Living the Gimmick

by Ben Peller

  “He . . .” I stopped. “He’s a great kid,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He nodded stubbornly. “I don’t know why I told you that just now.” He shook his head. “Just wanted to tell someone, I guess—”

  “Ricky Witherspoon didn’t remember your father,” I blurted. “I mean . . . he wouldn’t have. I never even asked him. He might’ve but I just didn’t know . . .”

  Just ahead of me the bushes were swaying, moving back and forth like lost fish under a blurry ocean. “I lied to you and I’m sorry, B.J.” I turned to look at him. He was nodding, his eyes curious. “I don’t even know why.” I went on, “I just wanted it to be true. I wanted it to be true and the only way to make sure it would be was to not question it and just tell you what I knew you’d want to believe.”

  I stopped and took a breath. The vague aroma of flowers wound into my nose, making me think of daffodils even though they had no scent that I knew of. All I remembered about them was popping off their yellow heads as a kid. So many afternoons on the way home from school had been spent decimating bright armies that seemed to lay over every block and grow back overnight.

  “It wasn’t that important, Mike. Really,” B.J. said slowly. “But I’m glad you told me.” He paused before asking: “You feel better?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “You?”

  He nodded and we both looked away from each other. A horn sounded in the distance, jabbing at the awkward silence B.J. and I were sharing. That confession had left me more naked than I had been in a long time.

  “Michael, we’ve got a surprise for you!” Terri’s voice rang merrily from the doorway behind us. She trooped out onto the porch carrying a box, the Sears slogan clinging faintly to the cardboard. She set it on the porch, and the first thing I saw resting on the top was my grandfather’s catcher’s mitt.

  “Oh my God,” I said, dropping to my knees beside the box.

  B.J. laughed. “Hell, yes, I forgot to tell you,” he said, “Terri went and picked up your stuff from your old apartment while we were down wrestling in Memphis.” The glove seemed to have accumulated a few more cracks, and as I slipped it on my fingers, it was dryer and tighter than I remembered. But then I inhaled and caught the smell of leather and pictured my grandfather clearly for the first time in . . . what, how long had it been? . . . six months, a year, two years? In all that time I had seen only snatches of him in dull and unfocused memories. Now I held a clear image of him as the accompanying gravelly voice drifted through my mind.

  I placed the glove next to the box and lifted out some old art books. “Oh, shit,” I said, laughing, “these must be years overdue.” I opened the cover and saw the stamp: March 9, 1987.

  “Amnesty day,” B.J. said. We all kept laughing and remembering as I sorted through the other items from my old apartment in San Bernardino. There was the alarm clock that I had brought from Chicago, a quilt I had purchased at a local Pic ’n’ Save, as well as several pro wrestling magazines. Holding the alarm clock made me remember a lot of mornings in that small San Bernardino apartment, the clock’s steady beep signaling the start of another day at Shane Stratford’s Wrestling Academy.

  One of the final objects was a small tattered book called Underground Steroid Guidebook. As soon as I brought this out of the box, I dropped it back inside. My eyes met with B.J.’s but neither of us spoke. I hurriedly yanked out the object I had been saving for last, the pillow I had wrestled with since I was fourteen. I gave it a light jab and watched it drop to the floor.

  As Beastie’s body fell from the cage.

  “Memories.” I blinked. “They’re something.”

  Later that night in the bathroom I took the last Valium in my pill case. I had forgotten to get a refill from Santa before I left Buffalo. A low murmur of nervousness passed through my body as I tried to recall how long it had been since I had gone an entire two days without taking a painkiller of some sort. There was no way for me to get more without going back to Santa, since I had no legal prescription. As I opened the door, I looked back at the mirror and maintained eye contact with my reflection for a few seconds before turning and stepping out into the light of the hallway.

  Before leaving the next morning I gave the pillow to Joey, who immediately wrapped it in a bear hug. “A natural born pro wrestler,” I proclaimed.

  “God help us.” B.J. laughed.

  Outside by my car, B.J. ran his finger along the hood. “Been doin’ a little traveling, huh?” He nodded at the dust clinging to his fingertip.

  I shrugged and looked at the house. Terri waved. She was on the front steps in a bathrobe. Her damp hair clung to her cheeks like a golden picture frame. She sat watching Joey, who was hurling the pillow to the ground then picking it up and doing it again.

  “Sure you don’t wanna stick around a little while longer?” B.J. suggested with a murmur of concern.

  “I can’t,” I said. He looked unconvinced. “I appreciate the offer, man. I appreciate everything. But I’ve got a few more things to do.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before . . .” I looked up at the sun, a hot and angry blade in the sky. “Before I start traveling again.”

  “Do your thing then. You know where to find me if you need to.” He hesitated. “What do you think, doc?” he asked quietly, gesturing vaguely at the house behind him. Terri was still on the front steps. Joey picked up the pillow and threw it in the air. He shouted happily when it landed, then ran to pick it up.

  “I’m jealous,” I said.

  “Bullshit.” He grinned. “I’m jealous of you.”

  “Bullshit.” And we laughed.

  I drove away, watching my rearview mirror. The houses were still identical in appearance but now I found myself imagining the individual worlds they contained. Separate realities where human emotions and memories could endure. My grandfather’s glove sat beside me as proof. I hoped my old wrestling pillow would be happy there.

  The old Shane Stratford’s Wrestling Academy sign still hung above the door; given its original filthiness, it was impossible to tell if the years had added any dirt. As soon as I walked through the doors, I recognized the same old smell of sweat that I associated with desire, as though the stifling confines of the gym only served to stoke its inhabitants’ dreams of wrestling in arenas that seated tens of thousands.

  Many of the same posters still adorned the walls. In the ring were about a dozen students in differing stages of bulk. I spotted two bloated juicers right away. All of them were watching Aries, who appeared a little stockier and a lot slower than he used to be. He was announcing in a loud tone: “When you go over the top rope, it’s easy to look like you’re controlling it. The key is making sure you look like you have no control over it.” He ran the ropes, and just watching his body’s instinctive tentativeness with every step made me wince a little. I had seen enough people wrestling with injuries to determine at a glance that he was obviously on a pill of some kind that was fooling his mind but not his body. In addition to the usual knee and elbow pads, both of his thighs and hands were heavily swathed in tape. An itch sprang to life on my right forearm, and I scratched it furiously as Aries launched himself over the ropes with a fierce abandon. He landed with sloppy but undeniable force on the mat outside—a human car wreck. The students watched silently for about fifteen seconds as Aries struggled to his feet.

  “Damn,” one of them whistled, “that looked good.”

  “’Cause I had no control,” Aries specified immediately. “What you just saw was a guy who legit could’ve broken his neck. And that’s what the crowd wants to see.”

  “Looks like it hurt,” came another much deeper voice from the mass of bodies in the ring. Aries laughed and reached over for a small pill bottle that was resting on a metal folding chair. “That’s what our little friends, Soma, are for,” he said, and chuckled grimly. I remembered how Stratford had used to offer us nail polish to kill the pain in practice; it appeared the stakes had gone up.

  At this point a
hand fell upon my shoulder. “Hey, kid,” a voice from what seemed like several lifetimes ago triggered a shrill alarm inside of me. It was not the reassuring bluster of Shane Stratford, but instead came with an unmistakably Canadian accent that belonged to Rand Staffer.

  His lips were twisted into the same gap-toothed smile I had mimicked so long ago. “Long time,” he said with a smirk. I wanted to extend my hand and see if my fingers would go through him or not.

  “What are you—” I stammered.

  “Shane Stratford went a little batty about a year ago. They said he was starting to have hallucinations and all. Part old age, part nail polish abuse.” He chuckled wryly. “So, I get a call from Hippo, who asked me to take over as WWO West Coast Rep. Part of the deal included running the school. I said, ‘Why not?’ My wife always wanted to live near the ocean.” He snorted. “I didn’t count on being stuck here in the desert, but what the hell, eh? Life isn’t always perfect.”

  I had never comprehended the fact that he might have been married. “Tough break about Beastie,” he continued. “How are you?” His voice was disarmingly curious.

  “Okay,” I said, casting a quick glance back at the class. Many of them were looking over at us, and I tried to read the expressions on their faces. Was Staffer setting me up for an ambush? Would he order these young hungry wrestlers to try and put me out of commission? I was too nervous to be amused at the potential irony.

  “Let’s talk in my office for a few minutes,” Staffer suggested. For a second I thought he meant to step into the ring. But he had already turned and was walking to the door that led to Stratford’s old office. His left leg showed the sheer hint of a limp.

  Once inside, he closed the door behind us. A ceiling fan had been added, lending a circulatory freshness that had dispelled the room’s former odor of nail polish. Aside from the fan, the layout of the small office was unchanged.

  “Do you hate me?” I asked.

  “I did,” he acknowledged slowly. “For at least a year, I had fantasies about showing up at the arena and charging the ring with a baseball bat. About a year after . . .” An edgy sarcasm took control of his voice briefly. “. . . the incident, I got drunk and hopped on a plane. I knew the WWO was there, and I knew what hotel the boys always stayed at. Waited in a car in the parking lot of the Hyatt with a pint of Scotch and a crowbar. You finally got back around midnight, and I watched you stagger in with Trevor and two women. I just watched you and I wanted to get out and hurt you so bad.”

  I tried to place the exact night but couldn’t. My feud with The Soultaker had been an exhausting chain of pills, women, and too much alcohol. If Staffer had attacked me that night, not only would I have been an easy target, but I probably wouldn’t have even remembered it.

  “But I didn’t move.” Staffer was now speaking in a voice blunted with softness. He seemed to be groping with a confession. “I just kept sipping from the pint and waiting for the old Staffer . . . the old Rand Staffer fire to hit me. The bloodlust, the need to hurt someone. Then damned if I didn’t start crying like a fuckin’ baby. It hit me what a true sonofabitch that Staffer had been, and how miserable his life had been. My kids had been terrified of me, my wife had been ready to leave me. But over that past year things had gotten so much better. Even though I wasn’t wrestling, I was . . . happier than I had ever been when I had that stupid gimmick I couldn’t turn on and off.”

  “I can relate to that,” I commented, “or at least the part about not being able to turn it off.”

  “I guess that’s what I figured. And it hit me that what you had done was . . . nothing personal,” he said. “So, I just finished the pint, slept it off, and flew home in the morning.”

  The breeze from the ceiling fan was making the top strands of his hair drift like small ripples over a dark pond. “That’s why I don’t hate you,” he said. “In a way, you ending my career helped me keep what, although I didn’t realize it at the time, was most important to me: my family.”

  I nodded. “Not that there aren’t times when I still don’t fantasize about kicking your ass,” he said and smiled, “just a little.”

  “What’s your real name?” I asked.

  “Rand Staffer,” he replied with a shrug. “My parents were always a little annoyed that I kept it throughout my career.”

  We both stood. I extended my hand. “Good to meet you, Rand,” I said. His hand was warm.

  “What’s yours?” he asked.

  “Rand Staffer?” I replied with a shrug. He chuckled.

  We walked outside, where I spent a few minutes talking to the students in the class. I scratched both my burning forearms and provided monosyllabic answers to their questions about how I had risen so fast in the WWO.

  “Hey, Chameleon,” Rand Staffer said as he came out of the office and unrolled a poster. It featured one of the shots “Ivan with an I” had taken of me in the downstairs studio of the Crystal Ship. I was standing against a black wall while clad in a black outfit. The picture had been touched up in such a way that my body blended completely with the wall, thus leaving a pair of ridiculously wide searching eyes as sole proof that an animal of some kind was occupying the space. Those eyes do look insane, I admitted to myself, remembering Ivan’s admonition.

  Staffer handed me a bottle of Wite-Out. “Better use this to autograph it,” he said with a grin.

  I dipped the small brush in Wite-Out and scrawled “Chameleon” across the poster’s pitch black background. Then I dipped it in again and added “M.H.”

  “All right, M.H.” Staffer nodded. As he taped it up to the wall alongside the many posters I had seen while in the ring as a student, I talked with Aries. He seemed surprised when I told him I had just seen B.J.

  “Haven’t talked to him for a while.” Aries’s shoulders jerked up in a random shrug. “Been kinda busy.” In a weary, petulant voice he filled me in on the new responsibilities he had acquired in the past few years. He had married the daughter of one of his parents’ lifelong friends and was now running all three of his father’s car dealerships, with a fourth one scheduled to open next spring.

  “Sounds like you’re rolling, Aries,” I offered.

  “Am I?” he glanced above my head, throwing the question at the sagging ropes of the ring behind me. “I can’t really wrestle anymore. It’s all I can do to teach.” He sighed. “Well, hell. Why aren’t you still wrestling?”

  “Ahh . . . ,” I said. “The thing with Beastie . . . it kinda got me.”

  “Beastie . . .” He nodded, then mumbled, “Lucky bastard.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded.

  “He died doing what he loved,” Aries declared defensively.

  “You have no right to call him lucky,” I said. “You didn’t know anything about him. About him.”

  “Maybe not,” he relented. He reached down and massaged his knees. “But I know plenty about me,” he said. I left his comment unanswered, lingering in the unventilated air. It’s fucking dry in here, I thought, scratching the prickling sensation that by how had grown up to my upper arms.

  “See ya around.” Aries sighed, turning back to the ring.

  “Yeah,” I said, “see ya.”

  I had originally planned to leave southern California immediately after visiting the school, but signing that autograph had awakened a memory in me. It kept growing in a manner as similarly ominous as the itch that now consumed both my entire arms. So I drove to the Denny’s where I had first made an inarticulate attempt to scrawl a gimmick name as an autograph. I took a booth by the window where I would have a good view of the doorway and ordered a “Moons Over My Hammy.” My stomach wasn’t feeling too good, so I only ate one or two bites. I drank several glasses of water and kept scratching my arms and chest, waiting for something.

  I stayed there until sunset, and by then I knew I was in trouble. My arms were on fire, and my organs felt like they were slowly imploding. With an involuntarily trembling hand, I slowly removed a pen from my pocket
and scrawled the name “Michael Harding” onto a napkin. I wrote it again, watching the curves and dips of the letters, trying to grasp the sum total of their connection.

  An overpowering urge to vomit made me drop the napkin. It floated on to the table. I added some bills to it. Staggered to the bathroom and puked all over a stall. I caught the reflection of my sweaty face in the mirror. You stupid sonofabitch. You’re hooked. My arms were an ugly, irritated red from nonstop scratching. Buried just under the red I glimpsed the small scar from that mosquito. Still a tiny white snowflake. Mine for life.

  My vision reeling, I made my way out of the restaurant.

  Well, I could check in to a hospital or deal with this thing on my own. Hospital, hell. The WWO fired people for going to rehab. Bad publicity. Although it was night, I knew that I could drive back to the wrestling academy and more than likely score something, some Soma at least. I hadn’t done Soma in years, having been spoiled by Santa’s easy access to more popular painkillers.

  That’s what I’ll do, I reassured myself. I’ll go get some Soma. Shoulda gotten some this afternoon.

  I pulled out of the Denny’s parking lot and began driving with sickened resolve back in the direction of the wrestling academy. But I heard Aries’s bewildered, unhappy tone ricocheting within my ear over and over, and every time I stopped, there he was . . . landing in a fantastically impossible bump on the hood of the car. My God, I thought, I’m going crazy. However, whenever the car began moving again, the image would disappear and his voice would recede. So, to ensure myself constant motion, I forgot about going back to the wrestling academy and instead followed the green arrow of a stoplight onto an entrance of the freeway. It would pass below my old apartment before stretching on into the darkness of the desert.

  In August even the nights were hot out there. The hotel room was strange; it was vibrating like a frayed drum. Finally, I realized this assault was coming from my own heart. Chest shuddering each time the life-giving organ pumped blood through a system in rebellion.