by Paul O'Brien
The phone abruptly disconnected.
Lenny checked the receiver and phone cable running to the box for an obvious breakage. “Oh fuck.”
He trawled through his pockets, looking for more coins. He stabbed his head out the door and asked no one in particular:
“Anyone got any change?” Lenny turned away from the circus on the street and shook his jacket looking for change. “Fuck-ing fuck.”
On top of everything that had happened, Lenny was now positive that his boss thought he just hung up on him mid-sentence.
He dropped the dead receiver and warily trotted toward the overturned van to see if he imagined dragging Gilbert from the passenger door. A female police officer noticed Lenny's dubious path straight to the crime scene. They both locked eyes as Lenny moved closer to the cordoned-off vehicle.
“Sir?” the female police officer more demanded than asked. “Sir?”
Lenny suddenly changed direction – like he was never walking to the van in the first place – and walked toward the giant who was being forcefully questioned.
Lenny knew that wasn't going to last long or turn out well.
Babu was not paying much attention to the pushy officer in front of him. The giant was dressed in a rainbow colored traditional African Agbada with a matching cap. His right arm was in bad shape, but you could never tell by looking at his demeanor.
“Officer?” Lenny interrupted.
The police officer put up a single wait a minute finger in Lenny's face.
Lenny Long wasn't cut out for this. That familiar feeling of wanting to go home crept up and mixed itself amongst his utter confusion like a flavored twist.
How could you lose someone, Lenny? A whole fucking person.
“Are you certifiably mute, sir? Do you have any papers to prove that as fact?” asked Tyler, the name-tagged, aggressive police officer standing in front of Babu. “Cause it looks to me like you're just being uncooperative.”
“Officer?” Lenny tried.
Babu stared silently into the distance over the officer's shoulder.
“He can't talk,” Lenny interjected.
“You already told me that, sir. We need him to confirm it.”
It was a long night and Lenny was starting to doubt his ability to make calls on irony, sarcasm or stupidity.
“Are you trying to be funny, officer?” Lenny asked in a wholly genuine manner.
“Do I look funny to you?”
Lenny sighed an accepting sigh. What else could he do? This whole thing was way beyond his power. “I will literally do anything to make you let us go. Please.”
“Are you trying to bribe me?” The policeman asked in a very agitated manner.
“No.” Lenny said, backing off completely.
Babu signaled to an invisible watch on his wrist. Lenny looked up to him, almost defeated. “I know.”
“Well?” asked the officer, chewing on nothing in particular. “You two going to come clean about what happened here?”
Lenny could feel himself reaching for any reasonable argument to get them off the hook. “No one was hurt here and we'll cover the damage.”
Babu stood. This seemed to put the police officer on high alert.
“You better sit again, chief, or I'm going to have to bag me a rhino.”
Lenny stood in front of Babu to try and gently deflect the situation. If he was to get them to Shea, this had to go smoothly.
The young cop patted his sidearm and widened his stance. “We're going to get this issue resolved if it takes all night. You see, I don't have the luxury of faking my job every night like you do.”
Babu's ham-like left fist launched from its hanging position, past Lenny's head, and dropped the cop instantly. Lenny wasn't even all that sure what happened until he turned.
“Oh, fuck,” Lenny said on seeing the uniformed body spasm on the ground behind him.
There was one thing that Babu would never let be said aloud: he was no fake.
Danno slammed down the phone backstage at Shea Stadium and bit down hard into an imaginary brace to try and contain his rage.
“He just hung up on me,” Danno shouted in disbelief before turning around to see that everyone in the company had lined up expectantly behind him.
“Get someone to see if they can find out where they are,” Danno demanded.
A few bodies at the back of the room jumped up and actioned Danno's request.
Wrestlers, ring crew, refs and a few invited wives all stood silently like they were waiting to hear the dire prognosis of a loved one.
The weight of the situation hit Danno like a falling typewriter. “Alright, there's no way to sugar-coat this; our main event isn't going to happen here tonight.”
The collective dropped their heads in unison. A few deeper voices in the middle somberly cursed their luck. This was the big one for all of them. The one they had been working toward for the last few years.
“We still getting paid, boss?” a brave, but anonymous, voice asked from the back. Danno ignored the question.
“It's time to make a call on the finish. We're going for a big shmoz, clusterfuck finish with everyone in the ring. Everyone who isn't booted up – get so,” Danno told the waiting crowd. “We're going to load the ring with everyone we've got.”
Ricky Plick was leaning his stocky frame against the wall just behind the rest of the troops. “Why aren't you going to let the natural thing happen out there, boss?”
Even though Danno had given a direction, nobody on the roster moved before hearing his answer.
“No. We're going to go out there to finish,” Danno said.
Danno hurriedly grabbed a paper tablecloth from a nearby table and thrust it into the chest of a wrestler in the front of the pile. “I need a list of everyone who is ready to work. Ricky? Go and find yourself some gear.”
Ricky tried again. “If they riot then we might at least get paid after all the shit we've been through.”
“I fucking know that Ricky,” Danno snapped back. “We can still work our way out of this. Get booted up.”
“With all due respect, Danno...” No one in that room had dared to call Danno anything other than 'sir' or 'boss' before. “But this whole place paid to see Babu versus Gilbert King and I don't see either of them here.”
The pressure in the room was immense.
Out on the pitch, the heat from the floodlights added that extra weight of closeness down at ringside. The word had traveled from the back to the ring about what was happening backstage.
Older hands had been in sticky situations further south, in crowds a tenth of this size before. Knives, bottles, cups of piss; nothing like this though. What was developing here was far and above annoyance or passion.
Years in the making. Personal shots taken. Wrestling put aside. All the stuff that is usually kept behind the curtain had been dragged out in front of everyone to see and read on national TV and newspaper columns.
This was the match that all the hardcore fans could point to for years to come as proof that wrestling was real.
Everyone in the stadium knew this match was a shoot fight; this match was personal.
“You sure you still want to work this angle, boss?” Ricky asked as he approached Danno aggressively.
The crowd of spectators had grown two-fold in the seconds that passed since Ricky questioned the owner. People who just worked for the stadium were now watching too.
It was not the wrestling norm to have so many people watching this kind of argument. Interactions like this usually happened behind very closed doors.
“I don't want to talk about it here, Ricky.”
Most wrestlers were drama queens at heart. They loved to gossip about each other and tear each other down. They loved confrontation and commotion. But this was different.
“There's nothing to talk about, Danno.” Ricky replied. “We can't give them what they paid for, so we make sure they riot.”
The long standing theory for a doomsday scenario
had been to incite the crowd with a distraction; let them riot and you could slip out the back with the box office money while the crowd was busy killing each other. If you let a group of civilized fans out early they usually stop at the box office for their money back on the way out. Make them riot and no one can be blamed for leaving in a hurry. Including the box office staff.
Danno wanted to address this in a stand up manner. Ricky was more about the business.
“I have no other choice now, Ricky. We stay and finish the card.”
Ricky butted his head against Danno's.
“You've done nothing but fuck this up since you got your greedy hands on it.”
Some members of the roster fired their displeasure at Ricky's disrespect.
Danno pushed his one-time student away. “Don't ever get in my face again.”
Ricky turned his back to his boss and clenched his teeth. He paused and silently looked around the room. “You people realize what's happening here? No payday. After all that's happened. The biggest pile of money we've ever seen is still on the table and he's going to give it back.”
“I'm not fucking this crowd over.” Danno continued to write out his revised card on the table. “We'll get them back again.”
“Your call, Mr. Boss Man. But I'm sick of trying to cover your fucking weaknesses all the time. You couldn't draw money with a green fucking crayon. Asshole.”
Ricky spun on his heel and sucker punched Danno hard in the side of the head. The old promoter stumbled helplessly into the tables which collapsed under his considerable weight.
Tiny Thunder, an Asian midget wrestler, grabbed Ricky around the waist as some of the roster fled to Danno's aid.
“Are you fucking crazy, man?” Tiny shouted. Ricky easily shrugged him off and moved for the exit. His strides exploded into a sprint when he saw some of the other wrestlers running toward him with bad intentions.
“Did everyone forget we're here to make money?” Ricky shouted as he bolted through the exit door.
The room melted into chaos.
Danno immediately tried to steady himself. There was a nasty gash above his left eye and a lump was already starting to form. Danno slammed his revised plan into Tiny Thunder's arms.
“We go out there and finish the card. We take what is coming our way. Then we are going to rebuild. That's what's going to happen. This is the way we go.”
Danno staggered out of the silent room and used the stadium walls to escort him to the restroom where he hid in one of the stalls. He knew that there was no way this was going to remain a secret. Everyone was soon to hear about the moment that Danno Garland lost the wrestling company that had been in his family since 1924.
The restroom door swung open and a panicked voice shouted, “Boss, Proctor King is looking for you.”
“You didn't tell him I was here, did you?” Danno shouted back.
“I meant on the phone, sir.”
Danno exploded. “Well say that, then. There's a big fucking difference.”
The messenger paused. “What should I tell him?”
There's no way this didn’t look like revenge on Proctor. Danno knew that was what it looked like. How was he going to explain his way out of this one?
“Boss?”
Danno stood on his uneasy legs, opened the stall door and checked his swollen face in the mirror. “Someone fucking find me Lenny Long.”
The messenger bolted down the hallway.
Maybe Merv was right. Maybe Danno would fuck it up after all.
A Few Years Previous:
January 9th 1969. New Jersey.
His father never ran Moose Hall. When he took the company to Jersey, he would run Union City, Patterson, Newark, Jersey City, Passaic or Highland Park. His father never ran Moose Hall, so Danno had to run Moose Hall.
The thirteen people in attendance were glad that he did.
“It's okay, Boss. You go ahead,” Ricky Plick said as he warmed up in the corner. He was wearing his wrestling gear that consisted of long black tights and red glossy boots with his initials on both sides. He had dyed black hair with a matching mustache. He wasn't old-looking, but his middle-aged body moved like it was too old to be doing this for a living.
“Thirteen people?” Danno said, “I could nearly give them all a ride home when we're done here.”
Ricky changed to squats – slow and traumatic ones. “They seem to be into it.”
“Fucking depressing. The guy at the door said there were about twenty more, but they thought it was bingo night.”
Ricky suddenly stopped and felt around the base of his spine.
Danno continued to watch the match in the ring. It was a midget wrestler match. The four children standing up at the front seemed to be enjoying it. The wrestlers in the ring were working their hardest to pull some excitement from the minuscule audience.
“I'm going to have to do something, Ricky. What's going wrong here?”
Ricky held himself straight against the wall. “It goes in cycles, boss. It was like that for your old man too.”
“This bad?”
Ricky didn't respond. Danno knew the answer anyway. His old man always managed to turn chicken shit into chicken salad. He always had a plan working in the background. Even when no one else knew the plan, Terry Garland knew the plan.
“Was it ever this bad?” Danno turned back to Ricky, who worked most of his career for Danno’s father, and saw the pain etched on his face. “You okay?” Danno asked.
Ricky immediately continued his squats. “Yeah. Never felt as good.”
The handsome white-toothed midget stamped his foot on the mat and clapped his hands to try and get the audience to follow. They didn't. He took a drop kick to the face instead.
Danno pulled the curtain shut. “I can't watch anymore. The sooner I get to Portland, the better.”
“You think it's going to go your way over there?”
Danno looked unconvinced. “That's what I've been told. Just a matter of agreeing with the deal.”
“You taking Mrs. Garland too?”
“Yeah. Another ticket I have to buy.”
Ricky took out a couple of tubes of lipstick from his bag.
“You know anything about the guy who's coming over to drive the car?” Danno asked.
“He's a hard worker from what I see on the ring crew. And he was willing to do it for nothing,” Ricky replied, crushing the lipstick into his hands. “Just like you asked.”
Danno restlessly sat beside Ricky. “I think it's important that we give the rest of the owners... at least the impression that we're still big time enough to have the champion down here.”
“Yeah, a driver would be good for that image.”
“This giant will be the biggest draw in our history. I know it. He's a once-in-a-lifetime type of wrestler. No offense.”
Ricky laughed. “None taken. He should be champ. A blind man could see that.”
Danno knew the task ahead of him in Portland. “It's not a blind man I have to convince.”
Ricky opened a bottle of baby lotion with his teeth and squeezed some into his lipstick-covered hand. “Merv can see money in him too, Danno.”
“What are you doing?” Danno asked.
Ricky rubbed the mixture of lipstick and baby oil all over his body. “It adds tone and sheen. Looks good for the people out there.”
Danno picked up his travel bag and put it on his shoulder. It was nights like this one that made him regret taking up the wrestling business at all.
“Good luck,” Ricky said sincerely. “Things will work out, boss.”
Danno wanted to be positive, but there was just something. “Have a good match.”
Both men could hear a smattering of applause from the ringside. Ricky walked to the curtain. “Showtime.”
“Exactly,” Danno said.
Ricky walked through the curtain and Danno walked through the door.
January 10th 1969. Oregon.
The National Wrestling Council was
a collection of nine men who owned the largest wrestling territories in Canada and the Americas. It was set up to prevent other wrestling outfits from starting up and eating into their pie in such areas.
For many years, they patrolled and promoted successfully without too much of a challenge. People knew better than to try.
Merv Schiller sat as president of the National Wrestling Council since its inception in the mid forties. Over the years, he had positioned himself so as to own the table that everyone else dined on.
“So, Romeo Roberts has finished his program with us in the Carolinas and I don't have anything else for him,” Tanner Blackwell informed the meeting.
“I remember him in New York. Good wrestler. I'll have him,” Joe Lapine immediately offered. “I see money written all over this guy down in Memphis.”
“So, who do I get in return?” Tanner asked.
Joe thought for a second. “Well, we just did a scaffold match with Mad Mark Mars, so he's done with us.”
Tanner scoffed at the suggestion. “Is he the guy who has the insane astronaut gimmick?”
“The crowds loved it. We positioned him as a spaceman whose helmet cracked during training on Mars and it made him psycho.”
“Training on Mars?” Tanner laughed and ran his comb through his slicked black hair. “Fuck me. And that made money?”
Merv intervened. “He's a good worker. Change his gimmick if you don't see money in it.”
“Okay,” Tanner agreed. Both men shook hands on a deal done.
To the owners it was just like swapping baseball cards. Both would return home and tell their respective wrestlers that they were moving next week – with no way of knowing for how long, or what their pay would be. That would all depend on how 'over' their act was with the paying public.
All eyes were now on the main item of the agenda. Danno's stomach had been upset just thinking about it.
Merv rechecked his notes as he rolled his fat cigar around his brown fingers. “No change,” he announced from behind his huge glasses. “That's the verdict.”
The small, smoky, back room acted animated like the outcome was a shock. Danno did all he could to hide his devastation.