The Gimmicks
Page 26
He shouldered the door open and let the wind hammer it shut. He went and sat with all his weight on the hood, right in front of me, and I could feel the back wheels almost lift off the ground.
Eventually, the gas station attendant knocked at my window and told me to go wait somewhere else. I was curious enough—about where Mina needed to be taken with those dice—to give her ten more minutes, but I knew I’d have to draw the line soon. For now, I pulled alongside the curb out back, near the alleyway between the gas station and the neighborhood. For ten more minutes, I told myself, I’d keep my eye on the mirrors. I’d always attributed my honest conversations in cars to the confined nature of the space, but it occurred to me now how impossible it was, surrounded by reflections, to ignore the fact that what was framed in the windshield one minute would soon be swallowed up in the mirrors.
I was still thinking about my admonition of The Brow Beater that morning in Wyoming, the way I’d wanted him so badly to want to become an American. I’d been sensitive to his growing ambivalence about America ever since a gig in Concrete, Oregon, where a crowd had chanted horrible racial epithets while he wrestled. This was during the Iran hostage crisis, and we were playing that angle—The Brow Beater as an anti-American Islamic so-and-so—so as far as I was concerned, we’d done a good job getting the crowd to react with serious energy. We’d played the angle in one form or another many times before, but this time, The Brow Beater got to the locker room and unlaced his boots in a different mood.
I let him cool off, and then in the car that night, I mentioned offhandedly that if the gimmick wasn’t working for him, we could always change it up. I started telling him about all the gimmicks I might’ve tried myself if I hadn’t gotten injured. An astronaut, a spy, a new-age healer, and my favorite, a doctor who assists in suicide. For that one, I had a finisher in mind: a sleeper hold called Painless Death. I must’ve gone on for an hour. Finally, I said, “It’s wrestling, big fella. We’re only limited by our creativity and how much we’re willing to work.”
Without the pretense of a segue, The Brow Beater started listing all the gimmicks we’d come across in our time together. Pretty soon it became clear to me what he was saying. For white wrestlers, he could name all sorts of heroes and villains with distinct personalities and motivations and goals. But the black wrestlers all had chains or grass skirts, and the Indians were noble savages and almost never portrayed by real Indians, and the Mexicans wore mariachi hats or masks, and the brown folks wore turbans and sheets and shoes with curled toes, and he listed all the hackneyed gimmicks of his own that even the smartest mark wouldn’t remember. The Shah, The Ra, The Beast from the Middle East. Killer fucking Kebob.
I said, “Look, it’s not perfect, but wrestling is an art form built on types. You are what you appear to be. Our job is to emphasize what’s already obvious about us.”
“Bro,” he said. “Obvious to who?”
That’s when I told The Brow Beater the truth about Joyce. I hadn’t meant to—I’d never mentioned her name to anyone—but I started telling him about Joyce’s letters to my mother, her inability to accept my brother’s death, and the time I found her in that bookstore in Tucson, Arizona. Pretty soon I was telling him the rest of the story, and in the car, I couldn’t help but tell him the whole truth, the full picture of the mess I’d made with her.
After spotting her in that bookstore, I told The Brow Beater, I tried to forget about Joyce altogether. But when Kennedy was shot, I thought of her. I was with three other wrestlers in a motel room in St. Cloud, Minnesota, watching the horror televised, and Joyce was the first person who came to mind. At the time, I thought maybe it was because Jackie Kennedy with her wide-set eyes had always slightly reminded me of Joyce, and now—after she’d lost her man so suddenly, so violently—the resemblance was etched in stone. But later, when the monks were self-immolating on the news in a motel room in Boulder, Colorado, or when King was gunned down on a gym television set on the verge of Tallahassee, when I found myself thinking at every televised tragedy first and solely of Joyce, I began to worry. I began to consider, late at night, the possibility that Joyce and her conspiracies—which had seemed to me like sad fantasies during the years when the country was awash in its white, postwar glow—now seemed less impossible. As the country rioted, as I watched black wrestlers get taunted with nooses in stands in the South (which I’d seen before but hadn’t paid attention to), as I saw uniformed servicemen spat upon, as I watched footage of brown-water navy vessels blasting orange arcs of napalm into civilian villages, as I read John White’s report on the purely fictitious events at Tonkin, as I saw man after man who stood up get shot down, I thought: Good God, my country could’ve done it. They could’ve traded Gil, just as Joyce had said. In those moments, the idea no longer felt like a conspiracy but a clue, a clear emblem of my country’s madness.
During the absolute height of tension and division in those years, when civil war or martial law seemed imminent, when both the hateful and the hated resorted to the comfort of their groups, I returned to Tucson once more. I found Joyce in an adobe house with three towering cacti splintering the yard. It was 1974, and Joyce had done well for herself as a new-age healer. She saw me and said, “You’ve injured yourself.” It was probably evident from the stiff way I turned my half-healed neck, but I was so relieved by the recognition of my pain that I went up and hugged her tenderly. She placed different stones to my neck, limestone and quartz. She was crazy—I knew that—but she seemed newly in control. She’d been high on everything, she told me, so nothing much lifted her anymore but the crystal-clear truth. Though her study of geology in college gave her business an air of scientific authenticity, I knew she was no healer. Still, she impressed me. She seemed brave and relentless, like a woman who’d built a well at a mirage and refused to stop pumping. And I wasn’t in any position to judge, staging fights for a living. I didn’t know what story I was telling myself about myself anymore, what story my country was telling me, what story the world was trying to tell, and whether I had a role at all to play in it. I was so low that year that I ended up staying with Joyce for seven months. She burned sage around me, kissed me on the neck, and didn’t charge me a dime for rent. I was so grateful, I didn’t mind when she brought up those old conspiracies about Gil. I didn’t even balk when, one night halfway through my stay, she asked me into her bed. In fact, I was grateful.
We got married in a little ceremony at the adobe house. A pastor made the trip from the city, and a few members of Joyce’s community gathered in the living room as he led our vows. We lived like that for almost a year, pretending to heal the sick and damaged, pretending to heal ourselves. Pretending so well that we forgot we were pretending. In the end, we even discussed exhuming my brother’s body, just to prove the extent of our faithful performance. Maybe I would’ve carried on that way, grasping at distrust like a salve. I might’ve held my brother’s bones and claimed they were not his. But wrestling came calling. An ailing bodybuilder arrived in the adobe house for a geotherapy session, and I found a new role to play, and I asked if he’d ever considered professional wrestling. Soon I’d dubbed him Mickey “Makeshift” Starr, and I saw money in him, and only Johnny Trumpet would take my phone calls. With Trumpet’s help, which I told him I’d always owe him for, I stopped living my own gimmick in Tucson with Joyce. With Trumpet’s help, I broke Makeshift into the business and took him on the road, and we drew real money and we drove real miles. I’d never told anyone about Joyce and me except The Brow Beater. Joyce, my brother’s girl, was my ex-wife. I knew I’d never forgive myself for being with her, and I also knew I’d never forgive myself for leaving her. But I was amazed at the phenomenon I started to witness once I was gone—that as my confidence in my new role grew, so did my confidence in my country. They seemed to go hand in hand, those two, so as I transformed again from Terry Krill to Angel Hair, Nixon fell to his disgraceful end, and the war fell to its, and the country seemed to regain some hold on its larger visio
n. And when I told The Brow Beater the truth—serving, as I was, as his liaison to the country—I felt that my old faith in my country was once again redeemable. My country and myself—The Brow Beater had helped me find that the more I believed in one, the more I cared to believe in the other, that we were each other’s keepers.
But The Brow Beater didn’t seem moved by my story, and soon we were fighting in Wyoming. Finally, I brushed him off as a cynic. Nothing he could’ve said would’ve changed my mind. I had worked too hard to rebuild my faith in my country. I couldn’t let it dissolve again.
Finally, my wait was over. Someone was in the mirror, approaching. I got out of the truck and stretched my legs.
“Shen,” I said, recognizing the man from Mina’s rooftop. I didn’t know his friends, two large buzzcuts in tailored suits.
“Buddy,” Shen said. “What’re you doing in Glendale, huh?”
“I told you,” I said. “Cat business.”
The three of them started speaking Armenian, a language I was beginning to think I should learn.
“Long trip for a cat,” Shen said, kicking my Washington plate with his heel.
“It’s a rental,” I said, and when Shen translated, they all looked at the Ranger, camper shell rusting at the bolts.
“Try again,” Shen said. “What are you doing with Mina? She has a bandage on her hand, we noticed. Are you trying to intimidate her?”
“God, no.”
“Are you a police officer? Are you working with the police?”
“Do I look like a cop? Is there something you’re doing in my country that warrants a police presence?”
“Your country,” Shen said. “Huh. Well, you’ve been sitting at this gas station for half an hour, and you lied about the rental, so you’ll understand why we don’t believe you when you say you’re just minding your own business in your own country.”
“I’m just an old wrestler,” I said.
This seemed to please Shen, and he translated for his friends. “Wrestling is very big in my country. I used to wrestle pretty good. Let’s have a wrestling match.”
I had to laugh. I said, “I’m a professional. I don’t wrestle for free.”
“Just this once.”
“I’m sixty-two,” I said. “I got a bad neck. Otherwise I would’ve loved to kick your ass.”
“Your hair makes you look younger. Did you wrestle freestyle, folk-style, or Greco-Roman?”
“Shen, this has nothing to do with you.”
“I’m just curious about your wrestling. Or is that a lie, too?”
“I wasn’t that kind of wrestler,” I said.
“Ohhh,” Shen said, drawing it out. He turned to his friends. All I could make out was “Hulk Hogan.”
“You’re one of those American wrestlers,” Shen said. “What’s the word? Fake.”
“Hold on, now,” I said. “I don’t know who told you that, but that’s not true. Trust me. What I did was very real.”
“But the fighting, though. It’s fake.”
Call it predetermined, I could’ve said. Call it entertainment. But not that.
“You seem to be an expert,” I said. “You’re acting tough with your friends, but who are you, really?”
The buzzcuts removed their jackets. I tightened my ponytail.
“Take it back,” I said, “and I’ll get in my truck and leave without a problem. But you’ve got to take back what you said about my livelihood. Understood?” I waited while Shen and the others corroborated their message. “Take it back, Shen. Take back what you said about my life.”
He licked a corner of his lips and looked me square in the face. “Fake,” he said.
I lunged.
21
Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1983
“They were very good friends, growing up together,” Galust told his mother over dinner, and she winked and said, “I bet they were.”
The snark couldn’t reach Mina, not with Avo back. There he really was, seated at one end of the long table in her home, directly across from her husband. She looked back and forth between them as between players across a backgammon board, and nothing—not her mother-in-law’s snide commentary or Araksya’s fussiness in her high chair—could trawl the joy from her. It was as though the pieces of her had all come home, and she could begin at last to bear them off.
“So what happened to your face?” her mother-in-law asked Avo.
“He moved here from Leninakan after the factory fire,” Galust said.
“That was earlier,” Avo said, “when I was a teenager.”
“And you left because why?”
“He was traveling the world,” Galust said.
“And you’re back because the world is overrated?”
Mina said, “Let the man eat, he’s skinnier than he was at fifteen.”
“It’s okay, I’m eating, I’m eating.”
Araksya began to cry.
Avo said, “No, the world isn’t overrated.”
“Do you have a favorite place?” Galust asked.
“Excluding brothels,” his mother said.
“Did you like America?” Galust asked.
“It’s too big for yes or no, I think,” Avo said. “Yes and no.”
Galust said, “Our daughter is only two but can add and subtract already. Care to see?”
Araksya cried.
“One plus one,” Galust tried, but Araksya wouldn’t stop crying.
“I enjoyed a place called Carlsbad, New Mexico, very much.”
“One plus one, baby.”
“He’s trying to tell you about America,” Mina said.
“I’m listening and listening,” her mother-in-law said, “but we haven’t heard a single thing yet about the concert. We shouldn’t just dust the concert under the rug because an old friend of hers arrived.”
“One plus one, baby.”
“Talin was nearly perfect up there,” Galust’s mother said. “But those blue sequins were a touch gaudy, I thought.”
“She was perfect,” Mina said, and she kissed her daughter’s cheeks.
“Two,” Araksya said.
“Two!” Galust cheered.
“Very impressive,” Avo said.
“Little girl,” Galust’s mother said, “lift your chin and stick it out as far as you can when you speak, like we practiced.”
Araksya fixed her posture.
The other day Mina had yelled at her mother-in-law, having caught her teaching Araksya to stick out her jaw. She covered her own chin while she yelled. Galust’s mother had said, “I’m only trying to make her more beautiful. What’s wrong with being more beautiful?” Mina hadn’t responded to that but now she wished she had.
“I have an idea,” Mina said now. She wanted to say, “Why don’t Mom and Araksya go put on their diapers and get ready for bed?” But she left out the diapers and said, “Go to bed. We’ll clean up out here.”
Araksya, out of her chair, ran straight to her room. Galust’s mother looked one last time at her son, at Avo, and then back at Mina. “I’m coming,” she called to her granddaughter, and left the table.
“She’s beautiful,” Avo said.
“No argument there,” Galust said, “but she’s a bit too old for you.” Everyone laughed a bit in that stalling way people tend to do in new groups. Finally, Galust sighed and said, “No, my daughter—yes. She’s a gorgeous and brilliant little girl. She’s my little fish.”
A silence fell between them, and Mina said she’d open a bottle of vodka if the men were in the mood to drink. “I am, anyway,” she said, getting up.
When she returned, they all three moved to the living room, where the lights were low and where Galust had put on his favorite record, a rendition of Khachaturian’s Spartacus by the Vienna Philharmonic. A ballet, Mina remembered, pouring the drinks. Galust’s first wife had been a ballerina, she knew. Mina poured four vodkas before realizing they were only three in the room. Discreetly, she downed the extra before joining the men.
“Your parents,” Avo said. “Still living in the building? First floor?”
“The whole family,” Galust said. “Her sister, too, on floor number three.”
“The Armenian dream,” Avo said, raising his glass.
“It’s been helpful, especially with the baby,” Mina said.
Galust agreed. “But it’s about time we start looking for a bigger place. In a few months, Araksya will need a room of her own.”
“It’s a beautiful name.”
“It’s my mother’s name,” Galust said while Mina sipped her vodka. “If it had been a boy, we would’ve named him after my father. Shaunt. He would have loved to be a grandfather, my dad. Heart issues all his life, though. I promised I’d name my first son for him, and it’s the best promise I’ll ever keep.”
“Salut,” Avo said. They raised glasses again. Galust got up to get the bottle, insisting that Mina stay seated.
“The best promise I’ll ever keep—I knew a man who asked me that once,” Galust said from the bookshelf at the end of the room. The shelf served as a stationary drinking cart. He was looking into the glasses he was filling, but it was clear he was talking to Avo. It was a story he’d never mentioned to Mina.
“He was a Russian I met in Leninakan. This was a long time ago, when I was your age. A boy, really. What, you’re twenty-seven? I thought I was a man already then, too, but that should have been my first clue. Only boys think they’re men already. Real men think they’re still boys. I was thirty years old, married already, with six years under my belt at the Leninakan bureau. I thought I had my whole life laid out ahead of me like a map. We had a little problem with getting pregnant, but my wife was seeing medical doctors and witch doctors, too, and between the two of them, I figured a solution would be found sooner or later. She was at home that night with all her female relatives, undergoing some sort of women’s magic, and so I steered clear. After work, I went to a place above the market where I’d heard alcohol was served. It was hot outside, and I craved a cold beer. The place was almost empty. Just a few drunks and the friend who kept serving them. I sat at a table in the corner, listening to the radio, enjoying the music and the cold beer.”