by Mike Edison
I had two years’ worth of credits from NYU in the bank, and maybe it was time to capitalize on them. I hate leaving things unfinished, and by now, without the pitfalls of freshman life, I felt that I had enough self-confidence to get the job done right. I wasn’t going for the beer. License to drink all night and bring girls home with me was no longer a novelty. I didn’t care about making friends with other students, whom I generally wrote off as multislacking pussies who lived soft lives delaying reality. I thought that a degree would be a means to an end, furthering my career as a journalist. I could see myself causing a furor in the White House press pool or running around the poppy fields of Laos with a Nikon, getting the scoop on the Golden Triangle heroin trade for Life magazine. I decided to trade up from NYU and apply to Columbia University. And then I’d have a real shot at flying the space shuttle, just as soon as they got the kinks worked out of it and got back to the plan of putting a reporter in orbit.
Right.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Jeremy had been officially coronated as editor in chief of Main Event, and I had moved up the ladder accordingly, to associate editor. I had been writing for the magazine whenever I was around, and four of my alter egos still jammed the masthead under “Staff Writers.”
One of the first things I did was tear into a new column, The Heart Punch, a monthly manifesto of misanthropy and smart talk. (Pundits take note: my version of the Heart Punch was an homage to former WWF champ Stan Stasiak, and not Ox Baker, as is commonly believed, although Baker, too, is an enormously admirable individual. Legend has it that he killed two people in the ring with his Heart Punch. He wore a T-shirt that said YOU WILL HATE ME, and is the author of the only cookbook written specifically for those elite gastronomes who are also wrestling fans.)
The Heart Punch was my mojo. “Open up and bleed!” I wailed, stealing another riff from Iggy, and waging a one-man war against the lunch-box-and-action-figure era of family-friendly professional wrestling. Gimme some juice, baby! Brutality and bloodshed for all! I championed men who used primitive can openers to carve their names on their opponents’ faces. I advocated sainthood for Dick the Bruiser. And I put Jeremy squarely in my crosshairs. I called him a milquetoast writer, an apple-polishing practitioner of puff-piece journalism, the hand puppet of the WWF publicity department. “I have had it with your editorial abortions!” I seethed. “You are a menace to the entire Fourth Estate!! You wanna butcher any more of my pieces, yer gonna have to get through me first!! In a cage, or by the railroad tracks . . . Loser leaves town . . . Winner takes all!!!”
Jeremy blasted back on his editorial page. “Edison is a disrespectful lowlife drunk. This morning he arrived in my office with a flowerpot on his head. There is only one way to settle this feud. I accept your cockeyed challenge! I will edit your face with my fist! See you in the ring, slimeball!!!”
Jeremy took to wearing a green visor and a pinstripe vest. Except for the fact that he was twenty-three years old, he looked like an ancient newspaperman. I carried on like the victim of a botched electroshock therapy session.
One morning Sgt. Slaughter picked us up in his camouflage limousine and drove us to a television taping. Another day we were invited to see Liberace cut the gold ribbon in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Rockefeller Center ice rink. He was brought onto the ice in a chariot pulled by a dozen winged skaters who helped him onto an enormous throne so he could approve the exhibition of Olympic skaters. He was wearing a solid gold fur coat, if you can imagine such a thing, and his fingers sparkled with about a million dollars’ worth of diamonds. There was a giant cake with a five-foot-tall marzipan skate on top. The whole thing looked as if it were art-directed by the same guy who did the old Batman TV series.
The Main Event office on the eighty-second floor of the Empire State Building was sparse and filled with the kind of office furniture you find at surplus sales. The space was cheap because you had to take two elevators to get to it—first with the tourists going up to the observation deck, which could take up half the morning, and then in a service elevator to get to the offices housed in a sort of no-man’s-land around the building’s heating vents and electrical infrastructure. But it was high up in the sky in the world’s most famous building, and we loved it. Occasionally when we came to work there would be a giant inflatable King Kong hanging outside our window—put there to show off the building’s simian legacy. It was hard to beat.
Main Event was owned by a bottom-feeding weasel of a publisher of indeterminate ethnic background, with a wide, lying smile and a pencil-thin mustache. He wore polyester shirts left over from his disco days and insisted we call him “Shuggie.” He was not an easy guy to deal with, but he knew the shit end of the business. We wrote on Smith Coronas and sent everything out to be typeset. He laid out the magazines himself, reducing photos to scale on a copy machine “for position only” and slapping them down on art boards using a waxer, which coated everything with a thin patina of paraffin wax so you could stick it down and then easily pull it up again if the layout wasn’t working. It was the ancient art of pasteup, and for all of his other shortcomings, he could compose a page in just a few minutes. He never really cared what we wrote, as long as we put popular wrestlers on the cover and filled the magazine with a lot of exclamation points.
It was around this same time that Vince McMahon, ever the hard-assed entrepreneur, decided to start publishing his own wrestling magazines, and he stopped giving press privileges to other writers and photographers. Since Vince owned Hulk Hogan, and Hogan pretty much owned wrestling, it made it even harder to stay in the game. Mr. McMahon is the Genghis Khan of show business—except with a better endgame.
I shot a lot of matches at Madison Square Garden from the seats, buying tickets from scalpers, and we covered a lot of action from other promotions who had yet to be squashed by Vince’s onslaught and who needed the coverage.
But we were still on the outside looking in, in a very closed industry. We didn’t have a whole lot of stroke in the biz. The other wrestling blats, like the TV Sports family of magazines, which included Pro Wrestling Illustrated and The Wrestler (and popular boxing slab The Ring), had been in the business for years and had indelible contacts and solid relationships with every promoter in the world. What they didn’t have was a couple of stoned punk rock lunatics running the show.
One Mad Wrestling Brainiac we became close with was Kevin Sullivan, a heel with a devil-worshipping gimmick, who had enlisted me into his Army of Darkness to work an angle where he would actually battle Satan. (Sullivan had also been a star of The Foreign Object, in a feature called “Ring of Fire.”) The idea was to write a three-part serialized story in which Sullivan would defeat his master, Lucifer, and come out walking on the Side of Light. We were going to “turn” him from heel to babyface in the pages of Main Event.
Sullivan was a smart, creative guy, and we were definitely ahead of our time—no one had ever done this kind of continuity writing in a wrestling magazine, and certainly nothing as weird as a battle with Satan, presented without irony.
The final, life-draining rays of the scorching Florida sun danced off of his bloodshot eyes. He was about to face his toughest match . . . with Satan! He was tangling with the basest forces of Mankind, the ego and the avarice that percolates in the pious man as well as the most villainous wrestler . . .
After twenty-eight novels, you bet I could spin a cliff-hanger of good and evil.
Next Month, it’s no holds barred as Kevin grapples with the Darkness that lives in the hearts of men . . . Will he conquer the greed that drove him to follow the Devil? Can he save his immortal soul? Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion, only in “The #1 Magazine for Mat Fans Today!”
To make matters even more confusing, in the third and final installment, we actually had a picture of Sullivan posing with Main Event, reading about his epic battle in episode one, and pondering his plight as if he had no idea what was going to happen to him and he relied on us for news of his fate.
As a reward for my contributions as an acolyte in his Dark Army, Sullivan scored me a brief spot on that much-heralded gem of Saturday morning television, Championship Wrestling from Florida, playing “The Investigative Reporter.” I put on a jacket and tie, tucked a big white card that said PRESS into my hatband, and interrogated him re his motives for forsaking the Forces of Evil. There are few things in the world better than being on television, because if it happens on TV, then it is real.
The Satan angle fed right into my feud with Jeremy. “It must be the time Edison is spending with Kevin Sullivan, because I have underestimated the darkness in his soul,” Jeremy mused in his earnest, goody-goody way. I railed back with a mouthful of vaguely satanic-sounding mumbo jumbo: “I will illuminate the Great Void of Professional Wrestling with my fiery Heart Punch!!!” The marks who read this shit went nuts. We received letters by the bushel, mostly damning us all to hell. It was awesome. There’s nothing like a solid devil-worshipping gimmick to get that good heat.
When we finally made our date at Gleason’s gym, Jeremy and I had both been sequestered in rigorous, top-secret training programs. Mine consisted of hoisting beer and chasing girls. Jeremy was more into drinking buttermilk and reading about Republican role models at the public library. But his blood was red, and it took only a few minutes before it was spilling onto the mat. He busted me open the hard way, with a mighty haymaker to the skull, and he choked me with the ropes. I couldn’t believe it—he was cheating! Which just goes to show that you can never trust these moralizing do-gooders. They are dirty, dirty, dirty, every last one of them. Fed up with his phony babyface act, I hauled off and leveled him with a high-velocity Heart Punch right to the sternum, before delivering a few more fists to his head. But no matter how much I kept punching him, he wouldn’t stop bleeding.
Main Event was now officially in the hands of a rulebreaker.
No one was more surprised than I was when the folks at Columbia gave me the green light and accepted my application. They were not fucking around with their groves-of-academia gimmick—that whole Ivy League shtick had really gone to their heads. At NYU the vibe was casual and easygoing, the side effects of a laid-back Greenwich Village locale straddled by Washington Square Park and an unwashed army of hacky sackers and fake beatniks. At Columbia, perched on a cliff in Morningside Heights, they were absolutely militant. And it actually looked like a school: a bunch of hoary neoclassical buildings surrounding a cookie-cutter quad. Actually, it was refreshing.
The first thing I had to do at Columbia was get past the expository-writing class, which I was told everyone had to take, no matter what school they transferred from. Apparently they didn’t trust anyone to compose a term paper without first studying the Columbia Method. They definitely were not going to give me a pass based on two undistinguished years at NYU, but . . . I was a journalist, damnit! I was the brawn and the brains behind “The #1 Magazine for Mat Fans Today!” I was also the author of a series of saucy adult novels—although I kept that sordid little secret to myself. The patched elbows on the admissions staff who prided themselves on being at the forefront of political correctness might humor me with the wrestling stuff, but they definitely were not going to be sympathetic to the bard behind Locker Room Slaves.
Yet somehow they bought my act and gave me a pass on the expository writing, although I still got socked with a mandatory music humanities class. One can push these Columbia people just so far.
It was insufferable. Beginning with Gregorian chants and slowly meandering its way through the centuries, this was the very cliché of an Ivy League cocktail-party education. If I paid attention, maybe someday I could sound smart at a PBS fund-raiser.
I busted the prof’s balls on a daily basis: I’m sorry I was late, did I miss the discussion of Charlie Parker? Is today Chuck Berry day?? Can I write my paper about the use of contrasting harmonic modality and the boogie-woogie guitar in the mid-period works of Marc Bolan and T. Rex???
At a liberal university fighting to stay on the front lines of multicultural curricula, I was not only livid that we did we not discuss any composers of color (here I am getting up on my soapbox), but I also posited that a basic knowledge of blues, jazz, and rock ’n’ roll—America’s only indigenous art forms—would be a lot more appropriate for a bunch of kids who might be able to apply that insight to music they actually listened to. He conceded my point and assigned me a detailed analysis of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
Actually, I like classical music, especially with a capital C. I love getting stoned and going to the symphony. It’s just a goddam shame that an outfit as polished as the New York Philharmonic is stuck playing at a dump like Avery Fisher Hall, which looks like the departure zone of a midsize international airport and has the acoustics of a high school gym. Nonetheless, there is something to be said for 106 highly trained musicians in evening wear sawing relentlessly through a lumberyard’s worth of fiddles, clanging away at a battery of kettledrums, and blowing their brains out through a forest of oboes and bassoons. Add to that racket a lunatic in tails gesticulating wildly with a stick in his hand and the Bugs Bunny Quotient goes through the roof.
I never got less than an A on any paper I wrote while I was at Columbia. I used the same techniques that brought us such pocket classics as Ding Dong Dildos and Marge Rides ’em All. The formula was one of detailed outlines and lots of whiskey. I knocked the Brandenburg paper out of the park—the professor told me it was by far the best he had ever read. I am sure I was the only student who had capriciously compared the fast third movement and the following menuetto of the concerto in F major to an overheated gibbon smoking a post-coital cigarette after a swinging round of treetop monkey fuck. He had no idea with whom he was dealing: when I wasn’t acing exams, I was still working behind the scenes, honing Main Event into a razor-sharp journal of Atomic Skullcrushers and Swinging Neckbreakers.
Somewhere in the midst of all this uptown hooey, GG Allin called. Against all odds, he had signed a legitimate record deal, and he wanted me to join the conspiracy, writing songs with him and slamming drums on the new album. With Sharky’s Machine on hold between tours, I had nothing to distract me except my college education.
Homestead Records was Gerard Cosloy’s label. Gerard had a reputation for putting out intelligent, quality recordings of hip, alternative rock bands. So I am not sure why he wanted to get in bed with GG Allin, a skid mark on the boxer shorts of the music business, who could cause havoc just walking down the street. I liked hanging out with GG, but I wouldn’t want him as a business partner. He was a proven liability. I reckon Gerard thought that signing GG was going to kick his punk rock street cred up a notch. I’m pretty sure he regrets it.
Gerard’s insistence on playing guitar in the band did not go over very well with GG. While Gerard was brilliant at putting out records, he had no place actually being on them, especially not in a group required to dodge bottles, one that ran the risk of being beaten half to death by angry fans—not to mention by the lead singer. This was a job for rock ’n’ roll terrorists. In that spirit, I named the band the Holy Men, and we soldiered on. We drank prolific amounts of Jim Beam and ran around completely blind, generally making a spectacle of ourselves, pissing off Gerard and pretty much anyone else who was around us at the time. It was hard not to get caught up in GG’s brackish behavior and aura of invincibility. I am sure I still owe a few people apologies.
The recording was a torrent of bourbon and noise. We did the whole thing, from basic tracks to a final mix, in two days. Not exactly Sinatra’s Songs for Swinging Lovers. GG used a cheap handheld mic for the entire session, rolling around the floor as if he were onstage and not in a recording studio, and then, thoroughly drunk, insisting on overdubbing his vocals four or five times on every song. It sounded like a Wall of GG, though it certainly didn’t approach the daunting quality of a Phil Spector record. The overall effect was a lot closer to the sound track from The Exorcist than anything by the Ronettes. The only thing GG A
llin and Phil Spector have in common is that you could not trust either of them with a loaded gun.
The emerald in our crown was a cover of Charles Manson’s ode to survivalism, “Garbage Dump,” with its refrain “That sums it up in one big lump.” The engineer was appalled. You can hear him at the end of the song, saying, incredulously, “You’re actually gonna put this out?”
Back in the Ivy League, I scored enough A’s to make it onto the dean’s list, and you can bet Mom was pretty well chuffed. That changed quickly when, as an encore, I went off the reservation and once again joined the ranks of dropouts.
I enjoyed my stretch at Columbia. Between going to classes, pumping out Main Event, and getting fucked up with GG while making enemies all over town, it had been a very satisfying four months. But all I had actually learned was that I could do the work if I felt like it. Other than that, there was nothing I couldn’t have bought for a few trips to the public library or an afternoon in a museum, and I did that anyway. At least at Apex Tech you got to keep your tools.
To supplement my paltry check from Main Event—I was now making about fifteen hundred dollars a month to put together an issue, including writing the bulk of it—I got a job at a record shop, Midnight Records on Twenty-third Street. It was a lot better than the gig I scored the first time I dropped out, delivering booze to perverts. Instead of smelly old men showing me their nut sacs, all I had to put up with was a nerdy gaggle of record-collecting geeks with Beatle boots and Prince Valiant haircuts. The improvement was marginal.
5
A VIOLENT
MUTHERFUCKING PEOPLE
Out in the parking lot of Gilley’s bar, in Pasadena, Texas, “Warlord” Jonathan Boyd was fumbling for his keys. He was fucked-up drunk and trying to do business out of the trunk of his Lincoln Continental. When he finally got it open he pulled out a championship belt. It was made of worn leather and heavy metal and it carried the weight of a thousand bloody matches won in a thousand sweaty roadhouse arenas. It was a totem of all that was great about Texas wrestling.