by test
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Starla breaks my heart.
She will say that she loves me only at the end of a great struggle, after she is too tired to fight anymore, and then she spits out the words, like a vomit, and calls me bastard or fucker or worse, and asks if the thing I have just done has made me happy. It does not make me happy, but it is what we do. It is the fight we fight. The next day we have dark circles under our eyes like the makeup only truly evil wrestlers wear, and we circle each other like animals in a cage that is too small, and what we feel then is nothing at all like love.
I manage a fern bar on Independence Boulevard near downtown called P.J. O'Mulligan's Goodtimes Emporium. The regulars call the place PJ's. When you have just moved to Charlotte from McAdenville or Cherryville or Lawndale, and Independence is the only street you know, it makes you feel good to call somebody up and say, Hey, let's meet after work at PJ's. It sounds like real life when you say it, and that is a sad thing. PJ's has fake Tiffany lampshades above the tables, with purple and teal hornets belligerent in the glass. It has fake antique Coca-Cola and Miller High Life and Pierce-Arrow Automobile and Winchester Repeating Rifle signs screwed onto the walls, and imitation brass tiles glued to the ceiling. (The glue occasionally lets go and the tiles swoop down toward the tables, like bats.) The ferns are plastic because smoke and people dumping their drinks into the planters kill the real ones. The beer and mixed drinks are expensive, but the chairs and stools are cloth-upholstered and plush, and the ceiling lights in their smooth, round globes are low and pleasant enough, and the television set is huge and close to the bar and perpetually tuned to ESPN. Except when the Hornets are on Channel 18, or wrestling is on TBS. In the old days in Charlotte a lot of the professional wrestlers hung out at PJ's. Sometimes Lord Poetry stopped by early in the afternoon, after he was through working out, and tried out a new poem he had found in one of his thick books. The last time he came in, days before the Final Battle, I asked him to tell me a poem I could say to Starla. In the old days in Charlotte, you would not think twice about hearing a giant man with long, red hair say a poem in a bar, even in the middle of the afternoon. I turned the TV down, and the two waitresses and the handful of hardcores who had sneaked away from their offices for a drink saw what was happening and eased up close enough to hear. Lord Poetry crossed his arms and stared straight up, as if the poem he was searching for was written on the ceiling, or somewhere on the other side, in a place we couldn't see. His voice is higher and softer than you would expect the voice of a man that size to be, and when he nodded and finally began to speak, it was almost in a whisper, and we all leaned in even closer. He said,
We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
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Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
P.J. O'Mulligan's was as quiet then as you will ever hear it. All of Charlotte seemed suddenly still and listening around us. Nobody moved until Lord Poetry finally looked down and reached again for his beer and said, "That's Yeats." Then we all moved back, suddenly conscious of his great size, and our closeness to it, and nodded and agreed that it was a real good poem, one of the best we had ever heard him say. Later, I had him repeat it for me, line for line, and I wrote it down on a cocktail napkin. Sometimes, late at night, after Starla and I have fought, and I have made her say I love you like uncle, even as I can see in her eyes how much she hates me for it, I think about reading the poem to her, but some things are just too true to ever say out loud.
In PJ's we watch wrestling still, even though we can no longer claim it as our own. We sit around the big screen without cheering, and stare at the wrestlers like favorite relatives we haven't seen in years. We say things like, Boy, the Viking has really put on weight since he moved down there or, When did Rockin' Robbie Frazier cut his hair like that? We put on brave faces when we talk about Rockin' Robbie, who was probably Charlotte's most popular wrestler, and try not to dwell on the fact that he is gone away from us for good. In the old days he dragged his stunned and half-senseless opponents to the center of the ring and climbed onto the top rope, and after the crowd counted down from five (Four! Three! Two! One!) he would launch himself into the air, his arms and legs spread like wings, his blond hair streaming out behind him like a banner, and fly ten, fifteen feet, easy, and from an unimaginable height drop with a crash like an explosion directly onto his opponent's head. He called it the Rockin' Robbie B-52. ("I'll tell you one thing, Big Bill. Come next Saturday night in the Charlotte Coliseum I'm gonna B-52 the Sheik of the East like he ain't never been B-52ed before.") And after Rockin' Robbie's B-52 had landed, while his opponent flopped around on the canvas like a big fish, waiting only to be mounted and pinned, Rockin' Robbie leaped up and stood over him, his body slick with righteous sweat, his face a picture of joy. He held his hands high in the air, his fingers spread wide, his pelvis thrusting uncontrollably back and forth in the electric joy of the moment, and he tossed his head back and howled like a dog, his red lips aimed at the sky. Those were glorious days. Whenever Rockin' Robbie walked into PJ's, everybody in the place raised their glasses and pointed their noses at the fake brass of the ceiling and bayed at the stars we knew
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spun, only for us, in the high, moony night above Charlotte. Nothing like that happens here anymore. Frannie Belk gathered up all the good and evil in our city and sold it four hours south. These days the illusions we have left are the small ones of our own making, and they have, in the vacuum the wrestlers left behind, become too easy to see through; we now have to live with ourselves.
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About once a week some guy who's just moved to Charlotte from Kings Mountain or Chester or Gaffney comes up to me where I sit at the bar, on my stool by the waitress station, and says, Hey man, are you P.J. O'Mulligan? They are never kidding, and whenever it happens I don't know what to say. I wish I could tell them whatever it is they need in their hearts to hear, but P.J. O'Mulligan is fourteen lawyers from Richmond with investment capital. What do you say? New people come to Charlotte from the small towns every day, searching for lives that are bigger than the ones they have known, but what they must settle for, once they get here, are much smaller hopes: that maybe this year the Hornets might really have a shot at the Celtics, if Rex Chapman has a good game; that maybe there really is somebody named P.J. O'Mulligan, and that maybe that guy at the bar is him. Now that the wrestlers are gone, I wonder about these things. How do you tell somebody how to find what they're looking for when ten years ago you came from the same place, and have yet to find it yourself? How do you tell somebody from Polkville or Aliceville or Cliffside, who just saw downtown after sunset for the first time, not to let the beauty of the skyline fool them? Charlotte is a place where a crooked TV preacher can steal money and grow like a sore until he collapses from the weight of his own evil by simply promising hope. So don't stare at the NCNB Tower against the dark blue of the sky; keep your eyes on the road. Don't think that Independence Boulevard is anything more than a street. Most of my waitresses are college girls from UNCC and CPCC, and I can see the hope shining in their faces even as they fill out applications. They look good in their official E J. O'Mulligan's khaki shorts and white sneakers and green aprons and starched, preppy blouses, but they are still mill-town girls through and through, come to the city to find the answers to their prayers. How do you tell them Charlotte isn't a good place to look? Charlotte is a place where a crooked TV preacher can pray that his flock will send him money so that he can b
uild a giant water slideand they will. I prefer to hire waitresses from Davidson or Queens, because when they are through with school they will live lives the rest of us can only imagine, but they are easily disillusioned and hard to keep for very long.
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PJ's still draws a wrestling crowd. They are mostly good-looking and wear lots of jewelry. The girls do aerobics like religion and have big, curly hair, stiff with
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mousse. They wear short, tight dressesusually blackand dangling earrings and spiked heels and lipstick with little sparkles in it, like stars, that you're not even sure you can see. (You catch yourself staring at their mouths when they talk, waiting for their lips to catch the light.) The guys dye their hair blond and wear it spiked on top, long and permed in back, and shaved over the ears. They lift weights and take steroids. When they have enough money they get coked up. They wear stonewashed jeans and open shirts and gold chains thick as ropes and cowboy boots made from python skin, which is how professional wrestlers dress when they relax. Sometimes you will see a group of guys in a circle, with their jeans pulled up over their calves, arguing about whose boots were made from the biggest snake. The girls have long, red fingernails and work mostly in the tall offices downtown. Most of the guys work outdoorsconstruction usually, there still is a lot of that, even nowor in the bodybuilding gyms, or the industrial parks along I-85. Both sexes are darkly and artificially tanned, even in the winter, and get drunk on shooters and look vainly in PJ's for love.
Around midnight on Friday and Saturday, before everyone clears out to go dancing at The Connection or Plum Crazy's, where the night's hopes become final choices, PJ's gets packed. The waitresses have to move sideways through the crowd with their trays held over their heads. Everybody shouts to be heard over each other and over the musicP.J. O'Mulligan's official contemporary jazz, piped in from Richmondand if you close your eyes and listen carefully you can hear in the voices the one story they are trying not to tell: how everyone in Charlotte grew up in a white house in a row of white houses on the side of a hill in Lowell or Kannapolis or Spindale, and how they had to be quiet at home because their daddies worked third shift, how a black oil heater squatted like a gargoyle in the middle of their living room floor, and how the whole time they were growing up the one thing they always wanted to do was leave. I get lonesome sometimes, in the buzzing middle of the weekend, when I listen to the voices and think about the shortness of the distance all of us managed to travel as we tried to get away, and how when we got to Charlotte the only people we found waiting for us were the ones we had left. Our parents go to tractor pulls and watch Hee-Haw. My father eats squirrel brains. We tell ourselves that we are different now, because we live in Charlotte, but deep down know that we are only making do.
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The last great professional wrestling card Frannie Belk put togetherbefore she signed Ted Turner's big check and with a diamond-studded wave of her hand sent the wrestlers away from Charlotte for goodwas Armageddon V, The Last Explosion, which took place in the new coliseum three nights after the Hornets played and lost their first NBA game. ("Ohhhhhh," Big Bill Boscoe said in the promotional TV ad, his big voice quavering with emotion, "Ladies and
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Gentlemen and Wrestling Fans of All Ages, See an Unprecedented Galaxy of SWA Wrestling Stars Collide and Explode in the Charlotte Coliseum . . .'') And for a while that nighteven though we knew the wrestlers were moving to Atlantathe world still seemed young and full of hope, and we were young in it, and life in Charlotte seemed close to the way we had always imagined it should be: Paolo the Peruvian jerked his bare foot out from under the big, black boot of Comrade Yerkov, and then kicked the shit out of him in a flying frenzy of South American feet; Rockin' Robbie Frazier squirted a water pistol into Naoki Fujita's mouth, before Fujita could ignite the mysterious Green Fire of the Orient, and then launched a B-52 from such a great height that even the most jaded wrestling fans gasped with wonder (and if that wasn't enough, he later ran from the locker room in his street clothes, his hair still wet from his shower, his shirt tail out and flapping, and in a blond fury B-52ed not one but both of the Hidden Pagans, who had used a folding chair to gain an unfair advantage over the Thundercats, Bill and Steve). And we saw the Littlest Cowboy and Chief YeeHah O'Reilly, their wrists bound together with an eight-foot leather thong, battle nobly in an Apache Death Match, until neither man was able to stand and the referee called it a draw and cut them loose with a long and crooked dagger belonging to the Sheik of the East; Hank Wilson Senior the Country Star whacked Captain Boogie Woogie over the head with his beloved guitar Leigh Ann, and earned a thoroughly satisfying disqualification, and a long and heartfelt standing O; one of the Harem of Three slipped the Sheik of the East a handful of Arabian sand, which he threw into the eyes of Bob the Sailor to save himself from the Sailor's Killer Clam holdfrom which no bad guy ever escaped, once it was lockedbut the referee saw the Sheik do it (the rarest of wrestling miracles) and awarded the match to the Sailor; and in the prelude to the main event, like the thunder before a storm, the Brothers Cleanthe Superstud, the Viking, and the Gentle Giantoutlasted the Three EvilsGenghis Gandhi, Ron Rowdy and Tom Tequilain a six-man Texas Chain-Link Massacre match in which a ten-foot wire fence was lowered around the ring, and bald Boris Yerkov and Harry the Hairdresser patrolled outside, eyeing each other suspiciously, armed with bullwhips and folding chairs, to make sure that no one climbed out and no one climbed in.
Now, looking back, it seems prophetic somehow that Starla and I lined up on opposite sides during the Final Battle for Love. ("Sex is the biggest deal people have," Starla says. "You think about what you really want from me, what really matters, the next time you ask for a piece.") In the Final Battle, Starla wanted Bob Noxious, with his dark chemistry, to win Darling Donnis away from Lord Poetry once and for all. He had twice come close. I wanted Lord Poetry to strike a lasting blow for love. Starla said it would never happen, and she was right. Late in the night, after it is over, after Starla has pinned my shoulders flat against the bed and held them there, after we are able to talk, I say, "Starla,
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you have to admit that you were making love to me. I could tell." She runs to the bathroom, her legs stiff and close together, to get rid of part of me. "Cave men made up love," she calls out from behind the door. "After they invented laws, they had to stop killing each other, so they told their women they loved them to keep them from screwing other men. That's what love is."
Bob Noxious was Charlotte's most feared and evil wrestler, and on the night of the Final Battle, we knew that he did not want Darling Donnis because he loved her. Bob Noxious was scary: he had a cobalt-blue, spiked mohawk, and if on his way to the ring a fan spat on him, he always spat back. He had a neck like a bull, and a 56-inch chest, and he could twitch his pectoral muscles so fast that his nipples jerked up and down like pistons. Lord Poetry was almost as big as Bob Noxious, and scary in different ways. His curly, red hair was longer than Starla's, and he wrestled in paisley tightspinks and magentas and lavendershe had specially made in England. He read a poem to Darling Donnis before and after every match while the crowd yelled for him to stop. (Charlotte did not know which it hated more: Bob Noxious with his huge and savage evil, or the prancing Lord Poetry with his paisley tights and fat book of poems.) Darling Donnis was the picture of innocence (and danger, if you are a man) and hung on every word Lord Poetry said. She was blond, and wore a low-cut, lacy white dress (but never a slip), and covered her mouth with her hands whenever Lord Poetry was in trouble, her moist, green eyes wide with concern.
Darling Donnis's dilemma was this: She was in love with Lord Poetry, but she was mesmerized by Bob Noxious's animal power. The last two times Bob Noxious and Lord Poetry fought, before the Final Battle, Bob Noxious had beaten Lord Poetry with his fists until Lord Poetry couldn't stand, and then he turned to Darling Donnis and put his hands on his hips and threw his shoulders back,
revealing enough muscles to make several lesser men. Darling Donnis's legs visibly wobbled, and she steadied herself against the ring apron, but she did not look away. While the crowd screamed for Bob Noxious to Shake 'em! Shake 'em! Let 'em go! he began to twitch his pectorals up and down, first just one at a time, just once or twiceteasing Darling Donnisthen the other, then in rhythm, faster and faster. It was something you had to look at, even if you didn't want to, a force of nature, and at both matches Darling Donnis was transfixed. She couldn't look away from Bob Noxious's chest, and would have gone to him (even though she held her hands over her mouth and shook her head no, the pull was too strong) had it not been for Rockin' Robbie Frazier. At both matches before the Final Battle, Rockin' Robbie ran out of the locker room in his street clothes and tossed the prostrate Lord Poetry the book of poetry that Darling Donnis had carelessly dropped on the apron of the ring. Then he climbed through the ropes and held off the enraged and bellowing Bob Noxious long enough for Lord Poetry to crawl out of danger and read Darling Donnis one of her favorite sonnets, which calmed her. But the night of the Final Battle,
