by Jack Tunney
Sue knew me well enough to know I meant it. Charlie started to say something, but Sue interrupted him and took his arm and headed him out of there. I waited until they were gone before I got up and went into the dressing room.
A lot of the guys were gone already. Real casual, I started asking those who were left about the wrestler who'd been Thumped. No one knew anything.
I didn’t know what I was up to. I just had a weird idea that those shadows around the loading dock had been that jobber getting tossed into that car. Probably my imagination. Probably if I’d never met Thumper I would’ve let the whole thing drop.
But I had met Thumper, so when I spotted Joe the Greek Pappas, the heel on the announcing team, I walked over and said, "What happened to that new guy?"
“Which new guy?”
“The one who got thumped.”
Joe caught me with the glare they called the Evil Eye when he was still in the ring. "He's fine," he said.
"Where is he?"
Another Evil Eye. "He’ll be back next week in Springfield." He pushed open the gray metal exit door and walked out. It had started to rain.
I stared after him for a second, wondering if he hadn’t answered my question for a reason or if he was just treating me like the dumbass he treated all the jobbers like, and then I walked back to get my stuff, and there was Lou holding my duffel bag.
He's shorter than he looks on TV, and skinnier, and paler. He tossed the bag to me. "Good work tonight," he said. "I really liked how you sold that clothesline from Big Boy. The crowd ate it up."
“Thanks.”
“And you won a match. That’s a good thing.”
“If you say so, Lou.”
He held his glasses up to the light like he was checking if they were clean. "What do you think of Thumper?" he asked.
“He’s pretty big.” About the same I’d said the last time he’d asked.
“The fans like him a lot,” Lou said. Now he was wiping his glasses on his tie. “He’s the best thing we’ve had in a long time. I wouldn’t want anything to mess that up.”
He put on his glasses and pulled on his raincoat and said, “I was thinking maybe it's time to give you a push.”
It wasn’t out of the blue – there was that chance to show my stuff with Tino a couple of weeks back – but it was close.
I thought about it and came up with, “You think so?”
“I just need time to think up a gimmick for you. Probably not by Springfield, but by the taping after I should have something. Then maybe I’ll put you in with Illegal Alien.” Illegal was a jobber-to-the-stars. He always beat the regular jobbers, but when somebody got a push, Illegal was usually the first one who lost to them.
Lou was still talking, and it was all coming out too fast. Like he was reading off a script. Like he had planned the conversation out in advance and was dead set on having it go the way he planned it.
“There’s just one thing,” Lou said.
Of course there was. There always was. “Name it,” I said.
“I want you to forget the new guy.”
A whole conversation went through my head. Then another. Then I said what any jobber would have said. “Sure, Lou. Consider him forgot.”
ROUND 6
When I was a kid, wrestling was the biggest thing in my life. Not wrestling in school, on a team with funny head guards and dopey singlets. But pro wrestling, on the television, and twice, for my birthday, on an overnight trip to see it live.
Live was good, and it was special, but what happened once a week is my absolute favorite childhood memory. Sitting on the sofa down in Uncle Charlie’s basement, watching wrestling with Stephan and Uncle Charlie. I would always be in the middle, and there’d be popcorn and root beer, and sometimes Stephan would bake cupcakes. And no, Stephan baking cupcakes didn’t mean he was gay or anything, and neither did two grown men sharing a house.
We’d watch Bruno Sammartino and Killer Kowalski and Gorilla Monsoon, and everyone once in a while Uncle Charlie would jump up and yell “Holy Maloney!” at something really exciting, and Stephan would roll his eyes. The two of them would always act like the whole thing was real, for my sake, even though I knew the first time I watched that it was all a big put-on, and they knew I knew.
Then one day Stephan disappeared. Uncle Charlie said he’d gotten a great job offer back in Chicago. I thought it sounded like a fib, but what was I going to do? Accuse Charlie of lying? So I let it go.
After Stephan left, I tried to keep up with the martial arts he’d taught me. But not having anyone to spar with – Charlie’s shoulder kept him on the sidelines – made it kind of hard. So, I mostly worked on keeping the ga-ni close to my heart. That was Stephan’s word for the little ball of something you had inside that made you understand a martial art.
I knew it was a made-up word, but I didn’t care. Because connecting to the ga-ni made everything work. He’d taught me a meditation exercise that got me to the ga-ni in a minute or so, and once I did that, I had all the moves back. They might be rusty, but they’d be there. Which came in handy one day behind a bar and one day in basic.
A week after I came home from Desert Storm, Uncle Charlie had a stroke, so I stuck around and took care of him until he made pretty much a full recovery. And while I was sticking around, I met Sue, who really got on well with Charlie, so when we started talking about living together, it was just natural for her to move in with the two of us.
Then I got the chance to try out for Central States Wrestling, Charlie spent a little time trying to convince me not to, but he knew this was one thing I wasn’t going to listen to him about. At the tryout, I connected with the ga-ni, and it was enough to get me the job. With no rent, Sue’s work as a paralegal, and me filling in at the lumberyard, we had enough to live on, so everything I made wrestling went right into our savings.
***
By an hour after whatever happened at that dark loading dock, I was mostly convinced I hadn’t seen anything off-kilter. For all I knew, the guys carrying the jobber had gone the other way, and whoever I saw was throwing leftover peanuts in the car. Guys got hurt all the time in wrestling, and one good thing I could say about Lou was he always made sure they got taken care of. Why would that stop?
And the more it seemed like nothing wrong had happened, the more excited I got about Lou’s offer.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
I pictured myself with my hand raised at the end of the Marcel match, only in this version I wasn’t wearing the dumb mask,
I know, I know. It’s all phony. You know beforehand if you’re going to win or lose. That doesn’t mean you don’t like winning. You think Dolph Lundgren felt good about losing in Rocky IV? Well, hell, maybe he did – who knows with actors – but for me, it made a difference.
By the time Sue, Charlie, and I had been on the road an hour, the loading dock thing might as well not have happened. I’d gotten to thinking about what kind of outfit they’d give me. And how I’d get to wrestle in real arenas.
“There’s a light,” Sue said.
“Huh?”
“A traffic light. We’re still quite a way from it, but wherever your head is at, I figured I ought to warn you early.”
I focused in and saw the light turn yellow and slowed down. When we came to a stop, I started telling Sue and Charlie about the push. Though I left out the part about the new guy.
“I wonder what he’ll call me,” I said.
“What?” Sue said.
“What name they’ll give me. They’re sure as hell not going to call me by my real name. They might as well call me John Smith.”
“You want to back up a minute?”
“Huh?”
“You still haven’t told us what happened when you ran out after Thumper put that guy down.”
“Oh.”
“Which I expect you to do right this second. After you move the car. Because the light is green. Maybe I should drive. Charlie, you think I should drive, don’t you?”
/> “I’m staying out of it,” he said.
“No, I’m fine,” I said. I heaved a sigh and tried to get my thoughts together. “Well,” I said. “For a little while there I might have thought I might have seen them maybe throwing him in a car.”
“That’s a lot of mights and maybes.”
“But I was wrong. I had to be. Whatever I saw wasn’t him.”
“I see,” Sue said.
“It was probably peanuts.”
“Right. Peanuts. Did you ask around?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“I didn’t get anywhere. After a while I stopped asking.”
“This stopping asking, this didn’t happen to happen around the time Lou was feeding you some crap about a push, did it?”
“It was because I realized I had to be wrong. There was no way they…”
“You weren’t going to tell us about what you saw, were you?”
“I probably didn’t see anything.”
“I see.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Charlie, do you believe him?”
“Not a whole lot,” Charlie said.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Sue said. “For now, please just keep your attention on your driving.”
***
That week I hit the gym even harder. I was there four hours a couple of times. I worked on my arms and shoulders, and on my back. My legs were fine. They’ve always stayed fine no matter how much I blew off training. It was the upper body I had trouble with.
I kept up the wrestling workouts with Charlie, and one time I nailed the standing dropkick. And then I couldn’t come close again.
I also started running. I hate running. I think, unless you actually run races, it’s a stupid thing grown men shouldn’t do. But I needed to work on my wind. Because if there was any chance I was going to be moving up, that would mean longer matches. The matches between stars went fifteen, twenty minutes. Sometimes more. Every once in a while, they’d go up to an hour. So, more wind seemed like a good idea.
I called Tino Terranova and asked him to check around about the kid Thumper had squashed in Forestville. He called me back a couple of days later and said the story he’d heard was the kid, whose name was Bart Valerian, was fine and had decided wrestling wasn’t for him and had gone back to wherever he came from. I asked Tino if he believed it and he said, “Why not?”
***
I had the next weekend off, and Sue and I spent Saturday sitting around like lumps. Come Saturday night, we turned on the TV, and just by accident, we ended up on wrestling. It was the Forestville show, and they aired one of my matches. It was the first one in my good guy trunks against Big Boy Blalock, and there was one point where he clotheslined me and I took a really poor bump.
Sue said, “I noticed that at the taping. You were falling down before he even touched you. If he ever did touch you.”
I looked into her eyes and said – mumbled really, “Lou said I did a good job of selling it.”
“This right before he started that business with the push?” She crinkled up her nose and got up for more beers.
We hadn’t talked about any of it since in the car on the way back from Forestville. She hadn’t brought it up and I sure as hell wasn’t going to.
From the kitchen she said, “You've got to get away from Lou. Find yourself another outfit to work with.”
"There's not a whole lot of call for jobbers, Hon,” I said. “You go where the work is. That's with Lou. And besides ...”
“I know, the push. Hon, he’s using you. Did you check on the kid?”
“Bart. His name was Bart. Is Bart. Yeah, I called Tino. He said the guy retired.”
She came back in and sat on my lap. Then she downed some of her beer and said, “Okay, look. I’ve been thinking about all this. I’m not comfortable with Lou, but I’ve never been and you know it. You’re a big boy. I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m just going to tell you to be careful.”
“So go ahead.”
“Be careful.” She put her head on my shoulder and got all content like she did.
Five minutes later wrestling was over and a Gilligan's Island rerun came on. I looked for the clicker and couldn’t find it, so I dumped Sue on the sofa and jumped up and changed the channel. Because I really hate Gilligan’s Island.
ROUND 7
Sue didn’t go with me to Springfield the next weekend. Charlie couldn’t. Another big deal with his car dealership. Some TV star from a cop show I’d never heard of was going to make a personal appearance.
They had Tommy Bufone and me against the Barrister Brothers again. But the Brothers had turned face in the meantime. Lou was short of good-guy tag teams, so he changed their name to Pro Bono and turned them by having them bounce their manager, Sammy The Muskrat Deegan, around the ring after he lost them a match by interference against Frick and Frack, a couple of jobbers-to-the-stars.
So now Tommy and I had to act mean when we were announced, making faces at the crowd, then Pearl-Harboring Pro Bono while they were taking their jackets off. Of course, it didn't do any good. Tommy got pinned and I got knocked out of the ring when I went to rescue him. This time I really did a good job of selling the bump, if I do say so myself.
It was a long taping, going on until after dark. I had one more match, against Man Mountain Beazel for like the eighth time, so I changed into my good-guy tights. Then I watched the next match on the monitor.
Lenny Lemaire against Thumper.
Lenny would do stuff like call himself Larry Levine in New York – he even teamed with Barry once as The Rabbis-- or Luis Larriva anywhere there were a lot of Mexicans. But tonight night he was using his real name.
I stuck to the monitor this time. On it, everything looked pretty much the same as with Bart Valerian. After a couple of minutes Thumper put the thump on Lenny, and the crowd went wild. They were shaking the dressing room, they were so worked up. Thumper was over. I’d heard someone in the dressing room say they were setting him up to challenge Beast Benton for the title, and it felt right. Beast had held the belt for two months, since he'd won it from Terry Casino by using what they liked to call a foreign object, and Lou never liked to let a heel be champ too long.
The monitor showed them carting Lenny out, and Thumper went with him. Lenny wasn't moving at all. Then they did the bit where Thumper ran back to the ring, and Lenny went off camera, but just before he did I saw a guy in the corner of the screen opening a door. It wasn't a door that would lead back to the dressing room. It was off on the other side of the ring.
I slipped out into the hall, and got my bearings, and headed to where I thought that door would have led. After a couple of turns, I found myself in a dark hallway that smelled like old beer.
Then I turned a corner, and there was a door leading outside. I went over and held my body to the side and stuck my head over so I could see out.
I was a turd.
I was a turd because deep in my heart I knew what had happened to Bart Valerian, and I had convinced myself I hadn’t because I was all tied up in the push.
Bart had been thrown into a car.
Because that was what was happening to Lenny.
The light was much better this time around. Two streetlights, not far away. The car was a big old Crown Vic. Parked behind it was a panel truck.
There were two men doing the throwing. I’d seen them around. One had a cauliflower ear and the other was short, but built like a linebacker.
Cauliflower was holding the trunk open and the linebacker was throwing Lenny in. I saw the face. It was Lenny, all right.
His foot was hanging over the edge. The linebacker flipped it into the trunk and the other one slammed the lid. Then they got into the front seat, Cauliflower driving. Then somebody else came out from behind the panel truck and walked around the front of the Crown Vic and leaned in to talk to the driver. It wasn’t much of a conversation. The third person stood up and the Crown Vic’s engine
roared to life. The big sedan backed out and shifted to drive and went away.
Why didn’t I stop it? I couldn’t tell you.
I probably could have slipped away before that third person saw me. But I decided to let him. So instead of slinking off, I stepped to my right, so you couldn’t miss me there in the doorway.
The third guy was Lou. He turned around and saw me and acted like he expected me to be there. I couldn’t see his face real well, but I thought he was smiling.
He put his hands out in front of him and made a pushing motion. Then he turned around and went back around the front of the panel truck.
***
I found my way back to the dressing room, and almost walked right into Thumper. He was still wearing his outfit, the furry white tights and boots, and he had the damn rabbit ears on his head. His face was pinker than ever.
He saw me and smiled. “Hey, little buddy,” he said, just like the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island. I’m not usually anyone’s little buddy. I’m six-three and two-thirty-five. So I especially hated when he called me that. “Didja see me thump?”
Real casual-like, I drifted a few feet farther away. “On the monitor.”
“I like to Thump,” he said. “Course, sometimes I thump a little too hard. I kind of like it. Cause the fans like it. And Lou, he likes it a lot, too, and Lou says if I keep thumpin’ I might just get to be champ someday.”
He pulled off his boots and stripped off his tights and laid them real careful into his duffel bag. Then he said, “Better watch out, little buddy. I might just have to thump you sometime.” He grinned, but the grin was all around his mouth. His alien eyes were worse than ever. Now they weren’t just alien eyes, they were pig eyes too.
Still wearing his ears, he went off toward the showers. “Don’t call me little buddy,” I said, but he either didn't hear me or acted like he didn't.
ROUND 8
I may not be the sharpest tool on the rack, but I had to face it. Something was going on that shouldn’t have been. Why no one else was noticing it, I didn’t know. Unless it was just that nobody pays any attention to jobbers. They’re like the henchmen in an action movie. You’re not supposed to care if they get killed.