by Ben Peller
He is lanky with slight birdlike features. His short black hair is combed straight and moussed so that it will not fall over a gold earring in his left ear.
He looks down, bashfully I think, as he takes my jacket. Then he snaps his head back up and glares with eyes burning a metallic blue. “You’re gonna lose, man,” he says with a practiced steadiness. I take a step back, surprised and a little frightened by the conviction of his voice. As though he knows something I don’t.
He turns and walks quickly back to the timekeeper’s table. I’m watching him carefully, wondering if the real reason he wanted to be ring-boy was to psyche out the wrestlers he didn’t like. Does he actually think it will make a difference?
If he has that kind of faith regarding his role in the grand scheme, I envy him.
If someone were asked to describe death incarnate, chances are the description would touch on at least one of Trevor “The Soultaker” Gladstone’s unsettling physical attributes. Just a few inches shy of seven feet, his elongated body was wrapped in skin so pale it looked bloodless. His movements contained a methodical quality that suggested an unconscious battle against human reflex. When in the ring, he always wore a white mask, but the emptiness of his eyes was startling even when viewed through the mask’s narrow slits. His fearsome presence and demonic gimmick made him wildly popular with wrestling fans, even though he was technically a heel.
When our series of matches began in early March of 1989, Trevor invited me out to his home in upstate Connecticut. His wife, Meredith, was a lively woman whose jet black hair was alive with unruly curls. Her athletic body was dominated by a set of remarkable breasts, which Trevor had told me she had done about eight months ago, shortly after their third daughter, Helena, had been born.
I sketched him in his backyard, surrounded by foliage awakening from winter. Fledgling greenery had already climbed halfway up a chain-link fence, which enclosed the yard’s perimeter. Trevor sat by a small fountain, clad in an overcoat similar to the black one he wore to the ring. He was missing the expressionless mask, as well as the top hat. “Jim, Janis, and Jimi,” he was saying in response to my query as to what had prompted him to be a wrestler. His voice split the air with the audible consistency of a tire crunching hot gravel.
“You wanted to be a rock star?” I asked.
“Nah, I just wanted to be someone who would be cheered by others. I guess,” he said and shrugged. “I guess I also respected the way those three lived and died.”
“You mean young?”
“Not just that. It’s like they lived life so intensely that they almost couldn’t make old age. Know what I mean?”
My throat caught. Sure, I knew all about people dying young. I quickly shifted to the topic of his gimmick.
“Like a cross between Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger,” he explained, as his thin red hair was stirred by a short gush of spring breeze. “When I saw that movie Halloween, I couldn’t sleep for two weeks. Something about that fucking guy just freaked me out.”
“I’ve never seen it,” I said.
“Oh, you gotta!” he enthused. “I’ve got it on tape. That and Nightmare on Elm Street—”
“What about Friday the 13th?”
“Nah,” he shook his head with authority, “it’s just a cheap knockoff. Nightmare on Elm Street is okay because Freddy’s so witty. So I use a few aspects of him for interviews. But Halloween, now that was the original. Michael Myers is the real deal. I love the way he walks after his victims; he doesn’t have to run, because it’s inevitable that he’ll catch them.”
“Like Death itself,” I murmured, frowning at the picture taking shape on my sketch pad. The Soultaker’s tall sinewy figure was well-formed, but without the mask to guide me, I couldn’t capture the usual expressionlessness of his facial features.
“You got it.” He exhaled. “It comes for you at its own pace. You see the sun rise and set every day and one day it’s gonna be the last time you ever see it and you don’t even know. Seems like a shitty deal, doesn’t it?”
I shrugged, a bit startled at the unease erupting in his gray pupils. Whenever he was in the ring, the only thing in those eyes was an unflinching gaze as trapped and soulless as a shark’s.
A breeze swept through again, bringing the trees to life. He took a deep breath and shifted his body lower, as though going into a fighter’s defensive crouch. “I wonder—” he began. Then over the rustling branches came a series of high-pitched exclamations from inside the house. “My girls are home from school,” he said, standing quickly. “Come in and meet ’em.”
Trevor’s two oldest daughters were named Dawn and Elektra. Dawn was five years old and possessed the same thoughtful eyes as her father, as though she were storing the world away in the back of her mind for further consideration at a later time. Elektra was nine and given to fits of shrieking laughter, as though she had an ability to reach into air and pluck a joke that no one else was able to grasp. Through dinner, Trevor smiled at Elektra proudly whenever she underwent one of these episodes.
“What’s so funny?” Dawn asked her sister.
“Nothing, dummy,” she responded. “Everything.” She smiled, then giggled again.
“What exactly, dear?” Meredith asked her.
“Let her laugh.” Trevor smiled. “It’s good for her.”
Throughout the meal I snuck looks at Trevor, and saw his face shining with contentment. The children were extremely well-mannered, both saying “please” and “thank you” while passing various items around the table. I had the feeling of being part of a well-oiled machine.
After dinner Trevor suggested we go “to a little place down the way.” It turned out to be a strip joint that catered to Connecticut’s upper crust citizenry, and stocked dancers that were accordingly devastating. The doorman, the wheelchair-bound bartender, and many of the dancers all greeted Trevor with comfortable enthusiasm, calling him both “Trev” and “The Soultaker.”
Trevor spent the next couple hours surrounded by strippers. While a stream of women danced for him, he chugged beer after beer. The tips of his fingers were soon sparkling with glitter that he had rubbed off the strippers’ waxed thighs. By the time we left, his eyes were completely glazed.
Fifteen miles of winding road stretched between the bar and Trevor’s house. Dark trees manned both sides of the road. The speed limit was 40 mph. Trevor had obeyed it on the way there, but on the return trip he jacked it up to 70. We skidded dangerously close to losing control on several occasions. “Live a little, my lost soul!” he growled after I implored him to slow down. “Tomorrow we die!”
“It’s 1:00 A.M.!” I screamed along with the tires of our car as we tore around a tight corner, “It is tomorrow!”
We made it home intact. My new opponent emerged from the car with a slow and fatigued momentum; the several moments of potential death on the way back seemed to have drained the fevered energy he had briefly possessed. After stumbling inside, he showed me where the guest room was. “We’ll finish that painting,” he said and sighed. “Gonna finish that painting tomorrow.”
“Right,” I said. “Sweet dreams.”
“Tomorrow.” The word fell from his lips along with a thin trail of drool. He turned away and staggered off down the hallway, leaving me in the perfectly still pool of light that filtered down from the ceiling fixture.
That night in bed I finished his portrait, remaining awake until four in the morning as the pen in my hand closed in on the haunted stimulation that I had seen grow from his eyes and gradually consume his entire face. Becoming The Soultaker, I concluded, enabled Trevor Gladstone to confront and perhaps feel a measure of power over his own mortality.
I put the pen and sketch pad down and tried to fall asleep. But every time I took a breath, the memory of almost overdosing in Memphis swept through me. Only when I saw the first rays of dawn seeping through the curtains was I able to trust unconsciousness.
In the coming months I took on the same deliberate mov
ement and gravelly voice that were a part of The Soultaker’s character. But with The Soultaker’s physical mannerisms came Trevor’s peculiar love/hate relationship with the idea of death. One night while lacing up our boots backstage I asked Trevor what he thought happened when we died, and he answered firmly, “This is it. When we die, we cease to exist.”
“What about our souls?” I wondered.
His hands froze in the middle of a knot while he looked at me like I was on the moon. “Souls?” he snorted. “What do you think, because some book says we have souls, that automatically makes it true?”
It seemed like an odd statement from a man who sent his two kids to Sunday school. When I pointed this out to him he shrugged. “I want them to make up their own minds,” he said. “Besides, I don’t want them to feel like I do,” he added.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Doomed,” he answered, looking back down at his laces and pulling them tight.
My father’s skin is sticky with pungent sweat. Sores swollen with pus covered his chest. They exploded one by one, flinging infection onto my skin. My flesh crackled and bubbled before dissolving completely and my father’s disease now burrowed through my muscles and split apart my bones in search of my heart, in search of my soul. It laid waste to my body from within, and I released my father’s body as life slipped away—
I awoke screaming. The hotel room was dark. “Just a dream,” I whispered, wiping the sweat from my upper lip. “My soul cannot be taken,” I recited, “for I am the taker of souls.” Then I reached over to the half-pint of vodka I was now keeping by the side of all my temporary beds. I had a sip and repeated what had become my common prayer.
Five sips later, I was finally deadened enough to believe it and slipped away into sleep.
For a while I frequented libraries whenever we had downtime in a city. Although I could never check any books out because I would be gone from that city the next day, I managed to get a lot of reading done during scattered episodes at various library tables. I pored through books on religion, searching through theories about the origin of life and what happens after death for something to dispel the unease that now clutched me during every sober moment. Nothing worked. So I did the next best thing, I began making sure I had as few sober moments as possible. It soon got to the point that during our matches, Trevor and I would sometimes be so drunk we’d be giggling with impish glee beneath our death masks. I had been doing steroids on and off for years, and with my increased drinking I feared my kidneys or liver were giving out. After three months of this I went to Dr. Tingle, complaining about pains in my side. Santa gave me blood tests and assured me that everything was fine; my organs were still functioning as they should.
“This is all in your mind,” he announced, pulling out several different rows of the portable medicine cabinet that he was always wheeling around. “Ah-ha! Here,” he said. His fingers closed around a small red bottle jumbled among other containers in the bottom row. “Take one of these a day,” he recited, “preferably after meals. Tell me if you feel better in a month.”
After leaving the office, I looked at the small plastic canister. Its label read Prozac. I tossed the present into a wastebasket and went off to get drunk with Soultaker at the nearest strip joint.
Most nights on the road I was too drunk and blitzed on pot or painkillers to even dial numbers, much less talk coherently. But on off days, holed up in my apartment, I was able to remain sober enough to call Shawna. Our conversations were, at that time, the only things that felt stable in my life. One night, over two thousand miles of wire, I asked her: “What do you think happens to us when we die?”
One of her customary silences followed. I looked across my sparsely furnished living room into the kitchen. One of the pictures she had sent me was stuck to the fridge with a small rubber magnet spelling out I Love You as one uninterrupted slogan with the words distinguishable as separate entities only by their differing colors. The picture featured her sitting on a wooden fence next to a pond. Her eyes were on the water, questioning its depth. She had told me a friend took the picture after a day of hiking. I hadn’t asked whether the friend was a man or woman.
Her voice gently parted my thoughts. “I once asked my brother about death,” she was saying. “I was probably about eight years old. We had been rafting down the river all day and were gonna go out to dinner with our parents. And it was one of the first times in my life I had felt good. I felt so good that I became afraid that it would end. Not just that day, but all of it. My whole life. That day was one of the first times, after all the foster homes and bullshit, that I actually cared about whether or not I was alive.” She paused. “So I asked him that same question you just asked me.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He looked down at me, and even though he must’ve been only twelve at the time, to me it sounded like the voice of a wise old man. He told me ‘Simple, Shawn. You become a star.’ It was still afternoon so there weren’t any stars out yet, but I looked up and imagined myself in the sky looking down over everything and it seemed all right. Everything seemed all right.” She took a long breath that reminded me of the ones I would take after waking up from nightmares about my father.
“You ever imagine you see him up in the sky at night?” I asked her.
“I don’t need to imagine,” she replied. “How about you?” she asked. “What do you think happens?”
“I don’t know,” I answered with a sigh, “but I like the idea of becoming a star.”
Strippers and professional wrestlers go well together. “It’s the common bond of creating an illusion,” a stripper in Detroit once told me. “You studs are, like, pretending to really fight. And we pretend to really dig the dorks we’re dancing for. All it usually takes is a look or a small kiss in their direction. You’d be surprised how easily these dweebs, who’re supposed to be all educated and shit, fall for it.” She had popped her chewing gum and I had nodded, more wearily amused than surprised, as her silicone-enhanced breast poked against my steroid-enhanced arm.
Later that summer, a pack of us went out on the town after a show in San Diego. San Diego was known as a “three wake-up call” town; it contained an abundance of hot rats and rich marks who just loved showing pro wrestlers a good time. Getting to bed at four in the morning made it hard to get out of bed and catch a nine o’clock flight.
That particular night, after hitting the rounds of clubs and drinking on the tabs of a few La Jolla doctors, we finished up at Les Girls, a popular strip joint downtown. Trevor talked two strippers into coming back to his hotel room. They went at it for several hours before passing out. Trevor awakened to a scream.
His eyes flew open and he saw his wife in the doorway. She had a room key in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. Trevor later related the incident to me in a trembling voice, “The first few moments, I thought it was some kinda dream, and then it hit me. It was the morning of our tenth wedding anniversary. She had caught the red-eye to be with me. At first I didn’t know why she looked so surprised, but then I saw the two strippers leaping out of the bed. Both of ’em nude as newborns, of course.
“I tell ya, Cam, I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. There was a buncha screaming, and the next thing I know here’s Meredith just kicking the shit out of these two naked beauties.” At this point in the story his chest swelled with pride. “She was really doing a number on ’em, man. It was all they could do to grab their clothes and get the hell out of that room with their lives. But then Meredith turned her attention to me. Shit . . .”
He shook his head. We were in the bar of a Miami hotel, sipping from large bowl-shaped glasses that contained a frosty purplish alcoholic concoction. Sprouting from the slush were tiny plastic showgirls. “She shattered the bottle of champagne and sat there shaking the broken neck at me,” Trevor recalled, nervously thrusting one of the showgirls in and out of the drink. “I remember tasting that dried-up pussy juice around my lips and th
inking, ‘Well, shit. Isn’t this some way to finally go. After all the morbid thoughts about dying, I’m gonna go with dried-up pussy juice in my mouth.’ I knew she was damn sure angry enough to do it. My life flashed before my eyes and everything. Well, not my whole life, just all the time I’d been wrestling and screwin’ around on the road and all that.”
He sighed and took a long swallow of his drink, not bothering to lick the purple foam that remained on his top lip. “But then she broke down crying,” he murmured. “She confessed that she had had her share of indiscretions—her word—while I was on the road over the past couple years.”
“Damn.”
“Two days later we went to this marriage counselor. He said our lives were being disrupted by all my traveling. We had grown apart, all that kinda shit. But I’ll tell you this, Cam, I do still love her. And she says she still loves me and I believe her. And my daughters . . . I’d . . .” His voice fell off momentarily before surfacing in a tone desperate enough to make his next words sound like a prayer. “I would die before I’d want them to be hurt.”
“I meant what I said that first night at your house,” I told him. “You’ve got a great family.”
“I agree.” His face relaxed and he wiped the froth from his lip. “It’s funny. All this time I was so worried about death and all that shit. Now I feel like . . . death is gonna come, that’s all there is to it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy life while I have it.
“There was once a great swordsman. He won many wars for his country before retiring. Though he claimed to dislike war, he kept his sword in his den. Became very successful in business and had a son. When he was dying, he asked that his grandson be given the sword. The rest of the family was upset; they wanted to know why, if he claimed to hate war so much, he gave the sword to such a young boy. His father had done the same.