Push (Fight Card)

by Jack Tunney

  Then I was telling her about his eyes, and the creepy feeling he gave me. And about how Barry had felt the same.

  She didn’t know what to say about it all. So she stood up and took my hand and led me into the bedroom. One good thing about Sue is, when no one knows how to say what needs to be said, she finds other ways of saying it.

  ROUND 4

  I went to see Uncle Charlie, which wasn’t very hard, since Sue and I lived in his house. It was a big house, one of the biggest in town, and sometimes, even when he and I were both there, I didn’t see Charlie all day.

  I found him down in the basement, fooling with his trains. They were his pride and joy, and he had a great big layout running all around the outside of the basement and filling up a good part of the inside too. And it was a big basement. Big house, big basement.

  He had on his engineer’s hat. He was sitting on the sofa with one of his transformers in his lap, which was open with wires all over the place. Charlie had a workbench down there for that kind of thing, but he never used it.

  In one way, Charlie was like a woman. You’d ask him something and you’d get a long story with every detail and every loose end. Not a typical guy answer of just the facts, ma’am. Normally I’d give him a hard time about that, but not with his trains, because he loved to talk about them. He was always trying to get me interested, which I was never going to be, but since he enjoyed it so much I gave him every chance I could.

  So, I went over and said, “What’re you doing?”

  He gave me a bunch of stuff about volts and something about amps. I’m pretty good at carpentry, which I’d picked up since I started working at the lumberyard, but electrical is Greek to me. Best I can do is replace a fuse. So, I listened for a while, and nodded where I was supposed to, and I suppose he knew I wasn’t getting it, but he didn’t care. Because this was the way things were with us.

  He said, “So, if I just crimp this here, and...hmm. Still not working. Oh. Got the polarity reversed. Wait a second...there. And voilà.”

  A light on the transformer illuminated. He nodded, got up, put everything on a table, said, “Heard you had some stuff go on yesterday.”

  “Two-count.”

  “Sue said.”

  “Whoopi-ki-yay.”

  “That’s kind of what I said, first time I got a two-count.”

  “Yeah, but you ended up being on the receiving end of three-counts a good number of times.”

  He picked up the transformer again, unplugged it from the rat’s nest of wires there in front of the sofa, and brought it over to his control center. He started to screw everything back together. He said, “You do know it’s all fake, right?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “So two-counts and three-counts, they don’t really mean anything.”

  “Course, I know. But still, you know, you want to make progress. And getting a win sometime, even if it’s in the script, is progress.”

  “In the old days, we never worried about that.”

  “Yeah, I know, and in the old days you walked twelve miles through the snow like Abe Lincoln to get to your matches.”

  “You thinking about quitting?”

  “No. But it’s the first time I’m wondering how long I’m gonna keep doing this. I mean, if I don’t get a push. Because it’s kind of a dead-end job.”

  “What about the money?”

  “Money’s no better than if I went full-time at the yard. Besides, I don’t need a lot of money.”

  “Oh, yeah, that rich woman you got yourself.” Sue was a paralegal. Not rich, but she made a decent salary.

  “That, and the fact the old man we live with won’t accept any rent money.”

  “Old man’s got a Ford dealership that’s going gangbusters and a mortgage that’s paid off. Old man don’t need his nephew’s rent money.”

  It was the only thing we ever had even close to an argument about. So I moved the conversation back to wrestling. “Remember that standing dropkick you used to do?”

  “No, I’m old and feeble and have old-timer’s disease. Course, I remember.”

  “I’d like to learn to do it.”

  “Then we’ll work on it.”

  “Good.”

  “Good is right,” he said. “Now get out of here and let me work on my layout.”

  ***

  I hadn’t been training hard for six months or so. After I got into the swing of being a jobber, I realized strength wasn’t all that necessary. It wasn’t like I was throwing anybody around a lot. Cardio wasn’t a big deal either. It was tough to get winded when you were in the ring five or six minutes tops. So, most of what I did was designed to keep me from getting hurt in the ring. Lots of stretches and other limbering exercises. Practicing falls. And what Stephan taught me.

  My dad died when I was four. My mom was a stewardess, and there was no way she could take care of me the way she should have. So her brother Charlie did, and I think he did a pretty good job. Aunt Charlene helped some, but she hadn’t wanted kids in the first place and she sure as hell didn’t want any then. So she left most of my upbringing to Charlie, which worked out okay, since Aunt Charlene kicked off when I was nine.

  Charlie spent his early years in St. Vincent’s orphanage in Chicago. Then my Grampa Earl took a shine to him on a business trip, and next thing they all knew my mom had a brother.

  They were big on boxing at the orphanage, and Charlie stuck with it. When he was old enough, he tried to make it as a pro. But he was too slow, even for a heavyweight. So he switched to wrestling. There he did better.

  Back in those days there weren’t many guys who jobbed for a living, and right from the start they let him win some matches. He worked his way up to big fish in a little federation, won the tag team title twice, with Bronco Finnegan and Bookxy Stark, and went up for that outfit’s version of the world championship once, where he lost to Big Bill Jones due to being hit over the head with the ring bell by Big Bill’s manager, Arlen Fibonacci, when the referee wasn’t looking.

  Then he hurt his shoulder and couldn’t wrestle. It took a long time to heal, and when it finally did, he realized he’d been a lot happier staying home with Aunt Charlene than travelling all over the Midwest putting wear and tear on his body. So, he retired and got into the car game and made his fortune that way.

  But he never forgot the boxing. He thought it was important kids knew how to defend themselves. So, since he was the closest thing I had to a father, he took that on with me. He tried to teach me, but I just wasn’t any good at it. I would fall for every feint and get hit by punches an old man could have avoided. Part of it was I could handle stupid high amounts of pain without it bothering me, and some of the time I was just as fine getting hit as I would have been getting missed.

  Then he made me join something called Kid Gloves. Which might have been because the gloves they wore were as big as the kid was. Even so, when I got knocked on my ass in the first round of my first match, I didn’t wake up for four hours, and that was the end of my boxing career.

  But he still insisted I learn to defend myself, so I tried karate for a while and judo for a while, and while I was better at them than I was at boxing, I basically didn’t care. I think, I figured if I was going to get beat up, I was going to get beat up, and if I needed to beat somebody else up, I’d find a way whether or not I had any training.

  Though we watched wrestling all the time, it never came up as something for me to actually do. Uncle Charlie taught me a couple of real easy moves – snap mare, basic stuff – but otherwise it was all sitting around watching the TV.

  Then, when I was ten, this guy he knew came to town. His name was Stephan Jaroszewicz, and he’d known Uncle Charlie way back at St. Vincent’s. When he was old enough he became a Chicago cop. On the day he showed up at Uncle Charlie’s house he said he’d retired from the police.

  Stephan knew a ton about self-defense, which he said was because he got interested in it at St. Vincent’s and just kept looking at different
kinds. He didn’t have a name for his martial arts stuff. Years later, I figured out it was mostly pulled from Krav Maga, though while I was learning it I thought he made the whole thing up. Whatever it was, it was enough that the next time somebody tried to pick a fight with me, I broke the kid’s arm and made him eat dirt and got suspended for three days.

  Once Stephan showed up in Avon City, he stuck around. He ended up staying for five years. He set up a little security business downtown, though it seemed to me he didn’t have to do so, because every time I looked he had a big bankroll in his pocket.

  He went to the office every day and came back to Uncle Charlie’s every night. Like I said before, it was a big house. Four bedrooms, so even with Uncle Charlie in one, Stephan in another, and me in another, we still had room for a workout room.

  Stephan and Uncle Charlie made me train for an hour a day. I lost all my baby fat and built myself a pretty good body. I even had a few girls at school after me, and one of them caught up with me behind the water tank when I was sixteen and grabbed my cherry.

  ROUND 5

  I had to go to the gym for most of my weight training and cardio, but the workout room was fine for learning the standing dropkick. It had some of the smaller exercise equipment, balls and Indian clubs, and there were mats all over the floor, and there was one corner we’d fixed up with ropes and a ring post and turnbuckles that could stand in for one corner of a ring.

  Uncle Charlie liked to start early, so that first morning I set the alarm and got there by six-thirty. By quarter to seven, when he came in, I’d jumped enough rope to work up a pretty good sweat. He made me keep going until I started slowing down, and then he made me keep going some more.

  We always worked on some basics, so we spent almost an hour on holds and reversals. Then a quick session on selling. It didn’t take long, because that’s one of my strong points, and Charlie knows it. When I don’t sell a bump, it’s because I lose focus, not because I don’t know how to do it. And Charlie won’t help me with what he calls mental toughness. Says it’s something a man has to develop himself.

  After that, we took a five-minute break, and after that, we started on the standing dropkick.

  I was pretty good with a flying dropkick. It was the first tricky move I learned, and I practiced it as much as I needed in order to know I’d have it when I needed it. It wasn’t beautiful, like Antonio Rocca’s or Ricky Steamboat’s, but it got the job done. I didn’t get to use it at all when I was a heel, and had only sprung it once or twice as a face.

  A standing dropkick’s a different thing. You don’t have any momentum when you launch your legs at the other guy. You have to have good leg strength, because the name pretty much describes it. What you do is, while standing in one place, you throw your legs high enough in the air to kick the other guy, then shoot them out and actually kick him.

  That first session, I mostly ended up in a pile on the mat. I’ve got a lot of leg strength, always have, and can afford not to do much leg work in the gym. But it didn’t help. If I got my legs high enough, I couldn’t manage to get them out straight to where they could look like they might do some damage. If I did manage to shoot them out, they would have hit the other guy in the thigh, and it would look really stupid.

  After an hour or so of this, when Charlie could tell I was getting frustrated, we called it a day.

  ***

  Once I got the juices flowing learning the standing dropkick, it made me want to hit the gym more. There were almost two weeks until the next card in Forestville, and I put them to good use. Three hours a day at least, building up the cardio and especially the lifts. With this and three or so workouts a week with Charlie, I was feeling pretty righteous. I got closer with the dropkick, and knew it wouldn’t be too long before I could pull one off.

  I spent an hour one night trying to explain to Sue why I was hitting the gym so much more and working with Charlie so much more. Which was a stupid thing to do, because, with all my talk about feeling righteous, I didn’t really know why I was doing it. I mean, I had my ideas. There was Lou letting me show off a little with Tino, which he’d never done before. It was probably nothing, him keeping one of the troops happy, but if there was even the slightest chance I was going to get a push, I wanted to look my best.

  I’d gotten a little bit of a gut – eating whole pizzas didn’t help – and I was feeling a little sloppy. I’d never been the most cut guy on the block, but I’d never really let myself go either, and I was afraid I was headed in that direction.

  The other thing, which I wouldn’t have admitted to Sue and probably not to myself either, was that I was getting ready for Thumper. I knew I’d have to face him sooner or later, and I wanted to be at my best, even though it would probably be exactly like dozens of other matches. But I just felt I needed to be ready. Because of those eyes.

  ***

  A week from Saturday rolled around, and Sue and Charlie both came to Forestville with me. Sue didn’t go to the tapings a lot, but this time she really wanted to. And I was glad to have her there. Charlie too.

  They were in the second row while I lost the first time, in my good guy trunks, and the second time, in my heel trunks. Then Marcel the Mask didn’t show up and I got to wear his stupid outfit and go on as him. Marcel must have had a giant head, because the mask was way too big, and it kept shifting around so I couldn’t see. One time, I smacked my knee right into the ring post, which hurt worse than anything my opponent did to me.

  The good part of playing Marcel was he was a small-time star. Like maybe half a step above jobber-to-the-stars. Which meant, he usually won, at least at the TV tapings. For a second, I thought, hey, let’s pull off the mask, and people will see it’s me, and they’ll know I don’t lose every single match.

  This was a bad idea for two reasons. First, most of them probably wouldn’t put this unmasked guy together with the jobber they’d seen not an hour and a half before. Second, if I pulled anything like that, Lou would fire me on the spot.

  So, I kept the mask on and managed to see out of it enough to do a pretty good imitation of Marcel’s finisher, the Crepe Suzette. I was glad I’d been working on my strength training, because part of the Crepe was picking up the other guy, and while a lot of the time when you pick someone up they’re doing a lot of the work, this time I was dealing with Buster Buford, the fattest jobber in history.

  But I made it work and threw him down and hooked the leg and got the three-count. And there it was. I had won my first match. And no one knew it.

  Well, not no one. I knew it. Sue and Charlie knew it. And the guys in the locker room knew it. A couple of them gathered around, congratulating me on my first win. It felt pretty good, even though it wouldn’t go beyond that room.

  Then I looked across the room, and Thumper was there.

  He was staring at me with those alien eyes. They weren’t so creepy from across the locker room, but I still couldn’t look back at him for more than a few seconds.

  I don’t know why I did it, but I put my hand to my face and pretended to scratch my nose. With my middle finger. Which was straight out, while all the others were curled under. Take that, Thumper.

  And then, I turned away.

  I showered and got dressed and slipped into the crowd. No one recognized me in street clothes. We were eleven matches in and people had started leaving, and the spot next to Sue was empty. I sat down and she handed me what was left of a bag of peanuts.

  “I saw something weird,” she said.

  “What was that?”

  “That guy Marcel was on. You know, the one with the mask?”

  “I know him.”

  “Here’s the weird thing. His package looks just like your package.”

  Uncle Charlie looked at her, made a face, turned away.

  “Why were you looking at his package?” I said.

  She couldn’t keep it in any more. “Hon, you won! You won a match.”

  “And no one knows.”

  “Still. I
t’s a milestone.”

  I turned to Charlie. “You think it’s a milestone?”

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what I think. Matters what you think.”

  Some new jobber I had met in the locker room, Brad or Bret or Brent something, marched through the curtain and headed for the ring.

  “Next thing,” Sue said, “you win as yourself.”

  The curtain opened again. And out came Thumper. And that shut us up.

  They did the announcements and got down to business. Business as usual. It was like watching Farley all over again. Except for one thing. This time they didn’t need me to run into the ring and call for a doctor. This time they had the ref do it.

  Only this time it wasn’t a real doctor from the crowd. This time it was our promotions guy, who showed up with a stethoscope and did a quick exam and called for a stretcher. A fake doctor meant they’d been ready for this to happen.

  Which opened up a can of worms I ended up crawling into.

  They rolled poor Brad or whatever his name was onto the stretcher, and they carried him out, and Thumper did the boo-hoo I’m sorry thing again, and ran back to the ring. Ears, pop, all she wrote.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Sue and Charlie.

  I went through the curtain. There were two ways to turn. One led to the parking lot. I took the other. I went around the corner and saw an open door another thirty yards down. I ran over and looked out. It was really dark, with just one weak light up on a post out by the street. There was something I thought was a loading dock and there was a car there with the back door open. Its inside light must have been busted. A bunch of shadows moved around and I heard the car door slam.

  One of the shadows turned toward me and I stuck my head back inside. Then I ran down the hall and back to my seat. Sue gave me a look. I just shook my head.

  There was one more match. When it was over, and most of what was left of the crowd had filed out, I said to Sue and Charlie, “Go get some coffee or something.”