Living the Gimmick

  A track surrounded the entire perimeter of the basement, and it was used primarily by the girls’ track team and the cheerleading squad. Oftentimes the girls would watch us through the small holes of the cage, reacting with questioning glances to the same grunts that would elicit Grabowski’s approval. We greeted their stares of mingled attraction and distaste with the casual indifference we thought would make us look even more unapproachable. For a while I dated one of the cheerleaders who could always be seen doing laps. Had Uncle Harry known of Charlotte Fischer, he would have most certainly approved. She embodied his notion of “a nice girl.” Her honey-blond hair always looked recently washed, and her face maintained an air of innocence even after our marathon make-out sessions. Although I really liked her, I found myself haunted by a hatred for her laugh—a high-pitched nasal shriek that made her sound like a witch. Even in the moments I felt truly drawn to her, her horrible laugh would sound in my head like a taunting chorus.

  “I want to have your children,” she said quietly to me on the night of our senior prom. We were twenty-five stories up in the bedroom of a hotel suite. She was standing against the window, her body draped with a white lace nightgown. She looked like a ghost against the dark sky, visible through the glass. “You being a wrestler would make it hard to raise a family,” she continued.

  “Family?” I cried. “I just turned eighteen, for chrissakes!”

  “My parents got married when they were eighteen. Two years later, they had me.”

  I nodded helplessly.

  “How old were your parents when they had you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well . . . did they meet in high school or—”

  “I don’t know,” I barked, fingernails digging into both my thighs. I pressed them down further, sighing with the sharp licks of pain. Pain that reassured me I was alive.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, “but I don’t know.”

  “I Remember You” by Skid Row filtered obscurely through the closed door, the words as mournful as the stalemate that hung in the air. “Come here,” I said and patted the bed. She did, and we lay there, hands clutching at each other’s backs, until long after the song ended.

  Later that night, we made love with a passion we had never been able to capture before. As we lie there afterward, she closed her hand lightly around mine. “It’s okay,” she whispered.

  When I called her the next weekend, she told me, very gently, that she had a date that night. I almost thanked her. As we promised to remain friends, sadness and relief collided in my gut.

  “That sucks, man,” Marty said to me later that week, as we lay on the high jump mat stationed about thirty yards from the cage. “She was hot, too.”

  “Phone breakups are pretty bad,” Bryan added. The three of us had been best friends since grade school. Almost every day after working out, we would have matches on the mat, its surface as bouncy as a trampoline. Marty and Bryan were rabid pro wrestling fans, and they viewed my dream of becoming a pro wrestler with a mixture of support and disbelief.

  “Me and her are still friends, at least.” I shrugged. “That’s important.”

  “Hard to be friends with a chick,” Bryan said, nodding his head. He would make a hell of a psychiatrist one day. His neat, thoughtful face was made to ponder. Marty was the opposite, with angry freckles and a face that always managed to shape itself into an expression of defiance.

  “How the hell would you know?” Marty teased him, then said to me: “At least you popped her, right?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “On prom night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You musta failed the test,” Marty chuckled.

  “Eat me,” I barked, face flushing. “It was . . . special.”

  They both hooted. “Oh, I’ll bet. If it was so special, how come she broke up with you?” Marty demanded.

  “Because she wanted to get married and I’m not gonna be able to do that if I’m on the road all the time wrestling.”

  “Jesus,” Bryan whistled, “are you really serious about this pro wrestling stuff?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “Sure,” Marty chided, scratching his chest. “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you’re at University of Illinois next fall, just like the rest of us.”

  “Fine. Let’s bet,” I started to extend my hand then saw his already waiting.

  “Come on,” he said, fingers fluttering. “Let’s do it.”

  I pulled back, my cheeks hot enough to explode. “If I know you, you won’t have the money to pay me,” I said in a lame quivering voice.

  That night, I wrestled with my overstuffed pillow a half hour longer than usual, repeatedly slamming it on my mattress, stopping only to acknowledge the pounding accolades from the apartment below.

  A week before graduation, the school newspaper printed all the names of the graduating seniors and where they intended to go after high school. Out of six hundred people, five hundred and sixty-four were going on to college. Thirty more were listed as: “full time workers.” And there were six whose future after high school was dismissed as “unknown.” I was one of them.

  This pissed me off because on the questionnaire they’d given us the week before I had clearly printed “Shane Stratford’s Wrestling Academy.” While others had sent for packets of information from various universities, I had written a letter to Buck Dipter, the editor for Pro Wrestling Monthly, asking for a list of any pro wrestling schools he might know of. The magazine’s 250,000 circulation apparently kept Buck busy, because he failed to respond. Finally, I stumbled across an article in another magazine listing a half dozen schools. I sent off a batch of inquiries, and Shane Stratford had been the only one to respond. His information packet had consisted of several photocopied articles citing his school’s “superior manner of teaching” and “great adherence to the sport’s dignity.” But what interested me most was that he was the West Coast representative for the World Wrestling Organization. Included was an application that asked questions that ranged from the benign (Who was my favorite wrestler?) to the more sinister (Did I bleed easily?). A week after I submitted my application, he called me at home and invited me to come out for a tryout. “Can’t guarantee that I’ll take you on,” he had warned. “You sound like someone who’s serious about this. But if you aren’t, I don’t want you wasting my time.” Assuring him that I was damn serious, I promised that I’d be out there sometime before the end of summer.

  But my school newspaper didn’t consider this a pursuit worth acknowledging, and neither did my speech communications teacher and classmates. The teacher had assigned a speech on “My Dream Job.” Several people had talked about becoming musicians or actors. The teacher praised these vocations as “artistically challenging,” while professions such as architecture or financial consulting were “grounded and secure.” When I announced my choice, he paused for several seconds, his lips chewing air. “Strange,” he finally proclaimed. I seethed in my chair, throwing up a coiled silence in response to the outburst of laughter.

  That afternoon when I got home, my mom was waving an envelope from Oakton Community College. She had pestered me so much that I had finally mailed off an application just to satisfy her. Now they’d sent a letter of acceptance. Reading the letter over my shoulder, my mom let out a delighted cry.

  “I’m not going,” I declared. Her face darkened immediately.

  “I’m going to go to California,” I continued, “to Shane Stratford’s Wrestling Academy.”

  “No, Michael. You’re not.”

  “What th—”

  “You can go to Oakton for a few years and get a handle on a basic education,” she galloped on, her words sounding very precise and planned, perhaps practiced in bed at night, “and get an associate’s degree—”

  “I don’t want to go to Oakton,” I interrupted.

  “And then, if you still want to try out this pro wrestling thing, we’ll see about you going—”

&n
bsp; “We’ll see?” I echoed incredulously.

  The phone let out a shrill ring. Mom rose and answered it in a weary tone. The thing I hated most about these conversations was how much they always seemed to exhaust her.

  Mom began answering “yes” in a suspicious voice. I looked up to see her staring blankly at the refrigerator door. She bit her lip, set the receiver down on the counter, and looked at me. “Jerald’s dead,” she said quietly.

  I blinked hard, body growing numb. Death. It was so real I could feel it inside me at that moment. Waiting. I gripped my biceps, rubbed my arms over and over. Only when I felt dizzy did I realize I had been holding my breath. My lungs gasped, sucking in air frantically. I began coughing and pounding my chest. “Michael, are you okay?” Mom asked urgently. “Do you want some water?”

  “No thanks.” I coughed again and turned away, tapping my own chest. The sound was reassuring. Steady and reliable; an artificial heartbeat that I could control.

  I went to my room, closing the door quietly behind me. The baseball glove peeked down from the bookshelf, where it lay nestled securely between two sketches. I lay on the mattress, tapping my chest. If I stopped I would die.

  My grandfather’s estate had been considerable, but taxes cut it down to a modest amount. He left most of it to my mom, much to the chagrin of his flesh and blood daughter, Annie. Annie had left home at eighteen and by the time she turned twenty was married to the heir of a hotel chain and living in Boston. She dove into the society life of parties and dinners with ease, divorcing and marrying six more times in the next twenty-two years. Throughout this whirlwind of matrimonial activity, she had found the time to call her father exactly twice. “She’s a heartbreaker,” he once told me wistfully. “I wish she was more like your mother.”

  So it was no real surprise that Annie wasn’t mentioned in his will. What shocked everyone, including me, was that he had left specific instructions that $7,000 go to me “immediately, for upkeep of the glove.” That was the exact reading of the sentence. I didn’t share the story he had told me with anyone. I thought it was something he would’ve liked to have kept between us.

  His will stated that his final wish was to have his ashes thrown into the legendary Chicago winds from the top of the Sears Tower. He’d often made reference to this during our afternoons together. “I never want to touch the ground,” he had said. After many tense phone calls, Annie had agreed to come out to participate in this last bit of cleanup regarding her father on the second of July, en route to a Fourth of July party at a North Shore mansion owned by some governor’s son.

  This was the first time I had met her. She was a slight woman with hardened features that bore the evidence of years spent constantly willing the world into a form that would suit them. Her hair was dyed red, and her nose had obviously been sculpted to remove any trace of her family’s Russian Jewish ancestry. She spoke with an affected Boston Brahmin accent that warped even casual observations into stubborn declarations.

  On the morning we met in the lobby of the Sears Tower, she was restrained in her greetings. The man standing a few feet behind her, her seventh husband, reached over and introduced himself as “Jed Smythe with a y and an e.” His face hovered above a neck overcome with fat. He looked like he weighed at least 275 pounds, and I wondered if I was capable of body-slamming him.

  As soon as we were all in the elevator, Annie’s eyes locked on me. About halfway up she spoke: “My father left you seven thousand dollars. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you planning to do with it?” Her chin pointed at me accusingly.

  “I don’t think that’s any of your—” Mom began.

  “I’m going to use it to go to professional wrestling school,” I said. “Anything that’s left over I’ll put in the bank.”

  There was a sharp ding. The elevator doors opened and I stepped outside. The observation deck was lashed by wind screaming off Lake Michigan. “I don’t think that’s very funny,” Annie’s voice came at me from behind.

  “I’m not kidding,” I said, raising my voice in order to make myself heard.

  “Let’s all remember why we’re here,” my mom interjected, holding up the ash-filled urn as though it were a peace offering.

  I hurried to the railing. Chicago sprawled out before me, a collection of patchy roofs and dark streets. There were millions of tiny cracks running through the concrete that supported the city, and each winter these cracks grew and new cracks sprouted when more salt was spilled to melt away the frost. In the summer this same ground was dipped in a soupy heat and cooked by a ferocious sun. My grandfather’s death wouldn’t stop this city’s cycle, and I now confronted the sober fact that mine wouldn’t either. My feet rocked back and forth in a hectic rhythm. I located my grandfather’s old building. The movement of my feet grew more rapid, and I gripped the fence as though it were a cage.

  Annie flew up beside me. “What kind of a joke are you trying to make, anyhow?” Annie asked.

  “It’s not a joke,” I said. Looking out at the city fanning out into a blurry green horizon, my feet kept rocking with wild restlessness. The one thing I had that was mine and mine alone was a goal of being like the men who had elicited so many of my cheers and emotions. If I didn’t leave this city to follow that goal, I had a sick assurance that one day I’d find a roof with no fence, nothing to stop my body from throwing itself off.

  “It’s not a joke!” I said louder. Her arms were crossed, and her face a mask of blank disgust. “It’s something I need to do.”

  “It’s perfectly ludicrous,” she spat back.

  “You don’t know me,” I told her. My words were even and full. “You didn’t even know your own father!”

  Her lips parted in shock. “Aren’t you going to say something?” she commanded my mother.

  “Yes.” Mom looked at me. After a few seconds, she turned back to Annie. “Shut up, Annie.”

  Annie shook her head. “I think you’re both absolutely ridiculous.”

  “I think you’re a pompous bitch,” I said.

  Jed angrily protested that I couldn’t talk to his wife that way. I glared at him. He suddenly didn’t look so big. I can slam your fat ass, no problem. His next few words were lost in the wind, and then he lapsed into silence. Air rushed against goose bumps on the back of my neck as I hurried over to Mom, grabbed a handful of ashes, and flung it over the side of the building. I looked over at her. “Mom . . . I’ve gotta go,” I said. She nodded. “Thanks,” I said, then was gone.

  After making it out to the sidewalk, I stopped and looked up, imagining that a gust of wind had captured at least a few of my grandfather’s ashes and for endless summers would keep them in a perpetual dance above the city he spent his life building. Then I turned and started moving again. There was a lot to do.

  That night I went to a party at an apartment on Belmont Avenue. It seemed like half of my graduating class was there. Like always, people asked in joking tones when I was planning on leaving for pro wrestling school. This time I had a concrete answer: “Tomorrow morning.” The Amtrak ticket was on the top shelf of my closet along with the cashier’s check for $7,000. Two duffel bags were packed; one had only clothes, while the other contained pro wrestling magazines, workout books, my faithful wrestling pillow, and my grandfather’s glove.

  There was a keg at the apartment. A stereo in the corner was at full volume, blaring rock songs by Motley Crue, Van Halen, Warrant . . . all their lyrics about being young and crazy screamed over drunken conversations about our futures. As midnight approached, the party began breaking out of self-contained chaos into genuine bedlam. People were vomiting through open windows, making out wherever they fell, and singing different songs with a shared intensity that made them sound as one.

  Sometime around two in the morning, Bryan, Marty, and I staggered out of the building. A warm breeze blew through the street, bringing the leaves that were in full summer bloom to life. A maple tree stood in front of us
, its branches waving gently to the tune of the night wind. To my blurred vision, its movements were not unlike signals of a conscious farewell. I was between Bryan and Marty, with one arm draped around each of them. “Hey,” I slurred, letting my face swing toward one and then the other, “I love you guys.”

  “Love you too, man,” Bryan said. Our hug was broken by Marty’s frenzied voice.

  “Check this out!” he was shouting. We turned and saw a firecracker in his hand, its wick blazing. He chucked the flames into the air a second before it exploded. The blast unleashed an echo down the street. Marty came up and locked his arms around my shoulders. His beer-tinged breath poured over me. “Let’s steal a car!” he whispered with aimless urgency.

  “No way, bro.” I started laughing. He broke away.

  “Aww . . . ,” he sneered. “You gotta go home and get your beauty sleep or somethin’?”

  “No,” I fumbled, unsure of something. “Well, yeah. I gotta catch that train tomorrow morning.” Bryan and Marty and I had been together for as long as I could remember . . . six, seven years old . . . and now I was leaving. Next year they would both be at University of Illinois and for the first time in what seemed like forever we wouldn’t be together. I didn’t want to piss away this moment in a drunken blur; it was too damn important.

  I stood there silently as attempts to express this whirled in my head. By the time I determined there was no real way to say it all, they were already staggering off in the general direction of the downtown Loop. I turned and headed in the other direction. As I passed underneath the shelter of a tree, I stopped at the sound of footsteps. When I turned, I discovered that I had only heard the echo of my own. Somewhere in the distance came the hollow blast of three rapid firecrackers followed by desperate cackling.