CHAPTER 5
James “Lucifer” Duvall was born in Manhattan on April 4th, 1979, the only child of Linda Duvall and Martin Gorman. He was conceived while his parents were both undergraduates at Columbia University, where they were active in what remained of the New Left on the campuses of the northeast.
Knowing that Martin would think a child an obstacle to his long-term plans, Linda kept her pregnancy a secret until it was too late to terminate it. At the beginning of her third trimester, Linda came home from class to find Martin naked in bed with a freshman English major. Martin, apparently consumed with guilt, was insistent that he should leave. By the time James was born, Martin was living in San Francisco. James was never to meet him.
James’s early youth did not include time spent with playmates and toys. Instead, Linda carted him around as she continued the rebellion of her university days. James attended his first political protest meeting in his mother’s arms when he was six months old. By the time he was two, he was riding the train from Baltimore to DC with his mother every morning so she could participate in whatever hippie regalia was taking place on the mall that afternoon. When he was four, he sat in the hallway outside the Chancellor’s office at Winston College for seven hours (along with his mother and sixty other people), in a successful attempt to shut down the school until a particular European history professor was fired.
The year of James’s fifth birthday, his absent father was named editor-in-chief of the radical magazine, Proletariat Activist, where he wrote a highly praised piece about the continuing oppression of women. Linda wrote a letter to the magazine calling Martin a deadbeat dad. The letter was never published, but Martin began sending a monthly check. Linda quit her waitressing job and became a full-time volunteer activist.
With guaranteed money and a stern hatred for all men, Linda renewed her radical spirit and took up the cause of oppressed women everywhere. She paid increasingly less attention to her son, who, in her mind, had driven Martin away, and was predestined to become an oppressive monster by nature of his penis.
His father gone, his mother inattentive, James grew up on his own.
At school he was a whipping post for the kids with social skills and confidence, becoming a regular in the nurse’s office with black eyes and bloody noses. At home he was a nuisance to his mother and her friends. So he withdrew from interest in the real world, and instead spent his time in daydreams of superheroes and adventure. Early one Saturday morning, while his mother was asleep, James discovered the professional wrestling programs that aired on network television. After watching two hour-long wrestling programs back to back, James ran into his mother’s bedroom and awakened her to excitedly relay all that he saw. He told her about the matches, the characters, the managers, and the spectacle, with an excitement he had never displayed before. Linda had never seen wrestling, but knew that it was violent, disrespectful of women, and insensitive about racism, and in a rare moment of parenting, she declared that James was never to watch it again. On the next Saturday, when she caught James watching wrestling in secret, she moved their only television into her bedroom. Wrestling was never spoken of in the Duvall household again.
When James began ninth grade at Ulysses S. Grant High School in the fall of 1991, he was five feet four inches tall and weighed 120 pounds. Two years later, when he finished the tenth grade, he was an even six feet and weighed a solid one-eighty. The schoolyard beatings promptly came to an end.
The next year James grew another three inches, placing him in league with the tallest students at school. He accepted an invitation from Mr. Garrison, the varsity basketball coach, to try out for the team, and found, to everyone’s surprise, that he was a decent athlete. His academics improved, and he found his own niche of friends. He took to exercising, and convinced Mr. Garrison to let him have a key to the school weight room, where he worked out every morning for at least an hour before school started.
On his graduation day, James drove his mother’s Saab to Hastings Arena, where the ceremony was held (she didn’t attend, calling graduations “pompous celebrations of the ruling class”). When James left the arena that afternoon, he didn’t drive home. Instead he got onto I-70 West and drove for ten hours. At one in the morning, he pulled into a rest stop off the freeway just inside the Kentucky border and slept in the car until dawn. Then he drove into Lousiville, parking the Saab in front of Pruitt’s Wrestling School, an unmarked red brick building in a seedy neighborhood outside of downtown. He went inside and paid $900 cash, money he had saved for three years, to Jack Pruitt, buying himself 10 months as a student in one of the South’s premier schools of professional wrestling.
Two days later his mother tracked him down with the help of a private investigator. She took her Saab back to Baltimore, and James never spoke to her again.
For the next year, James waited tables from morning until mid-afternoon, attended wrestling school in the evening, and worked out in the gym at night. He lived in an empty studio apartment within walking distance of his job, his school, and his gym. He didn’t own a car or a telephone, but he did own a television and a VCR, which were exclusively used for study. He watched GWA Burn and Revolution Riot every week. He borrowed tapes from Jack Pruitt’s library and caught up on all the wrestling he had missed in his youth. He studied the greatest matches, sometimes staying up all night or calling in sick to work so he could watch the masters of the sport for hours at a time. He never socialized with anyone, lest he lose even one more minute of life that could have been spent with his passion.
By the end of the year, he was Jack Pruitt’s prize student, and had been invited to join the Southeast Wrestling League, the largest independent wrestling promotion in the country. Two days before his first match in the SWL, he bought a used Toyota Camry, which would become his home for the next two years.
His first gimmick in the SWL was a mysterious gothic man named Scorpion Mace. He wrestled five nights a week, every night in a different city. He owned one suitcase, one gym bag, two pairs of shoes, one pair of wrestling boots, and a clear plastic jug that was always filled with water.
On most days, breakfast was a piece of fruit, and lunch and dinner were peanut butter sandwiches, made with ingredients purchased at whatever gas station could provide them. Showers happened in high school gym locker rooms, YMCAs, and one time at a homeless shelter. When he traveled through the Carolinas, where the shows were usually well-attended and the pay was better, he shared motel rooms with other wrestlers. Otherwise, he parked his car at rest stops and public parks and slept in the back seat.
Wrestling venues in the Southeast Wrestling League were as nice as the brand new 2000-seat arena at the fairgrounds in Greensboro, and as dreary as the abandoned airplane hangar in Jackson. Pay for a night’s work in the SWL varied from nothing to six hundred dollars, depending on the venue. If a show was cancelled due to poor attendance, the performers weren’t paid. If a show was poorly organized by a fly-by-night regional promoter, the performers weren’t paid. Grocery store shoplifting and gasoline pump driveaways were common practice among SWL performers.
After a particularly long stretch without pay in December of that first year, James asked a college kid who attended all the Kentucky shows if he was interested in buying the black T-shirt James wore in the ring. The kid paid twenty dollars for it, money James used for gas to get to Charlotte. In Charlotte, the promoter told James that he could not wrestle shirtless, that the black T-shirt was part of Scorpion Mace’s gimmick. James asked around backstage if anyone had a black T-shirt he could borrow, and received an old heavy metal T-shirt from the trunk of Frankie Dice’s car. The shirt was faded black, plain except for one word in red lettering on the back: Lucifer. That night James wore the shirt while he wrestled a popular babyface named Gunner Brown.
The next night in Raleigh, James wore the shirt again. A group of teenage boys who had traveled from the previous show in Charlotte held up a poster with the word “Lucif
er” on it. A large section of the audience chose to cheer for James’s character.
Before the next show, James purchased a bottle of black hair dye at a drug store off the Interstate. He paid $4.00 for it. In a grungy bathroom at a gas station in rural South Carolina, James dyed his hair black. That night in Charleston, James asked the promoter if he could be introduced as “Lucifer Scorpion Mace.” During his match, the black hair dye began to bleed. The match turned into a gooey mess, with black muck all over James, his opponent, and the ring. The promoter was furious and James was only paid half. As James headed for the shower, he saw himself in the mirror with his shirt off. Black streaks of hair coloring swirled down his neck and shoulders. James imagined he had thick veins filled with black blood. He left the building without showering and found a tattoo parlor down the street. He paid all the money he had, forty-three dollars, to have the black streaks of hair coloring turned into permanent tattoos.
The next show was in Jacksonville in a high school performing arts center. Three scheduled performers no-showed this small venue. To fill time, the promoter asked James to cut a promo before his match with top babyface Clubber Brody. Having never done a promo before, James nervously agreed. As he walked to the ring, he tried to think of what he might say, but came up with nothing. When he took the microphone in the center of the ring, he just opened his mouth and said whatever came out. “Do you people want to see a beating tonight?” A small chorus of cheers came from the seats. “Is that all you’ve got, people? Don’t tell me you came out here and paid your hard-earned money to watch a bunch of no-names pussyfoot around. You people want to see a beating. And I’m going to give it to you. Now, do you want to see a beating or not?” A few more cheers came from the crowd. “Do you want to see violence?” More cheers. “Do you want to see blood?” The crowd grew louder. “Who wants me to hit Clubber Brody over the head with a steel chair?” Now the crowd was getting excited. James dropped the microphone, jumped out of the ring, grabbed a steel chair, and hopped back in. “If you want to see me smash this steel chair into Clubber Brody’s skull, let me hear you!” The crowd screamed in approval.
When Clubber Brody’s music played and he stepped out, he was booed by the audience. The audience cheered wildly when James clocked Clubber Brody over the head with a steel chair, and booed when Brody eventually won the match as planned. As soon as they got backstage, Clubber Brody punched James in the mouth.
“That’s for stealing my heat,” Brody said.
“There’s nothing I hate more than a wrestler who won’t play the part. You were supposed to be the heel out there,” the promoter said. “Don’t expect to work for me again.”
James didn’t get paid that night. But his spontaneous babyface promo earned him far more than the $100 the promoter withheld. The show that night was broadcast on Jacksonville community access cable. A man named Stanley Mushnik was watching. He was impressed with the way James worked the crowd, so much so that he called his old friend, Gene Harold. After the next SWL show in Orlando, James met up with Gene Harold and Larry Jenkins backstage, and signed a one-year developmental contract with Revolution Wrestling.
Two months later, on October 26th, James made his national debut in Grand Rapids, Michigan for Revolution’s All Hallows Eve Pay Per View. He was a well-hyped “Mystery Opponent” for a mid-carder named Adrian Smoke. His ring entrance was a frightening combination of shadows and fire, set to crass heavy metal guitar music. The ring announcer introduced him only as “Tonight’s Mystery Opponent” and the television announcers made a big deal of his anonymity. In a four-minute squash, the nameless wrestler defeated Adrian Smoke. The crowd was confused. The announcers were aghast.
For the next three weeks James plowed through the undercard on Revolution Riot as an anonymous wrestler. His matches were booked more like a circus act than a sporting event, as James was encouraged to show off his cruiserweight-style repertoire and handle his opponents like crash test dummies. By mid-November, James was more over than any wrestler in the company. On the November 24th edition of Riot, James gave his first interview on Revolution television, and told the world his wrestling name, Lucifer.
Lucifer became an instant ratings sensation. At the Last Man Standing pay per view in November, he defeated veteran wrestler Miller Wilson and delivered Revolution’s highest buy-rate ever. On the next Riot, he defeated Revolution mainstay Edgar Hoover in a critically acclaimed 23-minute epic. The match was a mature showing of ring psychology, high spots, and mat wrestling, and featured the debut of what would become Lucifer’s trademark finisher, a variation on the Scorpion Deathlock submission hold. He called it The Devil’s Trident. The Internet wrestling community pronounced Lucifer as their new hero. Riot’s overnight television ratings went up a full point from the previous week.
January began Lucifer’s first ever extended feud in Revolution, when mat technician Tony Campbell laid him out backstage with a sledgehammer. A match between Lucifer and Campbell was announced for the Massacre PPV, and for the next three weeks, the two men put on an old-school style feud, highlighted by Lucifer’s first in-ring promo on the January 13th edition of Riot. Lucifer repeated “I’m coming for you Campbell,” as a mantra throughout the promo. It played more like an historic speech than a wrestling interview, and the Internet began comparing Lucifer to the greatest performers in the history of wrestling.
At Massacre, Lucifer and Campbell wrestled for sixteen minutes before Campbell landed in the Devil’s Trident and tapped out. It was the first time in Tony Campbell’s career that he had submitted.
Heading into February, Lucifer was Revolution’s biggest star, getting monster pops and selling hordes of merchandise. He appeared as a guest on SportsTalk, and spoke quietly and eloquently with legitimate sports journalists about the line between sports and entertainment. His interview was well-received by the mainstream press, and the television ratings on Revolution Riot reached new heights.
In February, Lucifer was booked in his first main-event-level feud with Butterfly Johnny Grace, a wrestler who might have been pushed to the very top had Lucifer not taken off like a missile. Lucifer and Grace stole the show at the Aggression PPV and had a rematch on the February 24th edition of Riot. Lucifer went over clean both times, solidifying him with the fans as a championship-level contender.
Rolling into March, ratings for Riot were closing in on Burn, and the Internet proclaimed Revolution Wrestling as the future of the industry. Max Zeffer announced on Revolution.com that March and April would be spent determining a ranking list for the number one contender for the Revolution World Title. A complicated round robin tournament was set up to take place over the next 6 broadcasts of Riot. Lucifer was given the chance to go from bottom to top on the entire roster again, and did so impressively, leading up to a critically acclaimed Number 1 Contender’s match between Lucifer and Jerry Senika on Riot in Worcester, Massachusetts. Three days later he made a nationally televised appearance on The Late Show With Reggie Foster. Lucifer’s appearance gave the talk show its highest ratings ever. He went to bed that night aware that he was on the verge of becoming an international superstar.
The morning after his talk show appearance, James awoke on the sixteenth floor of the Hyatte in North Brooklyn, feeling rested for the first time in many months. His schedule for the upcoming week would allow him to skip all the Revolution house shows over the weekend to do publicity in New York for the Monday episode of Riot, live from Madison Square Garden. It would be his first weekend off from wrestling in three years.
James rolled out of bed and walked to the window. Looking east, he could see Madison Square Garden, where on Monday Night he would wrestle Red Jackson for the Revolution World Title.
He thought of his childhood, and his mother. When he left her house three years ago, he had nine hundred dollars and a borrowed vehicle. In two days he was scheduled to win the World Title and solidify his place as the premier
wrestler in the world. He wondered where he could go from here.