by Paul O'Brien
“Hah?” Shane said again, waiting for some response. “What do you think?”
“That’s thirty-seven thousand owed in total. See you next week,” the uninterested man said as he shuffled out of the dressing room.
“That’s no problem,” Shane replied, almost offended that the moneylender brought up the subject of money at all.
The man took out his book and penciled in the new amount. “I’ll be back in two weeks to collect, plus interest.”
“No problem,” Shane replied, even more offended now that he mentioned the money again.
“What they do if you don’t pay is – they break the small finger on each hand and double the repayments for twice as long.”
Shane felt the need to cover himself up now. The atmosphere wasn’t a pleasant place for his penis to be hanging out.
“Okay,” Shane said in a suddenly serious voice.
The man left.
Shane sat in the front bleacher with ice strapped to his knees and both shoulders. He was sweaty and too tired to move from the seat. The Sportitorium was empty and covered in trash.
Shane smoked, not in any rush to get home.
“Hey,” Curt said as he entered through the tunnel.
“We need a new ring. That one is covered in mildew. And it’s like a rock,” Shane said.
Curt hovered but said nothing.
“What was the house?” Shane asked.
“It was better. Looking like nearly a thousand paid.”
Curt sat down in the seat next to Shane.
“That’s still terrible,” Shane said. “I’m working my ass off out there. I want an ass every eighteen inches out here. No empty seats.”
“The house here is slightly better, but TV … there’s a problem.”
Curt’s words got Shane’s fullest attention. The wrestler knew that having local TV was the biggest marketing tool the wrestling business had. Any trouble on the TV side of the business meant trouble across the business as a whole.
“What’s wrong with TV?” Shane asked.
Curt was clearly tired. Worn out.
“There’s some internal dispute at the station over there. Something about ownership. Nothing to do with us,” Curt said.
Shane could smell bullshit. “What dispute?”
“They’re not really saying.”
Curt lit up a smoke of his own. He rubbed his tired eyes and wondered what was keeping him in this business at all.
“They seem okay with not collecting our money every month,” Curt said shaking his head.
“If we got no TV then we’re finished,” Shane said as he turned directly to his partner.
“Now, we’re not done yet.”
Shane tore the tape from his icepacks and let them fall on the floor. He picked up his bag and propelled it angrily towards the ring in frustration.
“What’s really going on here?” Shane demanded to know.
Curt took a second before answering. He wasn’t used to talking to wrestlers like this. But Shane needed to know what was on his mind.
“I think it might be Danno Garland.”
“What?” Shane asked.
“I think he might be paying the station here to keep us off the air.”
Shane stood up. “He’s paying them to not have us on air?”
Curt nodded. “I think so. Looks like he’s trying to starve us down here.”
“Why the fuck would he do that?”
Curt in turn stood up and looked his partner in the face. “I have no idea. It seems he really don’t like us for some unknown reason.”
Curt stood on his cigarette butt and walked back to the locker rooms.
New York.
Ricky returned and took the steps into the shitty backroom where Annie’s wake was held earlier. He wasn’t surprised this was where they chose to meet. The greedy fucks probably got a special rate on the place. There was always an angle with the bosses.
“Gentlemen,” Ricky said as he approached along the sticky floor.
Most of the bosses were still huddled in the corner. All the wrestlers were gone. There was only a circle of Scotch, chewing tobacco and cigar smoke left.
“Where’s Danno?” Tanner Blackwell asked.
“I’m here,” Ricky replied.
His response seemed to anger some in the circle. A few of the bosses threw their hands in the air in exasperation and sighed their disapproval.
Ricky knew he needed to pull the bosses back into the conversation quickly. “I’m speaking with Danno’s full permission and on his behalf. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to give the man some more time to grieve.”
“Thanks to all the shit you guys are pulling up here, we don’t have fucking time for grieving,” Tanner shouted. “The walls are moving in quickly on us.”
Joe Lapine spoke softly from the head of the table. “Give the man a chance to speak.”
The circle widened out and the bosses sat shoulder to shoulder in silence and waited for Ricky to begin.
“I need your help,” Ricky began.
Tanner smiled at the predicament Danno, through Ricky, found himself in. One week before, Danno looked immovable as the top man. Now his number two was at the meeting looking for their help.
How quickly things can change.
“What are you asking for Ricky?” Joe asked. “What’s your proposal?”
Ricky continued. “I want to open out The Garden to your guys. I want to run an elite tournament that would put all of our top guys in there. Proctor has run off somewhere – afraid to face the giant. We strip him of the title … ”
Tanner again chimed in. “What the fuck does that do for us?”
Ricky wanted to launch himself across the table and beat Tanner’s face in. He instead steadied himself and continued. “We take a new path. One with more room and more money. We tape this tournament at The Garden tomorrow. Then we all use the same footage on our local TVs. All your guys will look like a million dollars fighting for the biggest prize in wrestling, in the most prestigious venue in wrestling. We’ll make your guys look like stars.”
“But there can be only one winner, Ricky,” Joe pointed out.
Joe’s point had some nodding along in agreement.
Ricky shook his head. “No. Two.”
“How the fuck can two win?” Tanner asked.
Ricky composed himself and continued. “In the main event we have a double pinfall. Both wrestler’s shoulders on the mat at the same time when the referee counts to three. We have chaos and both men leave claiming the title of Heavyweight Champion of World. One for us here in New York. And one for whoever you decide. Then both men crisscross the whole country for six months calling themselves champion. Never a day off. Two matches on Saturdays and two on Sundays.”
With every word, Ricky could feel the room moving his way. The body language was different. The hecklers silenced. Ricky could see that his proposal was sinking in well with most of the room.
He continued, “We all get twice the money that one champion can bring us. We all work together to get our business back on track, and we all make good out of it. Then at the end of six months we put them together and sell a super-bout for the ages. Two world champions clashing to decide who is the real world champion.”
Joe tried to read the room from the side of his eye. He thought that Ricky might just have found a perfect win/win scenario to put his members at ease. All but one.
“Why six months?” Tanner asked.
“Because I want Danno to have the say in who ultimately wins and claims the unified title again. It’s his belt to hand over if he wants. Or to keep if he wants. I just want him to have time to come back to the table.”
Joe stood up from the gathering and walked towards Ricky.
“Thanks,” Joe said as he escorted Ricky to the door.
Tanner stood too. “Wait.”
Ricky and Joe stopped and turned around.
“What about Danno putting out a bounty on Curt Magee?”
Tanner asked. “Not in the history of our great business have I ever heard of such a fucked-up move from one boss to another.”
“We can’t have that,” Joe said in support of Tanner’s question.
“I’ll talk to him,” Ricky said.
“Talk to him?” Tanner asked.
Ricky nodded his head.
Tanner wasn’t happy at all with Ricky’s softly, softly approach. “No. You fucking tell him that if he does anything else to draw attention to this business then all the talking stops.”
Ricky studied the room to see if the rest of the bosses thought that Tanner’s threat was out of line. Apparently, it wasn’t.
“I understand,” Ricky said as he turned back for the door.
Joe walked with him through the door. Both men stopped at the top of the stairs, out of earshot.
“Where does Danno want the other champion to come from?” Joe asked.
“Tanner,” Ricky quickly answered.
“Tanner?” Joe asked.
Ricky shrugged his shoulders and nodded his head. “Yeah, Tanner is giving up Curt.”
“What?”
Ricky buttoned up his coat. “Tanner is taking the bounty. He’s meeting Danno tomorrow to give up Curt’s whereabouts and to collect the cash. Danno wants him to have the second champion.”
“Alright,” Joe said, well aware of his duty.
Ricky put out his hand. “We need to get this going now. I have everything lined up at The Garden. I hope you can get this done.”
“Me too,” Joe replied unconvincingly.
Both men shook hands and both men went to work.
Two hours previously and the music pouring from the speakers would have made the troop of wrestlers on the dance floor more than likely kill someone. Now, knee deep into the ‘wake’ they were drunk, stoned, horny and on a night off.
“Just the way Annie Garland would have wanted it,” one of them noted sarcastically.
They were also heels. Bad guys. Not liked. The babyfaces went to a different club.
The Sugarstick Shane Montrose was a ‘tweener.’ A bad guy in New York and a babyface in Texas. He was so good at his job that even the most ardent fan bought him drinks out of pure respect.
And he drank them. Every single one.
He also threw fistfuls of money into the air and watched all the women around him dive to their knees in an effort to scrape some notes from the floor. He laughed as they pulled at each other’s hair and ripped at each others clothes.
He danced without any semblance of style, control or grace in the middle of the floor. The women were drawn to him and their men were just waiting to test themselves against the visiting ‘fake’ wrestlers.
Across the floor those same wrestlers sat in hope that the men would try and see how ‘fake’ they were. For them it would have been the cherry on the cake of a perfect evening.
Nothing bonds professional wrestlers like a huge brawl.
The Sugarstick turned and twisted and rubbed himself in unison with the music and the week’s worth of drugs in his system. He floated and could hardly contain his joy at being alive. The rush of being there, in that room, with those people, listening to that song was overwhelming.
His eyes moistened with joy.
In a world of his own. He spoke to himself as his hips operated without instruction or oversight. From inside looking out he was warm and confident and content and happy and at ease and strong and irresistible and forceful and capable and wrapped in all things good.
From the outside he looked like a fucking lunatic.
An embarrassment. Someone who, without money and wrestling fame, would have been thrown out on his ass a long time ago. He looked like someone who should be home with his kids or grandkids.
Shane nearly choked on the emotion rising up his throat. He reached out his arms to bathe in it. He spun enough to blur the room as he turned. He saw a head of jet black, perfectly pressed, long hair on each rotation.
He wanted to feel it.
So he clasped onto it as he pivoted clumsily and yanked the woman attached to it from her seat.
“Fucking greatness,” he shouted as he pulled the screaming woman around and around with him. Her girlfriends shook him and punched and slapped too so as he might let go.
Shane was elsewhere. Somewhere where he wasn’t the scumbag he knew himself to be. Somewhere where he wasn’t crippled with guilt and flashbacks. Somewhere where he was the undefeated world champion.
Shane Montrose lay motionless on the brown carpet. The meager contents of his turquoise hotel room were tossed and tipped over, except the umber-colored bed which was still perfectly dressed. His window was open and the earth-colored floral curtains flapped in the breeze.
On the floor, Shane hugged the phone. Even in his drunken stupor, he begged it to ring. Just ring. For hours he checked the dial tone and rang the front desk to make sure the lines were good. He richly paid the disgusting guy on the front desk to monitor the phones all day and all night.
But wish as he did, no call came through. He left his hotel phone number everywhere he knew Curt went or might be.
The Hotel Monterey wasn’t the usual standard that the Sugarstick liked for himself when he was on the road. But when he left for New York he didn’t know if he was going to be there for a night or a week.
Either way, he felt he had to be where people wouldn’t think to look. Just in case his problems from home fancied a trip to the Big Apple.
Ring, goddamn it.
He impatiently banged some numbers on his phone and waited. A sleepy female voice answered. “Hello?”
“Hey honey, any messages yet?” he said in his fake-sober, chirpy voice.
“Shane?”
“Anything from your brother?”
“There’s nothing over there. He’s checking.”
“Is he going to the house everyday?”
There was a slight confused pause. “What? Yes. He snuck on over there this evening. There’s nothing.”
“You sure he’s doing what he says he’s doing?”
“Yes. I want to go home Shane.”
Shane did all he could to hide his frustration. “Are you sure he knows how to work the answer machine?”
“Yes. Blinking red light. He’s checking the goddamn machine,” his wife shouted back.
Shane couldn’t believe his luck. Another night without knowing where Curt was. “You’ve got this number honey? Haven’t you?”
Shane’s wife was growing more and more anxious with every question Shane asked her.
“You’ve given it to me twice now Shane. Is there something else wrong?” she asked.
“Go back to sleep,” Shane said as he waited for silence on the other end.
“When are you going to get these people their money? We can’t keep doing this? These people are coming…”
Shane hung up the phone in the middle of his wife’s sentence.
It really came down to two men. Joe Lapine as Chairman and Tanner Blackwell as chief opponent. The NWC was made up of many members across the world, but the power lay at the top only.
And now that Danno was weakened and distracted, that power was moving downwards.
Both Joe and Tanner knew that.
The two men faced each other across a small, round room service table. They were happy to leave the meeting and let their wrestlers spread out across Manhattan to drink and hit the nightclubs. Tanner even gave some of his wrestlers an extra hundred to break a few jaws while they were out.
It was always a good investment for the bosses to pay their guys a little more to be tough with the locals. It protected the business and made wrestlers the one group of people you didn’t want to mess with in a bar.
The more people they could prove they were ‘legitimate’ to, the longer the deception could go on.
Joe and Tanner’s plates were filled with half-eaten meats, vegetables and exotic desserts. These were the plates of bosses who were earning money. The hotel roo
m made the same extravagant statement. A room too big and too pricey for the single man staying there.
But, that was wrestling. A con. A sleight of hand. A play, from the second their eyes opened ‘til the second they shut. Everyone in the wrestling business knew they were taking the money from the paying public or the ‘marks’ as they called them. They knew they were conning them.
But they also conned each other. It was a perception con rather than a deception con. They all did it to each other all the time.
Even the bosses did it.
Joe Lapine and Tanner Blackwell sat opposite each other, out-ordering each other with room service. They arrived on separate chartered flights. Drove in separate limos and booked the finest rooms in the finest hotels in New York.
And they were both broke.
Not broke like a guy who sleeps in the alleyway broke. But broke for a rich guy broke.
And they knew, like all the other bosses around the world, that Annie Garland’s funeral was the place to be seen. They called in favors to borrow expensive jewelry or pawned their second cars for pocket money. If you’re not seen like a boss then you weren’t seen as a boss. And to be seen as a boss you had to flaunt. Everything. All the time.
Tanner all of a sudden dropped his cutlery, like he couldn’t take it anymore. “I don’t know if this is the right time to be seen closer to Danno.”
Joe put down his cutlery and wiped the side of his mouth before speaking. “Now is the perfect time to be closer to Danno.”
Tanner had a little think before picking up his fork again. “Why do you say that?”
“There’s going to be two champions coming off the card tomorrow night. Danno has got one and you could have one. If something were to go wrong with Danno, who do you think is next in line?”
Tanner couldn’t hide his grin. “Why are you so adamant that I have it?”
Joe pushed his plate back completely and cleared the food from his back teeth with his tongue. “Danno has essentially triple the vote when it comes to the title. He has New York, San Francisco and Florida. We have one vote. We’re going to be a long time out in the cold if we don’t take this gift now. I’ve got no one ready. I’m voting for this. And Danno’s three. If you vote too then it’s a done deal that I can present to the members as a fait accompli. With that, you get the other title.”