Living the Gimmick

by Ben Peller

  “Fuck you.” I gave a chuckling Aries the finger. My eyes snapped away to the open window. The foliage streaking by on either side of the highway made me think of Chicago. Home. The maple tree outside that final party. In the same way that maple’s leaves had waved goodbye, these leaves now appeared to be waving in greeting. The petals fluttered by in a blur as though they were the hands of well-wishers lining a drag strip. I tried to picture whatever connected the leaves to the plants out here traveling underground and linking up with the roots of the Chicago tree through a vast network of intertwined vegetation. I extended my arm in a closed fist salute. A warmth licked my body, for this arm indisputably possessed the thickness required of a professional wrestler. I kissed the rounded head of its right bicep. B.J. laughed from the backseat.

  “Tonight’s the night, boys,” I boomed. “Muscular Mike Maple makes his pro wrestling debut.”

  They hooted, slapping me on the back as I flexed my neck in the rearview mirror. Fucking immortal, having found a gimmick at last.

  We arrived two hours before show time and found the promoter pacing in the narrow backstage hallway while guzzling ferociously from a bottle of beer. He was a pale guy with hair peeking out of the top of his weathered Harley-Davidson T-shirt. Moderately sized arms and legs extended out of a massive upper body, making him look like a Popsicle with four sticks. He shook our hands with a limp grip (the standard pro wrestler greeting, indicating you didn’t work stiff) while introducing himself as Steven Winters. It turned out he was a pro wrestler himself who claimed to be Sonny Barger’s cousin and went by the name of Jack “Rude Boy” Daniels. I introduced myself as “Mike Maple.”

  The ring had already been set up, and a couple rows of folding chairs surrounded its perimeter. The bleachers were pulled down expectantly. Steven informed us there had been twenty advance sales of tickets but he had high hopes that the gate would exceed two hundred people.

  A half hour before the card was set to start, I changed into multicolored spandex and a Gold’s Gym tank top I had fortuitously brought along. It added another level to my muscle persona. I was posing in a mirror above the sinks when B.J. tracked me down. “Hey, Muscular,” he said, “let’s go over that power slam spot again.”

  “I should press slam you,” I decided.

  “Say what?”

  “You know.” I turned to face him. “Press you over my head.”

  “You’re nuts.” He laughed. “Hell, we haven’t even practiced that.”

  “Hey guys!” Aries bounded over and clapped each of us on a shoulder. He was clad in a long black robe glittering with sequins that his father had paid $700 for in honor of Aries’ first match. “I’m gonna be a champion tonight!” he announced. “One of the guys no-showed, and Steven says my pirate gimmick’ll work perfectly. So I’m gonna be one half of the team that wins the tag-team championship.”

  “Hell,” Steven crowed as he ambled over, a beer in hand. “That robe is probably worth more than I paid for the two tag-team title belts.” Aries looked down and gave a sharp shrug as Steven chuckled tipsily. “Hey, Muscular Mike, you’re gonna be the face in your match with B.J., right?” he asked.

  Since B.J.’s gimmick was that of a psychotic dentist called “Dr. Eddie Extraction,” I told Steven that it looked like I would definitely be the one shaking hands and kissing babies.

  “Then you’re going over,” Steven said. “I’m workin’ as a heel and winning the title tonight, so we need some face victories to round everything off.”

  Steven was functioning, as most independent promoters do, as both the promoter and the booker. In pro wrestling, the booker decides not only who’s going to wrestle who, but also determines the winners, the angles or story lines, feuds, and the general direction of the promotion. Given this, it’s not surprising to find that when a wrestler is serving as a promotion’s booker, he’s generally also serving as that promotion’s champion.

  “What’s your finishing maneuver?” Steven asked me.

  “Press slam,” I answered before B.J. could speak. I pantomimed the maneuver by plunging both my hands up into the air. My palms collided with the low ceiling.

  “You can do that?” Steven asked.

  “Hell yeah.” I grinned and hit a double biceps pose. “I’m Muscular Mike Maple.”

  “Damn.” Steven belched laughter. “You really live the gimmick, huh?”

  “Every second of the fucking day.”

  Steven went weaving off, still chuckling and drinking. Aries was studying his robe in the mirror with defensive eyes. “I may just toss this thing into the fuckin’ crowd tonight,” he grumbled.

  B.J. shook his head. “All right, Mr. Maple. You better not drop me,” he warned, “or I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ gluteus maximus from here back to L.A.”

  Twenty minutes later I was flexing my way down to the ring before a listless crowd of around seventy-five people. The half empty bleachers mocked me as I hoisted myself into the ring and immediately began posing in hopes of stirring the apathetic silence. Muscular Mike Maple was announced and met with scattered lackadaisical cheers. Then B.J. made his entrance dressed in a dentist’s smock smeared with red paint and a handheld drill. The crowd booed him thoroughly and he ate it up, responding with equal vigor in the form of threatening gestures and fiendish cackling.

  Then he was in the ring. “A pro wrestling match is like any other work of art,” Shane had often advised us. “Make the opening three spots and the closing three spots the best. That’s all anyone’ll remember anyway.”

  B.J. and I glared at each other for several motionless seconds. A shout of “Boring!” rang out from somewhere in the stands. The crucial opening window of the match and my career was slipping away. A drop of sweat crawled down my forehead and found its way into my left eye.

  I was melting into just another shadow shaped by an unstoppable sun.

  My eyes closed, and when they opened their vision was clear and Muscular Mike Maple was nailing Eddie Extraction with a devastating clothesline that sent the evil dentist down to the canvas. My first movements in a ring were swept up in a whirling compound of the opening bell’s clangs and the audience’s cheers.

  The rest of the match was sloppy, with our spots stiff and rushed as a result of sheer nervousness. In spite of the mistimed pacing, the crowd popped for several of our moves. After every big move such as a power slam or suplex, I ripped off a few poses. To alleviate my nervousness, I focused on individual faces in the crowd. Down in front was a pigtailed little girl whose pudgy face was dominated by a pair of wide distraught eyes. At the end of one row slouched a man, sitting by himself and clad in a trench coat and a top hat. Drops of sweat traveled the wrinkled map of skin clinging to his shrunken face. He had his legs spread and both were bouncing up and down with a restless rhythm. In the bleachers, three guys in high school letter jackets hooted with exaggerated sarcasm, trying too hard to show their three weary-eyed dates that they were here simply as a lark. One of the girls’ blond hair reminded me briefly of the girl I had gone to prom with, although I wouldn’t be able to actually remember Charlotte’s name until I got backstage.

  B.J. and I had only gotten through about half of our planned match when the referee, a bearded Samoan with a massive girth, tapped me on the shoulder and muttered, “Nine minutes by. Better take it home, guys.”

  “Say what?” I murmured back, slamming an elbow against the surface of B.J.’s neck. It seemed like we had been in the ring for only three minutes at the most.

  “Take it home,” the referee implored. “End the freakin’ match.”

  “All right, baby,” I said quietly to B.J. as I backed him into the ropes. “We’re takin’ it home. Press slam time.”

  “You’d better pull this off—” he hissed as I threw him across the ring. I had practiced the maneuver a few times in advanced class, but not with any real consideration of ever using it. However, that was before I became Muscular Mike Maple.

  B.J. bounced off the oppos
ite ropes and flew back at me. I jammed one hand on the fleshy part of his leg just above his kneecap while my other went to his chest. He gave a little leap, and in the next second I had him successfully pressed above my head. In that moment I glimpsed a reflection of the ring in the dark window of an office located on the far wall. The distance shrunk our image, but it was still unmistakably that of a pro wrestler in a ring pressing an opponent above his head. Then I stepped forward and released B.J., letting the vision slip from my sight as I turned to watch him plummet to the canvas. I bolted against the ropes and came down on his prone form with a splash. Then I rolled him over for the pin, and three seconds later had won my first professional match.

  The referee raised one of my arms and I raised the other. Like wings I had just used for the very first time.

  Back in the locker room, B.J. and I shared an exultant embrace. “We did good, huh?” he asked.

  “We did good,” I agreed.

  Steven came up and clapped both of us on the back. “Great stuff, you two,” he said, “but for future reference, remember the first three matches of a card are preliminaries. They shouldn’t be anything too fancy. No false finishes, brawling outside the ring, or any of that shit.”

  “Oops,” B.J. said. We had brawled outside the ring for a good ninety seconds.

  “It’s cool.” Steve shrugged. “But you should still know this kinda stuff. If you’re ever in the first three matches, don’t shoot the show’s load too early. Save the chairs and other shit for the main eventers.” He paused and grinned. “But I wouldn’t sweat it. You guys won’t be in the prelim spot for long.”

  Basking in this immediate praise, B.J. and I watched the other matches with pleasant interest. The other wrestlers were wide-shouldered blocks of flesh; rolls of fat ballooned over their spandex tights. Their gimmicks were fairly standard; most were simply playing themselves in variations of a rowdy biker character. Aries teamed with a guy who dressed up as a Navy Seal and billed himself as “Sergeant Rox.” Aries and Rox won the tag-team titles, according to plan. Immediately after triumphantly bursting through the curtain, Aries scanned backstage for the robe he had neglected to throw to the audience. After spotting it draped over a folding chair, he looked again at the title belt in his hands with a relieved smile.

  Twenty minutes after the card ended, Steven finally paid off the wrestlers. He was pretty blitzed by that time; he had been stumbling noticeably during his main event title win. “You guys work pretty good.” His beer-soaked breath wafted over us as he handed each of us a well-worn twenty dollar bill. “This was your first time out, huh?”

  B.J. and Aries just nodded and shrugged. “First but not the last,” I stated, giving a most muscular pose.

  Steve laughed and hiccuped. “Well, there was this manager who used to work in the South. He’s in the big leagues now. He said you’re still a mark until your hundredth match.”

  “Damn,” Aries remarked.

  “How many matches have you had?” I asked.

  Steven belched. “This was my eighty-fifth tonight,” he groaned. “Fifteen more to go.”

  The next week was spent lifting weights with a ferocity I hadn’t known since the first year I picked up a dumbbell. I squeezed out forced reps, driving my muscles to growth through exhaustion. Also, with religious adherence to the advice in pro body building magazines, I increased my level of food intake. Whenever my friends and I went out to Del Taco after class, I now inhaled twelve tacos instead of six.

  But all this added exertion and force-feeding did was give me achy joints and serious indigestion while at the same time increasing my weight by seven pounds, most of which settled around my mid-section. I was now 211 pounds and had reached a plateau of some kind. It was becoming more and more obvious to me that B.J. possessed a muscular denseness that I lacked. His muscles came in levels; mine were large but one-dimensional. Instead of feeling validated when I flexed, I was now becoming alarmed. Muscular Mike’s muscularity couldn’t touch that of wrestlers in the WWO or even a few local southern Californian wrestlers. Without muscles, Muscular Mike Maple couldn’t exist.

  And without a gimmick, I would be back to being Michael Harding.

  When I mentioned to B.J. that I needed to get a lot bigger very fast, he was pleased. “I was wondering when you were gonna come around,” he beamed. “You’re at the point where your body’s taken you as far as it’s gonna. There’s only one way you can get bigger from here on in, and it isn’t by eating tacos, my man.”

  “Roids?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Fuckin’ A,” he affirmed.

  B.J. proudly displayed pictures of himself just a year ago. He had been taking steroids on and off for the past year and in that time had gained twenty pounds. In spite of the bullshit declaration by the American Medical Association, he assured me roids worked. They were easy enough to obtain. “Just across the border in Tijuana, doc.” He smiled. “Go over, buy ’em, get drunk, and walk back through the border just like another college schmuck down there for the weekend. Only difference is we got roids stuffed in our crotches.”

  On the Saturday following Muscular Mike Maple’s fourth match, B.J. and I drove down, parked in the United States, and walked into another country through a revolving door constructed of metallic slats. With each complete rotation the top rung would swipe a metal lever that rose briefly before falling back into a collision of metal-on-metal. Each toll signified the passage of another person.

  Our first stop was an island of three buildings perched on a small corner between dusty roads. One store used the sidewalk in front to display leather jackets and vases in the shape of cartoon characters. The building nestled between this store and a glitzy jewelry shop was the farmacia B.J. dealt with. Our entrance caused the lone clerk behind the counter to look up with a start. His thin cheeks quickly stretched into a smile. “Anabolica!” he cried.

  “Anabolica!” B.J. responded with a thumbs-up. By the time we reached the counter, the clerk had dug a box out from underneath the counter and placed it on the glass. B.J. and I rifled through the various jars and tubes with the considerate motions of soldiers scrutinizing a collection of semi-automatic weapons. The names were all familiar: Dianabol, Anadrol, Testosterone Cypionate. My junior year project had tackled the question of whether or not the risks involved in taking steroids outweighed the benefits. The twelve-page report had been fueled by many hours spent in the public library, reading countless articles that detailed possible side effects such as premature balding, high blood pressure, aggression, heart disease, kidney malfunction, impotency, and possible death. My conclusion had been that athletes who took these potentially dangerous drugs were risking their lives, and it was up to them to make that decision.

  Now, two years later, Muscular Mike Maple is making that decision.

  We wound up buying so much that the clerk threw in a few extra bottles for free. He smiled and nodded while watching B.J. and I shove tiny blue bottles of D-bol and vials of testosterone into our pants. “You two . . . ,” he began, and then his eyes expanded as though they had just fallen upon the sight of an unexplainable natural wonder. “Be gigantic!” he proclaimed with the excited fervor of a Sunday morning preacher. Or, perhaps not so ironically, a professional wrestler.

  After tucking our bounty safely inside our pants and socks, we made our way to one of the many bars lining Avenida Revolucion. The drinking age in Tijuana was only eighteen, making it a popular destination for students from San Diego State and other nearby colleges. Kids my age flooded the streets in a quest to drink away this late Saturday afternoon. They threaded through a bevy of vendors hawking wares such as jewelry, cigars, and small hot dogs of suspicious nature.

  B.J. and I sat at a window table on the top floor of a club, well above the madness. Our completed mission set us apart from the frat pledges getting bombed on tequila shooters.

  “You know . . . ,” I commented as we finished our third round of Dos Equis, “steroids are bad for the liver. We proba
bly shouldn’t be drinking.” I said this resignedly, almost as an afterthought.

  “Just this once won’t hurt us.” B.J. waved my weak attempt at caution into the cool darkness, where it was seized and trampled by the howling frat guys at the bar. As B.J. launched into a description of the cycle of steroids he was planning, I let my eyes wander out to the lined street below. I wondered how many of the kids clad in “SDSU” T-shirts were freshmen. I tried to picture Marty and Bryan, both wearing “U of I” T-shirts, downing beers or shots at some University of Illinois watering hole. I hadn’t talked to either of them since leaving Chicago. I looked away from the churning bodies below and caught my reflection hovering in the window against a sky colored by the setting sun.

  Or is it rising?

  I squeezed the thought from my head by flexing my arm, Muscular Mike Maple’s arm, then turned and waved to the waiter. “Dos cervezas!” I called.

  B.J. whooped. “Everybody in the business takes ’em, doc,” he said, carelessly patting his crotch. “And everybody parties hard, too. And ain’t nobody dropped dead yet.”

  In my junior project I determined that one of the reasons there were no documented deaths linked to steroids had to do with the newness of the abuse. But there was no point in bringing that up now. Muscular Mike Maple hadn’t written that paper, and it was his survival that was at stake.

  And so it was Muscular Mike Maple who unzipped my pants and reached inside. After extracting one of the small bottles (each contained one hundred Dianabols), he shook out two dusty blue tablets and washed them down with beer.

  I took a breath and waited. There was no remorse. No elation. No strike of lightning. A wry disappointment snuck into my thoughts. The world should have ended. The bar should have become a sea of fire, with every one of us consumed by an angry sun.

  But the light outside the window continued to fall and the frat pledges at the bar were still howling with drunken delight. I was still alive and could already feel my muscles growing. Having survived an initial attack against its natural processes, my body throbbed with invincibility. I was going to be bigger than nature ever intended. I raised my beer bottle, snug and cool in my palm. All as reassuring as a beer commercial. What good was fate if you didn’t tempt it? “Die young,” I said. “Die huge.”