Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  But God, that phrase. Mama’s boy. For years it’d return to me with a sharpness unblunted by time. An example: it’s fifteen-ish years later and I’ve been in Portland about a year. For several weeks I’ve been experiencing mysterious and unsettling episodes. Mood swings sing through me. Anger and anxiety and loneliness and fear and a deep unutterable sadness. There’s somatic stuff, too. A sudden and inexplicable paresthesia in my arms and palpitations in my chest that make me worry, like “Perfect. A stroke and a heart attack.” I pace and stomp about and I smoke. I take long walks in an effort to calm my underskin. I weep at TV commercials, at nothing at all. I feel like I’m going crazy. Like I’m turning into somebody else. So disturbing are these episodes that I have trouble believing the doctor when she tells me they’re called panic attacks—whatever was happening to me definitely deserved a less prosaic name. Weeks later, after more of these neural shock waves, these full-body flails, I finally cave and commit myself to a daily regimen of meds that promise to stabilize my moods and reduce both the likelihood and intensity of my episodes. But before they begin their work, they turn my mind into an empty castle, and it’s in those stilled and foreign corridors of thoughtlessness that I hear it softly taunting me, a thin persistent whisper: mama’s boy, mama’s boy, mama’s boy.

  Before their Three Year Anniversary show, the DOA wrestlers held a meet and greet at Pattie’s Home Plate Cafe in St. Johns, one of the northernmost neighborhoods in Portland. Primarily a fifties diner–cum–soda fountain, Pattie’s is also a music venue, sock-hop dance hall, gift shop, clothing store, video store, costume-rental shop, meeting place, and, I’m pretty sure, more. St. Johns has always seemed to me to be a living reminder of what this town must have been like before it became so hip and cool to live here. There’s none of the yuppie influence that pullulates in the Pearl District or the hipster-doofus aesthetic that teems elsewhere. There’s no upmarket flannel or fashion-statement glasses or knowing facial hair. Although it may be read onto the place, irony has not yet invaded and colonized St. Johns as it has much of the rest of this city. When you’re there, you feel it’s safe to take the place at its word. Work boots are worn to work and big-framed vintage glasses are just the glasses people have had for thirty years and mustaches are grown to make a face look better. Pattie’s hosts a regular Bigfoot believers meeting.

  It was a Saturday afternoon and sunny and the wrestlers had set up a card table with two gold-plated black leather belts, T-shirts, DVDs, and flyers for the Three Year Anniversary show the next day. J_SIN Sullivan sat in a chair built for a much smaller man. To call him simply “big” would be a silly understatement. In the ring, yes, he looks big. But when you’re next to him, he’s beyond big. Upright, he’s a hair shy of six and a half feet tall and weighs 380 lbs. You’d shudder and avert your eyes and pray little please-God-not-next-to-me prayers if he boarded your plane. All-you-can-eat buffets must factor people his size into their P&Ls. He’s gigantic.

  A fan—the only one who stopped by in the two hours I was there—approached for a photo. J_SIN slung the Tag Team Champions belt he and Big Ugly hold over his shoulder. Together, they are “Ugly as Sin” and weigh 650 lbs. In the ring, they are like two parts of one person, and are unstoppable. J_SIN posed his menacing pose and pictures were taken and the fan thanked him and walked off.

  Now, there’s J_SIN and there’s Jason and the difference between the two is at once subtle and pronounced. After the fan moved on, J_SIN relaxed back into Jason, the man who by day works at a printing plant and who’s a founder and star of an independent wrestling promotion. Jason’s bigness isn’t really intimidating. Rather, he suggests a soul-comforting equipoise, more Buddha than the bad guy he plays. I sort of wanted him to give me a hug and tell me not to worry, that everything was going to be all right. I imagined being hugged by a MINI Cooper. But Jason’s bigness was still intimidating enough for me not to suggest we try it out.

  “Some people just have it,” he said. The “it” he was referring to is the it factor, those characteristics an entertainer or person possesses that make him compelling, magnetic. For some wrestlers, it’s a physical talent, the way they carry themselves, a move they do in the ring. For others, it’s mike skills, their swagger and charm, the way they talk. Either way, it’s how a wrestler manages and engages the crowd—it’s the crowd, after all, with its response or lack thereof, that decides how long a match goes and whether a character makes it. “If they’re not feeling it,” Jason said, “we cut it short. No one’s bigger than the show.” As a “heel,” a bad guy, in DOA, Jason’s job as J_SIN is to inspire the fans’ derision and hate, to rile them up and get them rooting for the “faces,” the good guys.

  “I’ve got this thing I do with my eyes,” he continued. He cocked his head to the side and made movements with his brow and then said, “I can’t really do it out here. The sun, it’s too bright. But you get the idea.”

  A group of kids BMXed lazily by and shouted something I didn’t catch.

  “Nothing fake about this,” Jason called back as J_SIN, patting the belt he still had over his shoulder. “Come over and I’ll show you. Or are you too scared?”

  The kids moseyed on.

  “People are always like, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, it’s all fake anyway.’ But is this fake?” He held up his forearm and pointed to a four-inch pink scar that looked like a gummy worm. “That’s from barbwire.”

  In his essay on professional wrestling, Roland Barthes writes, “The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle.” The gist of the essay is that professional wrestling is a “spectacle of excess” and a species of morality play, and though highly athletic, it is decidedly not a sport. Unlike the crowd at a boxing or mixed martial arts match, the one at a professional wrestling production wants an image of passion, not passion itself. What is enacted and played out in the ring is “the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice . . . Everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers.” The shows may be scripted, but they’re not choreographed, and while some of the suffering and pain are amplified for effect, “sold,” that hardly makes it all fake.

  Jason said he’s bled in the ring twelve or thirteen times. At an event where the fans bring weapons for the wrestlers to use on one another—mostly pizza cutters and tenderizers and other kitchen utensils, but some real creatively sadistic shit, too, like an old keyboard with thumbtacks glued to the buttons like a miniature bed of nails—he got a cut on his back deep enough to demand medical attention, but he didn’t go to the doctor. “I just EZ-stitched it,” he said, meaning—I had him clarify—that he’d superglued the wound shut. Two years ago, he partially tore his MCL and he still hasn’t had the surgery he knows he needs, but continues to wrestle regardless. He said Home Boy Quiz (HBQ) recently underwent a fearsome procedure known as back fusion surgery. Two rods and six pins now stabilize his spine and he’s set for a comeback in a matter of months. I saw a picture of Wade “By God” Hess from the Taipei Death Match a few years ago. He and Thunder had dipped their taped-up hands in glue and rolled them in broken fluorescent tube lights, then punched and chopped each other until that grew stale, at which point they started smashing the fluorescent tubes over their heads and across their backs. In the picture, Hess is on his knees and his back looks like a river delta of pulpy skin and blood. Everyone has a bad back or bad knees or a bum shoulder or a crooked nose or broken ribs that didn’t heal right. Dr. Kliever said he has to do yoga every morning to make it through the day. For a time he also had burns all over his back from a show where he was slammed onto a table that had been lit on fire and, consequently, caught fire himself. Plus and all there’s the situation with his teeth.

  “Concussions are so common that they’re, that we, wait. Hold on. Where was I going with that? Anyway, every time you’re slammed to the ring, it’s like you’re putting yourse
lf through a fifteen- or twenty-mile-per-hour car crash,” Jason said. “In order to deal with it you need a lot of mental toughness. That’s more important than physical toughness, really. You have to condition yourself to deal with it.”

  One of the managers came out of Pattie’s to tell Jason there was a girl inside who wanted an autograph, but she was too shy or scared or awestruck to ask for it herself. Jason signed a picture of the DOA logo, smiling a smile more private than public.

  When I asked why he puts himself through all the pain, what he gets out of wrestling, Jason said, “There’s that, the fans, of course. And I just love the sense of community I get from wrestling. I met my girlfriend through wrestling. I’ve met my friends through wrestling. It’s also just fun as hell.”

  Another of the managers—they came in such a number that I got the sense that “manager” also meant “friend who wishes not to wrestle”—said they should probably wrap up. They had to head to the airport to pick up “Maniac” Matt Borne (of Doink the Clown fame) and Raven, who were coming in especially for the Three Year Anniversary show. Before we disbanded, I asked Jason whether he thought DOA could ever support him and the other wrestlers full-time.

  “It’s a dream, of course. Because, I’ll be brutally honest,” he said, as though he could be honest any other way. “It’s really humbling, going from being the boss to being the grunt. Monday morning back to work. It’s hard. That’s the reality of it.”

  After five-plus years, when the acuteness of my initial episodes had long since faded, I began to fear that the meds had leveled me into a listless, anhedonic, das Manian existence. So in an effort to purify my experience and gain access to what I imagined were deeper realms of myself, realms more vivifying and significant and “authentic” than any I’d recently inhabited, I decided to go off them. Because I didn’t know any better, I tried quitting cold turkey. By day three I was having vertiginous fits so bad I had to lie down for a half hour or longer. The dizziness was of a deeper, more severe sort than any I’d ever experienced, qualitatively different from what happens when you childishly spin around a lot of times. There were shocks and jolts that ran up and down my spine, to and from the base of my brain. They’re called “brain zaps” or “cranial zings,” which makes them sound a lot more whimsical and fun, like some cartoon bubble out of Adam West–era Batman, than they really are, in reality. My head ached. My mind went as mushy as a cake half cooked. Some kind of akathisia alighted and I felt as though I’d had too much coffee when I hadn’t even had any. I couldn’t keep still. I allowed myself to visit a handful of medical websites—after a spate of hypochondriacal false alarms I’d been advised to give them a wide berth—and read that the white-knuckling I was engaged in is ill-advised. Doctors instead recommend a process of gradual reduction called a taper. So again I took up the regimen and decided to think long and hard before I gave quitting another shot.

  After the Keizer Klash match with J_SIN, a victorious Dr. Kliever stood sweaty and breathless by the ring. He leaned against one of the ring’s posts, signing autographs and posing for pictures with kids from the audience, most of whom came up to about his waist. There was a thrilling and transgressive cultural exception about all this. Parents letting—no, rather encouraging their kids to get close to this man wearing nothing but little leather undies, who’s missing prominent chompers and who has a large crustacean tattooed on his chest, which was red and welted from J_SIN’s chops, and who was breathing suggestively and had sweat so much that he glistened and whose verdigris Mohawk had lost its initial pluck and verve and was now flopped over and matted and sad in a way that’s probably best signified by the sudden diminuendo of a slide whistle. The atmosphere was charged.

  In line with the kids to have his picture taken was an older fan. Disheveled in his loose jeans and Hawaiian shirt and unbuttoned flannel jacket, he walked with a cane and looked like he could’ve seen action in Vietnam. When it was his turn, he congratulated Dr. Kliever and said J_SIN was a whale and a jerk and it took balls to get in the ring with him. He asked Dr. Kliever how he felt, after a win like that.

  “You never get used to it,” Dr. Kliever said. “You never get used to the pain.”

  I lied to my dad, said I was getting in on Friday, when really I had arrived in Charlottesville the day before. I was in town briefly and wasn’t sure I wanted to see him, what with all the anger and disappointment, the annoyance and confusion—the rawness of all the shit I preferred not to reckon with. But I felt bad, guilty, and from a friend’s back porch I told him I was calling from the train, couldn’t talk long. Could we meet for coffee later that afternoon? After he’d moved out of my mom’s place but before he’d subleased a cheap room in a house with UVA graduate students younger than his three sons, he’d asked this friend if he could live with him and his wife. He doesn’t know I know this and even if he did I’m not sure he’d see the problem. On the phone he said Mom had Airbnb guests coming that night and he had to drive out to the house to cut the grass. So we made plans to meet for half an hour the next morning, at seven, before he headed to College Park, Maryland, to watch a UVA lacrosse game. Later that day I learned that Mom had already cut the grass, that he, too, had lied. And then, feeling bad and guilty himself, I guess, he went to pick me up from the train station, thus catching me in my own lie. I didn’t answer his phone calls and the voice mail he left only made me squirm: “Where are you, bud? Which train were you on? I’m standing by the entrance, the exit. . .” I just texted back that I’d see him in the morning.

  We met at Spudnuts, a fifties diner famous in Charlottesville for its dense potato-flour donuts and thin coffee. I was a little hungover—for a while there I’d been drinking in order to bring on a mild, manageable hangover. The symptoms of a mild hangover were the physical analog, the literal embodiment of the itchy-edged ache and estrangement of my normal mental state; and they were strangely soothing, in that they quieted the dissonance I typically felt while walking around. The wrongness felt right, evened me out. Dad was wearing an old T-shirt and, like me, was carrying a little extra weight and, who knows, maybe he was a little hungover, too. We got good donuts and bad coffee and talked.

  It can often seem like the world or someone in it has either executed an injustice against Dad or fallen well short of his expectations. No bone seems to go unpicked, no ax unground. This time, he wanted to discuss how my brother had shown up late for a lacrosse game someone had given him tickets to. Good seats. Box seats. He’d missed the first quarter and a few minutes of the second. What did I make of that? Wasn’t it messed up? Rude? (Was this really what we were talking about?)

  When he got around to asking about the train station, I came clean. I hadn’t been sure I wanted to see him, didn’t know what to make of what was going on—the separation but also everything that’d led up to it. I put some questions to him, was direct. Confusion bloomed on his face, for ours is a relationship that thrives nearest the surface. Behind the door I’d nudged open lay a mess of knottily complicated emotions. And for a second I was ten again, waiting in terror for his reaction to something I’d said or done. But I was also almost thirty, by any metric a man now myself, and wanted an explanation, an accounting of some sort. A story. How had Dad come to be a man with a marriage on the ropes? Broke with no reliable job? Was it really possible for life events of this magnitude to just like, you know, happen? But I also knew that nothing he could point to—depression, booze, laziness, pride, hebetude, booze—would undo or absolve the pain of the last few years. At bottom it wasn’t really about undoing or absolving the pain anyway, but honoring it as real, acknowledging that the rest of us hadn’t simply imagined it.

  We sat for a spell in silence. Donut particulate dusted Dad’s ratty tee. I don’t know why or exactly how I expected things to be different now, but I did and so his deflection bummed me out. He said Mom needed to get help. “I’m getting help. All kinds of help.” He said that word, “help,” like he resented even it. And before I knew it our half
hour was up, as though this had been some sort of prison visit. We hugged outside and he said, “Pray for your mother, bud,” and I said I would, even though I hadn’t prayed in years and probably wouldn’t start again anytime soon. And then I turned away, not wanting to see him get into his dinky little truck and blow into the pneumatic doohickey I’d heard he had to blow into in order for it to start. I didn’t want that experience. Walking back to my friend’s house, a heavy, donut-sick feeling in my stomach, the sun working its way through the morning haze, I wondered what alchemical substance is added to time that makes it possible for us to forgive.

  I spent my time at the first few wrestling events looking for socially or sexually or politically charged shit I could write about. And it’s everywhere to be found. Take, for instance, the wrestlers’ obsession with the microphone. In the face of working-class anonymity, of a system that renders them all but powerless, “voiceless,” controlling the mike could be read as their way of asserting control over their situation, their lives. When they got their hands on it, nearly all of the wrestlers first said something like “Shut up! I have something to say!” This all seemed symbolically complicated by the fact that the cordless mikes often cut out abruptly, mid-insult, and that even when they did work they amplified and distorted in equal measure, muffling the wrestlers’ voices into the nonsense, muted-trumpet language adults speak in Charlie Brown cartoons. Everyone would’ve been totally lost were it not for the fact that we were all sitting close enough to the ring to hear through the distortion. I thought of the improvisational nature of professional wrestling as a field of play and an embrace of pain that Nietzsche would have associated with his übermensch, and probably would have admired. Then I thought professional wrestling could be seen as a metaphor for our own normal and mediated lives, some of it real, sure, but a lot of it scripted, posed, fashioned for other people to observe and assess, to “like.” And that maybe folks get so up in arms about pro wrestling being “fake” because they’re acutely sensitive to and insecure about all the ways their own lives are a work.