by Ed Kurtz
The man was asleep again. Heather lay beside him wide awake. She heard him snoring. He was a young guy. Some kind of student. He’d been a lousy lay. She got annoyed. “Wake up. Wake up.”
“What?” he mumbled.
“Get up. Time to go.”
“What the fuck you talking about? It’s, like, two in the morning.”
“I don’t care. Get out of my house.”
He looked at her to decide if she was joking. When he saw she wasn’t, he shook his head with snort. He got up and stomped about while he dressed. Heather didn’t look at him. His footsteps were loud going down the stairs. He slammed the door after himself.
Heather took a deep breath, closed her eyes and slept.
Doing The Job
by Hector Acosta
Chants of "culero" filled the small gym while Joan Jett’s "Bad Reputation" tumbled out of cheap speakers. Red cups and empty beer bottles littered the ring alongside yells of "pussy" from the Americans in the crowd. I lay on the sweat-stained mat and stared up at the bright ceiling lights. When the song finished, I rolled out of the ring and made my way to the back.
The small crowd continued to boo, throwing curses at me in both Spanish and English as I walked past them. Gotta love when we put on shows so close to the border. By now, I knew how to say "loser" and "fag" in both languages.
I probably should have played up to the crowd more, but fuck ‘em. I was tired, sore, and considering the empty seats out in the audience, doubting I would make more than fifty bucks. For that little money, people should have just been happy that I showed up and wrestled.
Passing through the dollar-store curtains, I grabbed a towel from a nearby chair and wiped the sweat off my face. My back cracked as I arched it. Christ, losing to a woman was proving to be harder than pretending to win against a man.
The locker room had a bunch of the boys changing into their gear or playing cards. The spics crowded over by the corner, their attention on a game of dominoes. A headache I been ignoring since the end of the match clawed its way from the back of my head and buried itself deep behind my eyes. The loud accents of the Mexicans became harder to take, their boisterous laughter pressing against my temples. I put my hand up against the cold, smooth locker door and took deep, steadying breaths. After a few minutes, I’d managed to trim the nails of the headache down to something I could live with.
“Oye, Stone,” I heard someone call out. “Shouldn’t you be changing in the women’s locker room?”
Ignoring the voice, I opened the locker and stared at the frilly pink panties lying on top of my gym bag. They were frayed at edges and had small hearts sewn into the fabric. The headache started to sharpen its nails into pointy ends again, my heart pushing against a sagging chest.
I wanted to turn around, find whoever did this, and jam the panties down their throat. Then, afterward, I would go talk to Jack and tell him that he either gave me a program with an actual wrestler, and not some girl that he was fucking, or Vic “Super Soldier” Stone was out of his two-bit promotion.
Instead, I tossed the panties to the back of the locker and took my bag out. Told myself that as far as ribs went, this one wasn’t too bad. Hell, I myself used to shit on the bags of guys I didn’t like.
Setting my bag down on the nearest bench, I slowly peeled out of my wrestling tights.
“You no say nothing ‘bout your gift, viejo. You no like it?” a tall (for his kind anyways) Mexican asked. He stood among the others playing dominoes, his meaty, tattooed arms folded across a broad, hairy chest.
Fucking Oscar, I should have known. Damn jumping bean had a hard-on for me ever since I got here a couple of months back, shortly after my last run with the big boys up north went kaput. He hadn’t been happy with me taking the top spot early on, and clearly took joy in witnessing the shit slide I was now on.
“I like it just fine,” I said. “Give your mother my thanks, will you?”
Yeah, a crack about his mother was as much of a cheap heat tactic as badmouthing a city’s sports team—but judging by the way Oscar’s face reddened at my remarks, it worked.
“Shit,” he said. Well actually, more like shiiiiiiieeet, “You wish you could get at my mami. But she don’t fuck pussies that lose to putas.” He turned to one of the Mexicans, “First they got him losing to that gay, and now a girl? Si ese era yo, I hang things up.” Back to me now. “Fucking has-been. Who they gonna gave you lose to next, el enanito?” Oscar pointed to the midget in the roster—El Tiny Terror, who jumped on the bench and flexed his chicken arms to the laughter of the crowd.
Fucking assholes, the whole lot of them. They laughed at me now, but in my heyday, when I was main-eventing Madison Square Garden on national television, they would have all lined up just to have a chance to job to me. None of them here would ever achieve what I did.
Especially not Oscar, who was nothing more than a 'roided-up wetback with the wrestling ability of a broomstick. His shit-eating grin made me want to beat him so badly he would have to wear a mask twenty-four/seven to hide his disfigured face, like in those stupid sixties luchadores movies.
Pushing myself off the bench, I took a couple of steps in his direction, only for my left leg to seize up. My tights, which I never fully took off, started to slip, and when I made a grab for them, I tripped and fell. The room laughed harder and louder as I crashed onto the cement floor.
“Miren,” Oscar said, “The old man is so used to losing that he’ll automatically lay down without even an opponent now.” More laughter.
I stayed on the floor, hating Oscar, hating the girl that I just lost to, and most of all, hating the body that’d betrayed me.
It must be payback, I decided, for all the years that I ignored its pleas and continued to get in the ring. Payback for all the times when instead of seeing a doctor after a match, I took a couple of aspirins and drank half a bottle of whiskey. It probably also never forgave me for all the times where I replaced technique and storytelling in a match with stupid audience-cheering shortcuts like chair-shots to the head and barbed-wire bats to the back.
“Hey Vic, you okay?”
Tommy crouched down next to me, still decked out in his ring attire and offering me an outstretched hand. He had on a bright-pink wig, heavy eye shadow, a thin layer of mascara, and red lipstick—all clumsily applied.
“I’m good,” I muttered and ignored his hand, slowly getting up from the floor and pulling my tights back up.
“Awww, que cute. You two should think about talking to Jack and becoming a tag team. The gay and the…” he stopped, probably trying to think of a demeaning enough name for me that he hadn’t used yet, “…the jobber,” Oscar ended limply, the term for a wrestler that main task was losing day in and day out.
Crap-ass thing was, the name stung…mostly because I knew it was true.
“Fuck ‘em, Vic. You want a ride?” Tommy asked.
I watched the laughing wrestlers, their bodies years from betraying them, and nodded.
“A bar first,” I said.
*****
“So they got you jobbing to girls now, huh?”
I looked up from my menu. We were in Chester’s, one of those chain restaurants with crap on the wall, shitty food, and waiters who smiled a little too broadly and called you “chief” and “hoss.” Not my pick, but the only place in town that was still open after the show.
“You still got some red on your lips,” I pointed to his face, shouting over the loud song blasting from the jukebox in the corner.
“Shit, this makeup is a pain to get off,” Tommy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
I glanced at him. Tommy reminded me of younger me; All-American looking, muscled but not freakishly so, and with a face that you could picture on the front of a cereal box. And while he was relatively new to the business, he had an instinct for the flow of a match that you couldn’t teach. I'd bet that it wouldn’t be long before the crowd saw what I did and made him one of the top stars.
&nbs
p; Probably already would have if it wasn’t for Jack’s decision to saddle him with such a stupid gimmick. Jack could have stuck Tommy on top of the card as a babyface and be rolling in dough, but instead, he relegated him to the midcard as Tommy the Queen, where he got to work with washed up wrestlers like me.
“Doesn’t matter who they put on top of me,” I said. “Long as I get paid, it can be a man, a woman, or like with you, something in between.”
That was a lie. Wasn’t going to tell Tommy, but when I found out that Jack had programmed me against the girl, I went straight into his office and told the fat cunt that I’d quit before losing to a fucking woman. The thing about wrestling is that even though it’s fake, that doesn’t mean that no one cares about wins and losses. Reputations are one of the few things that we can carry from company to company. Lose one too many matches, and the crowd will stop taking you seriously. If that happens, there go your chances of getting higher in a card, along with the bonuses that came with it. Bad enough I was just coming off a program with Tommy. Slotting me with a woman would plummet my stock so much that I’d be lucky to be able to open a supermarket, least of all a competent wrestling event.
So yeah, I wasn’t exactly willing to go out there with the bitch. But Jack made me a deal in that tiny hot box of an office. Do a program with her, make sure she looked good in the ring, and Jack would give me one last run with the title.
Three months later and I still had yet to see that title—and like Tommy pointed out, not only was I wrestling a woman, but consistently losing to her.
“Supposedly all part of Jack’s initiative to—and I quote—‘branch out and gain a bigger, more diverse audience,’” I said, mimicking our boss’s nasally tone of voice. “Says that if we can build up one of the dumb broads and make the audience believe that she can hang the male wrestlers, we’ll have a star on our hands. You know what’s the worst of it all?”
“What?”
“Chick I been wrestling’s flat as a board. I mean, if I’m expected to go out there every night and lose to pussy, it might be nice if I got to feel a handful every now and then, you know? But with this girl, there’s nothing to feel.”
Tommy shifted in his seat and glanced down at the menu, flipping through its plastic pages. Way the guy was acting, made me wonder if maybe his gimmick wasn’t much of a stretch. Always used to say the best characters in the ring were the ones that stuck close to their real-life personas.
“When Jack assigned this gimmick to me,” Tommy said, “he told me pretty much the same thing. That there was this giant marketing opportunity in introducing a wrestler with an alternate lifestyle.”
“Fucking dumbass.”
I had to give Tommy credit though, he tried to work the gimmick a hell of a lot more than anyone else probably would have. Preening as "It’s Raining Men" blared out of the speaker, standing on top the turnbuckle while blowing unappreciated kisses to the crowd, and generally doing every faggy bit you could think of.
Of course, all that did was automatically turn him into the most hated heel of the company. You could have put him out there with an audience of holocaust survivors, wrestling a Hitler lookalike, and there’d be a good chance the crowd would have been chanting the Führer’s name in a matter of minutes.
Seeing Tommy work so hard at his gimmick had prompted me once to tell Jack to dump the girl on him instead of me. But Jack wasn’t biting; said she needed to work with someone the crowd already liked and thought of as credible. Me basically.
“You two ready to order?” our waitress asked in a tone of voice that made me think she was either high or drunk. No one was that happy having to do their job.
When Tommy asked what she recommended, the waitress leaned down so that her breasts pressed against his shoulders while pointing to several different parts of the menu. He finally went a piece of broiled chicken, large side of steamed vegetables, and a glass of water. I decided on pasta, an order of mozzarella sticks, and beer. Fuck it, right? I wasn’t trying to impress anyone.
Watching the waitress go, my eyes followed the pendulum track of her shapely ass as she walked. I bet that got her more tips than her cheery disposition.
“She wants you.”
Tommy shrugged. “I got a girl.”
I shook my head. “Big mistake. You should enjoy your time out in the road. Only settle down once you’re out of the business.”
“Says the man with four marriages behind him.”
“How you know that?”
“I used to be a fan. I mean, I still am. But back when I was a kid, you were my favorite wrestler. Never missed a show when I knew Vic the Super Soldier would wrestle.”
“You and every other kid born in the eighties.”
“Even saw you do your thing live once. I didn’t want to mention all this back when we were working together, just cause I didn’t want to look like a mark, but it was a thrill going out to the ring with you.”
I grunted and reached for the beer that the waitress placed on the table. Like before, she focused all her attention on Tommy, gently setting his plates of food down and asking if everything looked good. She forgot to give me a fork and knife, and I had to wait a few minutes longer until she retrieved them for me.
“I’m telling you, big mistake with the girlfriend thing,” I said when the waitress left. Or boyfriend thing, I thought.
Another shrug.
“Just saying.”
We ate in silence for a couple of minutes, and then Tommy said, “Jack’s going to end both of our careers, Vic.”
I looked up from my fork rolling into the middle of the pasta mound. “Not the first bad gimmick a wrestler has had to get out from under. You’ll be fine.”
Me, on the other hand, it was either this or I went back to the sad little wrestling conventions hosted in hotel lobbies. Places where I’d get to sit at a table and act grateful when some redneck recognized me and plunked down the five bucks for one of my autographs. Fuck that.
Plus, ex-wife number two had finally managed to track me down and was threatening that if I didn’t pay her the child support I owed her, she would drag my ass to court. Sometimes I thought I should call her bluff. Have the judge give her all my old wrestling stuff. Ain’t like it was making me a dime on eBay. No one seemed to recognize the deals I was offering.
“I’m tired of going out every night, wondering if some drunk is going to get ballsy and jump the barrier to come at me. You know someone left a note in my car telling me that I was going to burn in hell for being gay?”
“Well, then quit,” I said, banging my hand on the table. “You don’t like this, kid? Quit. You got options. Go to another promotion, or just leave the business and get a regular nine-to-five. Leave the whining for those of us that don’t have those options.”
Tommy leaned forward. “You still got an option,” he said, rattling the name of another independent wrestling federation, one who also happened to be Jack’s main competitor in the area.
I laughed. “They don’t want me, trust me. There’s some bad blood between me and the owner.”
“Shit, Vic, do you make a habit of burning all your bridges?”
“Keeps me moving forward.”
Tommy shook his head. “They approached me the other day. Told me that I should be walking around with the championship belt instead of a garter belt.”
“Make you an offer?”
“Kinda.”
“Take it from me, unless they put it down on paper, don’t believe anything they say. And even then I would be wary.”
“What if I told you I could get them to hire you, too?”
“I’d say you’re full of shit.”
“It’s true. I can even give you the phone number of the guy I talked you. They’ll sign both of us to a guaranteed two-year contract.”
“Now I know you’re full of shit. No one offers that type of contract anymore.”
“There’s a catch,” Tommy said with some noticeable hesitation.
&
nbsp; “Of course.”
“They want the big belt.”
I blinked. “What?”
Looking uncomfortable, Tommy glanced from side to side, then leaned even closer and whispered, “They want me to steal the championship belt.”
*****
Back in my day, wrestlers used to carry their belts with them wherever they went. But as competition grew fiercer, and guys started switching promotions, paranoid promoters decided it would be foolish to allow wrestlers to hold on to their belts after a show. Bad enough for one of their champions to suddenly show up on another wrestling promotion, it would look even worse if he did so with the old company’s belt around his waist.
So I could understand why the promotion Tommy talked about wanted him to bring Jack’s belt with him. In some ways, he wouldn’t even really be stealing the thing, as at one point, there had just been one federation that splintered into the two competing ones of this region. Both wrestling companies staked a claim on the championship belt, but until now, Jack had managed to keep it by never letting it out of his sight.
Even with this knowledge, I wasn’t about to get involved in Tommy’s plan. That is, until he told me who was supposed to be getting the belt next.
“You sure they’re giving it to that bitch?”
Tommy nodded, hands tight on the steering wheel. “She told me so herself. Said that Jack thinks the crowd is just on the brink of accepting her, and that winning the belt will be the key in getting her over.”
“Fucking dumbass.”
It’d been a week since our dinner. After Tommy dropped the news that the goddamn girl I was fucking laying down for was winning the championship belt—the belt Jack promised me—I’d gone on a bender that I was still recovering from. Every time I opened my mouth I could taste the cheap whiskey and the cigarette smoke from the beat-up old ring-rat I'd taken to bed. Ended up missing a show in the process, but when I called Jack up, he didn’t seem to mind. Told me that I’d be happy to know that I wouldn’t be wrestling the girl any longer. Said he had different plans for both of us.
