Savage

by Nathaniel G. Moore

  Leading up to Thanksgiving, I had attempted suicide twice, I mean not officially, how do you really define an officially licensed suicide attempt? Have your parents treated your personality like it was a dead corpse? For how long now? I cut myself with a steak knife. There were a lot of elements that worked during that period, a lot of political jealousies and rivalries...for years I didn’t forgive anybody involved in that—from Dad to Holly to Mom...even our cat. But at the same time, I realize that life’s too short to carry around hard feelings on an everyday basis.

  Aware of my freshly inked contract with GOING INSANE AT TWENTY, my family devised a plan to call for the signed real estate deal to drop on the family table just as dessert was served. However, as despicable of a scheme as it was, many argue that it was a necessary act for them to concoct. I take issue with anyone who ever suggests that there was no other choice. But, Diane was under a fair bit of pressure financially back then. I can feel for her a little. I think Diane has told me herself—and I believe her—that she wishes things had been done differently and has regrets about it. In one evening, my family screwed me not only out of family status, but also my childhood bed and my dresser. Around this time, you left the WWF for WCW for a $400,000 contract. There’s a rumour you called up Vince McMahon drunk the night you signed with WCW to tell him you were leaving him. Is that true?

  QUESTION 4: I’ve edited about forty wrestler interviews since I started working here. Mostly guys who were mid-carders for a while in the late ’80s or early ’90s. But since a lot of them had key matches with bigger stars, we can attract visitors because they talk about these types of matches with bigger stars, and people are interested. But you would be a dream interview because you haven’t made any public appearances or gone on the record since you released your rap album Be a Man. I feel like I’m drunk dialing you; anyway, the first year I knew you, that Christmas I asked for a set of workout weights and I studied photos of you and your forearms, the way your muscles formed along your triceps and biceps, even your leg muscles. I figured somehow I could resemble you in one way or another, I even thought of buying a small swimsuit and getting the stars and "Macho Man" on the back like you had, but the only colour they seemed to have at the local Eaton’s was this bright baby blue, a colour you never wore in the ring. In late June 1988, I christened my Spanish-Canadian classmate Juan Miranda the Juan Man Gang, after your opponent at the time, One Man Gang. After weeks of build-up, we had a cage match during the last week of school that consisted of us wrestling beside a linked fence, and the first person to reach the top of the fence won. Macho Madness was at its peak. I lost when Juan’s friend, acting as his manager, held onto my leg, preventing me from climbing the fence. After the match, people said, "That’s it?" I guess we could have thought of a way to make the match more interesting. About a month before, at an inter-school track meet, Juan had been throwing me around on the lawn, when Andrew kicked the fence and told Juan to stop it. And Juan did. It was just like when Hogan saved your ass all the time.

  QUESTION 5: The story I am about to tell you is of historical fact that took place in Leaside between the years 1981 and 1992. I arrived in Leaside after moving from North Toronto. It was in Leaside where I first met Andrew Murray Beverly. He was a funny guy with a wit for insults and jokes.

  During the early ’80s, I became good friends with Andrew.

  We went to the same church, located conveniently across the street from his house. He’d invite me over after church sometimes, and before you knew it, we’d become close friends. But not best friends.

  A few years later, I found myself on a bus every morning going into East York to my new school, Cosburn.

  I soon learned that Andrew was attending a school in the SAME area as I, and we frequently met up on the bus. One time I recall, on our way home from school, we decided we’d stay on the bus and go to Broadview Station. It was a very cold day, slowly turning into a blizzard. We made it onto the Bloor subway line, where we waited for twenty minutes in a delay of some kind.

  Finally we made it to Eglinton Station, where we hopped on a bus heading for Laird. We got as far as just past Mount Pleasant when we decided the bus was taking too long. We walked in the snow through the high school field and saw people that were smart enough to actually get off the bus instead of doing our shortcut, tobogganing.

  The next year was the commencement of our final year of public school. After the September strike, of which almost every day was spent with Andrew, I slowly began to take command of my status in my school, and by October, I had my first girlfriend (Corry). Andrew knew this, and whether he liked it or not I will never know, but what I did know was for the first time I saw the true nature of evil power that he so proudly possessed. Andrew went out of his way to make certain that my relationship with Corry would end in ruin. He managed to talk to one of my friends who also knew Corry, and whatever he said did something, because she dumped me like battery acid.

  I did not talk to Andrew for a month.

  The night he did this was just before Halloween. Andrew and I were preparing for Halloween, Friday, October 30th, 1987. At a party in another part of Leaside, I was losing my first girlfriend. Ninety percent because of Andrew, ten percent because of this guy named J.P.

  I had a few other girlfriends that year but I never told Andrew about them.

  Although at this time in our friendship, I did not particularly like him, Andrew and I realized we were best friends.

  Spring 1988: A track-and-field meet at East York Collegiate for all East York public schools. I was sitting on the hill with some people from my class when my friend Juan (The Juan Man Gang) began to throw me around like a rag doll. My friends begged Juan to stop. He wouldn’t. Crash. One giant kick from my 6’ 2" friend on the nearby cage ended Juan’s onslaught. Did you think you needed Hogan during that big run on top in 1988?

  QUESTION 6: I’m jumping all over the place here! It’s all coming out in a gushing wave. Around Wrestlemania II, March 1986, at school all the Greek boys were wearing your classic purple Macho Man T-shirt. Our school wasn’t really full of Hulkamaniacs; it was a bit of an alternative school anyway. Later on, it reminded me of Roch Carrier’s "The Hockey Sweater," which is a story about a boy who loves Maurice "Rocket" Richard, and his Montreal Canadiens sweater gets worn out, so his mother orders a new one from Eaton’s, and when it arrives in the mail, it’s the wrong jersey, it’s a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, and all his friends ridicule him, and he’s so ashamed and has problems during a game of hockey with his friends, and the ref tells him to go to the church and pray for forgiveness, so he goes and prays that moths will come and destroy his Maple Leafs jersey. The image of all the boys wearing the Montreal Canadiens jersey reminded me of the hallways of my middle school, which, as far as I can recall, were full of Macho Man T-shirts, and not the yellow-and-red Hulkamania shirts. That summer, I watched you wrestle live for my birthday at Maple Leaf Gardens along with my sister and my dad. There were these boys that sat in front of us who were huge fans of yours. I was rooting for Steamboat, but these guys insisted that you would win. Over the next few months, I studied your matches more closely. When you crushed Ricky’s throat with the timekeeper’s bell, I just started thinking that you were the greatest. I admired you; I thought you got the job done. I thought you were likable even if you were doing bad things. I wanted to see more, highly anticipating your next moment of controversy.

  QUESTION 7: In the beginning of 1996, that’s where I’m next on the journey of our entwined lives, um, I had been on medication for nearly eighteen months, and after dropping out of university once again, began couch surfing, mainly at my dad’s place which was on top of a funeral home where he worked. The funeral home was not Andrew’s father’s company, though my father still worked there from time to time. Holly was in her last year of university. My mother lived alone. My father was studying to become a funeral director, and I helped him every once and a while deliver bodies to the morgue or pick up flowers for
a service. I’d tune in to see you on Monday Nitro feuding with Ric Flair over the WCW world title, but my biggest memory from this period was definitely the pharmaceuticals. It was March 1996, a cold evening.

  My father had the night off or was on call, and I was joining him for a drink or something when I decided I would take all my Epivals. It was one of three pills I was on. So while he was on the couch in his living room, I lined them all up on his kitchen table. I had a tape recorder with me and was slurring as I did a running commentary of my actions. I just kept saying, "I’m going to do it," or "I’ve got to do it." The next thing I remember was being strapped to a table in the emergency room, a nurse telling me I threw up on her and the taste of charcoal in my mouth. My mom picked me up from the hospital, and I stayed with her for two days. This began the wilderness years. Ten years after first seeing you on television, there I lay, recovering from an overdose, the television screen off, the world stopped dead in its tracks. February 1986–March 1996: a decade of watching your Technicolor peacock meltdown, your voice gravelling away, colours fountaining out of you and that was it, 12–22, the complete seasons of my life, our life our various haircuts, mine moving from Hitler (like my Dad’s) to Elvis or George Michael and yours with a dark dye tint, Photoshopping the grey out with a glossy brush of glistening chemicals.

  23 )

  Atmosphere

  Friday, December 24th–Sunday, December 26th, 2010

  Christmas Eve

  Within the confines of early half-sleep, I saw Mom’s coal eyes up close as she prepared the salad for her new family. In her eyes, I saw the Reich eagle’s wings spread wide and slow, as Mom glanced down to watch a carrot being chopped. But it was Christmas, and how quickly the satanic bird-Mom mirage changed its tune to a Christmas choir, Christmas foil, sleigh bells and endless belly laughter: ho-ho-ho. I couldn’t get back to sleep. My restlessness was a long-playing vinyl groove, thick and succinct as a Gordon Lightfoot CD played on repeat, his voice ghosting on about heroes, Lake Ontario, highways, faces, longing and briny lost love.

  I thought of Mom in Dallas. Time difference was an hour earlier. I’d call her later, before dinner, my corduroy pants silent, store-fresh, my sweater in its pre-gravy-stain virginity, my hair without grease, a nice light-brown sheen, and Mom would be elbows deep in mashed potato triumph. Today Holly and I were heading to her in-laws: the plan was to visit them, Dad, and whoever else we ran into on the short road trip.

  It was now nine a.m. I had shaved, showered, watered plants, taken out garbage, put the remaining laundry away, packed up two-days’ worth of clean underwear, socks, shirts and a suit jacket. A frantic urge besieged me to read my interview previews online at Shooting Star Wrestling Review.

  Four interviews had been carefully prepared to go "live" online January 3rd.

  I yawned hard, hand through hair, opened my eyes and they watered. A fat cloud greeted me outside. It began to fall apart.

  The sun broke it open.

  The phone rang. It was Holly.

  "Holy shit," she said into the phone. I imagined Holly’s nostrils working like well-timed pistons and gears redistributing moisture. She raised her red face and blurted out—"Liz was in a car accident last night...she’s dead."

  "What?"

  "It’s so fucking sad; we just started to talk about visiting each other, like maybe me going to BC."

  "What happened?

  "She flipped over in her car and broke her neck on the highway, like midnight or something last night, on the way to her parents’ place."

  "That’s awful."

  "I just called to wish her a Merry Christmas, and Jake answered, he said he called me at home but I guess—"

  "That is horrible."

  "On top of all that, the rental property tenants or whatever are complaining there is no heat or water, so I have to go back to Toronto. Do you want to come or stay with Dad? I can come get you later, it’s not that bad driving. I’ll take Sarah to her friend’s place for tonight."

  "Whatever is easiest."

  "Plus, you have to call Mom, she thinks we’re on the hook for some sort of Texas Chainsaw New Year’s Eve party. Forget it, too much is going on. I feel like I’m losing my mind."

  "Yeah, she said something about that last week."

  "Dad’s gonna pick you up, at the train station as planned. I can’t go though, OK?"

  "Yeah."

  By two in the afternoon, I was in Dad’s Elgin, Ontario, trailer clutching my backpack full of clean underwear and gifts. Having travelled over three hundred kilometres, I was overheated, half asleep and not exactly ready for the drastic change in air quality.

  "Dinner will be ready at five," Dad said, immediately returning to what appeared to be an overzealous all-day cooking marathon for two people.

  "So you heard about Holly’s friend then, I guess. Liz?"

  "Yes. Very sad news."

  I walked into the living room to see the same sad pink couches, aged eleven years from the last time I logged any serious time on them, statues of a once seemingly arranged life: these are the couches we’ll put in our house; this is where we’ll sit and read The Globe & Mail and drink coffee before we go to work in the morning—

  Along a small wooden shelf, I saw a doll on a mantel, and my crummy acrylic lithium-based art, with a baby-blue and sand coloured-décor that looked ghastly like a small child’s memorial bedroom.

  Christmas Day passed like a warm Polaroid in crinkles: presents with rips fixed up, family-driven holiday movies on television complete with banter, snow being brushed off of shoulders, a wacky uncle careening into a snow bank, a gluttonous shellacking of Christmas stock footage, sopped up off the cutting room floor and remixed one more time.

  "Things are busy, lots of activity in town today," Dad said, lighting a cigarette.

  "Oh yeah, which town is this?" I asked

  I put on an Anne Murray CD and listened to "You Are My Sunshine." A tickle of pain crept into my stomach, so I focused on every dusty particle in the room.

  The kitchen table was full of clutter and paper-route evidence, confirming my father’s peasant status in this makeshift village.

  "Fuck off, coffee," I said, blowing over the steam billowing from my cup. "Dad this coffee is crazy hot. I’ll let it cool ’til St. Patrick’s Day." I always spilled coffee when I first woke up, walked down the street or wobbled with a cup through subway traffic. Now sitting completely still could be added to that magical list.

  I hadn’t been in Dad’s bunker in eleven years. Inside this cocoon of discolouring, a nicotine film of brown had formed along the ceiling and walls.

  This yellowing behaviour.

  Dad was now outside with his dog, Jazz, a stray he picked up one morning on his route two years ago, and who had some growth dangling from her chin that resembled a cancerous testicle.

  The trailer was compact, smelled of rust and bristled with modulated carbs.

  I looked down the hallway at the open bedroom door and crept into Dad’s room; the smell of dog hair had reached a state of alchemic stagnation. My dresser and bed (1981–1994, bought at the Art Shoppe on Yonge and Davisville) lay dormant and snug in the eight-by-twelve bedroom. On the dresser’s surface, a series of progressive photographs were garnished in theatrical dust in chronological order: his childhood on a couch with his siblings (1952), the love-locket-sized picture of Katie Flint (1965) and the classic (1982) family portrait of Mom, Holly, Dad and I taken for Northlea United Church. The final photograph came in the form of my father’s living and breathing form asleep between eight at night and three in the morning, when he’d wake to do his paper route, snapped by God himself.

  The coffee table was in a tool shed out back, as if it now served as a prop closet for some later re-enactment. Dad and I locking horns in the living room, his body going stiff, the low table getting the worst of it. Why did you always turn your head and back, it’s not self-defense and I’m not going for your head, and you watched boxing, so I don’t get the po
sitioning; it’s like your body is pretending you are not being aggressive, when you are, it’s frustrating. You’re a dream, one I’ve conquered, now you’re just static in the hallway Christmas morning, Boxing Day, April Fool’s, St. Patrick’s, and Halloween and back again—my father the boomerang.

  As I stared at Dad, all I could see was this extremely deflated version of the husky dinnertime character. He must weigh 114 pounds now, I thought, glancing at him sitting on the dusty-rose couch, as if he were preparing to tell the story of his life for the first time, like a stage actor delivers a monologue: the Sunday feasts, thick gravy, the family growing up in black and white on a farm house in Dunnville, moving to the big city, getting a big paper route, picking up the bundles from a drug store at Dundas and Ossington, at a store he would later work at as a delivery boy in 1953 when his brother Patrick, the last of five children, was born. Dad fiddled with an opal pushpin brooch, which he placed in a small dish, looked over a brochure and moved some plastic wrap from the kitchen table to the indoor stove. No one would ever pay twenty-five cents to stand in the rooms he grew up in.

  "I’ll be back in a minute and fix us something to eat," Dad said, disappearing down the hallway. For a millisecond, I imagined body slamming Dad through his floorboards. Ohhhh yeeeeaaaahhhh! History beckons the Macho Man!

  Elizabeth’s death was a fresh psychic scar that gouged the day. There were the mid-summer appearances at our dinner table after sprinkler prances, the three times Holly and Elizabeth locked me out of the house and laughed until my tears somehow lubricated the locks and they let me in, the time she kissed my cheek in my room and then vanished.

  Dad’s brow was knotted in a perplexed state. "Sound is off," he said, playing with the remote. "Did you turn it down?"

  Holly said she and Elizabeth had met up a few times over the last few years. The early hours of Elizabeth’s death and the vague details reminded me of Dad and his tragic pre-Mom life. There was an accident. That was the way it was laid out for me. Someone had died. Over time, Mom’s reticence to speak on the matter rescinded, but she warned me that she had fought tooth and nail with Grandfather and my aunts never to speak of that time in front of her children. "I told them, ‘I won’t stand for it!’" she had once re-enacted for me with fierce facial struts.