Living the Gimmick

by Ben Peller

  “Just got into town.” I shrugged. “You’re my first stop.”

  “Tell you what,” he said, “every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, I have an advanced class here. Now since this is your first day, you’re not ready for that. But the class ends at ten-thirty, and if you wanna head out and grab something to eat or whatever, you can come back around then and sleep here tonight.”

  I thanked him, left my bags there, and took a few buses back toward downtown. I ate at a Del Taco and found the main library, where I sat until six o’clock with a book of Giorgio De Chirico’s collected sketches in my hands. I didn’t look at a single picture, choosing instead to stare out the window at the palm trees that sprouted like exotic weeds beyond the rooftops of buildings. They were the first I had ever really seen, and I kept studying them even after the sun had set and their leaves were shadowy prisoners of their own shape.

  By the time I returned to the academy it was 10:45. I walked through the door and saw Shane shrugging on an overcoat. “Right on time.” He smiled, then gestured at the chair in the small office. “That’s probably the most comfortable place,” he said.

  “How’d it go tonight?” I asked.

  “Went all right.” His head bobbed contemplatively. “Brutal. Bloody. A little shooting.”

  “Shooting?” I asked.

  “Next couple lessons.” He winked, heading for the door. “Sweet drezeams.”

  “Hey, Shane!” I called, “Tuesday, Thursday, or Sunday?”

  “Huh?”

  “Is it Tuesday, Thursday, or Sunday?” I asked again.

  “Tuesday.” He frowned. “Remember for tomorrow,” he added, “watch the back of the head when you fall.” Then he turned and went out the door, leaving me to the stillness of the gym’s shadows. The wrestling posters hovered like ghosts against the walls. Outside, the only sound was an occasional squeal of car tires.

  I circled the ring three times before leaping to the apron and climbing through the ropes. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced to the surrounding silence, “The Heavyweight Champion of the World!”

  I threw myself back onto the mat, making sure to keep my chin tucked. After repeating this maneuver a couple of dozen times, I finally lay down in the middle of the mat, using my curled up jacket for a pillow. With sleep’s approach my breaths deepened, and I abruptly registered the pungent smell of blood. My eyes snapped open and focused on a dark stain about two feet away. My left wrist tapped the mat in a haphazard series of soft, dull thuds. After a few minutes of straining to recall if the mark had been there earlier that afternoon or not, exhaustion overcame excitement. My arm came to rest and I crashed into unconsciousness.

  In my dream, a body that I recognized as my own was in a ring. My hair hung to the small of my back. With the omniscient perspective unique to dreams, I became one with every person in the screaming audience. As both participant and observer, I was aware that this was a “mask vs. hair” match. If I won, I would be allowed to strip off my opponent’s mask. If he was victorious, he would be able to shave off all my hair. I leapt off a turnbuckle and landed on the masked figure. The referee’s hand slapped the mat three times, whereupon I had the sensation of rising. One of my arms raised in victory while I tore at the mask—

  Then an explosion ripped the ring apart, and I turned toward the audience only to see their bodies flying in all directions. A severed head, flames rising from its hair, whipped toward me. I woke as it collided with my face and saw not a head, but one of Shane Stratford’s legs. The bridge of my nose throbbed angrily.

  “Never let your guard down while you’re in a ring,” Shane said with a stern smile as he rolled off of me.

  We began to practice falls. “Good,” he said and nodded after only five minutes. “Looks like you’re getting the hang of them.” I beamed in response. He then suggested we try chops. I quickly discovered that a chop is one of the most legitimately painful moves in professional wrestling. The only way to create that sharp report that sounds like the crack of a whip is to legitimately slap the shit out of someone’s chest with the palm of your hand.

  For thirty minutes we stood in the middle of the ring and took turns striking the other’s bare chest with an open palm. At first we used polite restraint, but as soon as the pain kicked in, we were slashing at each other’s flesh with horrible force. Drops of blood began seeping through our raw skin. I didn’t care. I knew that if I suggested we stop first, then I would’ve failed some kind of test. After fifteen minutes, my nerve endings were no longer responding. Soon splotches of blood decorated our hands, making us into two children indulging in the goriest kind of finger painting imaginable. As we kept it up, I told myself that every chop would bring me closer to a title belt, that this was a test to get into heaven, that if I surrendered now I would die. I was feeling light-headed as hell from all the pain, of course, and that helped.

  “All right,” he bellowed, after my last chop burst yet another pocket of blood on his left pec. “Good enough,” he panted, allowing himself to wince at last. We both lowered our hands and simultaneously howled in pain. He insisted on cutting the lesson short that day and only charged me twenty-five dollars. I went apartment hunting and found a place about three blocks from the academy right next to the freeway for $450 a month. When the ashen landlady inquired guardedly as to my occupation, I told her that I was a student.

  “Oh!” she said, her lips relinquishing their taut frown. “At the junior college?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed numbly, wincing as my chest throbbed as though it were being struck with a thousand pins. I was in too much pain to even eat that night. All I could rouse myself to do was sit in a small chair by the window, listen to the cars shoot past on the freeway, and wonder what kind of a person paid twenty-five dollars to have their chest turned into raw hamburger.

  The next day, after covering lock-ups and headlocks, Shane suggested we spar a little. After locking up, he promptly hurled me out of the ring. I fell sloppily through the ropes and tumbled onto the floor. Before I could climb to a solid footing, he grabbed me and threw me headfirst at one of the steel bars that hold up the four corners of the ring. My forehead slammed against the bar. Stars burst into my vision. Drops of blood trickled down into my eyes.

  I was fuming. I’ll be damned if this fucker’s gonna split my forehead open and get fifty bucks for it. Wiping the blood away, I climbed back into the ring. Shane was watching me carefully. He lunged for me, but I cut him off by booting him hard in the gut. He exhaled sharply, and I grabbed his arm and threw him into the ropes. As he launched back at me, I came at him with a flying clothesline that snapped his head back with a furious jolt. He plummeted back onto the mat and lay there staring up at the ceiling. I ran the ropes once and paid him back for the leg-drop he had given me the previous morning by giving him one that would have made Sonny Logan proud.

  I rolled off, preparing to run if necessary. But when I turned, I saw that he was still prone, an ecstatic smile now on his face. “Pin me!” he shouted gleefully. “Pin me!” Dutifully, I covered him and slapped the mat three times. He sat up and extended his hand.

  “That’s shooting,” he said. “Welcome to the fezamily.” I took his hand.

  He went on to explain that he always tested newcomers to make sure they weren’t reporters or people just looking to uncover the workings of the business. With the recent popularity of professional wrestling had come a rash of controversy about just how much of the action in the ring was staged.

  “Now,” he announced proudly, as I tended to my wound with a couple of butterfly bandages, “you’re gonna learn how this business really works.”

  As if to cement the deal, he passed me the nail polish remover. I took a hit, and my forehead felt a little better. So I took another one.

  3

  GREATEST SPORT IN THE WORLD

  “So what’s gonna happen out there? You’re goin’ over, right?” Tug whispers to me. We’re standing by the wall, watching technicians scamper abou
t. The miniature ring that I will ride down the aisle is being readied.

  “You’re just gonna have to watch and find out,” I say. My own voice sounds so far away, as though it were coming from the end of a long tunnel.

  “I hope you win it, man,” Tug blurts out in a strangely petulant tone. I study his face, searching for jealousy. But his face seems more frustrated than anything.

  He shrugs and covers himself, “I mean you like posing with kids and all that shit, right?”

  “Don’t you?”

  He shrugs again. “It can get tiring. Like those autograph sessions.”

  I nod. The meet-and-greets before the shows. Some take place in convention centers near the arena, others in record stores or malls. Fans line up, linking up to form a chaotic snake of humanity, and wait for the chance to meet wrestlers and get signed pictures. It’s not uncommon to sign a thousand autographs at these things. Afterward, we have to plunge our hands into a bucket of ice to numb the cramping. The cold stings at first but after twenty minutes you can’t feel a thing. It’s either that or get a shot of Xylocaine to kill the area’s nerves completely. Just as long as you can work the match that night.

  Tug is talking about the night he begged off after his hand seized up on him. “My right hand was shot. I couldn’t even grip the goddamn pen any more,” he says, “so I just shook everyone’s hand with my left. I’ve got the right one stuck in a bucket of ice, right there at the table. So I hear some guys bitching about how a big tough pro wrestler is too much of a wimp to sign autographs. They’re getting closer in line and saying how I’m probably faking it. Usual bullshit. So when they come up to shake my hand, I grab one of their hands and pull it into the ice and hold it there. He starts shouting and I tell him, “You think I’d be keeping my hand in there if I wasn’t in pain, asshole?”

  He laughs a lot harder than I do. “Fuck,” he determines, “be a champion for those people? Who needs it?”

  “You’ve been a champ before,” I remind him. “International champ.”

  “Fuck it. The only good thing about winning a strap is it means you’re finally gettin’ a push. The fans don’t know who to cheer for. They just want a champ.”

  “You really believe that?”

  He picks at the red tape still wrapped around his wrists. “I dunno,” he says. “I guess people kinda think it’s time for some new blood. Someone who really wants it, you know?”

  I nod. Like most pro wrestlers, Tug was a fan as a kid. Once you’ve been a pro wrestler, it’s hard to see wrestling through the eyes of a fan. Because to be a fan is to be a mark. Wrestlers, a collection of characters towering above life, inhabit a world that is uniquely theirs. Anyone outside that world is a mark.

  But there have been moments while watching a match on the backstage monitor or through the curtain that tickle something lost inside me. A feeling, a conviction, a promise that everything was always going to be all right so long as I remained in pursuit of my dream.

  The kind of promise that does not age well.

  The next couple of weeks brought daily bursts of knowledge at a pace so hectic that I sometimes felt like a sponge in a river, surrounded by more water than I could ever hope to absorb. The first thing Shane filled me in on was the language he had been using when he said things like “bezody slam.” This variation on pig latin involved inserting an “eez” directly after the first consonant of a word. Wrestlers use this technique when talking to one another in the ring or in the presence of “marks” (fans). By distorting the words in such a fashion and saying them quickly, it makes relevant communication sound like gibberish to untrained ears. The language is known as carni, and got the name from its use among carnival workers dating back to the eighteenth century. Shane claimed he had been speaking it for so long that he now used it out of “unconscious hezabit.”

  Our lessons often extended to almost two hours, with equal amounts of time given to the physical and the psychological side of the business. I learned that pros didn’t wrestle each other. Rather, they worked with one another. “When you’re in the ring, you’ve got eight thousand things to be thinking about,” Shane said to me one day. “There’s the crowd, how long the match has gone . . . the last thing you need to be doing is trying to hurt the person you’re working with. You need him alive so you can wrestle him the night after that and the night after that.” In wrestling, there was no winning or losing. If you were victorious in a match, you went over. If you were pinned, you merely did a job. A draw was referred to as a broadway, because it enabled both wrestlers to move up in fans’ estimations.

  I learned how matches are structured. Shane told me that pros who toured with the WWO often worked with the same person every night, and some of them would memorize a match move for move, performing as actors would a stage play night after night. “I remember one time,” Shane told me, “Marty ‘Madman’ Mikiwolski and I had our match down so pat that the boys backstage would time us. Every night, the match would go exactly thirteen minutes and twenty-four seconds. We had it all nailed . . . every grimace, every gesture, every curse to the crowd.” However, Shane pointed out, frenzied travel schedules often made this kind of structure impossible. “So you need to know how to improvise,” Shane said. “Gotta be able to call spots while you’re in that ring.”

  A spot referred to a series of moves. Oftentimes spots would be planned out beforehand in the dressing room. Then in the ring one guy could say “drop-kick spot” and both would know that the spot consisted of a specific series of moves finished off with a drop-kick. Then there was pacing, with matches usually alternating between high-spots and rest-spots. High-spots were several moves following one another in rapid succession, while a rest-spot would involve one wrestler holding his opponent in a headlock while both caught their breath. One wrestler, often the heel, set the pace, or called the match.

  Toward the end of the second week I asked Shane something that had been on my mind since I had spent the night in the gym. “What did you mean that first night,” I said, “when you said there had been some shooting?”

  Shane smiled. “Shooting is the term used for when wrestlers really go at it.”

  “You mean sometimes wrestlers just start brawling with each other?”

  “It happens.” Shane shrugged. “Someone gets pissed off, starts throwing blows that really connect. The other guy takes offense, and next thing you know you’ve got a shezoot match.”

  He made a clear distinction between shooting and merely working stiff. “Working stiff means you’re throwing blows that connect. And they hurt. But you’re doing it because there’s a sold-out crowd or it’s a pay-per-view or whatever.” He took a long snort from his ever-present bottle of nail polish and sighed. “Shooting is the real shit,” he said dreamily. “Two animals tryin’ to kill each other.”

  During these weeks of lessons, I slowly grew more comfortable with seeing myself in the ring. Looking at the posters on the wall, I was able to envision my own picture up there. My face and body tensed and ready to pounce, flexing mightily just above a name distinguished only by its own intangibility in my mind’s eye.

  My past life fell away as easily as a spent skin. Soon the streets of San Bernardino consumed my thoughts and memories, effortlessly replacing the streets of Chicago I had walked for eighteen years. I called my mom once from a pay phone to let her know I had arrived safely, but couldn’t give her any home phone number. Who needed a phone? The only constant connection I maintained with my past life in Chicago came through my old wrestling pillow, which I would faithfully elbow-drop in farewell every time I left my apartment.

  Slowly the days evolved into a pattern. Every morning except Sunday I went to the academy and learned yet another aspect of professional wrestling. Then I had lunch alone at a nearby cafe, sitting on a stool at the counter alongside manual workers from the tire factory just down the street. Even though the same waitress, her cheeks recessed and littered with pockmarks, was always behind the counter and I always gre
eted her with a hesitant wave and ordered the same thing (a French dip with French fries and a chocolate milkshake), she insisted upon the ritual of pointedly asking what I was “plannin’ on today” while holding a pen to her order pad and giving no indication of ever having seen me before. She might as well have been asking me about my complete day’s itinerary, which was almost as unvarying as my meals. After lunch I headed over to a gym and worked out with weights. Then it was to the library, where I would pick up a few art books.

  Back in my room I would spend afternoons admiring the world through my window. The freeway was just below, and beyond it a mini-mall. The parking lot was a constant whir of activity. Fights, fender benders, ambulances speeding in and out—the glass pane filtered all these scenes, keeping them at bay like a television screen does the reality of the ten o’clock news. After the ink of night spread through the sky, I followed the headlights soaring along the freeway below. The art books I held at those times brought me some contentment, even though I had no desire to open them. I had left all my drawing supplies behind in Chicago and that was just as well. I had enough to think about, because in spite of their structure, my days were lived in a vortex of raw emotions brought on by my new circumstances. I had never come home to an empty room before, and found myself greeting imaginary fans on the street and inviting them home. I would buy a pack of cigarettes, smoke one, and then throw out the rest of the pack. I tried the same with chewing tobacco. All I ever bought at the grocery store were cans of soup and bottles of water. I worried what the checkout girls would think of me. That I was alone, a loser, had no friends? But I wasn’t lonely. I had the fans in my apartment, and every night I spoke out loud to them, discussing whatever latest intricacy of pro wrestling I learned from Shane Stratford that day. I conducted interviews with myself while walking down the street, discussing my humble beginnings in the hot desert town of San Bernardino, ending each with “only two things grew there: the tumbleweeds, and me.”