Living the Gimmick

by Ben Peller

  I thought of the woman who had stalked me in Memphis. How many people had landed in mental hospitals because of pro wrestling? “What happened to the guys who gave him the stuff?”

  “Nothing. They thought the whole thing was hilarious,” Chuck said. “So I shot on Eric in our next match and beat the shit out of him. Later that night they slipped some Halcion into my drink backstage. I woke up at dawn. They had hog-tied me and set me out by the side of the road. I was one of the most hated heels in Texas about that time. All it would’ve taken was for some local boys to find me and I woulda had the shit beaten out of me.

  “I hear this car pull up. Then there’re these cowboy boots walking in my direction. I managed to turn around a little. The wind’s kicking up dust everywhere, and I couldn’t see a damn thing. I was getting ready to plead for my life with some idiot redneck. But then through the dust stepped the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.”

  His voice became softer and softer as he described how she had used a bowie knife to free him from the ropes and then taken him back to the farm she ran. Her father had recently died, and her mother had slipped away only three weeks later. “I told her that was the most romantic thing I had ever heard, and she laughed. But it was a nice laugh,” he insisted. “And then she fixed me one helluva terrific breakfast. Fresh hotcakes and eggs that weren’t too runny or too stiff. The coffee was rich and strong. And as she did this she talked, and I just sat there. Not hearing a word she was saying ’cause I was too busy falling in love with her.”

  He was convinced that they were soul mates. “She used to always describe our meeting as kismet. She knows words like that,” he said and smiled. “I looked it up in the dictionary. It means fate. Beautiful, huh?” A delicate chuckle escaped from his lips.

  “How about kids?” I asked.

  His mouth drew back into a tight thoughtful line. “We’re on the road a lot, so . . .” He let the sentence dangle helplessly before sealing the dismissal with a shrug. “We’ll see.”

  Out of a strange reluctance to continue meeting his eyes I turned my attention to the portrait in my hands and was stunned to see that I had ceased drawing. His form was complete, but details had eluded me. The only characteristic that could possibly identify the shape as Chuck Beastie was the long black hair fanning out like wires seized by current. “We’d better get moving,” I heard him say, and when I looked back he was already on his feet. I jumped up and hurried after him, still half-studying the incomplete sketch. “Did you get me down?” he asked, peeking over my shoulder.

  “Sort of,” I mumbled, “I guess I got distracted by that story—”

  “Hey, I like it.” He slowed his pace for a few seconds, rubbing his elbow carelessly as he grew closer to my shoulder. By the time I slowed down, he had already resumed his previous stride. We passed the sunburnt couple, who were laughing and calling “yoo hoo” and “hey there” to a pair of hippopotamuses basking in the sun among a freshly constructed jungle.

  “Mind if I . . . keep it?” Beastie’s request was backed up by an assertive look.

  “Well . . . ,” I stammered. “Sure.” I tore off the piece of paper and handed it to him. He rolled it up and very carefully placed it inside his jacket.

  “Do you regret it?” I asked as we continued back the way we had come.

  “Regret what?” his words flew back with a tense expectancy.

  “Becoming a professional wrestler,” I suggested.

  “I love pro wrestling. I’m grateful as hell to my old man for giving me the chance to compete in it.” In spite of the rapid mumble in which he thrust these words forth, he managed to give each one a careful pronunciation. “The only thing is gimmicks like Vivian Vitale,” he added, his voice claiming a measured intensity, “they make the sport seem . . .” He paused, seeming to consider and disregard several definitions before settling on the appropriate one. “Goofy,” he concluded. “And my father always used to hate goofy stuff in this business.”

  “A little strange,” I replied, when Shawna asked me how the session had gone. We were backstage, preparing to go out for the match that night.

  “What do you mean, ‘a little strange’?” she asked, adjusting her low-cut sequined dress that ended mid-thigh.

  “A woman walking the streets of Hollywood in that thing would either be arrested or discovered,” I teased her, trying to change the subject for a reason I couldn’t quite apprehend.

  “Ha-ha,” she retorted. “Why was it a little strange?”

  I shrugged.

  “Let me see the portrait,” she demanded.

  “Chuck wanted to keep it,” I told her.

  “Hmmm . . .” She gave a pondering frown.

  “How was Mimi?” I asked.

  “She told me it would be a relief to have another collection of estrogen around all this runaway testosterone,” she said.

  “What about the wanna-be woman, Vivian Vitale?” I laughed.

  Shawna shot me a cool stare. “That’s a gimmick,” she said in a voice that contained enough shaded hostility to make me both confused and nervous.

  “Actually,” I pointed out hurriedly, groping at a bit of information Santa had once given me, “steroids are metabolized by the body as estrogen. So there are really several collections of estrogen around here.”

  “So I’ve noticed.” Her face reclaimed a smile as she jabbed my chest with a disapproving finger. But her touch was hesitant, as though she were touching a vase she was afraid might crack.

  “Alll riight,” I rasped, ignoring what Chuck had told me about the origins of the voice I was mimicking.

  The match went well that night. Afterward, Mimi and Shawna both changed into dresses more suitable for the terrace restaurant where the four of us were planning to have a post-match meal. Chuck and I both wore elephant pants and tank tops. There was some resistance to our attire at first, with a shaky-eyed greeter informing us that “coats and ties were required.” Chuck bribed him with a twenty and we wound up seated at a table near the kitchen. The reservations people had overbooked the restaurant, and new diners were being herded in with flustered speed only to be placed at folding tables covered with red tablecloths. These makeshift dining spots dotted the aisles, making it hard for the waiters to move around and adding to the chaos.

  Mimi immediately ordered two Hawaiian chocolates, a sweet mixture of Kahlua and sours, for herself. Chuck and I discussed the first couple spots of the match while Mimi tossed back both drinks. “I had a fan reach out and try to grope me as I came down the aisle tonight,” she hurled the words into the empty glass of her second drink, then turned accusingly to Chuck. “Where the hell were you, Stud?” she sneered.

  “Honey,” Chuck laughed nervously, “I was on my way to the ring. I had to be playing to the crowd.” His hands settled palms up at shoulder level, as though he were weighing two stones.

  “Some stud,” Mimi muttered. With a shared look, Shawna and I mutely asked each other if we should excuse ourselves. Then a waiter appeared, and instead of giving us menus, he informed us that they were putting in another table. Regretfully, they would have to move us. Immediately two large smiling busboys stepped up, lifted the table at either end, and hustled it eight feet to the right. After we readjusted our chairs, the waiter said he would bring menus. Mimi demanded another drink, and Chuck ordered a beer.

  “My pleasure, sir!” the waiter cried, then swooped away.

  “His pleasure . . . for moving us?” Chuck asked, looking at me. I shrugged. We strained to make conversation. At one point Shawna asked how Chuck and Mimi had met. Chuck quickly replied that he had already told me; Mimi snorted with a level amount of disgust.

  “Do we have to talk about wrestling right now?” she asked her drink. Shawna apologized carefully, and I got Chuck off in a discussion of the pets they owned.

  Two more times, once just after we ordered and once in the midst of the meal itself, our table was moved again by the same two burly workers. The waiter expressed his si
ncerest regrets, referring deferentially to us as “ladies and gentlemen” at every opportunity and assuring us after each move that it had been his pleasure.

  “Ha!” Mimi slurred, after the third time he’d moved us. She slammed her fork down onto her plate. The waiter and Chuck’s eyes both became equally nervous. “This gentleman,” she indicated Chuck with a blind thrust of her thumb, “wants to know why it’s your goddamn pleasure to move us and inconvenience our meal?”

  “Meem . . . ,” Chuck murmured, “come on, he’s just doin’ his job.”

  “She does have a point,” Shawna piped in. I turned to her, eyebrows raised. She shrugged at me. Our waiter’s face twitched as though he were trying to repel a fly attempting to land on his nose.

  “We consider it our pleasure to serve ladies and gentlemen such as yourselves—”

  “Ha!” Mimi shrieked, downing the last of her drink and slapping the glass down disdainfully. “This isn’t a gentleman next to me. He’s a no man! Oh, be a man!” she cried to Chuck. “If you can’t be a stud, at least be a man! Christ, why can’t you ever be a man?”

  “That’s enough . . . ,” Chuck muttered in the low grated tone he used in interviews.

  “I suppose it’s too much to expect for you to be a man in a restaurant if you can’t even be a man in the bedroom—”

  “I said—Enough!” Chuck bellowed. It would have been audible even in an arena packed with thousands of screaming fans. In this much smaller area of restaurant, it knifed through the busy chatter of diners with the force of a meteor crashing through space, leaving only anticipatory silence in its wake.

  I looked back cautiously at the sea of eyes staring at us. The waiter coughed, but stood rooted to his spot like a necessary prop. Mimi shoved her chair away, clambered to her feet, and strode out of the restaurant with impressive agility for someone who had been slurring as severely as she had. “I’m sorry,” Chuck said, his eyes sweeping over the waiter before settling on Shawna and me. The waiter nodded dumbly and retreated between the potted ferns cloaking the kitchen entranceway. “You guys finish dinner. Please.” Chuck cast an embarrassed glance around the attentive restaurant as he stood. “Just sign the check to my room.” Then his wide back was threading awkwardly down the narrow aisles crowded with waiters and busboys.

  Our own waiter emerged from the ferns. “Will there be anything else, sir?” he asked me.

  “Another drink, I guess,” I replied.

  “Right away, sir.” He snapped his anxious eyes over to Shawna. “And madame?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” she said and shook her head. He departed with a relieved air.

  “I kind of like it in here,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised.” Shawna chuckled. “Nobody would dare call you by your name. You’re just another characterless ‘sir’ to them. Must feel safe, huh?”

  I regarded her with bewilderment. “Shit,” she said, “I’m sorry.” Her hand found mine under the table. “It’s just seeing you dressed in that get-up he wears. Even at dinner. It seems . . .”

  “Let’s draw the line at living whatever gimmick Chuck and Mimi are,” I suggested.

  “You mean you’re ready to actually create a relationship . . . of your very own?” she suggested.

  “Yeah.” I kissed her hand. She drew it back with a grin.

  “Good friends, Romeo.” She specified our status as she wrapped her fingers lightly around her water glass.

  “Is there someone else?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she answered quietly, “but you’re still a professional wrestler, remember?”

  I turned my eyes up to the ceiling, seeking comfort in the impartial striped pattern I expected to find there. Instead, a skylight suffering the absence of sun threw my reflection back. “How could I ever forget?” I asked myself.

  The next day neither Chuck nor Mimi mentioned the incident. Shawna and I didn’t press the issue, and soon the four of us had managed to establish a respectful camaraderie. Shawna quickly became popular with the rest of the boys, which was no surprise. She was able to hold her own in raunchy conversation, attitude, and drinking games. But she drew the line at any kind of heavier drugs. “I’ve been down that road before,” she said in explanation, refusing to either elaborate about her previous consumption or lecture anyone about their current use.

  Two weeks after she joined the company, we hit San Francisco for a show at the Bay Arena. Afterward, Shawna and I went out alone for a night of cocktailing. We followed a string of windowless bars along Market Street, and in honor of our night out decided to play one cut from The Doors Greatest Hits at each of them. I would drink three shots of tequila and she would drink two before the song ended, and then we would seek out another bar with a juke box.

  It was early morning by the time we finished the album and made it back to the tenth floor of the San Francisco Hilton. I was staggering spiritedly down the hallway, nursing an idle desire to somehow wind up alone in a room with Shawna when I turned and found she was no longer beside me. I spun around and saw her kneeling at the other end of the hallway next to what appeared to be a dead body.

  I hurried to her side. Shawna was holding the naked body of a young girl. “Bastard,” Shawna mumbled, “that fucking bastard. Drug her up, shit on her, then toss her out like a goddamn room service tray.” I wondered blankly at this, then focused on two large turds clinging to the girl’s back. My vision was so blurred that at first glance they had appeared to be nothing more than grotesquely oversized moles.

  Shawna tore off a piece of her shirt and swept the shit off the girl’s skin. Then she knocked on the door. Soon she was pounding on it. I was busy wrapping my jacket around the girl’s naked body and slapping her lightly, trying to make her come to. Finally, the door opened, and I turned just in time to see Shawna fire a punch at the face of a bespectacled middle-aged man wearing a Hilton bathrobe. She pulled it in time, and her fist stopped about two inches from his slack jaw. Drunk as she was, this kind of control was truly impressive.

  Shawna and I stared at the dumbfounded man. “Harry?” a female voice came scratching from the darkness behind him.

  “Aaaahhh . . . ,” the man exhaled. The girl surfaced from her Halcion-induced coma and let out a mournful wail. The man’s eyes went from us to the naked victim cloaked in my coat. Shocked outrage took over his face, triggering in me a shame similar to what I had felt in Tennessee when a different man standing in a different doorway had witnessed the Wandering Wildman threatening a crazed stalker with a knife.

  The door slammed in our faces. The girl was crying by now, and I took her up in my arms before Shawna and I bolted off down the hall. Once we turned the corner Shawna wordlessly took the girl from me and disappeared into her room. I retreated into mine and, unable to sleep, sat staring out the window at silver blades of moonlight until a knock came at the door.

  It was Shawna. She walked inside and sat on the edge of the bed. “I gave her some clothes,” she said. “She went downstairs to call her friends for a ride.”

  I nodded. She looked up at me. “Can I sleep here?” she asked. I was not prepared for this. Inky guilt spilled from my heart, catching in my throat and making me cough. What could Shawna have gotten out of the past ten minutes that made her suddenly want to have sex with me?

  My coughing fit must have revealed this anxiety, because she let out a bemused chuckle. “Take it easy, Cam,” she said mildly. “All I want is to sleep in the same bed with a guy I know isn’t a total asshole.”

  “Sure,” I said, relief and disappointment reducing my voice to a whisper. But even though sex wasn’t an issue, my guilt lingered. We spent that night side by side, shoulders touching.

  In Cleveland the next day, Chuck and I were backstage discussing some spots for that night’s match when we heard a series of yelps erupt from the bathroom. This was followed by a toilet flushing repeatedly, and finally silence. Several seconds later Shawna strolled out with an impassive smile. By the time “Dastardly” Darr
en Domino made his way out, a bunch of us were waiting for him. He had obviously washed his face, but the humiliated look on his face was as unmistakable as any layer of shit.

  I started the chant. “Swir-lee! Swir-lee!” Soon the rest of the guys had joined in. Domino’s only response was to put on a brave smirk and half-strut, half-shuffle off to a corner.

  “That was great,” I told Shawna later that night, after the match.

  “Seems like everyone enjoyed it,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess he had it coming,” I added.

  “I wonder . . .” Her face locked into a hard expression that matched the tone of her next words. “. . . why the hell no one else ever did it, then.”

  She got up and walked off. I didn’t follow; I had no worthy response to offer. We didn’t speak again until the next afternoon in Dallas. I was backstage wrapping my wrists and fingers, using the same excessive amount of tape Beastie always used every night, when Shawna came up to me. “I’m sorry about the way I acted toward you yesterday,” she said. “You didn’t deserve that.”

  In the past twenty-four hours I had thought a lot about how I would respond to her apology, which I knew she would make eventually. Now that it was here, I said something I had not once considered. “Actually,” I answered, “I suppose I did.”

  She smiled, and we drifted into a hug. It tightened, but as soon as her breasts touched my chest she jerked back. She gave me a furtive smile, then turned and loped off. I stared down at the piece of tape dangling from my wrist, then felt a hand caress my back. I turned quickly to see Rob Robertson. “Better be careful,” he whispered, “the little woman might find out.” He cut his eyes at Shawna’s retreating figure, then strolled away. After several confused seconds, I figured it out: he still thought I was married. He must have seen something in the way Shawna and I were interacting that suggested an intimacy closer than friendship.

  I pressed the remainder of tape down across my wrist, taking a few moments to consider the tiny explosions going off below. They were unruly and strong; they scared me. I stood and went off in search of Beastie to plan the finish of that night’s match.