Living the Gimmick

  Via was the one who made me aware of Robert Brown, a ten-year-old boy dying of cancer in a New Jersey hospital room. She had slipped me a letter about two weeks before SlamFest.

  Robert wrote that he admired my courage, and even though he had been in hospital for the past couple of months, he was sure that he would get better in the same way I was sure I would win the WWO Championship. I read his letter eight times the night after Via gave it to me. Even the shaping of the letters was clean and polite. The postmark was from Fairfield, New Jersey, about a two hour drive from Giants Stadium, where SlamFest was taking place. I got in touch with the local hospital and made arrangements to visit there on the day before SlamFest. Three days before leaving for New Jersey, I poked my head into the response department. It was lunchtime, and Via was the only one there. She was at her desk with a view of a narrow alley, responding to letters while eating a chicken salad sandwich.

  I told her that I was going to visit Robert. “See there?” she cried, with a justified air. “I knew you’d like that letter.”

  “Thanks for giving it to me, Via,” I said, then reached out and clasped her hand.

  “Good luck on Sunday,” she urged. Her routine wish of luck was, for once, undeniably valid; the finish of my match with Logan had yet to be determined.

  This changed on Saturday morning, when I met Thomas Rockart Jr. in the rear booth of a coffee shop. He had called me in my hotel room at the Sheraton that morning, saying that he had to meet with me urgently “somewhere out of the way.” I copied down his directions and agreed to be in the rear booth at the specified coffee shop at 10:30 A.M. The shop was abuzz with activity when I walked in ten minutes early. Rockart had instructed that the meeting was to be top secret, so I had tried to dress incognito, in a football jacket and a sports cap pulled down low over my forehead. I was stopped for an autograph three times on my way back to the rear booth, where I found Thomas Rockart Jr. sitting with an impatient expectation.

  “I’ve got a plan,” he told me as soon as I slid in. This self-assured man bore no relation to the scared little boy I had seen staring up at his father’s picture. “We let the big lummox think he’s getting his draw. No problem. But at around the twenty minute mark, you’re going to get him into a Boston Crab. He’ll crawl to the ropes and break it. He’ll love that. The egotistical sonofabitch loves to get out of other people’s finishing maneuvers.”

  “So what about after that?” I asked.

  “There won’t be any after that.” Rockart’s smile was sinister. Then he coasted into silence as a waitress whisked by and deposited two cups of coffee on the table along with a pair of stained menus. Before she could speak, Thomas Rockart Jr. nodded at her with a smile that was pleasant and dismissive; she took the hint and disappeared.

  “As soon as you wrap Logan in that Boston Crab,” Rockart continued, his face reclaiming its former malevolence, “the ref is gonna pretend to ask him if he submits, then ring that bell so fucking fast Logan won’t have a chance to get within three feet of the ropes.”

  “Isn’t that a little . . . dishonest?” I ventured.

  “Michael, this is pro wrestling,” he reminded me. “It’s not like we’re planning to fix the World Series.”

  “True, but there’s a way it should be done,” I protested. “There’s a right way for a title change to happen—”

  “This is the right way. I’m the fucking booker—don’t forget that.”

  “You’re as bad as the reporters,” I mumbled.

  “Michael.” His tone was patient. “I love this goddamn business. I love it even more than you do—because you still want to shape it to fit the way you think is right. Well, I love it enough not to see anything in it as right or wrong. That’s the audience’s job. They decide who to cheer for. We just give them something to watch.”

  I remembered my first exposure to pro wrestling. I had wanted something to watch, and I had gotten it. Meeting The American Dream must have meant something to me, enough for me to chase the WWO heavyweight title all the way up to this point. Now my dream was being granted not in the ring but in a fucking New Jersey coffee shop. It was nothing like I thought it would ever be. Nothing ever is. The words repeated themselves over in my mind several times before I remembered they were Shawna’s. Thinking of her made me even more confused and upset and I pushed her from my mind.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Good.” Rockart nodded. “Three people know about this. Billy Harren is the ref; he’s been employed by the company for twenty years and is looking forward to his pension. So there’s no problem there. The other two are sitting at this table.” His clasped fingers swung back and forth between us like a pendulum. “So there will be no problems. And no leaks,” he commanded.

  I nodded at the tips of his fingers. He smiled, unclasped his hands, and rose from the table. I sat alone, shifting the salt and pepper shakers as though they were checkers. I realized vaguely that I had forgotten how to play the damn game, but was too unsurprised by this to laugh at it.

  The specific name for the cancer that was slowly destroying Robert Brown’s body was neuroblastoma. It had first afflicted him when he was only fifteen months old. Chemotherapy and radiation had cured it, but in rare cases neuroblastoma returns after absences as long as nine years. Robert, now ten years old, was a rare case. Two months ago the cancer had attacked again. Robert had waited two weeks, vomiting quietly at night and forcing himself to act well, in hopes that he would be able to fight off the disease himself without going back to the hospital. By the time he confessed to his mom that he might be sick again, the cancer had spread from his abdomen to his spine. He would be in the hospital at least another month while undergoing further chemotherapy.

  Robert Brown’s hospital room was lit by sunlight which framed his thin skeletal face in an unrelenting brightness. An official SlamFest cap covered a scalp made bare from countless radiation treatments.

  “Hi, Robert,” I said shyly. The room’s silence was amplified by the beeping of a few monitors at the side of his bed. A television on the wall was playing a pro wrestling show with the sound turned all the way down.

  “Omygod. I didn’t know if you were really coming.” His voice, squeaky but layered, surprised me. For some reason I had thought he would only be able to whisper.

  I stepped up to his bed. The room smelled like chalk dust. When he shook my hand, I wanted to grab him and run down the hall and outside and just keep running. His palm was damp.

  “You’re my favorite wrestler, Michael Harding,” he announced.

  “Thanks. Thanks, Robert.”

  “How’d you get to be one?”

  How indeed. “I took the train. Out west.”

  “Wow!” he exclaimed. “You went out west?”

  “Sure.” I nodded. “You’ve never been out there, huh?”

  “No. What was it like?”

  I started talking about Shane Stratford’s Wrestling Academy, the heat, and the desert. Just before I reached the line I had practiced so many times, the one about the tumbleweeds and me being the only things that grew out there, he broke in: “Are you gonna win the title tomorrow?”

  I took a deep breath and told him the truth. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s your dream, right?” he insisted. His eyes were trusting, staring at a hero. I nodded helplessly, captive to everything I had always wanted. “That’s why I think you’re gonna win,” Robert maintained hesitantly. “My dream is to get better. Sometimes I visualize my body, all my cells like wrestlers, body-slamming and drop-kicking the disease out of my system. Neuroblastoma. That’s what I’ve got. So I’ve got a name for my body: the Neuroblaster. It’s Neuroblaster versus Neuroblastoma—” His words were cut off by an abrupt frown; his bottom lip was twitching nervously. “Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked.

  I wiped the tears away and said nothing. The doctor had mentioned that Robert Brown would be lucky if he saw sixteen. “Sometimes I just get . . . emotional,” I whispered.
“You know ?” I asked.

  “I sometimes cry, too,” he admitted reluctantly. “The doctors say it’s like a release. But wow, I . . . I never pictured you crying.”

  “When something hurts bad enough, I cry.”

  “You ever get . . . down?” he asked, “’Cause sometimes, I don’t know. I wonder if I can beat this. It just . . . hurts. I try to picture the treatments like matches . . . like radiation as my manager. But then I’ll feel so tired afterward, I’ll throw up. Sometimes I don’t think I’m . . .” He was whispering now, confessing a sin, “. . . Strong enough.”

  I reached out and took his narrow hand. “Robert, the morning I left Chicago to be a pro wrestler I threw up too. I threw up because I was scared. I’ve always been scared. But it’s okay. It must be. Because it’s part of life. To see a guy like you fighting the way you are . . . let me tell you something. You’re my hero, Robert Brown.”

  “You’re mine too.”

  “Okay. Then let’s do that. Let’s be each other’s heroes.” His hand squeezed mine and I squeezed back carefully, his fingers like brittle straw. “Let’s both keep fighting. No matter what. And don’t be afraid to cry, or to feel down sometimes . . .” I pulled his small body to mine. “Don’t be afraid to be afraid.”

  His fingers dug into my back with a tightness that was familiar and unnerving. His father, I knew, had died of colon cancer when he was five.

  “We need to talk,” I told Sonny Logan that night at a banquet to celebrate tomorrow’s SlamFest. I was sickly aware that I couldn’t go through with Thomas Rockart Jr.’s plan. “Tonight.” I went on quietly, scanning the crowd to make sure Thomas Rockart Jr. nor any of his spies such as Hippo Haleberg or Rob Robertson were watching us.

  “All right.” Logan nodded, speaking out of the side of his mouth. “Room 1023 in ten minutes.”

  Room 1023 was the presidential suite; furnishings such as marble table-tops and golden sink handles all paralyzed in a state of luxury by sterilized air. We sat on two reclining chairs swathed in leather. “Thomas is going to fuck you tomorrow,” I informed him. He started laughing. It occurred to me that he may have been doing coke all night long. “Maybe I should talk to you about this later,” I said, beginning to stand.

  “No, wait!” he announced. Then he peered at me a little suspiciously. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  After I ran down the entire plan, he once again began to laugh. “Damn, that’s a relief,” he smiled. “I thought I was gonna have to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Harren told me all about it this afternoon.”

  “Harren told you . . . ?” I frowned. “Why?”

  “He’s going to Burner as well.” Logan winked. “Burner’s got a contract for him that’ll make the pension he’s getting from the WWO look like the peanuts that it is.”

  A silence engulfed the room. Outside the magnificently framed windows came a shallow trickling of laughter and splashes from the pool below. “There’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask you. This seems like the right time for it.” Logan fingered the palm of his right hand. “How come you never drew me?”

  Still stunned that he already knew about the setup, I responded to his question with a distracted shrug.

  “You drew everyone else you feuded with,” Logan continued, “but you never asked me.”

  His earnest tone marked a huge contrast to the feral teddy bear persona he hurled at television cameras and audiences in arenas throughout the world. A curiosity burgeoned inside; why hadn’t I wanted to draw him? “You know, I first met you years ago,” I revealed, “backstage at the Rosemont Horizon.”

  “Outside?”

  “No, on the staircase. One of the ones going from the dressing rooms to the cargo area.”

  “No shit?” he smiled politely, attempting to show a fond remembrance for a moment he obviously didn’t recall, a moment that had opened up a new direction in the course of my life. I wondered idly if every human being lived in their own individual dimension, all joined only by a bare thread of what we were taught to label as reality.

  “So, you were Sonny Logan. The American Dream,” I went on gingerly, wanting the words to be right, “and I . . . wanted to be like you. But at the same time, it seemed impossible. It was a comfortable goal, I guess. I thought that if I became WWO Champion, everything would be . . . right.”

  He chuckled. “Shit, you sure were a mark.” His head bobbed up and down.

  “I think I still am,” I said. “And that’s why I didn’t sketch you. I was afraid that I would lose something.” I found myself reaching out to touch his face. He shifted back instinctively, and I quickly dropped my hand.

  “Huh,” he grunted.

  Then his hand patted my shoulder. “You know what I wanted to be when I was growing up? A rock-and-roll star.” He seemed to be speaking with the same care I had just used. “Sometimes I look out at these people who wear my T-shirts and cheer for me and I wonder how the hell I got here. Barely any of these people know my real name is Edward Hemmings and that I sucked a pacifier until I was six and still don’t know how to swim and . . .” He shook his head and took a breath. “. . . was always picked on in junior high for being at least six inches taller than everyone else. When I went back to my reunion, all these people were there. It was during my second year as champion. They were all clapping me on the back in this condescending way, joking about old times that hadn’t even happened, and I just kept thinking you don’t know me, you don’t know me. But when I become Sonny Logan . . . I go under those lights and sometimes . . . there are moments . . . when I really feel like I’m living a dream.” He sighed. “You know how weird it is to be called ‘Dream’ all night and then come home and stare in a mirror?”

  “The only mirrors I like are the ones that come with smoke.”

  He grunted. “Tell me about it. I sometimes wonder if there’s someone out there who was born to do this gimmick, and through some fucked up twist of fate I’m taking his place. You remember when you came out and threw your gimmick away? That was so goddamn great to see. I respect you, brother.”

  “But not enough to do a job for me,” I countered with a smile.

  “Shit,” Logan determined. “My whole gimmick . . . the American Dream . . . has been mapped out from the get-go. I’m pretty tired of it, frankly. So this one time, I wanna feel like I’ve had some say in who I am; I wanna go out on champion or not as champion on my own terms.”

  So the American Dream’s desires were only a desperate reflection of my own. The thought both reassured and scared me even more. “So, do we blow off the match tomorrow or what?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow.” He said the word like the name of a poem he had just read and failed to grasp. “Tomorrow we do our job and give the crowd a show. All up to the point where you’re supposed to get me in a Boston Crab. Then we shoot.”

  There was nothing more to say. I got up and left the suite, unsure of everything except my need for sleep.

  I spent a long time in bed staring without thought at visions that tried to pull me into unconsciousness through an offering of illusions.

  There was no need to touch my own body. Soon I would be forced to find out just how real Michael Harding was.

  I closed my eyes.

  16

  IN THE RING WITH THE DREAM

  I approach “The American Dream” Sonny Logan without hesitation. There is no why anymore. There just is. Our chests touch. Sweat from our skins mingles and locks us together. He looks down at me.

  “You ready, Michael?” His voice like a tractor’s rumble, turning over dirt.

  His gaze locks me in. Eyes so blue and limitless. But they do have limits, I know this. This dream can bleed, this dream can feel pain, this dream may not be real. I won’t leave this ring until I find out for sure. My nervousness lifts, carried away by outside noise, which suddenly ceases to matter.

  “I’ll see you in twenty minutes, Dream.”

  “Let us know wh
en to start shootin’, Billy,” Logan tells our ref.

  “Ol’ Tommy boy’s gonna shit his pants,” Billy drawls.

  Sonny Logan staggers me with a shove. I shove him back.

  Although for the next twenty minutes our moves are choreographed, the expectant tension results in some very real damage. At one point I leap off the turnbuckle, and since my left ankle has been bothering me, I put more emphasis on my right. My right knee buckles as soon as my feet hit the canvas, and a hot poker of flame tears through my knee. It is soon reduced by an influx of adrenaline to only a vibrant throb. A few minutes later, after leveling Logan with a suplex, I hear him grunt and turn to see him clutching at his ribs. Later I will learn that he has cracked two of them.

  As the bout wears on, our surroundings dissolve. The only thing I see, hear, and feel is The American Dream, his sweat mingling with mine as we throw affected blows and grapple with an abandoned precision that would have made Shane Stratford proud.

  I am dripping with exhaustion, picking myself up from the canvas after a missed elbow-drop when suddenly Billy Harren reenters my existence. “Twenty minutes, boys,” he whispers excitedly.

  The spot Thomas Rockart Jr. wanted to pull the ruse with was a simple one; Logan was to slam me, then attempt his famous leg-drop and miss. At that point I was supposed to get him in a Boston Crab, and this was to be where Billy would immediately ring the bell. I instinctively allow Logan to slam me, then roll out of the way as he drops the leg. When I get to my feet and turn, I find him already on his feet. “Now,” he pants, “we shoot.”

  The audience senses something amiss as we circle one another slowly. From a small pocket of my hearing, I can make out Thomas Rockart Jr.’s frantic shouting. Logan and I launch into a tight lockup. His force knocks me off balance briefly before I am able to slip around and wrap a headlock around him. He shoves me off, and as I turn, his huge arm slams against my chest. My back hits the mat awkwardly; vertebrae jolt with sudden terror. Logan leaps on top of me. We grapple with a series of amateur moves . . . half nelson, grapevine, wraparound . . . I am surprised at how quickly they come back to me, and even more surprised at how their fluidity makes them feel less real than the solidly placed fake ones that preceded them.