Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  After my third event, though, I began to sense that looking for these signs and “readings” was, at bottom, dishonest. I could continue to shyster together language that masqueraded as insightful, but in the end I knew that that language would only amount to a form of avoidance, of hiding, namely from my own pain. But, further still, I’d also started to tire of the idea that all experience aspired to significance, to meaning of one sort or another. The idea that an experience was somehow only completed by insight. Because I’d had enough of insight—what had once promised an endless unfolding symphony of self-knowledge had lately taken on the tinny jangle of Muzak. Insights had come to be as easy to have as they were hard to live by. Know thyself? I’d been knowing on myself for years and yet here I was, almost thirty and still waking up feeling like I was in a stranger’s bed, a stranger’s life. Wasn’t reasoning like this just another form of storytelling and so, by definition, a work? Didn’t it betray the very nature of the experience? Barthes was very much on my mind here, particularly when he writes, “What matters is not what [the crowd] thinks but what it sees.” And as part of the crowd at the many events I attended, sometimes alone, I saw a lot.

  I saw “Loverboy” Nate Andrews introduce himself by stuttering the first syllable of his name with an overactive tongue—“Luh-luh-luh-luh-luh-luh-LOVERBOY. . .”—in a way clearly meant to signify cunnilingus. I noticed then that he’d shaved most of his stomach and chest, leaving one long center strip of hair from his neck to under his belly button. When it was his turn with the mike, Thunder called it an “unhappy trail” and we all erupted.

  I saw C. W. Bergstrom, who’s fifty-four years old and whose prime dates back to the days when Rowdy Roddy Piper wrestled here, come out and say to another tag team, “I hope you packed a lunch, because we’re taking you to school.” To which his opponent from the Honor Society responded, “My partner and I are the true masters of the double team. Just ask this girl,” and he pointed to a woman in the front row, which drew cheap heat, halfhearted jeers and boos, but didn’t seem to register any actual offense.

  I saw Mister Ooh-La-La on a YouTubed episode of Springer and learned that when he was eighteen, he’d changed his legal name to Mister Ooh-La-La.

  I saw Dr. Kliever throw J_SIN into the ropes and then clothesline him when he bounced back into the ring, and I saw all 380 lbs of J_SIN go horizontal in the air and fall to the mat with the sound of a cannon, after which Dr. Kliever walked around the ring pointing to his chest with his thumbs like I’m the Man.

  I saw a number of head butts to the groins of spread-eagled men that looked like deranged and hellish fellatio.

  I saw crowd members with what must have been seventy-inch waists hold up homemade signs that said FOOD STAMP TRAMP when the Left Coast Casanovas came out with their escort, Mary Jane Payne. As they entered the ring, I saw the Casanovas hold down the middle rope for Mary Jane, who paused for an awkward and long few seconds when her head came close to Draven Vargas’s crotch and her bottom came close to “Loverboy” Nate Andrews’s crotch, at which point the two wrestlers posed a high five to complete the pantomime of a sexual maneuver known as the Eiffel Tower, at which the audience collectively groaned.

  I saw J_SIN point to a much smaller opponent and say, “I’ve had bowel movements bigger than him,” and really almost believed that.

  When I arrived early at an event, I saw wrestlers warming up and going over their moves. They were wearing T-shirts that hung over their little spandex undies in a way that made me think they might not actually be wearing little spandex undies at all, that they might be Porky Piggin’ it.

  I couldn’t help but see that some of the wrestlers’ little spandex undies looked more full than other wrestlers’ little spandex undies and wondered why the less endowed wrestlers didn’t opt for shorts.

  My heart went out to one wrestler, gone generally flabby and a little gynecomastic, when a twelve-year-old girl in front of me started to chant, “Get a sports bra!”

  I saw Big Ugly stand in the ring wearing a plastic neck brace and tell a story about having been in a bad car accident with a semi. He’d had to spend time in the hospital, where some of the other wrestlers had visited him. Though he was in a lot of pain, he guaranteed that he’d be back in the ring as soon as he could. He made a point of saying that a lot of guys in the business, they spend their lives on painkillers to numb themselves. He didn’t want that life. J_SIN said he would wrestle their tag-team match against the Left Coast Casanovas alone, in honor of Big Ugly’s pain. And I felt a great wave of tension and then shock and then confusion wash over me when, during the match, Big Ugly rushed out from backstage, doffed his neck brace, picked up a collapsible steel chair on his way into the ring, and used it to smack J_SIN across the head. This betrayal, this twist in the angle, stupefied the crowd. J_SIN lay stunned on the mat and Big Ugly hit him another time. Then Big Ugly got another collapsible steel chair and put it on top of J_SIN’s head and hit that chair with the first one. “I can’t believe they let this happen,” said someone behind me. “Nothing fake about that,” said another. And I completely marked out, bought it. I was genuinely confused. Was J_SIN okay? Had Big Ugly been faking his injury all along? What just happened? After the managers got Big Ugly out of the ring, three wrestlers came to help J_SIN backstage. Scott got a picture of the four of them walking away from the ring, and when we looked at it later, we saw that Dr. Kliever is smiling at the camera, and his smile is different from the one I’d seen on him before. It is full of gleaming and perfectly white teeth and he looks movie-star handsome and I didn’t know what to think.

  I saw so many incredible things I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.

  Six months after the Keizer Klash, I found pictures online that a local journalist had taken that night. Sure enough, I spotted myself in one of them, standing in the back of the Lions Club, leaning against the wood paneling, an out-of-focus ghost taking notes as grown men pantomimed a primal struggle. This picture convicted me. In the months intervening I’d been dutiful about my reporting, attending events and interviewing the wrestlers, but had only recently begun to understand how much of myself this project was demanding I give. All along I’d been fighting the personal turn, afraid that naming or narrating certain hurts would both cheat and cheapen them. Amount to no more than complaining. But watching alone would no longer do, of that much I was sure. A line of Hölderlin’s kept coming to mind: “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.” And a little etymological sleuthing turned up that danger and risk are literally embedded in the word “experience”—I knew I was going to have to put myself in harm’s way, that is, in peril.

  The DOA training facility is in Troutdale, Oregon, about a half hour east of my house in Portland. It also serves as a school where Dr. Kliever teaches new wrestlers the ropes, as it were. I drove out I-84, the Columbia River on my left, and I was thinking about time and experience. I mean, I was thinking about Dad. How much of our relationship is a work? How much a shoot? And would its being a work make it any less real? Any less painful?

  Mount Hood rose outside my windshield. Clouds crossed it. It looked like something Ansel Adams might photograph. In the nearly seven years I’ve lived here, Hood has never looked real to me. Against the sky, it looks flat and matted, too much like what it is, and this subtle irreality has always led me to think of it as a symbol. How large and how small. Grandeur. Awe. Ineffability. Far-reaching singleness. Timeless time and eternal return.

  Behold! A mountain.

  There was an accident on the highway and three lanes became one and traffic slowed to a creeping pace as everyone passing tried to assess the damage, counted their stars. I grabbed my phone and checked my Instagram account to see whether any of my seventeen friends had liked the photo I’d posted earlier. Kyle was one of three who had, and he’d uploaded a new photo for his many hundreds of followers. I thought of posting a shot of the accident. There were fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances, a dizzying display of spiral
ing light. Surely there was a good filter for that. The rescue workers had lobotomized one of the cars that had come to a crumpled rest on the right shoulder. Its roof was peeled back like the lid of an anchovy tin. On the embankment, an abrasion of fresh red paint stretched behind it. I would put a knowing caption on my photo, an allusion, play to the Pacific Northwest crowd with “Randle Patrick McMurphy” and get tons of likes, or tens of likes at least. I slowed, assessed, and only after I had taken a picture that came out blurry and smeared-looking did I consider that it was probably in bad taste anyway, the situation too, well, real. As I drove on, I thought about how, at an earlier time in my life, like Dad, I would have prayed for the safety of the people involved.

  I got off the highway and drove past the semitruck dealership and then the Troutdale airport, where two small helicopters were either taking off or landing, just indecisively hovering there. I passed a sprawling and enervated office complex no different from one I remembered at that moment I used to work in. And then development abruptly ended and I was in the middle of nowhere and I almost missed the turn. I searched in vain for address numbers on a street that had large garages on the left and semitruck trailers behind chain fences on the right and knew I had arrived when I saw an SUV with a DOA sticker across its entire back windshield. I parked behind it. When I got out, I saw hanging from its rearview mirror what looked to be shrunken heads. The training facility’s windows and door were cheaply mirrored and I stood a moment in the thoroughfare between the two strips of garages. My face was imperfectly and fuzzily reflected in the DOA insignia on the door. I walked up and my reflection grew larger. At the door, though, gripping the handle, I hesitated, imagining the world of hurt that would be revealed to me in the ring. But I pulled it open because I had decided that, more than anything, I wanted a piece of the action.

  Beirut

  Every Thursday night was Games Night. That is, every Thursday night was Games Night so long as we weren’t on probation for our last Games Night. And a certain mood enveloped the fraternity those afternoons. Call it a tincture of excitement and aggression.

  The brothers would band together to ensure there were enough Solo cups and beer, to get the music set up and to check whether anyone had remembered to invite some girls this time. A pledge would layer printer paper over the windows on both of the doors to the basement—the sides facing out were Sharpied with BROTHERS ONLY. The intention here was equal parts secrecy and exclusivity: we wanted to protect our paddled asses from Campus Security and to invite everyone else to kiss them. Our informal slogan? “Whether you like us or don’t like us, learn to love us, because we’re the best thing going today.”

  Arrive after eight on such a Thursday in the early aughts and you would’ve heard the muted hubbub as you entered the house, which was a three-story dorm “unit” owned by the school. You would’ve descended the rubber-nosed stairs, rapped on the door with the proper cadence, and a pledge would’ve admitted you into the basement. You’d’ve made your way past the bathrooms and through a doorless portal on your left and into the claustrophobic charter room, where under a low ceiling there sat a pool table, but not quite enough space around it to really play. Against the far wall was the huge-screen TV funded by alumni donations, which would’ve been playing Stop Making Sense or The Last Waltz, possibly (oddly) on mute. Brothers and their guests would’ve been arrayed on the leather sectional couch, cards and empties strewn across the coffee table before them. This was surely some version of Kings or Asshole. The faces of brothers past looked nostalgically on from the composite pictures that hung on the walls. Then a pledge behind the chest-high bar would’ve proffered you a beer from one of two thirty-gallon garbage cans, which held ice and water and the many cases of Beast or Natty Light that one of the brothers would’ve bought earlier with membership dues that some of us paid at the beginning of the semester and others of us never. Back out on the basement’s open floor, lit with a fluorescence that made even the best complexion look a little Children of the Corn–ish, you would’ve surveilled the action.

  By the far door would’ve been a homemade table, warped and wobbly due to poor or hasty craftsmanship. Four or five washed-out-looking young folk would’ve been lined up on either side, chanting some variation of “Go, go, go,” as another person on their side endeavored to flip an empty Solo cup from the table’s edge and get it to land upside down, after which the next person in line would chug his or her drink and attempt the same. On an adjacent table, two people would’ve been struggling to bounce a quarter up into a single centered Solo cup—succeed and your opponent had to drink the contents, typically beer but sometimes rotgut liquor poured from a plastic handle, not to mention whatever microbial ickiness had been on that quarter.

  But all this action was merely incidental, a footnote to the main event. Because to speak of Games Night is to speak almost exclusively about one game, conducted in the center of the basement on two specially designed tables, both emblazoned with our Greek letters. We called this game Beirut.

  * * *

  Because he feels very far away from me now, I often have to remind myself that I’m the same person who pledged this fraternity, who puked and pissed into a communal garbage can with twelve other shaggy-headed young men, who learned trivia about older brothers’ hometowns (e.g., the lighthouse in Sea Girt, New Jersey, is forty-four feet tall) and memorized “family trees” detailing how all the brothers were “related,” who went on four-in-the-morning sandwich-and-condom runs for older brothers, am the same numbass who sat upon a block of ice while drinking liter after liter of a chunky concoction the primary ingredients of which were warm beer, cocktail onions, cayenne, and bananas. With time it’s getting harder to believe these are among the things wrapped up nice and tight in my hobo sack of experience. Why did I allow preppy manboys to spank me with a shoddy paddle I’d fashioned myself? Why, in front of a crowd of shrieking sorority girls, did I strut gamely upon a table, removing my clothing, article by article, to the tune of Ricky Skaggs’s “Country Boy”? Why did I swallow so many live goldfish? Why did I submit myself to the quaffing of nuked vodka? To humiliating vitriol? To running twenty-two miles one evening while holding on to a pole just long enough for all twelve of my fellow pledges to hold on to as well?

  Cue the harp music, watch the wavy lines play across your mind. I remember it all like it was yesterday. . . Though it pains me to admit this, I too was once a preppy manboy. I too once believed, and deeply, in the idea of fraternity, in a community of young men assembled, according to the preamble we all knew by heart, “for the establishment of friendship on a firmer and more lasting basis; for the promotion of brotherly love and kind feeling; for the mutual benefit and advancement of the interest of those with whom we sympathize and deem worthy of our regard.” All our literature was written in this semiarchaic language, which for me lent it the weight of longevity, of history. It was so earnest, full of sepia-toned notions of capital-V Values, capital-C Character. Its unapologetic bid for significance seduced me. As did all the secrecy, the elaborate handshakes and the candlelit rituals. But I was an easy mark, already a true believer.

  In high school I’d been on the margin of a number of friend groups, but hadn’t been an integral member of any one. Having been excluded from these core relationships, I was invited to imagine them as penetralia of a sort, intimate places where inside jokes flourished, where a cup of ambrosial acceptance was passed around, and where, possibly, people were getting laid. As evidence of this exclusion I submit a thing that would sometimes happen at parties: if they started to get too big or loud or unwieldy, if there was any threat of the cops being called, the host would walk around his or her house thinning the crowd. So while I’d go to these parties, I’d be nervous pretty much the whole time that I’d again be classed among the broke dicks asked to split early. It’s nothing special, of course, this not feeling special. But because it’d been denied me, I was possessed of the notion that my insecurity and anxiety and self-doubt, the Go
rdian knot of my identity, might be allayed or undone by being open-armed into a community. I wanted to be deemed worthy of regard, to be absolutely positive I’d make the party’s cut. There’s all that and, of course, there was a girl.

  I met Cara during rush, which was when you were supposed to go around meeting the brothers of all the different houses. They’d ply you with booze and drugs and show off the caliber of tail that hung around and you’d then decide whether they were the sorts of guys for whom you might freely befoul yourself. She was sitting in Luxton’s room with a couple of friends while Luxton was on his computer, his back to us. She was sporting a pink polo shirt with the collar popped up and athletic shorts that inched up her sun-browned legs, revealing a penumbral tan line. Her long, dirty-blond hair was parted on the side in the manner of all the southern girls who haunted my dreams then, who through my tortured adolescence had been responsible for so many mucked-up sheets. She’d grown up in one of the richest little pockets of minimansions in Richmond, and had attended the “old-money” private all-girls school not far from my house. Every so often throughout middle and on into high school, my public school would catch fire with rumors about these girls. Everyone knew they were the hottest—they seemed, to a girl, to possess the heart-hurting beauty that I came to associate with casual wealth; their hair and skin, their clothes and postures, the only word was “rich”—but these apocryphal stories also suggested that they actually put out.