by Paul O'Brien
He stayed in Japan because every penny he made was saved for Ginny. The only treat he allowed himself was a trip at the end of every tour to a small, non-descript steakhouse in Gotanda.
Even then, he left the number of the restaurant at his hotel, just in case something came from home about Ginny.
Ricky knew that he couldn’t do all that much, anymore, with his body as broken-down as it was, so he had turned to other means to attract an audience, and keep himself employed and on the booking sheet.
If he couldn’t entice them with speed or skill, there was a growing market for blood in Japan; they loved their technical classics and bloody brawls equally.
Technical exhibitions were many years removed from Ricky’s capabilities, so he leaned on the bloody brawls to keep the crowds interested in him.
Ricky’s matches weren’t about headlocks, body slams, or suplexes, but about barbed wire, blood, and sharp objects. His old body couldn’t go sixty minutes, anymore, but it could bleed with the best of them, and that’s what it did to pay the bills: bleed.
New York.
1984.
Three days after Lenny got out.
Ginny spent however long it takes for hot water to go cold looking at his plastic razor. He had no idea what it was for, so he kept looking at it until it came to him. He knew it was close to six p.m., and six p.m. was ice cream time.
There was shaving cream on his face for a reason, but he couldn’t piece it together, so he used the now-cold water to wash it off, and he threw the razor in the bin.
Somewhere in the middle of the night, he’d remember what it was for, and he would hide it, again. They didn’t like him having razors in his room.
He laid his shirt on his bed, and his shoes on the floor. His neck and ears still had a little shaving cream on them, but he didn’t know. He decided to go with a tie.
He dragged his favorite soft chair into the middle of the room, and had the TV ready to go on his channel. Sometimes he’d forget to turn on the TV, and sometimes he’d forget to get fully dressed, but he never forgot that six p.m. was ice cream time.
He just didn’t know that it was coming from Ricky.
Shirt on, tie on, pants on—his shoes were forgotten, this time. Ginny waited, facing the door. He watched the seconds tick by on the clock. It wasn’t a minute past, or a minute before; the ice cream always came at six.
The second hand made its way around, and excitement made Ginny want to pee, but he dared not move. The mixture was the same every Wednesday, but it still seemed like Christmas to him. It reminded Ginny of being a boy, or something, and it made him happy. It made the stressful day of remembering and forgetting a little less terrible.
Ricky had no idea how long Ginny would get this much of a kick from it, but, for now, it was heartwarming to see just how much joy it brought him.
Tick, tick. Tap, tap. It was six o’clock, and there was a tap on the window. Ginny was facing the wrong way, due to months of getting his delivery through his door. The home had been giving Ricky shit about it, so he’d had the delivery come to Ginny’s window.
Tap, tap. Ginny tried to identify where the sound was coming from, and then it hit him.
“The window,” he said to himself.
Ginny put his two fingers underneath the slim frame, and pulled up. There it was: Pagladoni’s twelve scoops, four bananas, three candy toppings, whipped cream, and a long spoon.
He could hardly control himself as he took it into his room. He never looked around to see who had left it, and he never bothered closing his window. It was ice cream time, and nothing else mattered.
Japan.
Ricky usually rode the bullet train. He did so at his own risk, as Mr. Asai, the Japanese owner, told him. Ricky was a heel bad guy in Japan, and the Japanese took their wrestling very seriously.
For longer trips, the promotion put on a bus for the heels, and a bus for the baby-faces to travel on. Ricky preferred to keep to himself. He was usually one of the only gaijins onboard, so he always felt a little like an outsider.
He knew that it was his own fault for not learning the language, but when Ricky arrived in Japan, he had never imagined that he’d still be there ten years later.
Mr. Asai and his promotion knew that Ricky might be a little isolated, so, on trips like this, they insisted that Ricky took their English-speaking referee, Masa Kido, as his travel partner.
Masa was a veteran who had been sent to look after the foreigners, and to make sure that they made their bookings on time. At this stage, he was also one of Ricky’s most trusted friends. Both the old wrestler and the English-speaking referee had spent hundreds of hours around each other. Ricky had met Masa’s family, and slept in his house when they were passing through.
Ricky was too long around to need Masa’s personal touch, but he saw it as a sign of respect that Masa had showed up before Ricky’s last match.
He wondered what was in store for him, and just how much blood he was going to have to spill.
Ricky turned nothing down, no matter how violent or dangerous the match. He knew that Mr. Asai was running out of ways to hide his broken-down body, so he appreciated every single booking he got.
The hall was full with a good main event on top. Ricky walked through the curtain, and his presence garnered an audible ‘ahh’ from the crowd. He was a New Yorker, but his gimmick in Japan was that of a cowboy. He made his way to the ring with black ropes and white turnbuckles, as the crowd patted him on the back, and showered him in paper confetti. Ricky tried to heel it up by threatening to punch the fans, and blustering his way through them.
They still applauded him; they liked Ricky, and they knew that he was a one hundred percent kind of wrestler. They wanted blood and effort, and they wanted the right man to win. Ricky had mastered all three of those categories in Japan.
The building, itself, was quite industrial looking, with the different levels separated by exposed concrete. The ring sat on a perfectly shiny wooden floor, and the audience around the ring was cordoned off to give the wrestlers a pathway around it to work.
Inside the ropes stood Masa, the ref, in his lime green trousers, and his lemon yellow shirt. Beside him stood some pretty local girls, waiting to hand their bouquet of flowers over to the combatants. Of course, Ricky, in character, wouldn’t take his, and this made the crowd finally boo him.
Ricky’s opponent, Genji Shin, made his entrance, and the crowd became noticeably more excited. Genji was once the face of the company, but a betting scandal had rocked him out of the top spot many years ago. He was still a good worker, but was the sleaziest man you could ever meet. He was always on the end of his nerves, with nails bitten down to nubs, and hair greased back on his head. He took delight in ripping the fans off at the bar, his merchandise stand, or wherever he could. He was also not shy about taking advantage of the female fans in every town he worked in.
He was a classic example of a holier-than-thou persona in public, but a scumbag in private.
Ricky was a man past his prime who needed money, and Genji was the same. Both men, however, needed money for diametrically different purposes. In wrestling, that didn’t matter.
The ring announcer began to introduce both Ricky and Genji Shin, but Genji smashed Ricky in the back of the head before his name could be read out.
Ricky could tell by the snugness of Genji’s punch that there was going to be very little acting involved in their match. Genji was supposed to be the baby-face good guy in the match, so his attack from behind made no sense to Ricky.
Genji stomped down on Ricky’s head, and all he could hear was the piercing high-pitched squeal of an eardrum blowing. Ricky quickly got out of there, and took a knee while he tried to figure out what was going on.
“Are we working, here?” Ricky asked Masa.
“Be careful,” Masa said.
Ricky knew that his opponent was going to use Ricky’s last match in the territory to make himself look like a killer.
He rose
as fast as he could, but the blow to the ear made it harder for him to stand straight. Genji rushed him backwards into the turnbuckle, and began to “potato” the shit out of Ricky with punches. Every punch, usually measured and careful, bounced directly off of Ricky’s skull.
He put up his hands, fish-hooked his over-zealous opponent, and spun him into the corner. Ricky gave his receipt in strong right hands: one, two, three hard rights, just above Genji’s eyebrow. Ricky could see the scar tissue there, and he went to work on it.
Genji raked Ricky’s eyes, and now Ricky had a hard time both hearing and seeing what was coming for him. After a stiff elbow to the jaw, Ricky was down in the corner.
Even though he was getting hit, he still didn’t want to retaliate too hard. Sometimes wrestlers got over excited and sloppy, and it was unprofessional for their opponents to fight back. Ricky didn’t want to leave a territory with a bad name—not unless he had to.
Genji slid into the corner with Ricky. He wormed his way to the side, and Ricky presumed that he was back to working, again. That was, until he felt the sting of a blade above his eye, and then the resulting warmth of his own fresh blood running down his face and neck.
Fuck that.
Ricky struggled free, and stood away from Genji. It was totally disrespectful to “get color,” or blade a veteran, and it was a killable offence to draw blood from them if they didn’t know it was coming.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Ricky shouted to his smiling opponent, as he ran his fingers across the huge gash on his face.
“That’s bad,” Masa said, as he flew by.
“You fucking think?” Ricky replied.
Ricky advanced to Genji, and stiffed him with a forearm across the face. He then grabbed him by the throat, and fired him as hard as could between the ropes, and to the floor.
Ricky slid out, and followed. He wiped his blood from his eyes, and grabbed a chair. Genji could see Ricky approaching quickly with his new weapon, so he fed him his back: he bent over, and made his back as long and straight as possible for Ricky to aim for.
Ricky wasn’t having any of Genji’s sudden wish to work together, though, so Ricky swung as hard as he could toward Genji’s head. It bounced off the back of his skull, and blood immediately squirted out, and hit a few in the front row. Genji went down hard.
Ricky kicked his opponent’s head, and stomped on his face, as he lay almost unconscious on the ground.
Masa slipped in between the two men, and tried to push Ricky off. “Enough.”
Ricky spat on Genji as he lay on the floor with a pool of blood growing beside his head.
The audience booed and heckled Ricky. He was in no mood for working, though. He was pissed off, and there was no room for acting any other way.
As he stood there and looked around, Ricky couldn’t come up with a solid reason to stay, anymore. He was tired and beat up, and he missed Ginny. With New York showing seeds of growth back home, Ricky didn’t feel the choking pressure to remain Japan.
“I’m going home,” Ricky said to the referee.
Masa wasn’t sure what Ricky meant, because that was also the term used to finish a wrestling match. It was when he saw Ricky turn and head for the dressing room that he knew what the American meant.
Ricky slipped off his boots in the dressing room. He watched as a young boy took the boots of another Japanese veteran. Sometimes these young boys were, indeed, just that, but more universally, they were rookies looking to get into the business. They slept on floors, washed the backs of more established wrestlers, and changed in the hallways.
Ricky once saw a forty-year-old Sumo wrestler who wanted into the business wash the feet of the owner. It made Ricky uncomfortable to see, but to everyone else in the locker room, it was a sign of respect.
He smiled to himself as he thought about implementing that into American wrestling when he got back home to New York.
Jimmy was on a mission to impress his old man. He was known around the neighborhood, and he wanted Lenny to know that. He saluted, greeted, and nodded coolly to people as they walked and drove by.
“I’m well-known around here,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good,” Lenny said.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Jimmy continued to walk.
“So, where are we going?” Lenny asked.
“Just another block.”
Jimmy crossed the road between traffic. Waiting for cars to stop was for little babies, and Jimmy Long was no baby.
Lenny could finally see where his boy was bringing him. “I... eh... we should go somewhere else.”
“What, you don’t like pie?” Jimmy asked, with a look of utter confusion on his face. “Who doesn’t like pie?”
Lenny had no money; Jimmy could read him.
“It’s my treat,” the boy said, as he continued walking.
Lenny followed.
Lenny noticed that the guy behind the counter in Pizza Pizza didn’t smile at Jimmy, even though Jimmy was polite, and smiled back.
“Thank you,” Jimmy said, when his two piping hot orders came his way.
Not only did the guy behind the counter not smile, but Lenny was pretty sure he was also giving Jimmy the evil eye.
“Here you go, Pop,” Jimmy said, as he slid the cheese supreme over to Lenny.
Jimmy didn’t seem to notice, or care, about the guy who served him, so Lenny left it alone.
“Thank you,” Lenny said.
Even though it felt all around weird to meet his boy for the first time, and not have the money to treat him, Lenny couldn’t help but feel a joy rising up from his stomach.
“You shouldn’t eat it all at once: it’ll burn your mouth,” Jimmy said.
Lenny wasn’t sure if Jimmy was advising Lenny, or if he was reminding himself that it would burn him.
“Can we keep this to ourselves?” Lenny asked.
“Yes,” Jimmy replied, very matter-of-factly. “I won’t say anything to Mom.”
Lenny got the impression that it was all he needed to say, but he felt the need to explain, nonetheless.
“It’s just that I haven’t seen your mother in—”
“Twelve years,” Jimmy looked up from his slice for the first time. His eyes were identical to his mother’s.
“Yes, twelve years. But... I know I don’t look...” Lenny touched his own face to see if his various swellings and scars had magically disappeared. They hadn’t.
“What I’m trying to say,” Lenny continued, “Is that I’m not usually like this, and when I meet your mother, I want her to know that things are different.”
Jimmy looked at his father, but his face gave nothing away. “How... how is she?” Lenny asked.
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah.”
“How good?”
“What?”
“Is she happy?”
“Are you asking if she misses you?”
“Yes.”
“She cries sometimes. I don’t know whether that’s because she misses you or not.”
“When does she cry? I mean, is it every day, once a week...”
“It’s less now.”
“Less?”
Jimmy nodded.
“Good,” Lenny said.
“How’s your pie?” Jimmy wondered.
“It’s weird,” Lenny said.
Jimmy laughed a little. “Weird?”
“It’s been a long time since I had the real stuff. It doesn’t taste real no more.”
Jimmy leaned in, like he was about to discuss serious business. “How would you break into this joint?” Jimmy tried to make himself sound street.
“What?”
Jimmy kept eating, and his eyes stayed on the table. He imagined that he and Lenny were being followed, or something.
“Just say that we’re casing the joint. How would you get in?”
“Why would you ask
that?”
Jimmy shut down, and his face was painted in disappointment. “Nothing. It’s okay.”
Lenny wanted to answer. He wanted Jimmy to feel like he thought he was cool, even if it did mean talking, in theory, about breaking the law.
“It can’t be done,” Lenny said. “There are windows all along the front of the building, and foot traffic outside. I’d say it would be impossible. Why?”
“I like to scout places, just for fun. It helps me think.”
“Scout places?”
“For when I grow up.”
Lenny didn’t know the boy across from him enough, yet, to know if he was joking; it sure didn’t look like it.
Jimmy took another gigantic bite. “Can I tell you something?” he said with a full mouth.
“What?” Lenny asked, as he followed suit.
Jimmy took a couple of chews, and wiped his mouth. “I have no money.”
Lenny nearly choked. “What?”
“I lied,” Jimmy said.
“What? Why did you lie?”
“I don’t know why I do it. But I do.”
Jimmy calmly picked up his slice to have another bite; Lenny slapped it out of his hand.
“You can’t eat it if we can’t pay for it,” Lenny said.
“Wrap yours up; we’ll run.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I have to run,” Jimmy said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because I can’t get in any more trouble with the cops, or they said I’d end up in a home.”
Each line was making Lenny more exasperated. “What?”
“Go,” Jimmy said, as he nodded his head toward the door.
Jimmy saw that the guy behind the counter was looking down. Lenny didn’t have much of a choice: Jimmy wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get in trouble with the law.
Lenny slowly moved to the edge of his seat, and bolted out the door, like his son.
