by Ben Peller
“What I am giving the boy is a tool,” the old man said. “The same tool my father gave me. War occurs, and a young man needs tools with which to sometimes fight. But I have cherished this sword for so many years because every day when I look at it, I am reminded of the men it felled. I am respectful of their lives, and this makes me even more appreciative of mine. This sword reminds me every day of how fragile life is. This is a lesson we must learn for ourselves. The world is not always a pretty place; battles must be fought. But hopefully, and he turned to his grandson, you will learn the lesson I have: Live your life as a human being, not a slab of metal.”
Trevor paused. “Not as a slab of metal,” he contemplated, raising his glass. “I really like that. Here’s to being human.”
“Here’s to it.” I touched my glass to his and tilted it back, careful not to poke an eye out with one of the tiny women bobbing in the cocktail.
“Well, part of my being human means getting off the road and back to what’s important: my family.” Trevor finished his drink. “So congratulations, Cam. You’re gonna put The Soultaker out of professional wrestling.”
So it came to pass that at the annual Fall Maul, Soultaker and Chameleon engaged in a “coffin match.” To win, one of us had to dump the other in a coffin, which was stationed on a platform near the rear rows of the main floor. We battled throughout the arena, slamming into chairs and hurling fireballs at each other. This match was the wildest one we’d ever worked with each other; we both performed maneuvers we never wanted to risk while drunk. After being tossed out of the ring, I looked up and was legitimately shocked to see Trevor’s 6’10” frame leaping over the top rope. I managed to catch him successfully, and we went down in a carefully jumbled heap.
“I had never done a move like that before,” he explained to me later, “and I knew it would be my last chance to ever try it.”
In the closing moments of what Pro Wrestling Monthly would term “an epic battle,” The Soultaker was placing me in the casket when I shifted my weight and flipped him inside with me. We pulled the cover shut, giggling like a couple of kids as the coffin lowered.
Once safely below the platform, a couple technicians opened the coffin. Trevor hopped out and was immediately congratulated by Hippo Haleberg, who patted Trevor’s sweaty back with a hand caked with Twinkie crumbs and said, “Hell of a match, boys.” Trevor nodded, then turned to me.
“Match of a fuckin’ lifetime, brother,” he panted.
After we shared a quick embrace, I laid back down in the coffin. A simultaneous gasp escaped eighteen thousand mouths above and I knew that all the lights in the arena had just been extinguished. Above me, I could hear liquid spilling over the coffin’s steel-coated cover. Then came the sound of flames crackling to life. Production values. I smiled, my satisfaction ascending with the coffin. Though the coffin’s space was stifling, I felt ready to fly, a million miles removed from that night in Tennessee when I had hacked through the bottom of the ring with a machete.
The padding next to my head was equipped with a small speaker. Once the coffin made it safely to the top, a voice squawked in my ear: “All right, Cam. You’re all clear. Take it home.”
I threw open the flaming cover of the coffin and climbed out. The broadcasters were Thomas Rockart Jr. and Robby Redondo, a former pro wrestler. The two worked very well together; they had a natural animosity for one another that extended over to the broadcaster’s booth and enabled them to effectively play off one another, with Rockart assuming the babyface role and Redondo the heel. Although they both knew Rockart signed Redondo’s checks, they also both knew Thomas Rockart Jr. would never break up a winning team over something as trifling as his own personal feelings.
For this event, their comments were being broadcast not only for the pay-per-view audience, but for the arena as well. As I stood in darkness, the arena’s only light coming from the flames swarming the coffin, their voices boomed:
“Who is that?” Rockart shouted, “Is that The Soultaker . . . or—”
“It’s The Chameleon, I think!”
“No, it can’t be! It just can’t—”
“It is!”
“No, it’s not!” Rockart cried. “You’ve got too much of that fake hair falling over your eyes, Robby!” (Robby, prematurely bald from steroid use, was never without his lengthy red and blue toupee).
At this point the house lights ignited and shone down on The Chameleon standing triumphantly above the flaming casket. I slowly removed The Soultaker’s trademark mask from my face. “It’s The Chameleon!” Rockart was shouting, “I can’t believe it! The Chameleon has vanquished The Soultaker!”
With the mask off, my hair was free. Dyed back to its natural color, it stood out in a violent display of static electricity which had taken a hairdresser hours to create. “Wait a minute!” gasped Rockart, who tended to turn melodramatic whenever behind an announcer’s table.
“You know who that looks like—” Robby began. Then I pulled off my Soultaker attire, revealing a Chuck “The Stud” Beastie T-shirt. This touched off a unanimous buzz from the crowd. I hurled the black overcoat into the coffin and slammed the blazing lid. The fire’s light disappeared beneath the platform as the coffin lowered out of sight. I grabbed a microphone conveniently draped across the edge of the platform’s railing.
“Aallllll riiight,” I growled in the Chuck Beastie imitation perfected long ago on my high school’s high jump mats.
“The Chameleon is going after Chuck Beastie next!” Rockart howled excitedly over a storm of cheers.
I turned and hopped down the platform in the same agile fashion The Stud always bounded about.
Like father, like son. The words ricocheted around my skull, and I found myself mouthing them without conscious thought. I mouthed them two more times before I realized their source: My own feeling of nonexistence that, unlike The Soultaker, remained unvanquished.
11
CHASING SHAWNA, FINDING MOM, AND A FATHER’S ULTIMATE JOB
“Better work the corners,” the referee, now at my side, tells me. His name is Billy Harren, and he has been with the World Wrestling Organization for twenty-five years. Set to retire next year. He originally got into the business because he wanted to be a wrestler, but his 5’6” ectomorphic frame made that an impossibility. He worked his way up from ring-boy to referee. A few years back there was an angle in which he started favoring the heels in every match. The story line culminated in his being “fired” as a referee and becoming a manager. After two years managing, he opted to go back to refereeing. “As a ref, you’re more a part of the match,” he explained. So his manager character disappeared, and after a six week vacation in Hawaii with his wife, Billy came back and was quietly reinstated as a referee. By that time, most fans had forgotten he was once a “horribly biased” referee.
Many critics consider it ludicrous to have a referee for a match that is “fixed,” but the third man in the ring is crucial. Not only does he enhance the theatrical element, but he watches the crowd. Billy Harren often speaks of the night eleven years ago when he was reffing a match between “Howling” Hunter Thomas and “Waco” Willie Falk and a crazed fan streaked into the ring with a knife. The fan (who later was found to be an animal rights activist) went after Hunter, who was notorious for bragging about wiping out entire species of animals. The wrestlers were in a clutch and didn’t see the attacker, but Billy did. He tackled and disarmed the animal lover, but in the process suffered a cut on his shoulder that required twenty-two stitches to close. “Battle wound,” Billy will term the scar while displaying it with considerable pride. “In a weird way, that was one of the coolest experiences of my life. Goin’ to the hospital an’ gettin’ all sewed up, an’ every moment I was feelin’ like a wrestler. Like one of the boys, y’know?” That night has become a part of wrestling folklore and cemented his reputation as the best ref in the business.
“Do the corners, Michael,” he is urging me now, teeth gritted so it doesn’t look
like he’s speaking. “This is SlamFest, for chrissakes!”
I head over to the first corner and step onto the turnbuckle. The crowd gets louder when I press my arms above my head, as though there is an invisible volume switch I am pushing against. Their screams crack with enthusiasm and hostility, but the passion in them seems forced. They do not really care.
This thought makes my knees lock on the turnbuckle. I stand frozen, outside of myself and able to watch all the collections of vocal energy sailing past my body. A few die at my feet. None are able to penetrate the invisible shield of despair that holds my body in a dim black cloud. Seeing myself, I see no hero. Just a scared kid who is unworthy of the dream that has nursed him through life. A premonition of death seeps through the cloud and just as quickly retreats, leaving my body limp and restless.
To myself, hiding in plain sight before millions of people, I look like the only person in the world.
One of the things that made Chuck Beastie so popular with men was the constant presence of his beautiful valet, Mimi. With her playing the faithful and loving companion, he remained true to his gimmick by unleashing a storm of verbal abuse on her during every match or interview. Wherever Beastie wrestled, it was not uncommon to find a few representatives of the National Organization for Women outside the arena carrying picket signs that bore slogans such as: Studs Don’t Yell at Women and Mimi—Why Do You Stay? The picketers lent a nice touch of authenticity, and I often suspected Thomas Rockart Jr. of setting them up as shills. But when I asked him about this, he denied it. “They’re out there on their own accord,” he said, sounding as mystified as I was. “Great publicity, but I’m kind of tempted to let them know it’s really a gimmick.” In truth, Mimi and Chuck had been married for six years. I would soon find out just how much of a gimmick their in-ring relationship really was.
But first I needed to become Chuck, and to do that I would need a Mimi. I told Rockart about Shawna. “If she’ll work for a straight two hundred dollars plus transport and lodgings a night, she’s in,” he said. When I relayed this info to Shawna, her silence over the phone made me wonder if she was stunned, offended, or perhaps both.
“Shawna?” I ventured.
“When do I start?” she asked.
Chuck and I were set to have our first match at the San Diego Sports Arena, and I met Shawna that morning at San Diego International Airport. I arrived for her flight two hours early and spent the time pacing the gate and telling myself this was no big deal. Shawna was coming out here for a job, pure and simple. It had been more than two years since we had seen each other in person—what the hell did I expect to happen?
I careened back and forth between posts, discarding various scenarios of our being reunited. I remained mercifully unmolested by fans. Fans rarely bothered me; my status as a chameleon made it difficult for them to recognize me when I was stripped of the complementing presence of an opponent.
Shawna was one of the first people off the plane and was hard to miss in a pair of jeans that gripped her thighs like cellophane wrap. Above her narrow waist dangled the bottom of a pink Gold’s Gym boat-neck top. A narrow sea of flesh parted the two articles of clothing, and a belly button ring glinted like a sparkling island. Her skin had taken on a deeper tan over the past two years; this increased glow shadowed the fresh red highlights in her hair. I was squinting as I stepped before her. “Wow,” she said, her eyes taking me in. “You grew.” She reached out and touched my shoulder. This first real contact vanquished all the fantasies I had been entertaining for the past couple of hours, leaving me empty of everything but the passing moments and Shawna’s very real presence.
I blurted out an improvised line using Chuck Beastie’s growl: “Been eating three square meals a day.”
“I’ll bet, Mister Stud.” She pulled me in for a hug. Her neck smelled like lilacs. As we headed toward baggage claim, our sides bumped together in a gently irresolute tempo. Her presence altered the airport’s makeup, transforming what before had seemed merely a corral for purposeless travelers into a buzz of motion that suggested everyone there was either arriving from or preparing to depart on a search for possibilities only they could see.
I wanted to spend some time with Shawna that afternoon, but she insisted she had to prepare for this first match. “I need to meet with Rockart,” she said as we drove toward the hotel in our rented Ford Taurus. “And I should meet Mimi, too. Besides, you haven’t sketched Chuck yet, have you Chameleon?” she added.
“Not yet,” I admitted, although Chuck had told me he was looking forward to it. “I’ve always wanted to see myself as others do,” he had told me.
So that afternoon I headed off to the San Diego Zoo with the same man who, as a child, I had fantasized about accompanying to father-son softball games. The zoo was his idea; when I asked him why, he shrugged and spent the next few seconds exhaling an unintelligible mumble. “I like animals,” he announced finally. “Meem and I have two dogs, a cat, and a parakeet at home.”
Our first stop was the chicken cage. Chuck watched the parade of feathers and precise pecking, his lips sewn in still concentration. His hand was slapping his thigh with the same whiplike snap imbued in his ring moves, but at that moment the limb’s energy made it seem cut off from the rest of him.
“You uh . . . like chickens?” I asked idiotically. His brown eyes remained fixed on the chickens but his hand abruptly stopped. It sagged, a melancholy weight, to the side of his right thigh.
“Do you know,” he suggested, his voice grappling with what sounded like an unfamiliar wonder, “that if one chicken is different than a group of other chickens, those chickens will peck the different one to death in twenty-five seconds or less?”
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.
“Discovery Channel,” he answered.
After we left and were wandering by the peacock cage, I noticed a group of children ogling us from over by the lion pit.
“The peacocks . . . ,” Chuck was saying, his voice now a soothing hiss that made me picture a snowy television screen. “I love it when they let their feathers come out. They’re beautiful.”
“I think we’ve been spotted,” I mentioned, nudging him and pointing out the gaggle of kids. Chuck’s face assumed a look of alarm, as though he’d been caught doing something forbidden.
“Shit,” he said quickly, “let’s move.”
We hurried down to the southern area of the zoo. Chuck stopped before the zebra exhibit, then motioned toward a bench across the dirt trail. It was tucked under a blanket of shade provided by surrounding pines. “How about there for the sketch?” he suggested.
“All right,” I agreed.
He positioned himself on the bench with one leg tucked to his chest. “How’s this look?” he said.
“Great,” I said.
“Do you want me to sneer or anything?”
“No,” I laughed. “Just relax.” A careful wind teased his long frizzy hair. My pen traced this movement and the sketch was underway.
“Have you always . . . talked like this?” I asked.
“I had a real high-pitched voice when I was younger. It stuck around until I was about fifteen.” His smile receded further into the folds of his mouth. “The guys used to tease me about it all the time. Called me Chuck Whiner. That’s when I started rasping like this . . . so I wouldn’t sound like a fucking girl all the time.”
“Did you always want to be a pro wrestler?”
“I never had much other choice,” he said. “My old man was in the biz, as you probably know.”
I did. His name had been Randall Montgomery, and he had been the first person to hold the WWWO (as the WWO had been called back then) Heavyweight Singles and Tag-Team Championships simultaneously. “He had me training by the time I was twelve,” Chuck informed me. “Other kids were out playing softball, I was in the basement taking bumps in ninety degree heat. Used to call it ‘the pit.’” He shook his head. “I never had any choice but to be a pro wrestler,” he stat
ed flatly.
“You mean you wanted to be something else?” I asked, a little stunned. The desire to lose myself in professional wrestling had been so all-consuming that it was hard to imagine anyone begrudging so wonderful a birthright.
“I don’t know.” Chuck shrugged again. “I always looked at it like a plumber pulling his kid into the family business.”
“I guess . . . ,” he began, peering past me with eyes that were overcome momentarily by a terror so intense that I felt certain he’d spotted a sniper aiming for my head. “I just don’t know,” he sighed, looking to the ground. But my fear remained, held taut by an extreme feeling of déjà vu. I glanced behind me, but the only thing I saw was a couple shuffling past many yards away. Even from this distance, it was easy to see the painful beet-red glow throbbing on their faces, arms, and legs. They continued along with determined steps, gesturing gamely at the animals.
“How did you meet Mimi?” I asked, turning back. Chuck’s face immediately filled with fierce pride.
“I met her walking out of a cloud,” he announced. “It was a show back ten years ago, when I was starting in Texas. There were these three jokers . . . real assholes . . . Eric, Billy, and Jeff. Old-time veterans who used to give hell to all the newcomers. Naturally, they were hard partyers, too. Eric used to have this LSD liquid. Pure stuff. One time they dipped a candy bar in it and offered it to this Samoan kid. Poor bastard ate the whole fucking bar. He was tripped out for about a week, then claimed afterward that Satan had come and possessed his soul.”
“Sounds like Trevor’s old gimmick.”
“But this was a shoot,” Chuck said severely. “The kid wound up in a mental hospital.”