, “I almost think you were serious that first night.”

  “What first night?”

  “The night you told Rampart you’d wrestle for free.”

  “I suppose I would have,” I swallowed more beer, “for a while anyway.”

  “Why?”

  I ground the bottom of my beer bottle into the thin surface of dust on the table. Then I picked it up and lowered it into the ring of moisture it had just created. B.J. was watching me so intensely I checked to make sure my wig hadn’t slipped off. It hadn’t. I retreated into safe territory, that of Wildman.

  “I’m crazy,” I said, “I guess.” Then I gave a soft howl.

  The raise in pay made it possible for me and B.J. to finally settle into apartments in Tower 99, a well-kept, three-story apartment building on the north side of town. Many of the other wrestlers lived there, and after wrestling in Nashville on Saturday nights, we would drive back to the Tower and have parties that often lasted until the next morning. They were always well attended by the wrestling groupies we called “arena rats.”

  “Just r
emember to make sure these rats are over eighteen,” Rampart would remind us, “No high-school girls!” A year and a half ago a scandal had been narrowly avoided when the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Tennessee senator had attempted to elope with one half of a popular tag team. The girl had been shuttled off to a private school in Florida, and the wrestler was now working in Mexico. “Check IDs at the door,” became Rampart’s motto.

  Aided by copious quantities of Valium, alcohol, and high grade marijuana, parties at Tower 99 most often dissolved into random coupling in different rooms, shadowy corners, or if the intoxication level of those involved was high enough, a couch right out in the open.

  At first, I participated in a few of these encounters. But the next day I always felt guilty, half-suspecting that the cops were on the way to my apartment to arrest me for some nameless wrongdoing. Many of these “rats” were either reckless young girls in their late teens or the tired-cheeked women who had been left by husbands (usually after years of abuse) and now worked as waitresses in sawdust-filled honky-tonk bars. I liked the older women better, and always insisted on talking to them before sex because their stories contained a tragedy which made their presence in this world so painfully acute. Still, they never failed to depress me. When I confessed this to William Epstein (aka “Foreman Rip Tractor,” a construction worker gimmick), a tall New Yorker with a shaved head and legs the diameter of ripe watermelons, he pinpointed my problem immediately. “You’re supposed to fuck rats,” he admonished me, “not talk to them.”

  Even though I eventually pleaded impotence at these parties, I still found myself drawn to the general decadence. I became content to simply sit and observe through dulled vision the blurry semblance of naked bodies writhing together. Snatches of laughter and sometimes young girls’ sobs would sway into my ears in an unfocused rhythm. I would pop another Valium to numb my senses further, but would remain at the party until the sun rose. Only with this indication that a world outside still existed could I manage to get up and stagger off to sleep.

  One Sunday morning I floated back to my apartment in worse shape than usual. I collapsed onto my bed and watched my brain raise out of my head and float toward the cottage cheese patterned ceiling, which was transforming into a whirlpool of tiny man-eating fish. As this image blurred, I sucked in a breath and held it in hopes that this would help accelerate my heart’s lagging pace. It didn’t seem to be working, and I let the breath out and inhaled again and reached for the phone.

  “Hello?” Shawna’s voice was groggy.

  “Shawna?” I slurred. “Hi. It’s . . .” I inhaled sharply as my heart gave a kick.

  “I think I’m dying,” I said after two more complete breaths.

  “Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Valium and alcohol . . . that’s . . . not a good combo is it?”

  “I hear it’s great if you want to die or go into a coma and have a machine breathe for you,” she said. Then her tone cracked a little, “Shit, I’m making fun of you. I shouldn’t do that. How much did you take?”

  “I don’t really know.” I flexed my tongue, not as an obsessive action but simply to make sure I could still exert a measure of control over it.

  “I wanta draw,” I said slowly, trying to capture the thoughts melting against my skull.

  “Draw?” she challenged immediately. “Like pictures?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then I told her in a slow thick voice about the picture I had bought my mom. I told her about how I thought it was neither dusk or dawn, but instead the end of the world. “I’ve never told anyone that,” I announced in conclusion, “before now.”

  “What do you usually draw?” she asked.

  “Abstract things,” I said. The word “abstract” struck me as funny, and I began giggling.

  “I want you to draw something for me,” she spoke intently. “Are you listening?”

  “I’m listening,” I replied.

  “You know that bridge . . . the Hernando DeSoto . . . it spans the Mississippi River and leads west into Arkansas?”

  “Yep.”

  “When you cross that bridge, there’s a stretch of highway a mile later that straightens out and stays that way for almost ten miles. There’s nothing but rice fields around it. This time of year they flood the fields and it looks like something you would see in China. The first time I saw that scene I couldn’t believe it was right here in America.” Her voice’s growing ardor made my heart beat a little faster. “At the right time of day, the sun sets and reflects off all the water, and you can just get lost. You can get lost and pretend you’re on the other side of the planet. Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” I responded immediately.

  “I want you to drive out there and get that feeling down on paper. Draw it for me.” She paused. “Will you do that?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You better not die on me,” she warned. “I want to see that picture.”

  “You will,” I assured her. We hung up. My heart was beating comfortably by then. I had a mission, one that was obviously important to Shawna, and this gave me the confidence to close my eyes and know that I would wake up.

  A week later, I followed Shawna’s directions and drove over the bridge. Five minutes later I spotted the fields rising up on both sides of the flat stretch of highway that extended all the way to a tiny indecipherable point at the edge of my eyes’ range. I pulled over. The water on either side of me absorbed the glare, throwing off tiny fires of light that sparkled across the surface like a carpet of diamonds. I stationed myself on the car hood with my right hand holding a pen motionless against the top sheet of a sketch pad. With my other hand I slowly removed my sunglasses and closed my eyes. Twisted orbs of light danced between my pupils and the dark vacuum that protected them, and my hand began to move.

  While I drew, my eyelids trembled, fighting an instinct to open and stare into the sun. They did slip for a moment, and my hand froze in the avalanche of light. Only once back in darkness was I able to resume drawing, feeding off a vision that lingered and altered itself like a dream remembered in consciousness.

  When it felt done, I blinked several times before focusing on a cool suffusion of red across the horizon. The sky now served as a beacon, a means for the sun to demonstrate it was still burning deep within a temporary grave, and would rise again. Without looking at what I had just drawn, I folded up my pad, got into my car, and drove back to Tower 99 where a few Valium and my own impermanent death awaited.

  “I can’t believe you’re still taking Valium,” Shawna scolded me when she called five days later.

  “I’m more careful now,” I assured her. I had successfully convinced myself that my near overdose had been a result of irresponsible drug taking. Having monitored my intake more carefully over the past couple of days with no life-threatening incidents, I was able to banish the unpleasant experience to a corner of my mind that was kept under lock and key. “What about the picture?” I asked.

  “I like it,” she said simply. The picture had arrived yesterday, she told me, via ExpressAir.

  “You like it?” I asked. “That’s it?”

  “It seems a little . . . ,” she paused.

  “Don’t be shy,” I said. “Say what you mean.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “That’s what you’ve got to do more of in your art,” she concluded. “You’re hedging.”

  “Hedging what?” I asked, confused.

  “You tell me.”

  I let my eyes wash over the neat rows of thin white tiles that made up the kitchen floor. An ant was navigating across the ocean of neat squares with a speed that suggested some essential errand. I had read somewhere that ants were one of the strongest creatures on earth. I threw a shoe at it and missed.

  “Yourself,” Shawna’s answer finally came through the receiver.

  “I’m gonna start feuding with Rampart,” I said blithely. “He told me today. I’m supposed
to attack him at the next television taping.”

  “Oh boy,” she said, “are you in for it.”

  “For what?”

  “People down there love him,” she said, “and remember what I said one time about two percent of the United States population believing pro wrestling is real?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They all live in Tennessee.”

  During a card at the Mid-South Coliseum on June 15th, “The Prince” Larry Rampart was ambushed by members of the “Street Warriors.” As they double-teamed him in the ring, the “Wandering Wildman” appeared in the aisle with a twisted grin. The crowd became frantic. Rampart and the Wildman had spent the past three months engaging in a series of brutal matches, and his appearance seemed to spell the end of Rampart. Wildman walked down the aisle, climbed into the ring and then, for reasons of his own, pummeled the surprised Street Warriors and threw them both out of the ring. He then helped Rampart to his feet. A skeptical Rampart finally shook the Wildman’s hand, and a new fan favorite sprang to life in the Southern Wrestling Association.”

  —from Pro Wrestling Monthly, 8/2/89 issue.

  The above article was printed as an epitaph to my feud with Billy “The Prince” Rampart. The “reasons of my own” the article referred to was that after three months of feuding with Rampart, I feared for my life.

  The feud started well. According to plan, the Saturday after I talked to Shawna I attacked The Prince from behind while he was giving an in-ring interview. I then “pummeled him from pillar to post” as they say. He bladed himself, and as he lay bleeding in the middle of the ring, I pranced around in his robe while the fans hurled garbage at me.

  Rampart and I began having matches all over the circuit. The reaction was immediate and harsh. Up until that point I had been what’s known as a “hace,” a heel who is entertaining enough to be cheered by some as a face. But my attack on Rampart immediately catapulted me to the unenviable position as the most hated wrestler in the SWA. Whenever I was introduced, fans spit and flung a storm of half-eaten hot dogs, cups filled with tobacco juice, and other assorted bits of garbage at me. I began to carry an umbrella so I could shield myself from the assault of putrid refuse that was hurled at me during that long walk down the aisle. They unleashed an audible attack as well, their curses and insults and threats of violence peaking with a vehemence that was alarming in its confident self-righteous tone.