Living the Gimmick

  My physical stature made taking on giants like Sonny Logan a long shot; when I started high school, I was only 5'5" and 115 pounds. It was impossible to look to my father as evidence of future growth; he had died of prostate cancer when I was six. My only memories of him were of a gaunt, hollow-eyed figure struggling to sit up in his hospital bed in order to give me a hug. I had been too scared to hug him, afraid that if I so much as touched him, his bones would burst through his skinny sheet of flesh.

  “Was my dad big?” I asked Mom a few weeks after I started lifting weights. She halted her work on the back door’s loose handle. The kitchen was silent as she studied the screwdriver in her hand.

  “Yes, I suppose,” she said. Her eyes left the screwdriver and found me, sitting at the table and rolling an orange from one hand to another. “He had a desk job, you know. At the Board of Exchange—”

  “But he had a big build, right?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes. He had a big build.” Her voice came slowly and her eyes were far away. She might have been studying an old picture in her mind. There were none that I knew of in the apartment. “Why do you ask?” she asked.

  “I want to get big,” I said. “I want to be a pro wrestler.”

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “A pro wrestler, huh?” She nodded and went back to the door handle. “All right, kiddo. Just don’t get too big.”

  I didn’t tell her that in order to get into the ring, I would need to get too big. For me, part of the attraction of being a pro wrestler was the requirement of being larger than the average human being, larger than life itself.

  Hours and hours of reps, the same movements either pulling or pushing, but the weights kept increasing. I fell in love with lifting huge amounts of weight. After a workout I would multiply the number of reps by the number of pounds I used for each exercise, then dutifully record the total in my “Muscle Journal.” A vague goal of a million pounds had formed in my mind. This goal made it possible for me to endure those first few months of pain, when my arms would hurt so much from the previous day’s workout that I found it hard to raise a pen in class.

  But I soon saw that as far as muscles were concerned, pain signaled growth. Every hour spent in the gym brought Michael Harding one step closer to climbing into a wrestling ring.

  I reached one million pounds by my sixteenth birthday. After noting this in my Muscle Journal, I threw the book away. By that time, there was enough physical proof of my body’s growth to inspire me.

  During these years, I saw my efforts to bulk up as evidence of determination, drive, and growth. My family had their own adjectives to describe my goal, “crazy” being the most popular. My mother settled for “murky.”

  Murky or not, by the end of my junior year I had grown seven inches and built myself up to 192 pounds. At a Christmas dinner with my mother’s sister, my relatives said that I was looking “too big.”

  “No such thing.” I waved their worries away with a sweep of my arm before taking a large bite of the chicken leg I held. We had come out to the suburbs of Chicago, where my Aunt Shirley lived in a compact two-story house, complete with a portable pool in back and a spacious basement recreation room.

  The house was located on a street lined with other houses differing only in minor details such as the type of wood paneling on the front door and what kind of bushes lined the driveway. A few brave souls risked neighborhood censure and threw up bird feeders in their front yards. My Aunt Shirley found them “tacky and offensive.” “Birds can make very offensive noises,” she had explained on more than one occasion.

  Now she sat regarding me with an air of self-righteous suspicion as I gnawed at the chicken leg. Her black hair was set in flammable curls. “I don’t think those people make much money, dear,” she said to me as I reached for another helping of mashed potatoes.

  “Sonny Logan makes two, maybe three million a year,” I said. In fact, I had no idea. “At least,” I added.

  “But that’s before taxes,” my cousin Jim pointed out from across the table. “After taxes, he’s probably only doing a million. These days, a million isn’t all that much.” Jim, a year older than me, had a medium-build, medium-complexion, and a medium-personality. He had already been accepted for early admission to Harvard, where he planned to major in economics. He had been seeing the same girl for three years, and the two already had plans to get engaged soon after high school graduation. He allowed himself a beer and a half at parties (the other half of the beer he allowed his girlfriend to consume) and had never been drunk in his life. He smoked one cigar a month and thought people who sold “pot and all that other crap” should be given life in prison. He based his objection not on the standard conservative argument that drugs were deadly, but that the illicit drug trade messed up the pharmaceutical industries. Not that he wasn’t a rebel. His one “trip astray,” as he put it, came when he had just turned seven and had hatched a plot to disfigure every bicentennial quarter he came across. He figured the proof sets his parents had given him for his seventh birthday would be worth a fortune if he destroyed all the others. He once confided that he and his Boy Scout knife had scarred over fifty bicentennial quarters before he finally came to grips with the unlikelihood of knocking the millions of other quarters out of circulation. He also conveniently overlooked the fact that his was not the only proof set in existence.

  “Plus,” Jim now said to me from across the table, “that stuff’s all fake.”

  “Oh yeah?” My voice jumped. “How would you know? Ever been in the ring?” To hear Jim dismiss a carefully orchestrated illusion like pro wrestling as “fake” rankled me. It was like calling a classic car “old.” Years as a pro wrestler would hone this defensiveness to a fine edge. What Jim didn’t know was that I had already written several scripts for matches, which I performed with a pillow laced with extra stuffing. My bed served as the ring for my one-sided battles. These matches never failed to draw pounding on the ceiling from the apartment just below my bedroom. In my imagination, I had learned to transform the angry beats into the roar of the crowd.

  But someone like Jim didn’t want to understand the subtle magic that made pro wrestling much more than a “fake” sport, and my own inability to explain frustrated me as well. I kept up my attack. “Have you?” I demanded again, with the mounting anger I believed a pro wrestler would display in that situation.

  “Honestly, Bonnie.” My aunt threw the words at my mother while casting anxious glances at me. “Can’t you talk to him?”

  Mom just shrugged and attempted the nonchalant grin she relied upon whenever this subject came up. “Harry, what do you think?” Shirley turned to her husband, who took the matter seriously enough to give it a few seconds of silent thought, a spoonful of peas poised before his thin lips.

  “College,” he determined. Then he plunged the peas into his mouth and chewed with careful motions. He was a small-framed man, and his actions were always tainted with a hesitation so precise that it must have taken years to perfect. “Go to college.” Harry finally swallowed. “Then find a good job and marry a nice girl.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because . . .” He became flustered at the question. “What do you mean ‘why?’”

  “Why does it only have to be a ‘good’ job? I think being a pro wrestler would be a dream job,” I told him, then felt embarrassed at revealing this much to someone who probably wouldn’t get it anyway. “And I think nice girls are boring,” I added.

  Harry stabbed another group of peas with his fork and said nothing for the rest of the meal.

  On the ride home that night, Mom spent the first ten minutes in the smoldering silence that always came before a big talk. I waited, gripping my left forearm like a vise for ten second intervals. Houses shot past my dim reflection in the passenger window. “Shirley’s worried about you,” Mom announced. I responded with a weary sigh. “Michael—” she began.

  “I don’t want to go back to Shirley’s again,” I said, turning
to face her. The car rumbled over a rough portion of the road before smoothing out.

  “Michael.” She sighed again. “They’re concerned about you. I am, too.” As I opened my mouth in protest, she added quickly: “In a way. I mean, it’s great that you have such a clear goal. But why . . .”

  “I don’t know,” I said quietly. My forearm was ready to explode from the pressure, but my hand didn’t release.

  “Is it . . . anything to do with your father?” she asked cautiously.

  “No,” I snapped, embarrassed that she felt she had to be so tentative. “It’s got nothing to do with him. It’s about having pride in myself.” I went on quickly, gesturing now with both hands free. “And taking advantage of being an American and going after my dream.” This regurgitation of one of Sonny Logan’s trademark rants was enough to convince myself that I was making sense. I kept talking, afraid to stop. “That’s what life is for, for hunting down your dreams. Would you feel better if I wanted to be an accountant like good little Jimmy?” I asked.

  “Michael, stop it,” she said, voice rising. “I don’t want you to make a mistake. Besides,” she added, “you are getting too big.”

  My arms were curled at my sides, and I flexed both biceps in armored defiance. “Too big is never big enough—”

  “Damn it, Michael! Don’t give me these goddamn pro wrestler speeches! They’re a bunch of overgrown ignorant kids! Is that what you want to be? Some ridiculous cartoon?”

  “What did you want to be when you were growing up?” I demanded. Several seconds of silence. I watched the road markers being eaten up by our car.

  Then came her quiet response: “A mother.”

  “Sorry if I’ve disappointed you,” I said. Her silence found a way through my sarcasm. I snapped on the radio.

  “Dusk or dawn?” she asked in an uncertain monotone.

  “Dusk,” I offered. Without moving our heads, we found each other, both forgiving, in the corner of our respective ranges of vision.

  When I was around eight, two years before pro wrestling entered my consciousness, I got my mother a painting for her birthday. It was of a small building shaped like a boat and colored a pristine aqua-blue. A small chipped sign reading “Bed and Breakfast” dangled just above the small doorway. The building’s hull was perched just above a cliff strewn with bushes and a stairway of different sized rocks leading to a smooth ocean below. Half of a burning sun hovered expectantly above the sheet of water. A red haze emanated from it, as though it was in the throes of a slow explosion. Its redness overtook the entire picture, giving the sun the intensity of a fiery diamond cutting through the sea of glass. The cliff’s landscape offered no clue as to what coast this scene portrayed. As soon as I hung it up in the living room, my mother and I had engaged in a good-natured argument over whether it was “dusk or dawn.”

  “What’s it called?” she had asked.

  “Broken Dock.”

  “Oh, that’s a big help,” she had replied. And we had both laughed.

  This became our anchor of sorts; and we clung to it as our arguments grew more heated throughout my teenaged years. This was a mystery we agreed to both be puzzled by.

  I never told her that I sometimes had the strange feeling, after studying the picture for a long period of time, that it was neither dusk nor dawn. That instead the sun was approaching the earth (I read somewhere that in a billion years this would really happen) and was setting the entire planet on fire. I imagined that painting was of earth’s last refuge, the one place the sun hadn’t yet consumed. The ship had tried to crawl onto land in order to get away from the ocean’s boiling water. It was the end of the planet, of life as we know it, and of a predictable orbit that had been in place for billions of years.

  I revealed this to no one, storing it away in my mind like some rare collectible weapon that was too dangerous to keep in plain sight but too valuable to throw away.

  Still, it troubled me enough to inspire me to create my own artwork. I wanted to tap into the strange mystery that Broken Dock proposed. During high school, art was the only subject that even came close to igniting the same kind of enthusiasm in me that professional wrestling did. I stored all my sketches in a small cardboard box I kept on the window sill. Its fold-up top was covered with heart stickers from several Valentine’s Days ago. My sketches were done in pencil, all of simple colorless objects shaped not by their own essence, but from the surrounding features. A vase would be outlined against a mirror floating in the background, illuminated by its own reflection. I sometimes imagined that the sunlight shining through the window down onto the box would awaken color from the sketches within. But every time I emptied the box to make room for new sketches, I saw the sun hadn’t made a damn bit of difference.

  My grandfather on my father’s side, Jerald Harding, had played an integral part in the Chicago real estate boom back in the 1920s, and then again after the Second World War. He now lived in the penthouse apartment of a building located two blocks inland from the “Gold Coast” of Lake Shore Drive. In addition to helping design the structure, he had overseen its construction, greasing necessary political wheels and extracting various permits from key city government offices. The end result was that it was located on a strategic corner and had possessed one of the best views of Lake Michigan until 1956, when larger buildings had sprouted up closer to the lake. Angels and clouds festooned its brick facade.

  Every Saturday after working out, I would take the bus over to see him. He let me drink beer so I could “get a bit of a glow on” for the nighttime festivities of hanging out with my friends. My grandfather was the kind of man who was able to pontificate about his youth without becoming maudlin, and share life lessons without sounding pedantic. He believed in a certain old school of responsibility that he claimed was distressingly absent in the modern world. But, true to his self-restraint, he never belabored this point or any other. “Keepin’ your mouth shut is the best way to keep your options open,” he would murmur contentedly as we sat on his porch in silent contemplation of the buildings around us.

  We spent a good portion of our afternoons together playing gin rummy with a deck of cards he claimed once belonged to Al Capone. I had beaten my grandfather steadily in these games up until the time I was sixteen. Then he began trouncing me every game, and it took a few weeks before I realized he had simply been letting me win all along. I was flattered that he now believed I was worthy of beating.

  One afternoon a few months before my eighteenth birthday, we were taking a break from playing cards and simply sitting on his deck staring at the water. Slivers of Lake Michigan squeezed between buildings like light through a row of giant metallic fingers. He wrapped a large hand around a moist beer bottle. “You’re really serious about this pro wrestling?” he asked. In spite of the pack-a-day cigarette habit he maintained for sixty of his eighty-three years, his voice had managed to retain a smooth layer just above its gravelly strength. His scalp still boasted a fair amount of hair, although its color had faded.

  I began to nod. “Yes,” I said for further emphasis.

  “How’s your ma feel about it?”

  “She thinks it’s a phase.”

  His eyes were growing more and more curious, and I was finally able to stop nodding. “Maybe it is,” my grandfather chuckled. “Hell, I still look at smoking as one of my phases.” He leisurely exhaled a cloud of smoke, which was soon broken apart by winds whipping in from the lake. “Life is all about phases. Everything you see here . . . all these buildings . . . they were a phase. In 1928 I designed and built a row of apartment houses on Belmont. We made sure each of them was tailor made to the buyer’s requests.” He drained the remaining beer from the bottle. “Now they’re knockin’ ’em down for rows of identical ones. Tract houses. Fuck me if I know why someone would wanta raise a family in one of those.”

  He sighed. “If I give you something, will you promise to keep it?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  He excused
himself and rolled his wheelchair inside. A few minutes later he emerged with two fresh bottles of beer in each hand and an old mitt resting on his lap. “Thanks,” I said, accepting one of the bottles from him. He kept studying the mitt as though he half-expected it to suddenly leap off his legs.

  Finally he spoke: “I used this mitt while I was growing up, playing in the pick-up games down on the south side. This was back in 1919, 1920 . . . the days when scouts still hung out in neighborhoods. I was a pretty good player. A scout even offered me a contract once.”

  He lit a fresh cigarette with his old one and exhaled again before continuing. “Couldn’t take him up on it, of course. My father was dead, and I had brothers and sisters to support,” he said, looking up at me. “You don’t have any brothers and sisters. And your mother doesn’t need supporting.” He extended the glove to me. I took it. The leather was hardened with age, but I managed to work it down over my fingers.

  “Thanks,” I said quietly. He nodded. The glove’s insignia was faded, but when I brought it to my nose I could still pick up a stubborn trace of rich leather scent.

  An hour later, after he trounced me in several rounds of gin rummy, I got up to leave. He went with me as far as the door, where we stared at each other for a time that seemed longer than the few seconds it probably was. “Are you sure . . . you want me to keep this?” I asked, indicating the glove I was holding tightly in my right hand.

  “Yes,” he nodded firmly. “Please.”

  The basement of my high school was always hot and sticky, even in wintertime. I spent a lot of time there, lifting weights in “the cage,” a weight-lifting area surrounded by chain-link fence. It was located in the center of the basement, and inside were bench presses, squat racks, dumbbells that went up to seventy pounds, and slabs of metal weighing as much as a hundred pounds each. The football coach, Chuck Grabowski, a former pro football player who looked as though he still ate bottle caps for breakfast, supervised the cage from behind a copy of The Sporting News. Whenever someone would release a particularly powerful grunt, he would look up with a hint of approval flickering through his perpetual scowl.