I was still scratching my own skin, but being in the ring helped lull the urge into a temporary silence. I felt comfortable in a ring. Four roped off boundaries.
One day Shane made reference to the comeback Sonny Logan worked into every one of his matches. “He’s in the ring, gettin’ the shezit kicked out of him, but he’s reachin’ out toward the crowd,” Shane explained, “grasping power from all his little Dreamers, and all of ’em cheer and feed right into his gimmick.”
“What’s a gimmick?” I asked him.
Shane gestured around at the poster-lined walls. “They are,” he said. “They’re all gimmicks.”
I scanned the posters needlessly. I knew them all by heart. Ivan Tostoff, “The Russian Tiger.” Tod “The Bod” Malibu. Johnny “The Devil” Satanic. Dozens of men like these snarled down from their posts on Shane Stratford’s Wall of Fame.
“A gimmick is,” Shane explained, “a wrestler’s character. It makes the marks boo or cheer. An all-American, a cocky boy-toy, a renegade cop, a rock star, a matador . . . anything that gives ’em an identity the crowd can relate to.”
“An identity.” I moved my head up and down. “So Sonny Logan’s gimmick would be like an all-American?”
“Not quite deep enough.” Shane picked at the salt-and-peppered stubble on his chin. “Logan’s gimmick is that he’s the American Dream. But at the same time he makes his fans believe that his very existence is completely due to them. They’re convinced that they give him the strength to do what he does in that ring.”
“You don’t think they are?” I asked quickly, remembering the narrow stairway and the warm grip of Sonny Logan’s hand. That night his grasp pulled me up into this world of “body slezams” and gimmicks.
“Who knows?” Shane shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re convinced. When does an illusion stop being an illusion?”
A few seconds passed before I realized the question wasn’t rhetorical. I raised my shoulders and dropped them.
“When someone becomes convinced of its existence enough to respond to it as their perceived rezality.” Shane smiled and clapped once. Twice. Three times. “Lesson’s over for the day.”
That night back in my apartment I sat staring at the art books which lay stacked against the wall. A tower made up of different sized bricks. It was impossible to summon any kind of hope that if I held one of those books in my hands, I might actually open it. I sat on the edge of my bed, held still by a mute terror.
Am I real? Is any of this world real?
A hope sprung up. I reached down and picked up a Carl’s Jr. napkin and a pen. Slowly I traced a square. Then another square within the first. And then a third. My hand vibrating, tapping the pen against paper, now against my wrist. Black dots nicked my flesh. I flung the pen and napkin to the floor. Then I paced, hitting my tensed stomach until the pain was real enough.
After two and a half weeks and $750 worth of lessons, Shane announced to me that I was ready for the advanced class.
The advanced class consisted of maybe two dozen people who had either undergone training at Shane’s or somewhere else. Some of them were actively pursuing wrestling as a career, while others were passionate hobbyists.
My knees were shaking the first night Shane introduced me to the group, but when he announced that he and I had chopped each other for a full thirty minutes there were impressed exhalations, and I was granted immediate respect. It turned out that no one else there had gone over ten.
Every session basically consisted of people getting into the ring with one another and staging impromptu matches while a third man played the role of a referee. These sessions went for two hours and Shane charged us twenty dollars each for “ring maintenance.” As I worked with various people in the advanced class, I learned how to adapt to different styles of wrestling. Hubert, a man six inches shorter than me with a massive beer belly and arms as thick as hams, liked to work slow and stiff. Juan, a 160-pounder who had grown up watching the fast-paced Mexican style of wrestling known as lucha libre, enjoyed incorporating various flips and high-flying maneuvers.
Shane spent every class observing and critiquing the matches. It was important to wrestle before a discerning audience, he constantly reminded us. “Many people don’t think of professional wrestling as a sport because a sport is defined as a competition between opposing teams or single participants.” Here he would pause. “Well, consider this: You and whoever else is in that ring with you are on one team. The crowd is the opposing team. You’re competing against their skepticism and powers of observation in order to make them believe and appreciate what you’re doing inside that squezared circle. Your job is to make a match appear as violent as possible while at the same time imposing a conscious order on the very chaos you’re creating and using to entertain. You want to pop the crowd, make ’em say ‘wow.’ Break down their barriers of disbelief and they’ll keep coming back. That’s the competition that qualifies pro wrestling as a sport.” At this point he would stop, take a deep inhalation of nail polish remover, and conclude, “And I happen to think it’s the greatest sport in the world.”
Everyone always applauded that speech.
During my first week I gravitated toward another student in the class, named B.J. Thomas. Although the B.J. stood for Bobby Joe, his nickname in the class, much to his chagrin, was “blowjob.” He was a couple years older than me, as were almost all the people I wrestled with. (Due to this fact, I automatically increased my age by almost three years, telling people I was six months shy of turning twenty-one.)
B.J. was exactly my height and had the same subdued facial features I did. His body boasted an overall thickness mine didn’t have, and this along with his curly hair and black skin were the only things that really differed in our appearances. B.J. also happened to be as dead serious as I was about pursuing pro wrestling as an actual vocation, and this bonded us immediately.
B.J. explained that since his father had worked sixty hours a week as a limousine driver to support a family of six (“Growing up with three sisters, imagine that,” B.J. would say, rolling his eyes), the only real father-son time came on Saturday nights, watching All-Star So Cal Wrestling.
B.J. had been indirectly guided to a career in professional wrestling by a wrestler known as “The Billion Dollar Baby” Ricky Witherspoon. He had been in the WWO for about a year, and his gimmick was that he was the son of an oil tycoon and believed he could buy anybody off with his immense wealth.
“So, I’m two years out of high school,” B.J. explained. “I’m living at home. I’ve got this nothing job at a drug store while I’m taking general education courses at a junior college. And one night about six months ago Dad comes home and shows me a hundred dollar bill. He had driven Ricky Witherspoon from the airport to his hotel, and Witherspoon had laid that bill on him and told him to keep the change. I had always loved wrestling, and I knew I could take those dudes on. So I decided right then and there, doc . . . I wanted to be the one being driven instead of the driver.” He had called Shane Stratford a week later.
B.J. had a unique rule he followed whenever in the ring: He would never deliver a head-butt. It was a staple in pro wrestling that any African-American or Samoan wrestler would possess a devastating head-butt. This angle reeked of the racist notion that their heads had to be harder to protect their weak minds. “Used to drive Dad crazy.” B.J. would shake his head. “That was the one promise I made him. Well, second promise. First, I told him I was gonna make a million dollars as a wrestler, and second that I was gonna become a world champion without once throwing a head-butt.”
“Come on,” Shane Stratford said after one session, testing him, “if the WWO offered you a contract on the condition you go out as ‘Hard Hat Mac’ or something, you’d sign quickern’ a whezore swallows.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” B.J. replied simply, and Shane raised his eyebrows as though he believed B.J. was sincere. I knew I did.
By my third week in the advanced class,
I was a regular visitor to the apartment B.J. shared with his girlfriend, Terri. They had been sweethearts since junior high and were planning on buying a house within the district of West Covina Junior High so that their child could go to the same school where they had first met each other in sixth grade gym class. They already had this child named. “T.J.,” Terri revealed proudly.
“He’ll love it,” B.J. hooted.
“She’ll love it,” Terri teased.
They would often refer to details of their future together as if they were vacation plans. Whenever I was around them I found myself gripped by a hopeful longing, which soon blossomed into fear that made me a blur of repeated movement.
“Why do you do that?” B.J. asked one afternoon. We were at the gym, resting between sets of bench-presses.
“Do what?”
“Touch yourself.” He tapped all the way up and back down his arm. “You don’t notice it?”
I leaned on the end of the barbell, its steel cold and reassuring. “It’s a habit, I guess.” I shrugged.
“That’s it?”
I shrugged again, thoughts popping in my skull like hyper-kinetic popcorn. Isthisbodyreal? If its skin was cut woulditbleed? Do I exist? “I guess.” My voice stumbled over these silent questions. “I don’t know.”
B.J. gave a careful nod. “Let’s keep this show goin’,” he said. After a few confused moments, he laid down on the bench press, and I realized he had meant the lifting. I exhaled.
Picking me up at my apartment one afternoon, B.J. noticed some art books from the library. They were scattered on the floor below the window. “Crazy stuff, doc,” he said in a careful, noncommittal tone as he flipped through one. I didn’t tell him that in the last four seconds he had seen more of their contents than I had.
Sometimes B.J. and I hung out with another guy in the class named Aries Watori. Aries was twenty-three, and his father owned a couple of used car lots and a few higher-end apartment buildings in downtown Los Angeles. He was around 5'10", with a stocky barrel-chested upper body balanced on two skinny legs. “A castle held up by twigs,” Grabowski would’ve mumbled from behind his newspaper, had Aries ever stepped into the cage. Aries claimed to get off on pain and often rammed his own head into the turnbuckle several times, particularly if people were watching him. He often took insane chances, such as diving on tables and somersaulting off the turnbuckle onto the mat for no apparent reason. He once told me that his hero was Jim Morrison, because he had “hated his father.”
“My father treats my mom like shit,” Aries informed me one night. We were headed to the wrestling academy in a BMW from one of his father’s lots. “He’s a fuckin’ joke,” he spat. I nodded mutely. “They’re both a fuckin’ joke,” he added, taking a corner at forty-five miles per hour. Aries always drove as recklessly as he wrestled.
One Saturday afternoon the three of us were at Del Taco, where we usually went after class to stuff ourselves with forty-nine cent tacos. Aries had performed a particularly risky maneuver in class earlier that day, diving off the top of a turnbuckle onto a table positioned on the floor fifteen feet below. He had broken the table in half to great applause from the dozen or so wrestlers present, as well as Shane Stratford. “You’re nuts, man,” I told him as we sat down at a patio outside with a half-dozen tacos each. “You could’ve been killed,” I said, my tone halfway between admiration and disapproval.
Aries smiled and nodded. “I know,” he acknowledged, “but it got a reaction, didn’t it?”
“Jesus,” B.J. belched, “you risked your life to get a reaction from fifteen people during a practice session?”
“Damn right I did,” Aries’ voice lowered. “I remember when I was like eight or nine years old my dad took me to one of these IMAX theatres. They were showing this film about speed. Drag racing, planes breaking the sound barrier, that kind of stuff. Well, there was this one story about this guy. He was a teenager speeding along the road and gets pulled over by this small town cop. The guy’s all excited, and he asks the cop how fast he was going. ‘Over a hundred miles an hour,’ the cop replies. ‘Did you hear that, Mary?’ The guy turns to his girlfriend. ‘A hundred miles an hour!’ The guy loved speed, pure and simple. Then the screen shows, ‘So and so won the 1965 Indy 500. Won the 1966 Indy 500. Died leading the 1967 Indy 500.’”
We sat silent for a few seconds, munching thoughtfully. “That was when I realized,” Aries declared, “there’s no shame in dying if you’re doing what you love.”
“Sounds pretty admirable,” I admitted.
“Sounds like a bunch of sentimental horseshit,” B.J. scoffed.
“What was the guy’s name, Aries?” I asked.
“I forget,” Aries said. “But it was a great fucking movie.”
I raised my large Mountain Dew. “To living and dying doing what you love,” I announced.
“To living and dying doing what you love,” Aries echoed with appropriate zeal. B.J. raised his cup in dubious silence but gave in to a grin as the three of us touched paper cups. Then we drank, happily swallowing the conviction that whatever we loved was not only pure, but destined to be; that mixture which enables people to believe in truly fantastic toasts.
4
MUSCLE MAN
The champion’s dressing room door remains closed. The murmur of the crowd reverberates through the high-ceilinged backstage area. Through a series of mellow cries and whoops, the fans are issuing a collective exhalation before the main event. They need their strength to unleash the enthusiasm required for the night’s climax. Rarely does a match succeed or fail solely on the efforts of either the wrestlers or the crowd. Each feeds off the other, and when the energy is right, they produce a union as wondrous as sex.
Thousands of hands find a common rhythm and are soon clapping as one. The bleachers above our backstage area vibrate from perfectly timed stomps. “Marks are gettin’ ready,” Tug says, his cheeks filling with a hot flush.
The pounding now fills the air; my breaths are rapid and shallow, matching their rhythm. I need to get out to that ocean of people.
The technicians back away from the miniature ring. Three ropes of red, white, and blue surround the four-by-six platform.
Rob Robertson lowers his walkie-talkie. “Three minutes to intro of Michael Harding!”
My legs tremble as I climb into the shrunken ring. I recall my first trip down an aisle and am surprised that this memory is tinged with sadness. Although too nervous to enjoy the experience, that first time possessed a perfection spread over all of its panicky blurs. A diamond made even more precious by glaring flaws.
Standing in this mini-ring, I suddenly feel like a museum piece. I could be a mummy, cordoned off by this patriotic colored three-rope barrier. The crowd’s unanimous claps and stomps have become the beats of a death march. How many more ring entrances will I be able to make before the thrill is completely gone, when the possibility of becoming WWO Champion will be more of an inconvenience than a goal?
“Ladies and gentlemen . . . and wrestling fans!” The announcer’s voice tunnels under the crowd’s rhythm and surfaces: “This is the main event!” Instantly the beat is scattered into thousands of separate cheers and howls that rise in a tidal wave of noise. It frightens me.
This is the biggest match of my career, and for the first time a fear of what I will either have to destroy or be destroyed by makes me dread heading down that aisle.
My first match in front of a paying crowd came soon after I started my advanced training at the academy. A promotion based in Los Angeles was putting together a show at the YMCA down near San Diego. Shane knew the people in charge and got the three of us on the show. I was slated to wrestle B.J. It would be his first paying gig as well. His gimmick was a psycho dentist.
For five nights I sat up well past midnight, trying to conjure up a gimmick of my own. The cars shot by outside my window while I ran my nails over my chest and arms. I had an uncertain hope that if the skin broke just once, an identity would be r
eleased with my blood. But my flesh held firm.
Lying in bed was torture. Sleep had become an orgy of shadows; I was convinced that one night my lack of identity would enable them to absorb me and I would never awaken. Why can’t I think of a fucking gimmick? What’s the big deal? It’s just a gimmick.
Just a gimmick.
The nights passed and I remained gimmickless. Back when I had been sketching in Chicago, I had found subjects for drawings effortlessly. The shape of a vase could spark a dozen possible sketches, each one its own story. But now when I consulted my surroundings for any clues as to a gimmick, one gimmick, there was no assistance to be found. I stared at the cracks, which spread like aimless spider webs in the ceiling, but they remained cracks in a wall and nothing more. I conducted interviews with myself, playing the roles of both announcer and wrestler. But the announcer simply referred to the subject as Michael. Michael? I rubbed my temples. What kind of a fucking gimmick is Michael?
When I turned to Shane for help, he just smiled. “It’s your gimmick,” he said firmly. “You’ve gotta pick one you feel comfortable with.” There was no way I was going to tell him I wasn’t even comfortable in my own skin.
The day of the show B.J., Aries, and I all drove down in the new Mercedes Aries’ father had given him for his twenty-third birthday. “I’m nervous, guys,” I admitted on the way, trying to make my voice casual. “What the hell should I call myself ?”
As the car streaked toward San Diego County, we tossed some possible ideas around. It quickly turned into a game:
“Mike the Mangler?” Too football. “Mikey the Moocher?” Too bluesy. “Malicious Mike?” Rhymes with delicious. “Marble Mike?” Sounds like an ice cream flavor. “Michael Myers?” Too Hollywood. “Mike Starr?” Too porno sounding. “Mr. X?” Not porno sounding enough. “Mikey, he likes it?” Aries suggested.