Living the Gimmick

  “So do it!” she snapped. I held the phone away from my ear, stunned. When I brought it back, her voice was softer, “—for almost four months, and then suddenly you call and expect me to drop everything to come see you wrestle.”

  “It’s only been three months,” I protested, though I really wasn’t sure. Travel had forced time into a perpetual string of hotel rooms, airports, gyms, and arenas. Days no longer passed, they vanished, swallowed up by the kinesis of my newfound life. “I’m sorry I didn’t call,” I murmured.

  “Don’t be sorry . . .” Her voice wandered into silence. “What’s your name now, kiddo?” she asked.

  “Chameleon.”

  “Chameleon,” she said, sighing. “Don’t be sorry. You’re doing what you have to do with your life, obviously. But can you understand . . . I have to do the same.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’m still sorry.”

  “I’m not,” she said, and laughed, “I love you.”

  “How’s Harry and Shirley? And Jim?” I asked, wanting her to remain on the line, to keep talking.

  “They’re . . . they’re fine,” she responded, sounding surprised, “and Jim’s at Harvard Business School. He’s interning at some kind of savings and loan.”

  “That’s good.” I nodded at the phone. “That’s good.”

  She invited me for lunch or dinner the day after the match. But we were going to be flying out the next morning at six for Houston. I told her I’d try to come back when I got a few days off.

  “I’ll watch for you on TV,” she said, before clicking off.

  When we landed in Cleveland I had tried to locate Bryan or Marty. I tracked Bryan down at his apartment at Southern Illinois University. He was enrolled in summer school and told me he was planning to study abroad for a year. “Maybe Italy or Spain,” he said, “I hear there’s a lot of women over there who like American guys. What’s up with you, man?”

  When I ran down an abridged version of the past four months, he was amazed. “The WWO!” he exclaimed bewilderedly. “That’s too much. I can’t believe you—”

  “I’m gonna be wrestling at the Horizon!” I told him. “You gotta be there, man!”

  “When?” he asked. I gave him the date. “Shit,” he groaned. “You would pick the night of my last afternoon final.”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed, “but if I can shoot through the final quickly maybe I can get up there in time.”

  “How’s Marty?” I asked.

  “I dunno.” Bryan sighed. “He’s down here, but he’s not going to summer school. Just hangin’ out, I guess. I haven’t seen him in days. He’s partyin’ a lot. He’s, uh . . .” He paused. “He’s Marty,” he said finally. Bryan and I agreed that if he could make it that day, he’d meet me in the lobby of the Radisson Hotel next door to the arena. As teenagers we had spent many hours at the tables there loitering in hopes of seeing our favorite wrestlers stalk by.

  A few weeks later I was landing at O’Hare airport. My heart skipped excitedly at the thought of seeing an old friend. But when I got to the Radisson only one table was occupied. Two elderly couples sat engrossed in some kind of card game. Bryan was nowhere in sight. I approached the front desk.

  “Hi,” the redheaded desk clerk greeted me. Her face was sprinkled with a dizzying amount of freckles.

  “Hi,” I said. “Reservations for World Wrestling Organiza—”

  Her expression grew officious. “Your name, please?” she asked.

  “Harding,” I said and glanced aimlessly around the lobby. “Harding,” I repeated. Her fingers danced rapidly over the keys, and in a few seconds the smile returned to her face.

  “Oh, here we are!” she said. “I didn’t recognize you at first. You must be new.”

  “Yep.” I nodded as a cry of joy went up from one of the ladies at the table. I turned and saw her waving a hand of cards triumphantly.

  Once in my room I took a Valium and called Bryan. “I just had the most intense final,” he moaned. “Sorry, man. But I’m too burnt to make the drive.”

  We talked for a few minutes and hung up with a promise to keep in touch. I sat on the edge of the bed, slowly realizing that when he moved out of the dorm, I would have no way of reaching him. I had forgotten the number of his parents’ house. I could feel the Valium entering my system, soothing an incipient depression. A different phone number slipped out from a fold in my memory and I found myself dialing it. A woman answered—Charlotte’s mother. I had only met her once, that night I took Charlotte to the prom. “Is Charlotte home?” I asked.

  “Charles?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed nervously.

  “She should’ve picked you up by now,” she said, “but you know how she drives. Nervous Nellie.”

  “Yes, Nervous Nellie.” I laughed.

  “Of course, I don’t have to tell you your wife is also one of the most careful drivers—”

  I hung up the phone and stood. The Valium was blotting my sensitivities, turning potential joy or depression into feelings that I could recognize but not experience. Fine with me. It was time to engage in what was becoming a pre-match ritual. I called Ricky Witherspoon’s room. “Hello?”

  “Spoon, it’s Chameleon.”

  “Cam . . . gimme ten minutes. You know where the bar is?”

  “Hell, yes,” I chuckled dreamily, the Valium pummeling the outside world into a dim blur. “I practically grew up in this hotel.”

  That night, in the arena I first discovered the dream I was on my way to achieving, I worked another match in front of thousands of faceless marks. Several times during the match, the building rumbled as a plane flew by at a low altitude either on its way to or from O’Hare Airport. As a member of the audience, I had always incorporated the rumble into a general excitement that grew from the cathartic feeling of watching simulated struggle. But now the noise was merely that of an airplane flying overhead on its way to some destination. The next morning I would be on one as well, going to another city to do the same thing all over again.

  “It wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

  This was how I described the night to Shawna a week later. I was talking to her on the phone in the living room of my fashionable New York apartment. Outside the window, a throng of tiny bright dots lay packed together like interconnected vessels marooned in an expansive vein of darkness. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be,” I repeated, looking away from the window.

  “Nothing ever is.” Her laugh was tender and a little sad.

  Gradually the semblance of a routine began to emerge in my schedule with the WWO. We would usually wrestle anywhere from twelve to thirty nights in a row, then receive something like four days off. Beastie told me that he had wrestled three hundred and ten days last year. Oftentimes, the only three things we saw in a city were the airport, the arena, and the hotel. If we had enough time, we went to the gym and suffered through a workout with limbs and muscles trashed from a relentless schedule of colliding with a mat. The workouts didn’t matter that much; steroids made our physiques possible. Our bodies were controlled by a variety of substances; downers made it possible for us to sleep after the adrenaline rush from a match, uppers got us up in the morning so we could make a 6:00 A.M. flight, and painkillers helped us ignore nagging injuries such as torn muscles, bruised ribs, and sprained ankles. We were kept well supplied with pharmaceuticals by the physician who traveled with the WWO. His name was Dr. Randall Tingle, but we always called him Santa, partly because he looked like old Saint Nick, but mostly because his main duty was dispensing steroids and painkillers. The good doctor was most assuredly necessary, because although our pay paled in comparison to that of professional baseball or football players, we had no off-season to recover from injuries. Rather than see this as an injustice, many wrestlers took a bizarre pride in the harsh life we endured. It served as another stripe of exclusivity that separated us from the marks. “Just get me under those lights, brother,” Sonny Logan said ba
ckstage one night. “It makes all this shit worthwhile.”

  I nodded vigorously as he drew a small bullet-shaped canister to his nose and fired a few hits of cocaine into each nostril. When he offered the vial to me, I took it immediately. We hadn’t talked much, and I had the feeling this was a test of some sort.

  I tilted the bullet and snorted deeply. Cocaine flew up into my nose, savagely tunneling into my mucous membranes. I winced and coughed a little as Logan began laughing. “Take it easy, brother,” he advised. “Let it glide in by itself.”

  I did much better with the other nostril. I handed the vial back and he clapped me on the shoulder. I tried to remember him doing the same thing to a kid in Chicago years ago but at that moment was too wired to be able to call up the memory. I just kept looking at “The American Dream” and nodding, my face frozen in a numbed smile.

  ANYTOWN, U.S.A.

  The locker room saturated with the scent of baby oil. I sat in the corner, my body a vibrating battlefield as a Percodan buzz clashed with a hit of Dexedrine I had just taken because I only got two hours sleep the night before due to partying and some fucked up flight reservations. In the center of the room, “Dastardly” Darren Domino was holding court, talking about the woman he H-bombed last night. An H-bombing involved slipping a Halcion in an unsuspecting rat’s drink. Then after Domino had sex with her, he shit on her and deposited her naked feces-smeared body in the hallway. He bragged that he’d done that to at least a hundred women throughout the United States. I didn’t know why he did this, and probably neither did he. There was no time for self-reflection. Not with our schedules and our personal appearances and photo sessions. Sixteenth straight day on the fucking road and I was supposed to give a shit about some drunk girl? All I needed to know was that I was going to be allowed to go out into the arena that night. Hit the lights and the music and then during the match I’d be counting the number of marks with my T-shirt on. That’s all they existed as now—bodies wearing my T-shirt. That meant I was still saleable, and that meant I would have a job tomorrow. Unlike Sledge who, as soon as his feud with Officer O’Malley was over, had been dismissed by fans and hence let go by Thomas Rockart Jr.

  The fickleness of fans toward wrestlers led to many “gimmick-lifts,” in which a wrestler simply traded in one gimmick for another. There were other reasons for gimmick-lifts. Mickey Jeter had always been known as “The Lone Warrior” and was getting a good push until three months ago when he jokingly press-slammed a drunken Thomas Rockart Jr. at a riotous party after a successful pay-per-view. (“He insisted,” Mickey would protest afterward.) Mickey’s claim had been backed up by several witnesses, who remembered Rockart proclaiming: “I can take it!” The Warrior followed his boss’ orders, sending Rockart to the ground as gently as possible. Nonetheless, Rockart suffered three bruised ribs as a result. Three weeks later, Mickey had been informed that the Warrior gimmick was being retired. He now worked a drag queen gimmick as “Vivian Vitale.” Whereas the Lone Warrior had howled his way through interviews while beating his chest, Vivian Vitale lisped while flaunting an exaggerated limp wrist. Before every match Mickey caked his face with makeup, painted his nails fuck-me red and doused his body with glitter. “What the hell,” he would say and shrug, smearing mascara on his eyelashes, “I used to paint my face when I was the Lone Warrior, too. Just the other side of a fuckin’ coin.” I would nod as if I knew what he was saying. And I thought I did. Twenty-six straight days on the road and nothing seems real. Always another destination looming, adding a slippery impermanence to every location. Even emotions seemed too fleeting to trust. My disgust at Domino’s H-bombing was nothing more than a remote ache that would soon be replaced by the excited heat of going to the ring and then the exhausted ride back to some hotel and then the listless laughter at that hotel’s bar before a confused tumble into sleep.

  I had no desire to touch my own body anymore. Why bother? I wasn’t even real. I was Ricky Witherspoon. But in rare sober moments I realized this freedom from my compulsion was only temporary. If I stopped touring, stopped wrestling, it would all reemerge.

  So I clung to my Chameleon character, remaining a skewed reflection who experienced days like notes in a chaotic opera I had written but now failed to understand.

  As my feud with Ricky Witherspoon was played out in arenas across the country, I managed to buy a Mercedes convertible and lease an expensive penthouse in Manhattan’s fashionable high-rent district. “It’s where the well-off reside,” Witherspoon, who lived four buildings down from me, informed me proudly.

  When we worked the Capitol Arena in Washington D.C. Witherspoon made reservations for a group of us at a particular downtown restaurant frequented by the president. But during our match I bit off a small piece of my tongue while getting hurled from the ring, and had Santa shoot my mouth up with a local anesthetic. When I told Ricky I wouldn’t be joining the rest of them for dinner, he expressed disbelief. “How could you not wanna go to this place?” he demanded indignantly.

  “I won’t be able to taste anything!” I protested.

  “So what?” he cried, “We’ll be eating with the same silverware the president of the United States eats with!”

  So I went along and ended up getting drunk on a bottle of eighty dollar champagne. When I was with The Billion Dollar Baby, money was never an object.

  Many months passed with Shawna and I playing phone tag. Every time her machine came on I listened to it all the way through, then hung up on the sound of the beep. Near the end of my feud with Ricky Witherspoon, she finally caught me at home on one of my rare off-days.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” she promptly accused. “No phone calls—”

  “I called a couple of times, but I always got your machine so I hung up.”

  “Why didn’t you leave a message?”

  “I hate the sound of my own voice.” This was curious but completely true, and the silence on the other end of the line indicated she was just as stunned by the confession as I was.

  “No artwork, either,” she said, more quietly.

  A sketch pad lay on one of the small black end tables bordering the couch. Except for the sketch of Ricky Witherspoon lounging by a Denver Hilton swimming pool, its pages were blank.

  I shifted the phone from one ear to the other before speaking. “Not too many fields out here. And you can’t see the sunset.”

  “Why not?”

  “Buildings get in the way.”

  “What kind of building do you live in?”

  “Place in the upper forties,” I said. In response to the silence I added, “Got a doorman and everything.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m impressed, already,” she said and laughed. “What’s your apartment like?”

  I glanced around, shifting uncomfortably on a thin-backed chair twisted into some kind of fashionably esoteric design. This was the first time I had been forced to fathom my apartment as a home and not just a crash pad. I surveyed the living room that joined the kitchen via a wood-paneled bar. Pieces of metallic, sharp-angled furniture crouched throughout the room like animals laying in wait. “It’s . . . modern,” I stammered finally, using the only word I could remember from the description the broker had recited. “It has all new furniture. I ordered the stuff out of a catalogue. Came in prearranged room designs.”

  “Prearranged?” she pronounced the word with distaste.

  “I didn’t have time to go through a store and pick out stuff,” I protested. The chair, as though in retaliation for this insult, held its strange curvature stubbornly as I tried to scrunch into a more comfortable position. “Cost me a fortune,” I added, both in justification and to pacify the chair. It didn’t work.

  “I’ll bet,” she drawled. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s all right.” I stood up and cracked my back. “I wouldn’t mind a rocking chair, though.”

  “So why don’t you buy one?” she asked, laughing. “You have enough money, right?” she teased. “You can buy a top-of-the
-line rocking chair.”

  Her chiding tone made me angry enough to visit a Salvation Army the next day and pick up an old rocking chair with wide thick rollers and immense cushions for thirty dollars. I set it up before my window and began rocking. I rocked and thought about the apartment, its cramped rooms and tremendous views and extraordinarily high rent. Downstairs in the parking garage sat a Mercedes convertible that I barely ever drove. It reminded me of a gun Ricky Witherspoon had once shown me. The thing was a collector’s item that had never been fired. “Never gonna be, either,” Ricky had maintained, patting the barrel protectively. If fired, he explained to me, the weapon would lose most of its value. I had never understood the purpose of owning a gun like that. I didn’t know that I ever would; our series of matches was winding down.

  The next day I traded in my Mercedes for a used Honda. Two weeks later, Witherspoon and I had our final match in Madison Square Garden. That following weekend I moved into a spacious flat in Brooklyn and decorated it with an array of mismatched, second-hand furniture. My new place had a softer feeling than the penthouse; this was a place I could actually see myself wanting to come back to.

  I was helped in the move by Ricky Witherspoon, Jake Jugular, and the person who was set to be The Chameleon’s next opponent, The Soultaker.

  10

  WRESTLING DEATH

  Dark stains dot the canvas; blood and sweat from the matches that have filled the afternoon and early evening. A cup flies into the ring, fanning out a stream of beer, which for a moment becomes a rainbow under the artificial lights. The beer splashes onto the canvas, and the cup finally comes to rest by the ring’s opposite edge. The referee kicks it out of the ring with a neat sweep of his leg while security guards descend upon the general area from which the cup was thrown.

  The air is rich and taut, smelling vaguely of sweat. The day has been hot, and a lot of people still have their shirts off even though the sun has gone down and the air is now cool. I take off my leather jacket and fold it up carefully. The special guest ringboy comes up to the edge of the ring. He won a write-in contest for the privilege. About one hundred and twenty thousand people sent in essays explaining in a hundred words or less what being ring-boy would mean to them. I don’t know what this kid’s winning answer was.