Living the Gimmick

  Four middle-aged men, their thinning hair matted back by sweat, are the only ones who jerk their hands away as I walk past. “You suck, Harding!” one of them shouts and gives me the finger. A dark stain lurks underneath the armpit of his halfway-unbuttoned white dress shirt. Two others, both in plain white T-shirts, begin to chant the champ’s name. I just smile and move on. Next up is an elderly couple. They look embarrassed and I have a momentary suspicion that those guys are all brothers and these two are their parents.

  “Good luck, son,” the man, who appears shorter than his wife, advises me gravely.

  “He needs more than luck!” shouts one of the T-shirt boys.

  I pass by a group of three women in low-cut dresses who caress my arms and chest. One presses an object into my hand. Sharp ridges bite my palm. It’s a hotel room key.

  The items that people at ringside give wrestlers seem to be indigenous to their particular city. L.A. and New York fans usually pass vials of coke. Midwestern cities produce the most hotel room keys and phone numbers balled up inside panties. One night in Dallas someone handed me a small pill bottle that was filled with teeth. Backstage, we saw that some of the teeth were still coated with dried blood. We debated what it meant.

  “Tooth fetish,” someone offered.

  “Edgar Allan Poe reader,” Tug Tyler suggested.

  “Psycho.” I shook my head.

  “Wrestling fan,” Wild Joe Irwin said, and that settled the matter.

  I threw the bottle away. I throw everything away that is handed to me at ringside. Most pro wrestlers do. Only an idiot would snort drugs given by some anonymous mark who could very well want you dead.

  Drifting past a group of younger guys who high-five me, I let the room key slip from my hand.

  By this time I’ve lost track of how many times my theme music has finished and restarted. But I recognize the notes that signal the climax. Time to head into the ring.

  I climb the stairs and grip the top ring rope. It feels like a rubber snake in my hands. I lean down and step between the ropes. My foot catches on the second rope and I almost slip flat on my face. I manage to recover a semblance of balance, falling into the ring with a stumble while my music peaks.

  Did other wrestlers, I wondered, have their own reasons for choosing the gimmicks they used? I had already noticed that all the WWO wrestlers called each other by their gimmick names, just like in the SWA. Were gimmicks coined as arbitrarily as some porno stars make up their stage names (their middle name first and the name of the street they grew up on), or was a piece of the wrestler’s “legit” personality sewn into these masks they threw at the audience? By piecing together the identities of others in the WWO, I could emulate them even more thoroughly while at the same time distract myself from any thoughts about me. Since the only one way I felt truly comfortable looking at something or someone that closely was as a subject to be rendered in black and white, I bought an array of sketching pencils and an easel at a Manhattan art supply store the day before I was set to fly to Denver for my first match with Ricky Witherspoon.

  Because my disposal of Staffer gave me immediate respect from the other wrestlers, when I asked Witherspoon if he would consider posing for a sketch he looked at me strangely for only a brief moment before shrugging and saying “sure.”

  This was on the afternoon before our match at McNichol’s Arena. I set up an easel down at the pool area of the Denver Hilton as he settled into a lounge chair.

  “Where’d you grow up?” I asked, choosing a pencil from the sketch kit.

  “Midwest,” he answered distractedly, closing his eyes against the sunlight.

  “Chicago?” I prompted.

  “Nah, Wisconsin,” he drawled. “Can I just lay here like this?” He propped his head up and squinted at me. “You don’t want me to pose or anything, right?”

  “Just kick back. Close your eyes, whatever.”

  “All right,” he said, leaning back and closing his eyes once more. I was already laying in the outline of his body. “Apple Creek, Wisconsin,” he said with a sigh.

  “Small town?”

  “So small the census once forgot to put us on the state map,” he said. “Us citizens of the town weren’t even surprised. Just amused. All hundred and thirty-four of us.”

  “What was it like growing up there?”

  “Well, we went to a high school about twenty miles away. Spent a lot of time cruising around, drinking beers, and listening to the Bear at ninety-five point nine.” He chuckled and said, “Can’t believe I still remember the frequency.”

  “Did you watch pro wrestling?”

  He laughed. “I watched Knots Landing and Dallas. Seein’ the way those people lived . . . it put me in awe. I mean I know they were actors and all, but still . . . the biggest event in our whole county was usually the Saturday afternoon high school football game. I was Kenosha High’s running back,” he added.

  “You play ball in college?” I asked.

  “Never went to college,” he said, “wasn’t good enough for a scholarship and we sure as hell couldn’t afford it. My old man was a farmer and the market was shit. Still is.”

  “So you went into wrestling,” I said.

  “No.” His eyelids tightened against a light breeze but remained closed. “I became an insurance salesman. The only reason I got into wrestling was because I was trying to sell some promoter a policy. His name was Harvey, and he had a group of wrestlers he traveled around with all over the Midwest. He saw how big I was and said he’d buy the policies if I agreed to wrestle for him whenever he came into town.”

  I traced the cherubic contour of his cheeks; their color was already deepening in the harsh afternoon light. While I searched for a pencil of proper thickness to record this, he continued, “So I took a few wrestling lessons from Harvey and started working whenever he got into town. Next thing I know, he’s offerin’ me forty bucks a night if I tour with his group. I go, ‘Why not?’ Nobody in the county had any money to buy insurance anyway. So I left with the tour. I remember the first time I went into Milwaukee. I was fucking amazed.” He laughed. “I thought, this is just like Dallas! Shit . . . can you imagine getting all excited over a dirty little city like Mil-fuckin’-waukee?

  “After a year of touring the Midwest, Harvey opened a promotion in Florida and made me the champion. I was wrestling with a football player gimmick back then. About a year later I went to another promotion out west. By that point I was makin’ what at the time I considered pretty good money. Maybe a hundred a night, and I was happy as a pig in shit.

  “But then Thomas contacted me, and two days later I flew into New York first class with a huge ol’ limousine waiting to pick me up.”

  I grinned, recalling my identical introduction to the WWO and Thomas Rockart Jr. Although his eyes remained closed, Ricky matched my amused expression. “Yeah, I know,” he acknowledged, “the WWO does that with everyone. But it was a big deal to me. First time I had ever been in a limousine. I pictured it like it was the opening of a television show. I felt like J.R. fuckin’ Ewing. Then I went into the corporate offices and Thomas offered me a job and you bet your ass I jumped at it. When he asked if I had any idea for what my gimmick could be, I told him I had a great one.

  “The original idea was to have a tycoon who had built himself up from nothing. But Thomas thought it would work better as a heel gimmick. So I made up Ricky Witherspoon, an oil baron from a rich family who believed he could buy anything . . . or any one in life. Thomas loved it. Those first few months, he gave me rolls of hundreds to pass out even when I was outside the ring. It would get me in the right frame of mind, he said. I was in heaven. Three years removed from rationin’ toilet paper, and now I’m passing out hundreds wherever I go.”

  I started to ask about whether or not he remembered B.J.’s father, the limousine driver in L.A. he had tipped a hundred dollars, but his voice washed over my first hesitant words. “Money can make people do crazy things,” Ricky Witherspoon said with a
rising edge, the same one he used during on-camera interviews. “And why is that? Because money can change people’s lives. Forever.”

  Trying to guide him away from his gimmick, I asked about his parents and their farm back in Kenosha. “They’re still there,” he said and confirmed with a curt nod, “tilling the soil, was how my father would put it. He said the land would always take care of us. Meanwhile, I was wearing jeans a size too small because we couldn’t afford to buy new clothes. We . . .” He shook his head again, as though he were refusing to speak on a witness stand. But then the words came out haltingly. “There were times we couldn’t afford soap . . . or shampoo. Christ . . .” He sighed with a resignation that made me expect him to break out into shudders underneath the July sun. “That’s why I wanted Ricky Witherspoon to be an oil baron. The land had been fucking me over all my life. It owed me. It’s like, yeah, Dad, the land takes care of some people. People that take oil from it. Not growing wheat and fucking corn.

  “He’s a good person, though,” he added. “Both my parents are. In their way.” He smiled blithely. “I bought them a new tractor last year,” he said with a triumph that suggested he had won something. And perhaps he had. Rather than cut himself off from his parents and destroy his whole history in order to gain freedom from it, he was willing to merely recreate himself in the present and take a victory by default. The portrait was close to completion.

  Should I mention his influence on B.J.?

  A kid with a tuft of dirty blonde hair sprouting from his head approached Witherspoon warily. The child was wearing a Sonny Logan T-shirt and blue jeans. He moved with the awkward balance of an eleven or twelve year old whose growth has outdistanced his coordination. A dark-haired mother hung back by another cluster of chairs, her eyes careful and observant.

  “Mr. Witherspoon,” the kid ventured. Ricky looked over at him.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  His casual tone seemed to set the boy back at least ten seconds. After a few stammers, he finally bleated out: “Can I have your autograph, please?”

  Witherspoon accepted the pen and Hilton notepad the boy thrust at him. “You think you’ll ever beat Sonny Logan?” the kid asked. Fans’ confidence levels always seemed to rise sharply once you agreed to scribble your gimmick name on a scrap of paper.

  “We’ll see.” Witherspoon shrugged. “I may just buy the title off him.”

  “He wouldn’t sell it to you!” the kid yelped. Witherspoon peered at him, and the kid shrugged. “At least . . . I don’t think he would,” he amended.

  “What do you wanta be when you grow up?” Witherspoon asked.

  “A professional wrestler.” This proclamation came with no hesitation. “And rich. Like you.”

  Ricky Witherspoon scrutinized the boy with new interest. “Professional wrestlers do some crazy things, you know,” he said in a tone imbued with a vague challenge.

  “I can do crazy things.” The boy’s voice rose defensively, peaking with a slight crack.

  “How about . . .” Witherspoons’ eyes blinked like a high-speed camera as he scanned the pool area. “. . . jumping in the pool with your clothes on?”

  The kid looked shocked. Then he turned back to his mother and called: “Mom, can I jump in the pool?”

  “Well . . . sure,” she called back. “Go up to the room and change.”

  “I have to do it with my clothes on.”

  “No, I’m sorry, Bill,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t allow that.”

  Billy turned back to Ricky Witherspoon, who had removed a hundred dollar bill from the rolled-up Hilton robe lying next to his chair. “You wanna be rich like me, Billy?” he challenged. “This hundred dollar bill is yours if you jump in the pool. Right now.”

  Billy’s eyes widened as he stared at the bill in Ricky’s hand. He shot a quick glance at his mother, then took off running toward the pool’s edge. “Billy!” his mother shouted.

  There was a loud clap as Billy hit the water with his legs and arms tucked in a cannonball position. He disappeared beneath a liquid mushroom cloud. His mother charged over to the pool. Billy paddled to the side and climbed out sheepishly while his mother cast a peevish glare over at a smiling Ricky Witherspoon. Billy dodged his mother’s grasp and ran up to Witherspoon, who handed Billy his reward and asked quietly, “Do you still think I can’t buy Sonny Logan’s belt, Billy?”

  “I . . .” Billy frowned, his face reflecting a battle between his loyalty to Logan and loyalty to himself. “I think you could.” Witherspoon’s new disciple nodded eagerly, flinging water from his damp hair.

  “Billy!” his mother’s shrill tone made me cringe. Like an owner calling her pet.

  Billy slunk toward her, flinching as she gripped his arm. With a final venomous stare at Ricky, she turned and pulled Billy away. The two disappeared through a pair of doors layered with tinted glass. Ricky lifted up the pad with his signature scrawled just beneath the Hilton insignia. Billy had forgotten it. “He’ll remember this day for the rest of his life,” The Billion Dollar Baby remarked airily, tossing the forgotten prize to the ground and closing his eyes.

  I set my pencil down. The portrait was finished.

  Back in my hotel room later that afternoon, I placed a call to California. Terri answered. She was officially B.J.’s wife now; they had gotten married a week after he returned from Tennessee.

  She told me about their weekend honeymoon at a bed-and-breakfast inn in Santa Monica. “That ocean air is so thick,” she said, laughing. “I could taste it every morning.”

  “A desert gal, huh?”

  “Always and forever,” she chimed. “So when are we gonna see you on TV?”

  “Probably in a couple weeks,” I said. “How’s the recently retired psycho dentist doing?”

  “He’s great. He misses you,” she added. “He’s at work right now, but if you want I can have him call—”

  “No, that’s all right,” I said quickly. “I have to be at the arena pretty soon. But could you give him a message?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell him that Ricky Witherspoon remembers his father as a gentleman.” I dispatched these words in a rush, hoping brevity would mitigate their untruth. “And also, Ricky got a real kick out of his effect on B.J.”

  “That is so cool,” she gushed. Terri knew well the story of B.J.’s father and Ricky Witherspoon. “He’ll be psyched to hear that.”

  I swallowed, guiltily thankful that Terri had bought the lie.

  After hanging up I walked over to the thin-backed chair by the corner and sat. The wallpaper screamed out a diagonal pattern of snarled lines. Their static breakups matched my thoughts as I tried to figure out why I had just lied to my best friend’s wife. After a long time I still had only one conclusion: hotel wallpaper was very, very ugly.

  My series of matches with Witherspoon called for me to go over him via pinfall in nearly all of them. We worked out a finish where the referee took a bump (thus being “knocked out”) and Witherspoon got his steel briefcase and tried to hit me over the head with it. But I ducked and kicked him in the stomach, forcing him to drop the briefcase that I then picked up and used to crack him over the head. Then I tossed the briefcase out of the ring and covered an unconscious Witherspoon just in time for the referee to recover and make the three-count.

  Since Witherspoon was a heel who usually taunted the fans with a wad of money, I too came out with a fistful of cash. But instead of taunting the fans, I tossed the money out to them. That first night in Denver I hurled a few fifty dollar bills loosely in the direction of the first couple of rows, picturing a good-natured grab for the cash. As soon as the money left my hands, the first three rows broke down the barriers and trampled one of the poor security guards in an effort to get at the bills. While the other guards restored order, the trampled one was fished from the crowd and taken to the hospital. He suffered three cracked ribs and a puncture wound in his right thigh apparently caused by a stiletto heel.

  Ricky
was furious. “Shit, Cam!” he yelled backstage afterward, referring to me by what was to become my nickname among the boys. “You gotta throw those bills far!” he urged. “Otherwise, you’ll have those fuckers rushing the ring!”

  After that night I threw only one or two bills out at once, and I made sure to ball them up and hurl them as far as I could. I usually aimed for someone big, knowing that little kids might be mauled if they attempted to snag a bill meant for them. Logan always hurled his T-shirts at little kids and there was no trouble. But, as I had learned, T-shirts were one thing, money was quite another.

  Even though The Chameleon was still a mystery to most pro wrestling fans, the money I dispensed at the start of each match quickly bought their cheers. I dressed in a carbon copy of Witherspoon’s black sequined suit and dyed my hair a sandy brown to match his color. “You’re going to be facing the one person you can’t buy, Witherspoon!” I trumpeted in pre-match interviews, which were run on Saturday morning television. “That person is yourself!”

  Three weeks before I made my hometown debut at the Rosemont Horizon, I called my mom to invite her to the show. She told me that she already had other plans. She had met someone, she explained. About six months ago he had come into the restaurant where she was waitressing part-time and asked for change for the parking meter. Then he had come back a half hour later and asked her out. The night of my hometown return was also the night of his lodge’s annual “Starlight Dance and Dinner.”

  “I wish you could’ve told me sooner,” she told me over the phone. I was calling her from an airplane, partly because flights were the only relatively calm period in my average day and partly because I liked the idea of being able to spend seven dollars a minute on a phone call and not sweat it. “Isn’t three weeks enough notice?” I asked her.

  “Well,” she acknowledged, “it’s just that this meeting is very important to Irling. And it’s important that I be there.”

  “But this is something . . . ,” I hesitated, “that will never come again. My first time wrestling in my hometow—”