Living the Gimmick

  A deep regret gripped me, and I flexed my arm angrily. “Love you, too. Bye.” I hung up the phone. The muscles in my legs expanded as I urged them to life. I hopped out of bed, then flexed into the mirror and didn’t stop until I could clearly see the figure of Muscular Mike Maple, who decided to screen his calls from then on.

  Contrary to popular opinion, there are season changes in California. I discovered this on the Christmas day, my first away from home, that I spent walking the dry empty streets of San Bernardino. My landlady thought I was visiting instate relatives. B.J., Aries, and all my wrestling pals thought I was going back to Chicago. My mother thought I was insane and off doing God knows what. Only the latter was perhaps true. I shuffled from one deserted street corner to another in the chilled afternoon light. The air was surprisingly cool, forcing my hands into the pockets of my jacket. The day’s wary sunlight suggested a reluctance on nature’s part to invest any energy in these quickly interrupted daylight hours.

  Taking step after step after step, I walked on in a daze and didn’t stop until I became aware of the air’s change. Rusty urban dampness had been replaced by a warm blanket of chocolate and smoke. I looked around and saw a residential area of flat one-story homes. Many of them had a swarm of old worn cars in front. The houses’ front windows were shut tight. Most of them were encircled by narrow strips of Christmas lights, ornamentation that seemed cheerless without the snow I was used to. The main color behind the lights was the fuzzy blue of a television.

  I looked back the way I came, trying to spot a landmark that would provide some kind of clue as to the route I had just drifted down. But nothing was familiar. I was lost. Lost on my first Christmas away from home.

  By the time February came I was halfway to shedding my status as a mark. Fifty matches down. The second weekend of March, B.J. and I worked a match at an old-time rock-and-roll club in the San Fernando Valley. Merv Evans, the promoter, had erected a ring on the stage and taken out several ads in weekly Los Angeles newspapers as well as in The Pennysaver. He was known throughout the business as both a savvy businessman and a deceiving little snake. In pro wrestling, as in most fields of entertainment, the two descriptions often seem to go hand in hand.

  Merv was about forty with brittle black hair that looked as though it had last been shampooed with bacon grease. His eyeballs didn’t seem to be able to move all the way up, so when facing you he always seemed to be focused on your crotch. If he said something he wanted to sound earnest, he tilted his head back and you’d be greeted by two long hairs poking out of each nostril. His body appeared elongated to an unnatural degree, as though he had spent years as a child hanging from a bar in order to stretch himself to additional heights.

  Like a starving ferret. I thought, shaking his thin hand.

  “Good to see you two guys. I’ve heard fabulous things about you two,” he said.

  “From who?” I asked with genuine interest.

  “Oh. Here, there, ya know. People in the biz . . . ,” he said and waved his hands and apparently felt the gesture was significant enough to take the place of actual names because he ceased talking for a few seconds while studying me and B.J. intently.

  “You’re the heel, am I right?” he said suddenly to me. I shook my head.

  “Right, of course.” He turned to B.J. “The pay is fifty each, but you can make a hundred if you want.”

  “No shit.” B.J. exhaled. “How?”

  “Juice, kid.” Merv’s head reclined slightly as he kept an eye on B.J. “Juice.”

  Juice meant blood. Thanks to a mention of our feud in a national wrestling magazine, B.J. and I were in the semi-main-event slot. Semi-main eventers usually juiced. B.J.’s eyes registered a momentary alarm before easing into a thoughtful mode. “Fifty bucks more, huh?” he asked.

  “And the crowd’ll love it.” Merv smiled, his nostrils aimed assuredly at B.J.

  A veteran named Hal Duncan, known to wrestling fans as Al “The Landlord” Hoover, was also on the card that night. With his shaved head, handle-bar mustache, and thick frame, he fit perfectly into the physical stereotype of the evil landlord found in old-time melodramas, all the way down to his practiced evil laugh and tongue-rolling rrrrrrrrs. He was the one who showed B.J. how to juice.

  “Just keep that baby tucked there,” Hal said, placing a small razor blade against B.J.’s index finger and wrapping a bit of tape around it. “Then, after Mike throws you against a ring post, hit the ground facedown and do what you gotta do.”

  B.J. peered at the hidden razor blade. “And it won’t . . . pop out or anything?” he asked nervously.

  “Just be careful. Don’t pick at the damn thing,” Hal snapped as B.J. fingered the tape.

  “Where should he cut?” I asked. Hal thrust his face at me like a charging bull. Scar tissue crossed the top of his forehead in a puffy maze, as though miniature creatures had been burrowing underneath the skin for years.

  “Take a wild guess,” he remarked. I nodded mutely and he laughed. “Scars are good,” he added, rolling the “r” heavily. “They’re a symbol of dues paid.”

  Two minutes before the match, Hal came up to where B.J. and I were standing behind the curtain and handed B.J. a pill. “Take this,” he said, “it’ll help.”

  “What is it?” B.J. asked. “Speed, Valium . . . ?”

  “Aspirin.” Hal winked. “It’ll thin out your blood so you won’t have to cut too deep to bleed.” After a slight hesitation, B.J. popped the pill.

  There were about four hundred people in the crowd, and most of them were young drunk rockers who had ventured to the show out of idle curiosity. They were the kind of audience who regard the whole show with a sloshed skepticism, coiled for one slightly pulled punch that will give them an excuse to release an onslaught of jeers: “Bullshit!” “You fucked up!” “Do another take!” and other validations that they are in on the joke. They were the kind of crowd Shane had told us would be our toughest opponent.

  Because we knew they would heckle us at the slightest excuse, B.J. and I worked a very stiff match. After a couple minutes, my forehead was throbbing from B.J.’s repeated punches. It’s a rule that you never give stiff punches to the neck or throat or side of the face. “If you’re gonna go stiff,” the saying goes, “go stiff on the hardest part of the body.”

  We had that crowd popping, especially when B.J. busted open my nose with a drop-kick. “Sorry,” he whispered as he picked me up for a suplex.

  Then juice time arrived. We went outside the ring, where security guards were shoving back a few rowdy fans trying to scramble onto the stage. I hurled B.J. into the ring’s post and watched him go down. A delighted roar erupted from the audience in response to a security guard shoving a fan off the stage.

  Figuring I had given B.J. enough time to do what he had to do, I walked over and picked him up. “Oh, shit,” he was whispering. “Oh shit!” I glanced at his face and instinctively released him. He had made a common rookie’s mistake—cut too deeply. A gash split the skin across his eyebrow and almost reached his temple. The blood streamed down his cheeks and dripped off his chin like rivulets of lava from an erupting volcano.

  The crowd saw this and went insane. I felt like vomiting and passing out. “Do something,” B.J. pleaded. I did the only thing I felt I could; I picked him up and body-slammed him on the concrete floor.

  The cheers soared passionately, and the knots in my stomach eased. As I pushed B.J. back into the ring, I heard a chant go up: “Ma-ple! Ma-ple!” It was the first time a crowd had ever chanted my name. I turned and flexed to their adoration. They responded with throaty cheers. A stray flashbulb went off.

  People don’t take pictures of nothing. My heart thumped in triumph.

  I climbed to the top turnbuckle and leapt to the mat with my hands clasped like an axe handle. My fists collided lightly with the top of B.J.’s head and he went down. I covered him. “You wanna keep goin’ or take it home?” I whispered.

  “Take it home,” he croaked
back.

  I quickly stood and he gave me a crotch-shot, which involves throwing your arm up between your opponent’s legs without actually contacting anything. I keeled over and the crowd cried out in angry retaliation to this cheap shot. B.J. crawled to his “dentist’s bag” sitting in a corner of the ring. The finish called for him to go over via disqualification. So out came the “dentist drill,” its gigantic bit obviously meant for boring holes in wood, not teeth. He hit me in the stomach with the tool’s handle and the referee called for the bell. “Hit me again,” I whispered, “in the head.”

  “Huh?” he asked, wiping blood from his eyes.

  “Make me bleed, man,” I urged through gritted teeth.

  He whacked my forehead with the drill. The blow launched streaks of pain through my head into my shoulders and down my arms, but failed to puncture the skin. He gouged the drill bit into my flesh. The crowd’s violent enthusiasm was now a force of nature gone a little crazy; being one of its targets made me exhilarated and uncomfortable. “What are you guys doing?” the ref hissed. The drill nibbled through my skin and then I was in ecstasy, feeling blood flowing down my forehead. My blood.

  “Now hit me!” I demanded. B.J.’s blow split open the cut and blood ran down over my pupils. “Thank you.” I exhaled.

  “Get me outta here, doc,” he said.

  I kicked him in the stomach and tossed his compliant body out of the ring. As he staggered back toward the curtain, I turned to confront the crowd. Blood shielded my eyes, sparing me the need to focus on any of them. As I fired off poses, their frenzied chants of “Ma-ple!” blended with the blood to make me an entire being. One who could bleed and be cheered. I wanted to kill them all as they worshiped me. I felt like a god, and I did not want it to end. Ever.

  “Are you feelin’ all right?” I asked B.J. later, back in one of the dressing rooms. He was sitting on the edge of a table holding a formerly white T-shirt that was now deep crimson. Like Achilles, only the part of the T-shirt that B.J. held was untouched by blood.

  “Yeah,” B.J. replied, dabbing at the gash. “Hal looked it over. Said I cut a little too deep.”

  “No shit,” I said in a deadpan tone, igniting his laughter. I examined the cut. It was deep, but didn’t appear as wide as it had before.

  “Did we have that crowd goin’ nuts or what?” A slow grin took over his face. Combined with the dried blood, the smile made him look like a contented vampire.

  “Bet your ass we did.” I nodded. The frenzied storm that had gripped me in the ring had passed, leaving behind a mellow uneasy glow. “Thanks for cutting me.”

  He nodded, his lips parting uncertainly. A chorus of shouts erupted from the hallway. “Let’s go check that out.” B.J. slid off the table. We hurried into the hall and spotted a throng of our fellow wrestlers. They were surrounding Merv who, it seemed, had been trying to duck out before the show was over. Merv was hurriedly explaining that he was a busy man and that he couldn’t be expected to remember everything.

  “One thing you can always be counted on to remember is taking the gate money with you!” a rotund man in a farmer’s outfit cried out.

  “And you always seem to forget about paying wrestlers for the matches they’ve worked!” growled Hal, rapping his fleshy knuckles against the concrete wall with intimidating ease.

  “But I can’t pay anyone!” Merv whined, his head arched fully back. “I haven’t even been paid yet.”

  “Cabron!” a dark-skinned wrestler wearing an Indian headdress cried out. “Search his pockets!”

  Triumphantly, Merv pulled out his front pockets. Both were empty. He did the same to his rear pockets. “Try his socks!” a wrestler draped in the outfit of a mental patient called out.

  With dramatic indignation Merv removed his shoes and socks, unleashing a foul odor into the air but revealing no money.

  “Fuck all that,” Hal said, advancing menacingly, “I’m checkin’ his jock.”

  “Okay, okay,” Merv screeched. He explained that although he had stashed an envelope with a fairly large amount of money in his crotch (due to the muggers roaming L.A.), he needed that money in order to put a security deposit on the next place. But if we could give him all our addresses he’d be more than happy to send us—

  “Hey, motherfucker!” I growled, pushing my way through the other wrestlers. “If you don’t pay us, we’re gonna carry you out there and feed you to that pack of animals we just wrestled for!”

  We all paused a moment. Outside, the main event was in full swing. A chant of “Make him bleed” was being sent up by the crowd.

  Merv’s hands began shaking rapidly. He slowly reached into his pants and removed a mildly soggy envelope. “These fuckin’ bills better be dry!” Hal warned. Merv began counting out cash.

  He handed B.J. five twenties and then quickly placed a fifty in my hand, snatching his hand away as though I were a mongoose. But I caught him and said: “This is fifty.” I pointed to the red gash on my forehead. “You owe me a hundred!” I snarled at his nostril hairs.

  “You juiced on your own. I didn’t ask you to!” he whined huffily. “Everyone knows you don’t double-juice except for in the main event. Everybody knows that! What are you, a mark?”

  I slammed him up against the wall. This money was needed to validate my blood—to make what had happened out there real. “I bled to pay dues,” I snarled. “Now give me what I earned, goddammit.”

  Merv pushed another fifty in my direction. I grabbed the bill and released his jacket. “You’ll never amount to anything in this business,” he seethed.

  “Trim your nostril hairs, asshole,” I said. Laughter and hoots followed Merv as he fled out the back door.

  After the show ended and the riotous crowd had finally dispersed, Hal and I exchanged numbers and talked a little bit in the parking lot. “You handled yourself pretty well,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I responded, taking the compliment with proper gruffness. “Guess I can kinda count on Merv not calling me up for work any time soon.”

  “I wouldn’t sweat it if I were you.” Hal laughed. “Merv doesn’t put on that many shows. Damn near every wrestler in the business knows what a weasel he is. Whenever a promoter tries to skip out without paying the boys, it’s called ‘pulling a Merv.’”

  “‘Pulling a Merv,’” I laughed. “I like that.”

  B.J. dropped me off at my apartment that night. “You sure you’re all right?” I asked him, my right leg dangling out the passenger door.

  “Yeah, I’ll be okay.”

  I got out of the car. “Hey, Mike.” His words contained a careful steadiness. I turned back. “Why’d you bleed tonight?” he asked.

  “I bled for you.” I lied uneasily. Focusing on his eyes that shone against the bleak light of the car’s interior bulb. I noticed with a strange relief that his irises displayed a distinctly richer shade of green than my own.

  “No, you didn’t,” he said quietly.

  Heat swam across my face. “No. I didn’t.”

  “What for then, man?” B.J. asked, his tone deep and curious, “I know why I bled—to get an extra fifty dollars to take Terri out for a nice dinner. But I know you don’t need fifty bucks that bad.”

  I sat, paralyzed except for my tense biceps. The wound on my head was still offering reassuring throbs. The cut was real, Muscular Mike Maple was real, I was real. But that mosquito I had so easily killed years ago had been real, too. I wanted to tell B.J. about this, but kept swallowing the words and preventing their escape. Sweat rolled down the inside of my Gold’s Gym sweatshirt.

  B.J. rescued me by placing a hand on my shoulder and saying, “Whatever it is, doc . . . it’s cool. Do your thing, all right?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded automatically and placed my hand over his. We held this for a few seconds before we both pulled back and threw out farewells laced with overzealous vulgarity.

  After hopping out of the car, I watched his taillights disappear around a corner inhabited by a three-story a
partment building that had once served as a lamp factory. The night was hot with only an occasional timid breeze for relief. A rush of air prodded my wound. I had bled. My body was real enough. But what was inside this body? I exhaled this silent question into the dry heat, then turned and headed into my building to finish off the night with a few more Soma, a beer, and another art book I wouldn’t open.

  5

  ROAD TRIPPING

  Opening chords of my entrance music skate across the crowd’s cheers. Their voices rise to meet this fresh noise. I grip the ropes on either side of me and lose myself in the movement of the red curtain. It is rippling lightly with breeze, a crimson sea.

  We call these curtains wide red lines. This term has a vague Midwestern origin; an old saying spoke of a thin red line between the sane and the mad. The backstage area is our land of sanity, where we plan and structure matches. The arena is where a bunch of crazed marks watch this structure blossom into simulated war. All that separates these two realities is a felt curtain, the wide red line.

  I slowly realize the ring isn’t moving.

  I turn to see Rob Robertson kicking at the ring’s wheels, which sit motionless on the metal track that leads outside to the stadium. “Come on, you sonofabitch!” Rob howls, switching his assault to the ring’s corner post.

  “Everyone push!” Hippo Haleburg shouts. Several wrestlers jog over and press their weight against the cart. It begins to creep along.

  “Fuck it, I’ll walk,” I say, parting the ropes to step out.

  “No!” Hippo commands, “The champ’s gonna be walking. You gotta ride.”

  The ring inches toward the curtain. Outside, the crowd’s cheers have begun to dip. Timing is now crucial. If I don’t appear soon, they’ll find it hard to gather a second wind.

  Moments slip by as the ring grinds along inch by inch. “What the fuck is going on in there?” a voice screams from Rob Robertson’s walkie-talkie.

  “The cart’s malfunctioning!” Rob shouts back.