Living the Gimmick

by Ben Peller

  Now Richie was telling me that to be like Sonny Logan I would have to snort at least a gram of coke a day.

  “That’s what he was doin’ while I worked there.” Richie nodded. “He’d always say ‘I’m a big man. And big men need big lines.’ ” Richie unleashed a harsh laugh as I tried to smile. After another drink I was able to see more humor in the situation. A couple more and it was pretty fucking hilarious. American Dream, shit. Who wouldn’t want to party every day and make a lot of money and be worshiped?

  By the time Diane and Stevie arrived, I was laughing my ass off. They brought along some friends, who squealed when they recognized Richie and Allah from their WWO days. A girl with plastic bracelets covering her forearms couldn’t get over the fact that the two wrestlers were partying together. “Aren’t you guys supposed to hate each other or something?” she asked.

  Another woman, her black hair streaked with blond highlights, elbowed bracelet-girl in the side. “Duh, Cheryl. They’re acting. It’s fake,” she said. I waited for either Richie or Allah to shoot back a response that calling pro wrestling fake was selling it short. Instead they just laughed.

  “Actually,” I heard myself slur, “they really do hate each other. They’re just trying to patch up their differences.” This inspired further laughter. I smiled and drank. I hadn’t mean for it to be that funny.

  Two hours later, the party was veering out of control. Richie had disappeared with the one called Cheryl (he would later tell me with a wry grin that the reason she draped her forearms in bracelets was because of a hirsuteness that she claimed ran in her family). Allah and Hal were having a makeshift match, throwing punches at each other in the midst of women downing beers and shouting out choruses to Pat Benatar songs. Jimmy was making out with a woman in the corner. Taz was peppering the wall with head-butts, forging a large crack in the plaster to the delight of three squealing women who surrounded him.

  I ended up in the next bedroom with Diane and Stevie. Both women were amazingly patient, but my thoughts were lost in a swirling montage of Sonny Logan snorting coke, Allah reciting Shakespeare, and Richie taking pictures of it all so that he can auction them off to the highest bidder. Rather than feeling privileged to be in bed with two women, I found myself gasping for breath. After twenty fruitless minutes, they finally accused me of not finding them sexy. I assured them that wasn’t the case. “Just too much to drink,” I maintained as they left with forlorn looks. Then I was visited by an image of Shawna, and soon found myself with an erection. So I masturbated, finally gaining a release and a temporary relief from the hopelessness that Richie and Allah’s report inspired.

  But afterward I laid in bed, remembering Stevie and Diane’s fallen faces and feeling very much like Steve Stallyon.

  The first time I heard the words kay fabe I thought it was Spanish for shut up. But it turned out to be the way wrestlers alert each other that there are outsiders present. When kay fabe is in effect, heels and faces aren’t supposed to mingle. But this rule is enforced with varying degrees. As I had seen with Richie and Allah in the hotel room, where women were concerned kay fabe was less important than getting laid.

  The night after the party, we were changing for a show in the back supply area of the local community center. It consisted of a few rusty garden tools hanging from the wall and several bags of manure stacked in a wheelbarrow. Suddenly Richie’s voice barked from around the corner: “Kay fabe!”

  Taz, who had been going over a spot with Hal, dropped Hal’s arm and walked off. Around the corner came Richie alongside a stubby-legged police officer. The flesh on the officer’s face was glazed like the skin of a turkey hanging in a market, and a viscid liquid, which looked like some kind of soup, clung to the hairs of his moustache. Richie announced that this gentleman would be providing security for the show.

  Once the show started, it became apparent that we might need some security before the night was over. The audience consisted of every farmer, mechanic, and blue-collar worker within a twenty-mile radius. It was Saturday night in the middle of nowhere and we were the circus that had just rolled into town. They were determined to get their money’s worth and were loudly insistent of this fact from the opening match. Our security officer sat ringside and watched with bemusement as the audience made up of his neighbors (and probably some second or third cousins), assaulted the ring with cups, half-eaten hot dogs, and crumpled up programs.

  One bearded man, whose well-stained T-shirt sagged over his pear-shaped body, was especially active. He called Shawna and Summer lesbo dykes and threatened to “climb in there and give ya a fuck that’ll make ya blind.” In reply, Shawna shouted from the ring that it would be no use to go blind after she fucked him. This shut him up for about thirty seconds while he groped unsuccessfully for a retort.

  When we came out for our tag-team match, he roundly proclaimed us a bunch of pretty boy queers. He then screamed that he would fuck us up the ass like the pansies we were. Other people in the audience hooted enthusiastically, urging the lunatic to jump in the ring and back up his words. The security officer was busy taking the whole spectacle in with a look that matched the curiosity of the very people he was supposed to be controlling. “Jesus, Sammy,” I whispered to one of the guys on the other team as I picked him up for a body slam, “let’s get the hell outta here.”

  I power-slammed him and pinned him. The ring was immediately besieged by flying debris. A beer can narrowly missed my head as we charged down the aisle back to the dressing room. Pear-man followed us all the way screaming: “Goddamn sissies! Buncha fake bullshit! Bet I could kick all your faggot asses!”

  The possible causes of this man’s vehemence were manifold, Jimmy informed me once we reached the safe haven of backstage. He ticked them off . . . Terrible home life, job he hated, latent homosexuality . . . while Pear-man continued to bellow at us from just outside the curtain. The anger in his voice made his words into weapons that could slice the curtain’s flimsy material that, I realized with evolving trepidation, was all that separated us from his wrath and the crowd’s lust for violence. Until this moment, the ideas of the wide red line had always been an amusing concept, part of one of Shane Stratford’s many lectures. Now it seemed all too real and far too narrow.

  Mark came up to us. “Tell me that crowd isn’t as bad as it sounds,” he said wearily.

  “They’re worse,” I said, “especially the guy who looks like a pear.”

  “We’re talking serious repressed aggression,” Jimmy added.

  “Fuck,” Mark scowled.

  Richie and Allah had wrestled in front of hostile crowds before. But the days of dealing with violent fans were behind them. They had families now, Allah pointed out before the match. They were getting too old for this frightful nonsense.

  “Speak for yourself, baldy,” Richie chided him.

  When the two were first announced, the crowd gave them grudging respect as former WWO stars. Mark, wearing a turban, went out as Allah’s “interpreter from the Middle East.” The crowd spat at Mark, with Pear-man leading the crowd in a chant of “Dune Coon.” Ninety seconds into the match, Pear-man was accusing Richie and Allah of being “washed-up old queens” and others were hurling objects at the ring. Most of the crowd was drunk by this time, and their projectiles had grown more lethal. When a chair flew over Mark’s crouched head into the ring, Richie immediately small-packaged Allah for the pin and rolled out of the ring.

  From where Shawna, Jimmy, and the rest of us were all watching behind the curtain, the crowd seemed to be surging toward the backstage area, led by Pear-man, whose voice was now growing hoarse: “Fuckin’ pussies! I’ll kick your asses! I’ll break your heads! Hey, you little weasel, bet you’d love that, wouldn’t ya? You want me to beat your little ass, don’tcha?”

  We all watched, horrified, as Mark broke away from Allah and Richie (who by now were jogging back together), and turned to face the man. “I couldn’t resist,” Mark explained later. “I didn’t think he’d really do any
thing.”

  Mark’s motionlessness caused Pear-man to halt abruptly. Pear-man studied Mark for a quick second with eyes as removed as an actor scanning an imaginary page for his next line. Then Pear-man blinked and screamed: “I’m gonna tear you apart, you Middle East faggot!”

  “Oh brother,” Shawna whispered in my ear, and this combined with the general excitement of the situation made my neck catch fire.

  Pear-man lunged, grabbing Mark by the shirt. He smacked Mark’s face and the turban hit the floor, revealing Mark’s patchy blond hair. By that time, Richie and Allah were by Mark’s side. They grabbed Pear-man, with Richie seizing his arms in a full nelson while Allah hoisted his legs. He was howling and trying futilely to kick his way out as Richie and Allah carried him back toward the curtain. The crowd watched in inebriated awe. We stepped back as Richie and Allah barreled through the curtain, deposited Pear-man on the floor and started stomping on him. A bewildered buzz exploded from just outside the curtain. A thousand drunken voices seemed to be debating if this too were all part of the act.

  Then Shawna unleashed a wide kick into Pearman’s groin, and his howl left little doubt that we were up to no good. “Stay back, just stay back, I’ll find out what’s going on!” came the voice of our security officer. I peeked out the curtain. He was marching sternly up the aisle.

  I closed the curtain and hissed, “That cop’s coming! We better get the hell outta here!”

  Everyone scattered, leaving Pear-man huddled and moaning in a pool of vomit which had escaped his bloated body. I quickly grabbed my boots, my bag, and my white fringe leather jacket that I wore to the ring. The cop stumbled through the curtains and shouted, “What the hell—”

  Then he saw Pear-man moaning on the floor. “You’re all under arrest!” he shouted.

  “Fuck you!” Mark snapped before turning and running for the back exit. “I know your names!” the cop was screaming as we all scrambled after Mark. “I know your names!”

  The crowd had begun to filter in. After looking around confusedly, they finally saw us tearing down the hallway and linked all of us with the sight of their leader lying on the floor wallowing in a pool of his own vomit.

  Some of them started shouting: “Come back and fight like men, you assholes!”

  “Eat me!” Shawna shouted back over her shoulder. We were the last two to reach the door, which I held open for her. “Why thank you, kind sir,” her words escaped in a burst of breathless laughter. I took a last glance at several beefy guys in T-shirts storming down the hall before I whisked out and slammed the door.

  Hal already had the van started and was gunning the motor while in neutral. His spinning tires bit into the ground and sent a storm of dust and pebbles into the air. The lack of moonlight made it difficult for our eyes to penetrate the mounting cloud. “We’re outta here!” Hal’s voice came through the haze. “Meet us at the Motel 6 on Route 25. Just over the New Mexico border!” Then he popped the clutch and the van shot out of the lot, creating a momentary opening that quickly became clotted with swarming dust. Shawna and I squinted our way through the filthy vapor and found her car. There came the slam of the back door of the community center. “Oh shit!” I spat out the dust that had flown into my mouth. Shawna got into the car and unlocked the door. Through the cloudy shield, I was able to make out three human shapes. One had something clutched in his hand. It could’ve been a gun, it could’ve been a flashlight. I didn’t want to find out. I slipped into the car. “Gun this motherfucker, Shawna!” I shouted.

  “I love this business, I swear to God!” she exclaimed. She started the car up and tore out of the parking lot. Once we reached the interstate, she ran the car up to ninety, hit the cruise control, and flashed a relieved smile. “Too bad I can’t stand most of the fans,” she said.

  “Do you think a lot of them are that dangerous?” I asked. She laughed.

  “There was supposedly some survey conducted at various wrestling cards around the country,” she said. “Out of all the fans, two percent of them truly believe that pro wrestling is on the up and up.” She clutched the wheel a little tighter. “That two percent keeps me up at night.”

  “What about the other ninety-eight percent?”

  “They’re like anyone, I guess,” she said reluctantly. “Looking for an escape from the grind of life. Pro wrestling gives it to ’em. It’s a fucking male soap opera, is what it really is.”

  To hear my dream laid out in such bare terms took me aback. I turned to my window, vaguely seeking some external source of reassurance like the kind I had gotten on the drive down to my first match in San Diego. But my vision was stopped by the darkness speeding past the window.

  “You could disappear out here and no one would ever know.” Shawna’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “Be abducted by aliens,” she continued, “anything.”

  “Should I be worried right about now, Shawna?” I joked.

  “If you could just drive down a road like this forever, would you?” she asked wistfully, intent upon the transparent barrier of the windshield.

  “I thought I was the one that was supposed to ask strange questions.”

  “That’s not a strange question.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Answer it.”

  “I just did,” I replied. “I don’t know. We’d have to stop. To eat, to workout . . .”

  “To wrestle.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed with a shrug, “that too.”

  She abruptly whipped the steering wheel to the right, throwing me against her as we lurched onto the sand. After about twenty yards into the desert, she stopped and extinguished the lights and motor. The sole illumination now came from stars poking through the blanket of perfect blackness above. Shawna got out of the car. “What’s up?” I called nervously.

  “Come out here!” she shouted. “Look at them!”

  I followed her, staring up at the sky. My focus became lost in the boundless sea of tiny orbs blinking far above me. I pictured myself on a concert stage, staring out at an infinite throng of fans holding up flames. “Just think of how many more galaxies there are like this one.” Shawna’s voice found me, but in the darkness her form was featureless. I thought of the people I drew in sketches and felt an urge to touch her. “They go on and on,” her shadowy outline spoke again, “forever.”

  “I once heard that some of the stars we see could already be dead,” I ventured, “but are still visible to us because the speed of light can take years and years to reach earth.” I didn’t continue with what I had always wondered about—that when I died, would distance provide me with an extended life to aliens observing from other worlds? Who would they be watching? I became aware of my heart pounding, an engine powering a starless sky. I fell back against the car for support, at least the steel felt real enough.

  Once we began to drive again, the feeling of motion possessed my body as I flirted with sleep.

  “Is it what you thought it would be, Michael?” A voice came from somewhere ahead of me. I struggled for an answer. Two months ago, I had been changing before a show when the promoter came back and informed us that he was canceling the thing because only ten people had shown up. I had been overcome with a strange relief, followed by nagging guilt. I was supposed to love pro wrestling. It was my dream, so why the hell had I been so relieved about not having to actually go out and do it on that particular day?

  Muscular Mike had been able to swiftly chop that trepidation down to a manageable size by blaming a simple case of nerves, an “off” afternoon, or a number of other reasons both incidental and harmless. But in the twilight between conscious and unconscious reasoning, I wasn’t so sure. Quickly, I struggled for another answer. And I found it.

  “Gettin’ paid to party,” I mumbled sleepily to the darkness my closed eyes blessed me with.

  “Whatever you say, Mick,” a voice responded. The motion accelerated and I became lost in the dream again. The masked man was pinned. This time I managed to rip off the mask. />
  I jolted awake. Shawna looked over at me. “We’re here.” She smiled. I yawned and looked out the window. Hal’s van was parked beneath a Motel 6 sign winking steadily at the surrounding night.

  Mark was already gone, but Hal had gotten the night’s pay for me and Shawna. The ring, apparently, had been one that Mark was ready to get rid of. Even though leaving the ring probably cost him five hundred dollars, “it was worth it,” Mark had said.

  From the room, I placed a call to West Covina. It was one in the morning, which meant it was only midnight in California. B.J. answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “B.J.” I said. “You’ll never guess what—”

  “Mike!” he cried, “Where are you?”

  “New Mexico border, man. We had to leave Colorado or we were gonna be thrown in—”

  “No, like where exactly? What interstate?” His voice leapt into a higher pitch of excitement with each word.

  “Interstate 25,” I offered.

  “I’m leavin’ right now, doc,” he declared. “I’m picking you up.”

  “What?” I stammered.

  “I talked to Shane today,” he announced. “We’ve gotta be in Louisville by Monday night for a tryout with the Southern Wrestling Association.”

  Eleven hours later I was sitting in an Albuquerque bar near the corner of Broadway and Indian School. That was the intersection B.J. had picked out on his road atlas as the meeting point, and Hal and company had dropped me off there at nine o’clock. I was on my fourth beer, heading outside periodically to search for B.J.’s Toyota.

  Giant boards lining the windows barred the entrance of any exterior light. The bar was darkly illuminated by neon words. There was also a sign that was actually a miniature screen. Across it scrolled different extravagantly drawn locations. Snow-capped mountains, a festive Mardi Gras–type street, the magnificent skyline of a city at night . . . all of these scenes were strung together by the name of a beer which occupied several strategic spots in each setting. As I watched this electronic world revolve, I wondered where my current situation would fit into it. The tour was over. Motley Mick Starr was history.