Champion of the World

by Chad Dundas

  The first wrestler to show up at The Green Sheet that night in 1912 was Aldous Hawthorne, a strutting fireplug with a sandy mustache who wore no jacket over a blazing pink shirt with white French cuffs. Moira didn’t know he was the world’s lightweight champion until one of the waitresses told her, but from the way he breezed into the club without paying the cover charge—two toadies following him like they were sewn to his elbows—she knew he was somebody.

  Being somebody didn’t necessarily distinguish Aldous Hawthorne from the rest of the clientele at The Green Sheet. The club belonged to Jellyroll Hogan, a St. Louis alderman and part-time gangster, and everyone who drank, gambled and danced there did so with an unqualified belief in their own specialness. On a Saturday night, it was typical for ballplayers and tycoons to rub elbows with politicians and hoodlums. If a man didn’t at least bring a stage actress as his date, he could count on being mocked behind his back, all of them competing at an unspoken game of who was most important, who was most dapper, who would live forever and never grow old.

  This night the staff had been warned of a wrestling program at the Coliseum downtown and expected most of the mat men to drop by for a party afterward. Hawthorne had only been at his table near the dance floor for fifteen minutes before he dismissed his waitress and asked for Moira to be sent over. She was the floor manager of the club’s casino room, not a waitress, and told him as much as she stood over his table with a clipboard in her arms and pencil tucked behind her ear. Hawthorne sat and listened with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. When she was finished he said he’d been watching her and thought she might like to have a drink with him. Up close she could see he had gray hairs around his temples and in his mustache. His British accent was thick and briny, his frankness disarming. His eyes said he knew what he wanted and saw no reason to hide it. In a room full of people acting out vaudeville parts, she thought he might be the only one just being himself, and she liked him for it immediately. Later, she would come to associate these qualities with wrestlers in general, but at the time she was just a few years off the riverboat and The Green Sheet was her first real job. She accepted his offer and sat at his table.

  Hawthorne said he’d had an easy night of work, taking two straight falls off some local boy in under forty-five minutes. He’d barely got a sweat going and now he couldn’t recall the kid’s name.

  “Riffraff, mostly,” he said when she asked which of the other wrestlers might turn up at the club. He mentioned again that he was the lightweight champion, and when she didn’t seem impressed enough for his liking, he sipped his scotch and added: “That means I’m the best in the world.”

  “I gathered that from context,” she said.

  He told her that in his younger days he’d traveled around England taking on all comers. The place he was from was called Lancashire, and from the way he talked about it, it seemed all the men there were wrestlers. At first his stories thrilled her, but after an hour of listening she started to wonder if he enjoyed the sound of his own voice more than she did. Still, she couldn’t stop herself from feeling envious of the life he described: staying in the finest hotels and moving from one town to the next in expensive private train cars. From what she could tell, it sounded as though Hawthorne spent less than an hour in the wrestling ring each night and the rest of his time carousing. When she said so, he scoffed.

  “There’s a good deal more to it than that,” he said.

  When the other wrestlers began to show up, her first thought was that they all looked like slightly different versions of the same man. They all stood a little bowlegged, with wide, flat chests, heavy brows, and the impassive, deep-set eyes of apes. They didn’t have the show-off muscles of strongmen or body sculptors, but they had big shoulders and blunt, scarred hands like fieldworkers. The club regulars gave them a wide berth, which only made it easier for the shills, cocktail girls, and prostitutes to get to them. The wrestlers didn’t seem to mind.

  Moira could tell Hawthorne was warming up to ask her back to his hotel, when another wrestler in a floppy newsboy cap appeared at their table. At first she didn’t notice anything special about him, just a guy with the same face as the others, one pounded flat and rubbed smooth by the wrestling mat. His nose was still mostly straight, which made him look younger than some of the others, and his suit didn’t fit him, his shirt collar left open around a tree-trunk neck. It was his ears that set him apart. Shriveled and misshapen, they stuck out from the sides of his head like clenched fists: the left one just a bubble of scar tissue with no discernible hole or lobe, the right a dying flower, wilting in on itself.

  She felt an itching at the back of her neck and turned her head just enough to see that the wrestlers crowded around the bar had stopped what they were doing and were watching them.

  “Mr. Hawthorne?” the young man said.

  “In the flesh, my boy,” Hawthorne said, giving Moira an amused wink. “What can I do for you?”

  The young man stuck out his hand and Hawthorne shook it lustily. “I knew it was you,” the guy said, grinning. “I saw you backstage at the Coliseum, but you cut out before I could catch you.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been hot on my tail,” Hawthorne said, enjoying the chance to parade his fame in front of her.

  “Yes, sir,” the guy said. “I wanted to introduce myself and give you the chance to meet the man who is going to take your title.”

  Hawthorne’s smile turned to tin on his face. “I beg your pardon?” he said. His two toadies, who’d been sulking at a nearby table since Moira sat down, caught the scent of trouble and scooted closer.

  “It’s nothing to get hot about,” the young man said. “I’ve seen you wrestle a hundred times. You’re a fine champion, sir, but you’re just not me.”

  In an instant Hawthorne was up out of his seat, his face flushed, a sheen of sweat on his brow. Moira felt a tightness building in her chest and flashed a signal to the bouncers standing in the doorway to the casino. They frowned back at her, clearly in no hurry to get involved. Some of the wrestlers hooted at them from the bar.

  “I’ll not sit here and be disrespected by the likes of you,” Hawthorne said. He was taller than the new man and used his bulk to brush him back.

  “You’ve got the wrong idea,” the guy said. “I didn’t come over to make threats. I thought I might buy you and your lovely wife a drink. A kind of passing of the torch, if you will.”

  Hawthorne sucked his chin deep into his chest. “You strike me as a crazy person,” he said. “I assure you that you are no threat to me. As for this whore, I’ve only just met her.”

  Moira saw disgust flutter across Hawthorne’s face and was immediately angry with herself for sitting with him for so long. She lit a cigarette and said to the guy: “If you’re buying, I’ll have a gin rickey.”

  The guy smiled but didn’t look at her. “You haven’t even got my name yet,” he said to Hawthorne.

  “Nor do I care to,” the champion said. He shoved the man, and suddenly they were all in a tangle on the dance floor—Hawthorne’s toadies and the bouncers and even a few of the wrestlers who’d hopped the rail from the bar. Everyone pulling and swearing and knocking over tables. It took the bouncers a few minutes to pry them all loose while Moira retreated to the safety of the bar. The wrestlers looked amused at the efforts of the bouncers, but they backed off, some of them holding up their hands like they were being held at gunpoint. The last man off the floor was Aldous Hawthorne, yanked up and hanging from where the bouncers had him by the shoulders. Blood was running down his chin, his pink shirt dotted with it.

  “This is outrageous,” he said.

  The bouncers paid him no mind. They looked to Moira, who stood with her hands on the bar and her heart flapping like a bird against her rib cage. She gave a quick sideways nod at the door, and even as a team of bouncers hustled him off with his toadies, the lightweight champion of the world was trying to e
xplain to them who he was.

  “What about ‘Tiny’ here?” another bouncer asked Moira.

  It took her a moment to realize he meant the young guy, who had somehow avoided the worst of the fracas and was scouting around underneath the tables for his cap. His hair was a deep brown brush cut, which made him look even more like a schoolboy. “Say that again,” he said to the bouncer as he located his hat beneath a chair and reset it on his head, aiming for a little tilt. “I’ll pull your tongue out and step on it.”

  The bouncer simmered, but Moira sent him away with a slight shake of her head. His lips twisted in a way that said letting the kid stay was a mistake, but a moment later he moved back to his spot at the door to the casino room. The wrestlers retreated to the bar, and music filled the air as the band struck up again. Maybe they’d never stopped playing; Moira didn’t know.

  For the record, she told the guy as he took a stool across from her, she wasn’t a whore. Secondly, the club had a two-drink minimum, so he’d have to order something if he wanted to stay. The guy looked around and then asked what Aldous Hawthorne had been drinking. Moira brought him a scotch and soda and told the bar manager to put it on her tab.

  “He got the message,” the guy said, staring at the closed back door through which the bouncers had deposited the Englishman, “but I’d say the meaning was lost on him.”

  Moira hid her grin. “A man takes off his hat when he speaks to a lady,” she said.

  He stared at her a long time before pulling off his cap. “Sorry for queering your evening,” he said, leaning forward to offer her a warm, dry handshake across the bar. “I’m Pepper Van Dean.”

  That night she took a bottle of red from the club’s back room and they stayed up late sitting on a bench, watching the river, sipping out of paper cups. She was delighted to find he couldn’t hold his liquor. After just a few drinks he told her about running away from home when he was twelve years old, winding up at a religious school for boys in the Idaho mountains. The older boys there made things tough on him, he said, until one of the brothers saved his life by forcing him to join the wrestling team. She left him with a handshake as dawn broke over the city, knowing she would see him again. Sure enough, a month later he was back, and then every few months after that, as part of Abe Blomfeld’s stable of wrestlers, which toured the midwest in an endless loop. They went on two proper dates and then he started showing up at The Green Sheet unannounced, confessing he had no match in town, that he’d taken the train down from Chicago just to see her.

  The night he proposed, they went to dinner at the Cottage and then roller-skating through Jackson Park. At the steps in front of the Palace of Fine Arts building, he got down on one knee and presented her with a ring so big and tacky, she had to ask if he had stolen it. He laughed but stayed down there, looking at her with those confident eyes of his. Like he already knew the answer. She said she wasn’t going to marry him until he told her his real name.

  That set him back. “How did you know?” he said.

  “Please,” she said. “Nobody’s named Pepper Van Dean. It makes you sound like a comic-strip character.”

  He still had the ring in his hand. Shifting from side to side on one knee. “Zdravko Milenkovic,” he said after a bit, looking as sheepish as she’d ever seen him. “There. Nobody else knows that.”

  She whistled, the sound of it echoing off the stone front of the building. “Let’s just stick with Van Dean when we go see the judge.”

  A year and a half later, she sat ringside at Convention Hall in Kansas City as a crowd of three thousand people watched him take the lightweight title from Aldous Hawthorne in straight falls. For months the two men feuded in the press, and by the time Pepper stood in the ring while Blomfeld strapped the title belt around his waist, he was maybe the most famous wrestler in the world not named Frank Gotch. For almost a full minute after he’d been beaten, Hawthorne slumped in a corner with his forearms braced on the top rope and his face pressed into the turnbuckle. When he’d finally collected himself, just a glint of tears in his eyes, he limped out and shook Pepper’s hand. She had to give him credit for that much.

  Even now, she couldn’t make sense of the giddiness she felt seeing Pepper win the championship. Perhaps the biggest surprise to her had been the sudden realization that he might actually be as great as he said he was. Before winning the title, he’d been a darling of the press for his quick wit and sharp tongue, but she’d always assumed it was mostly puffery. Sure, he was tough and clever, but the best in the world? It seemed too much to hope for by half.

  After he became champion, they moved out of their cramped rear-facing room on Chicago’s South Side to a sprawling two-story house outside the city. The backyard, with its stone patio and enough grass for a ball field, was perfect for entertaining. Nearly every weekend they hosted the wrestlers of Blomfeld’s troupe, along with any other sporting types who happened to be passing through town.

  The wrestlers were odd men, as different from each other as they were the same. A surprising number of them had done at least some college and could talk about art, books and food in ways she’d never heard before. Others were nothing more than street toughs, with scars like fat earthworms burrowed in their eyebrows and under their chins. Some were gifted scientific wrestlers, with encyclopedic knowledge of holds and escapes and a hard-won understanding of angles and leverage. Others were just mean. Some, like her new husband, were both.

  Moira suspected they imagined themselves to be immortal. None of them spared a thought for tomorrow, spending money without counting it, unable to conceive of a day when they might wish they’d stashed it away. The longer they all wrestled, the more they looked alike as their faces grew shiny with scar tissue, their ears calcified hard, and the corners of their eyes drooped from nerve damage.

  One of their backyard parties was where she first encountered Fritz Mundt, a rookie wrestler who seemed to have a new girlfriend every week and was always talking about how life would be after he became heavyweight champion. In those early days Fritz was one of her favorites, a fact that now burned especially badly. He had a funny way of pretending to be dumber than he really was, when in truth he was always playing some angle.

  It took her a little while to get used to being rich and having friends. As soon as they moved out of their apartment, Pepper insisted she stop working, and even though it gave her an uneasy feeling, she agreed. She was not a person who dealt well with spare time, and after a month of sitting around the house, trying to plan dinners and hovering over the cleaning lady, she asked him what he would have her do. He just handed her a wad of bills and told her to go find out what she loved.

  First she tried shopping, following the women who were now her peers around the streets, watching them get gooey at the sight of sale signs in shop windows. The new house had closets bigger than the riverboat stateroom she’d grown up in, and she did her best to fill them with hats and shoes and dresses. When she discovered that buying wasn’t her talent, she tried joining. She went to meetings of the Women’s Peace Party, the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Women’s Auxiliary to the Republican Party. She met suffragists, patriots, pacifists, Bolsheviks and anarchists. She had tea with women who were outraged at the expansion of what they called the “American Empire,” women who seemed to care more about the Philippines and Latin America than their own children. She met women who decried alcohol as a tool of Satan, the ruination of the modern family; rich women who buried themselves in orphans, and wet-eyed, earnest women who filled their mansions with stray dogs and cats. Then there were women who just wanted her to read Frankenstein so they would have someone to talk with about it. They had petitions for her to sign, newsletter subscriptions to push, donation plates to pass after the coffee was served. Nine times out of ten there was a sales pitch hidden somewhere in the slogans, the hymns and all the sisterhood.

  T
hese women embarrassed her, and she sensed the feeling was mutual. Her membership in groups quickly assumed a recognizable pattern. She would go to a few luncheons or sewing circles and at one of them she would drink too much or whisper too many jokes to the lady next to her and would not be invited back. That was fine with her, she told herself, and it was this acceptance of herself as a loner that eventually led her to admit there was nowhere she felt more at home than at a gambling table.

  She began scouting out every racetrack, gaming hall, and card game in the city. Thinking back on it, the memory of those carefree days filled her with longing but also a sense of dread. It had been the best time of her life, but now it seemed like she’d known all along that something was lacking. It was undeniably less exhilarating to bet on the ponies or the ball game when there was no risk involved. If she dropped five or ten dollars on a race or a boxing fight one week and then won it back the next, it didn’t really matter. The triumphant lift she felt from winning and the stab of regret she got from losing were both dulled. They had so much money, the money became meaningless. To compensate, she bet bigger and bigger, but it still didn’t give her the same thrill as the nickel and dime bets she’d made with her father as a girl, when every penny seemed like a fortune. She typically won more than she lost, but the times she went back to Pepper needing more, he always had it for her.

  Toward the end, something changed. During what turned out to be the last six months of his title reign, Pepper was withdrawn and quiet. With newspaper reporters or in public he was boisterous, full of jokes and brags. At home she could hardly squeeze a word out of him. At first she assumed Blomfeld was having trouble finding worthy opponents for him. The general consensus in the press was that Pepper had already bested every lightweight worth his salt and now promoters were resorting to booking him opposite bigger and bigger men or against two-bit bums on the undercard of more important bouts. She knew his reputation as a drawing card and his salary were suffering because of it. Over time she realized something deeper was troubling him. She asked him over and over what was the matter, but he refused to say.