Living the Gimmick

  After a few more pleasantries, I hung up the phone. The owl’s body was still there, poised eternally for attack.

  What had happened to everyone? To Shane Stratford, Hal, Aries, and all the rest? The only person from southern California B.J. spoke to since arriving in Tennessee was Terri. I had contact with no one in California, and to my mother only during a few calls that interrupted months of non-communication. All the people in my past other than Shawna and B.J. had fallen away, and my lack of genuine concern baffled me. I never even called the landlord of my apartment in San Bernardino. For all I knew my belongings had been donated to a Salvation Army. Was someone sleeping on my former wrestling pillow? Thousands and thousands of faces swam before me joined by a current of screams for something that wasn’t even real; did it make their screams worthless? What about the two girls who once paid five dollars to have their picture taken with me? Did they still think I was worth something? Where would that picture end up? Kept in a trunk somewhere safe with other memories of an unreclaimable youth or as just another piece to discard one day during a disposal of fan magazines and other indulgences from teenage years?

  These thoughts battered at my slippery hold on sleep before finally loosening it completely and pitching me into a free-fall toward consciousness. The last image I glimpsed in sleep was of the latest picture I had sent Shawna, the one which featured thousands of screaming mouths. I awoke remembering the one thing I had left behind in the apartment I would never set foot in again. My drawing supplies were tucked in the upper shelf of the closet, which was the same place I had hidden pornographic material when I was in high school.

  B.J. was pulling into the parking lot of Kansas City Memorial Stadium. He pulled up to the curb at the rear tunnel, behind a semi bearing the silver-lettered logo of the World Wrestling Organization.

  We remained silent as the sun flirted with an opening in the clouds, casting intermittent glares on the windshield. “Been a hell of a ride, hasn’t it?” I offered.

  “You’re in for another one,” he said. “You need me to be here tonight?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”

  “No backing out now, doc,” he warned. “You promised, remember?”

  “Under extreme duress.” I grinned.

  “Whatever works.”

  “Thanks, B.J.,” I said, “for everything.”

  We clasped hands. Our eyes gently grew closer, a pair of approaching reflections. This imperceptible movement was stopped only when our foreheads touched. This contact was enough. His irises like green planets. Maybe mine appeared the same way to him. Other people’s eyes always have a certain measure of mystery simply because of our inability to possess them.

  “My first and last head-butt,” he murmured. We both started laughing. It was right that the only head-butt of his life take place out of the ring, away from the sight of any mark.

  “Say hey to Terri for me,” I told him as I got out of the car.

  “Will do,” he called. “Keep in touch.”

  I stood there, watching B.J.’s car swim across the parking lot’s empty rows. My dirt-infested Chevy was back in Tennessee, gone for good. To hell with it. I turned and looked around.

  Kansas City jutted up around me. Its buildings wide blocklike Herculean creatures paralyzed in their own steel and rock. The stadium looming over me was no exception. Its pillars looked tall and strong enough to hold up the sky. After a few minutes, I felt as good a hold of my bearings as I was going to get so I started walking toward the loading tunnel.

  The first time I met “Hippo” Haleberg he was in the process of stuffing a Twinkie into his mouth. “Houdimf?” he asked, shaking my hand and chewing while I glanced around the backstage area. Pipes were dripping onto the floor, forming small puddles of multicolored liquid. I wondered idly if it was gasoline or just water from the Kansas City sewer system.

  Once Hippo swallowed, he introduced himself more formally. He had been a wrestler some twenty years ago, and now worked in an executive position. He had possessed a stocky bullish frame when wrestling five nights a week, but the intervening years had turned most of what had once passed as solid fat into noticeably loose fat. His jowls sagged down to the collar of the Hawaiian shirt he wore. Perhaps he felt loose-fitting attire could camouflage his bloated stomach, but it was clear at a glance that this man was a prime risk for a coronary.

  “You’re Michael Harding, right?” he asked, pushing his glasses back against his sweaty brow. “Good to have you on board.” His voice became lower. “We’ll put you in with Staffer tonight. Don’t do anything heavy. Just feel him out.”

  “Right,” I nodded, “about my gimmick—”

  “Worry about it later.” Hippo waved his half-eaten Twinkie like a magic wand. “We’ll just intro you as Michael Harding. Okay?”

  I was still nodding as a tall, good-looking man in a tan suit glided over. “Hi there,” he said with an excessively cheerful air. “You must be new.” His eyes roamed my body, and I realized who this was. Rob Robertson. The guy who Allah had referred to as the “buggerer” who tried to molest young wrestlers and ring-boys. “You a face or a heel?” he cooed.

  “I can work both ways,” I stammered, then flushed red as he responded with delirious laughter. “I’m married,” I announced.

  “Jesus, Rob.” Hippo pounded him on the shoulder. “This is the one who’s gonna wrestle Staffer.”

  “Oh!” Robertson exclaimed. “You must be a hell of a shooter.”

  “Yeah,” I growled halfheartedly. A well-muscled man with carefully groomed black hair swooped out of a dressing room and raised an eyebrow at Rob. Both of Rob’s trimmed eyebrows jumped up in response. I recognized the man as a jobber for the WWO who went by the name of Nerve Glandon. Rob turned back to me. “Nice meeting you. Good luck tonight.” The last three words carried a degree of gravity. Then he bounded off and caught up with David. The two of them disappeared through a doorway.

  Hippo Haleberg shook his head as he munched with absent savagery on the last of his Twinkie. “Donletimwuryu,” he mumbled, then swallowed. “He’s harmless,” Hippo assured me, then asked: “You really married?”

  “Not in a physical sense,” I answered guardedly.

  “Probably a good idea to let him think you are,” he said with a sigh.

  By five o’clock that afternoon the dressing room was filled with wrestlers, several of whom I had watched on Saturday morning television just three years ago. There was “Big Jim” Pitbull, a tall black man whose thickened 255-pound body and tightly drawn face were tempered by surprisingly gentle eyes. He usually barked and growled during his interviews, but up close he carried an air of sophistication. His nose was buried in the “Money” section of USA Today. Right beside him was “Officer O’Malley,” a man who had a chest like a bull and exuded an impenetrable countenance. O’Malley’s real name was Walter Schwartz, and he had been in the business for about twenty years. After years of working the Caribbean and other rough territories, he had finally settled into the WWO before his body gave out completely and was working the Irish cop gimmick. To his right was “The Soultaker,” a relative newcomer to the WWO who worked a gimmick as a zombie wandering the earth in search of souls to possess. He had introduced himself to me as Trevor, and was now in the process of applying the makeup that created his zombie pallor.

  I stood in a corner, watching with dim wonder as they dressed into their various costumes and went over spots for the night. There was a pervading smell of baby oil in the room, and I saw many of them were slicking themselves down. I hesitantly returned the few cautious smiles and nods in my direction, breathing a sigh of relief when Chuck Beastie entered the dressing room and immediately came up to me and shook my hand with a raspy “How ya doin’?” This broke the ice, and a few more of the boys came over and introduced themselves. Sledge, a squat man with a perpetually red face and thin blonde hair trimmed in a crew-cut style, complimented me on decking Rampart.

  “I d
idn’t know the story traveled that fast,” I marveled.

  “In this business, there ain’t too many secrets,” he chuckled, pulling on a plain gray shirt. His gimmick was that he was an ex-con, and he and O’Malley were currently in a heated feud.

  When they found out I was scheduled to wrestle Staffer, a commiserating exhalation went around the room. “Shoot hard,” Ricky “The Billion Dollar Baby” Witherspoon, a shaggy blonde-haired guy with a slight limp, informed me. I nodded weakly, remembering that as the same advice I had gotten from Rampart last night.

  Witherspoon (whose real name was Richard Turkin) and I talked for a while. He had only been with the company for three months, and I got the feeling he felt as alien as I did. He had entered the dressing room wearing torn jeans and a Gold’s Gym tank top, but his costume was a black suit strewn with sequins that jumped to life every time he moved.

  I was too nervous to mention his generosity to B.J.’s father and his subsequent influence on B.J. I would do it later, I told myself. The next night or the next . . . my hands shook a little as I rubbed and flexed my pectorals to a fixed rhythm. Wildman was gone, last seen standing alone outside an arena in Memphis with an unloaded gun in his hand.

  Staffer sauntered into the dressing room at about 5:45. He exchanged a few nods with the regulars, then staked out a mirror and began examining himself. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. Shaggy dark hair spilled over his forehead, stopping just over a crooked nose that looked to have been broken several times. His forehead was a rough map of scar tissue. I followed the movement of his left hand as he wound tape around his right knuckles. He was muttering to himself. Suddenly his voice shot up. “Hey, needle dick,” he snarled at the mirror, “you gonna fuckin’ propose or somethin’?”

  It wasn’t until everyone in the locker room had shifted in my direction that I realized he was talking to me. Determinedly swallowing my pride, I walked over to him. “We’re working together tonight,” I said, thankful my voice wasn’t shaking.

  I waited for a response, acutely aware that everyone in the now silent dressing room was watching us. “Do you want to go over some spots or something?” I asked.

  “Spots!” he shouted, making me jump back. “We don’t need any fucking spots!” he hollered. “I’m going over! That’s all you need to know.” He tore off the tape and smacked his well-taped fist into the beefy palm of his left hand. “That’s all you need to know,” he insisted in a sing-song rhythm.

  I walked back to my corner and sat down in bewilderment. Chuck had already disappeared into his private dressing quarters with Mimi. Top wrestlers like him and Sonny Logan had their own dressing rooms, but the rest of us were packed into one. I spent the next two hours busying myself with tying and untying my boots and trying to pretend I didn’t notice the other guys looking at me and talking amongst themselves.

  When Rob Robertson stuck his head in the door and announced “Staffer and Michael, you’re up,” Staffer, clad in his customary costume of a hockey jersey and long tights, snagged his goalie’s mask from the floor and stalked out of the dressing room. I followed, clad in plain blue trunks I had borrowed from Ricky Witherspoon. They were a size too big for me and I had had to use a safety pin to get them to stay up around my waist. As I walked by my fellow wrestlers, each of them became engrossed in the floor.

  Robertson met us by the red curtain that separated our backstage area from the arena. “All right, boys. Ten minutes max. Staffer, you’re goin’ over. Make it a cheap victory—”

  “No way,” Staffer barked. “This kid’s doin’ a clean job.” He glared at me as though the idea for a cheap victory had been mine.

  “This kid’s gonna be feudin’ with you for the next coupla months as soon as he arranges a gimmick with the big guy,” Robertson said, leaving me to wonder if he was talking about Thomas Rockart Jr. or God, “so you better get used to workin’ with him.”

  “Shit, ya send me dese fuckin’ greenies and expect me to work with them?” Staffer demanded. Robertson’s only response was to sigh and gaze at me helplessly before retreating into the darker recesses of the backstage area.

  “Seems like Rob likes you, greenie,” Staffer sneered. “Young kid like you, what’d you do, suck dick to get here?”

  “Fuck you, man,” I said in a snarl corrupted by a nervous flutter. Staffer smiled widely enough to reveal a gap where his two front teeth should have been. “I’ve wrestled in the South for sixteen months,” I continued.

  “Well, well,” he said, still smiling, “we’ll see how much those good ole boys taught you.” He warped the last of his sentence into a slurred Southern tone that, combined with his Canadian accent, made him sound like a stoned Boss Hog.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the ring announcer’s voice filtered through the curtain, “Introducing . . . from Chicago, Illinois . . .”

  Hippo’s head poked through the curtain. “Lesgo Michael,” he said while chewing something. “Jog when you go down the aisle. Remember, you’re young, fulluvinurgy.”

  Staffer lowered his face mask and uttered: “Shoot.”

  Then came the ring announcer’s mechanically enhanced declaration: “Michael Harding!”

  As I jogged down to the ring, a confused murmur arose from the crowd. Their lack of interest made me feel invisible. By the time I hit the ring, I was running. Once inside there was no stopping my hands as they groped my entire body. Thighs, arms, chest; all were flexed and touched by my roaming hands. “You nervous, kid?” the referee asked, smiling just a little.

  I shook my head. Then Staffer was announced, and he stormed down the aisle to a passionate chorus of boos and jeers and assorted cries of “Fuck Canada!” Staffer lunged into the ring and kept charging. His body slammed into mine, sending me in an unprepared heap between the second and third rope. I sprawled onto the padded area next to the ring and was pushing myself up when a sharp pain cut across my back. The blow sent my face back down against the thin ringside padding. I glanced up and saw Staffer raising his hockey stick. I scrambled forward, but he connected once again. My body curled itself into a ball. Through labored breathing, I could hear laughter from the fans at ringside. I hated them. I hated Staffer. But for myself I held a unique loathing. I felt smeared with shit; I wanted to crawl out of my own skin and leave it beneath the ring like a used piece of toilet paper.

  The bell burst into methodic repetitive tolling. I shrieked as the stick collided once again with the small of my back. Several fans at ringside howled and imitated my cry. I turned over and saw Staffer standing before the crowd with his stick raised like a trophy.

  I began to unfurl with the hope of scrambling back into the ring, but he quickly turned back and fired another swing at my head, which I avoided only by rolling completely under the ring. Staffer’s laughter trailed behind, settling in my ears as I lay there in the darkness. I sneezed to expel the dust tickling my nose. My eyes grew moist, and I stubbornly reassured myself this too was from the dust.

  The referee eventually got Staffer on his way back to the locker room. I remained under the ring, still sneezing and swatting at my eyes while digesting the cheer that the crowd gave Staffer. Nothing’s changed, I thought, crowds love violence. The referee’s head poked between the draping. “You all right, son?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I croaked, “I think.”

  I emerged from underneath the ring, and the arena exploded with hoots and laughter. Briefly I thought of the jeering response my English class had given me when I had announced that I wanted to be a pro wrestler. All the achievement of my goal had brought me was 1,000 times more ridicule.

  Not a whole lot to show for two years’ work.

  As we approached the curtain, I got up the guts to pull my eyes from the floor and regard a few faces in the audience. “You suck!” a boy about twelve shouted at me.

  “I hear there’s job openings at McDonald’s!” a voice bellowed from my right.

  “Fuck you,” I whispered.

  “What???
? the referee whispered back.

  “I’m gonna kill them.”

  “Fuck ’em,” the referee murmured. “They’re just marks.”

  But I wasn’t referring to just the fans. I was referring to everyone who had made me feel inferior and scoffed at what they considered a worthless dream. The faces of Max Egan and the four other kids who had first introduced me to my incompleteness floated before my burning eyes. I’ll show them, I thought, Goddammit I will. No matter what I have to do.

  That night, in a motel on the interstate in the middle of Missouri, I popped two Valium and washed them down with tap water from the bathroom sink. Then I focused on my reflection. Hundreds of miles separated me from anything I had ever been connected with. I could become anything I wanted. A psychotic, a sexual pervert, a mild-mannered investment banker, a retired porn star who had been sold into the business by a junkie mother, anything at all. The people in the room next to mine or the next hotel or the next city would never know it.

  I raised the blade in my left hand. Its steel exuded neither warmth nor coolness; gripped by my fingers it looked like an extension of myself. A nervous impulse surfaced, some scared voice urging these fingers to release the blade and touch my reflection. The reflection of a whole Michael Harding. The blade now caressing this reflection’s forehead.

  I recalled Rand Staffer’s forehead, a map of criss-crossing scars. “Scars are good,” Hal Duncan had once informed a young punk rookie named Muscular Mike Maple. “They’re a symbol of dues paid.”

  I cut across flesh. For a few seconds there was nothing except a zipper of pain, high pitched and screaming. Then the flesh was eased open by blood. My hand was already in motion. Another cut. Then another. I imagined a million mosquitoes coming to drink this blood, proof of my existence. The wounds crossed one another like intersecting streams. Their output formed a river that washed down the bridge of my nose and over my eyes. I felt an unfocused longing to touch this blood, to make it real. But nothing was real anymore. Not even the taste gliding over my top lip and invading my mouth, a soupy oxygen-filled rust.