Living the Gimmick

by Ben Peller

  I reached into my pocket and touched the neatly folded piece of paper Shawna had given me that morning before I left the hotel. It had her address in Phoenix and her phone number. “Call me,” she had said and smiled, running her hand through my hair. I took out the paper and looked at the curves of her writing. I traced them with my finger, keeping my body in motion against a sudden fear that I was very, very insignificant in this world. I’m like Jack Kerouac, I reassured myself. Even though I had never read any of his books, I knew the title of one: On the Road.

  A roided up Jack Kerouac, I reconfirmed. This reminded me it was time for my shot, so I went into the bathroom and injected 400 mg of testosterone while standing up in a stall.

  A few minutes later I finished my beer and stepped carefully outside. As the sunlight hit me, I had the sensation of emerging from the barriers of an old photograph. For a moment I was afraid that the abrupt brightness would reduce me to ashes. But there was B.J. across the way leaning against his car, and when I raised my forearm in a salute, the flesh on my arm tingled against the sun’s rays but didn’t disintegrate.

  6

  SOUTHERN WILDMAN

  A pair of spotlights ambush the mini-ring, cloaking me in a sheet of illumination so hot it sets my skin on fire. The path to the ring is clear.

  Ring entrances are sometimes better than the actual matches themselves. These moments without rules, like that magical image in the opening kickoff of a football game when the ball touches its zenith. Anything is possible. The upcoming contest is a story about to be told, a life yet to be lived.

  Wary security guards man either side of the aisle. I squint at the crowd, but the lights make it impossible to discern anything more than a dark mass of howling humanity. Arms slash through air. Fists pump in time to my theme music, which is a loose instrumental interpretation of “Eye of the Tiger.” No words, just a powerful beat and an electric guitar slashing out the anthem of an underdog. Fans love it, the single has reached number nine on the charts.

  The song is exactly three minutes and thirty seconds long, and I’ve been able to time my ring entrances so that I’m always inside the ring and perched on one of the turnbuckles by the time the triumphant crescendo comes. But at SlamFest the song ends while the cart is barely halfway to the ring. The song starts over and nobody seems to notice. Eighty thousand people continue to cheer and howl. A few aimless screams break apart from the pack of noise, but they are soon swallowed by the crowd’s concentrated aggression.

  Louisville, Kentucky’s sports arena earned its affectionate nickname, Rough Arena, during an event that had taken place just a year ago. A pro wrestling card, of course. There had been a title change involving Billy “The Prince” Rampart. Rampart was immensely popular in the South. In Memphis, his hometown, he was second only to “The King” Elvis Presley in popularity. When the fans in Kentucky had seen The Prince cheated out of his belt by the dastardly “Adam Prescott the III” (who was really Rampart’s nineteen-year-old son), they had rioted and torn half the seats out. Prescott had been forced to flee the building still clad in his gear with the belt clutched in his hand. He had almost run three people over in the parking lot while trying to escape a half-dozen teenagers who were beating on his car. The next week on an interview segment, Rampart had said that the Louisville arena was “a rough arena to lose in. That’s why I’ll never do it again.” Naturally he hadn’t lost there since, and the nickname caught on.

  B.J. and I heard this story from Rampart himself. We had arrived at Rough Arena a few hours before the show was set to begin and were in Rampart’s private “dressin’ quarters.” He wasn’t exceptionally tall, standing a few inches below six feet, and sported the beginnings of a pot belly. His shoulders drooped into solid but unremarkable arms. Although his body’s overall shape was that of an untoasted marshmallow, this only made his face more striking. It was a beautiful face, with features that managed to look both defined and reckless. A blubbery roll bulged at his neck, and one wondered if some autonomic function of his body somehow prevented any fat from traveling beyond this point. Only a few nasty scars on his forehead marred his “princely” facial features. He later confessed to me that he went to a doctor every twelve months to get his forehead sanded down.

  As The Prince proudly filled us in on the history of the Rough Arena, I couldn’t help staring at the drawing leaning against the mirror. It depicted a tremendously muscled man with sharp abdominals adorned in an outfit that suggested royalty. He was wearing a crown and standing on a rock, looking off at what was surely a horizon as infinite as his conquests.

  “That’s kind of a self-portrait,” he said, his voice lapsing into a rusty shyness. “Drew it myself,” he added needlessly.

  I struggled to find a link between the self-portrait and the man who drew it. As far as I could tell, only the face seemed fairly accurate.

  “Heard some good things about you two,” he said, pulling out a small silver tin. “Dip?” he suggested, as though offering a glass of wine.

  “Sure,” I said, not wanting to be ungracious. B.J. accepted as well.

  “Yep.” Rampart fished out an astonishing wad of chew. “Heard some things. But I gotta see it in the flesh.” His last four words were obscured by the tobacco inserted between his cheek and gum. B.J. and I awkwardly followed suit. “So what’re your gimmicks?” he asked.

  B.J. described his psycho dentist. Rampart nodded eagerly. “I like what I’m hearin’,” he announced. When B.J. showed him the ketchup-stained outfit, Rampart whooped. “Love it!” he exclaimed, then spat a wad of tobacco juice onto the floor. “How ’bout you, Mike?” he asked me.

  “I was . . . a rocker,” I said hesitantly. He immediately shook his head.

  “No can do,” he said. “Already got one of those.”

  “How about . . . the Wandering Weapon?” I asked. He frowned.

  “The Wandering Weapon?” he repeated with distaste.

  “Yeah,” I forged ahead, “the Wandering Weapon . . . Michael Harding.”

  He scratched his head. “Can you be crazy?” he asked. “You know, like act a little loony? One oar in the water? Drool, talk to yourself—”

  “He does that anyway,” B.J. interjected.

  I shoved him. “Hell yeah I can,” I said.

  “The Wandering Wildman,” Rampart proudly christened me. “We’ll have it be that you just escaped from a mental institution or somethin’. I know a nurse at Memphis General. We can probably even get you a straitjacket.”

  “The Wandering Wildman . . . Michael—”

  “No, for Chrissakes. Don’t use your real name. Don’t use any name. It’ll spoil the gimmick. ’Sides . . .” He spat meditatively onto the ground. “You don’t want someathese fans knowin’ your real name.”

  “Don’t you use your real name?” B.J. inquired. Rampart smiled proudly.

  “’Course I do, son. But I’m the Prince.” He spat onto the ground with the same authority of a judge pounding his gavel and turned to face the picture. “People love me,” he observed matter-of-factly.

  That night, “The Wandering Wildman” made his SWA debut against “Flatliner Nelson.” Flatliner’s backstage nickname was Flatulence. I found out why in that match. Luckily, his farts’ unsettling stench was quickly absorbed by the beer, fried chicken, and cigarette smoke emanating from the eight thousand people surrounding us.

  The match itself went well. I hissed and barked at the crowd as though I were undergoing some kind of transformation into a wild animal. At various times I would space out and stare into nothing. The longer the match went on, the more legitimately crazy I felt. Soon I was standing on the second turnbuckle in the corner, howling at the crowd like a lost werewolf. The main thing expected of wrestlers in the South is to draw heat from the crowd. Drawing heat simply means making the crowd react to you. I knew that when the crowd began howling back at me, I had done my job. B.J. was also successful in his match. He menaced the crowd with his drill and had pieces of chicken an
d empty cups hurled at him in retaliation.

  After the card, Rampart offered us jobs. “Here’s how it works,” he explained. “Y’all will start at fifty bucks a night. Responsible for your own lodgings. Wrestle six nights a week. Ya’ll got Sundays off. It ain’t exactly glamorous, but you can work your way up and you get a hellalotta exposure. We got a deal?”

  “Hell, we’d do it for free,” I announced. B.J. elbowed me sharply. Rampart peered at me from his stool.

  Then he uttered something that would gradually evolve into the truth over the coming year: “Damn, Wildman. You really’re nuts, ain’t you?”

  Being on the road six nights a week made it difficult to locate a place to live. Most of the boys lived in Memphis, the aptly named “littlest big city” in America. Endless rows of flat two-story buildings squatted along the streets like weary troops. The only structure of note was the Hernando DeSoto Memorial Bridge, which spanned across the Mississippi River and joined Memphis with West Memphis. The well-known Beale Street offered a jumble of smoky blues clubs and darkened corners where one could obtain anything from black beauties to DMT.

  B.J. and I quickly learned that wrestlers in the South didn’t bother with Soma. They preferred to pop a few Valium or Quaaludes, then wash them down with Jack Daniel’s. “Valium is nice,” B.J. said one night after downing two Valium and six beers.

  “Valium is very, very nice,” I agreed, displaying the usual wit I had after downing two Valium and a half pint of vodka. We were in B.J.’s car, which was parked at a rest area. There was no way we were going to blow half of our night’s earnings on a roadside motel, so we slept in B.J.’s car when we were on the road. I averaged about three hours of sleep a night; B.J.’s passenger seat didn’t tilt all the way back, plus he snored like a horny wildcat. After a month of this, I bought my own car (an investment I only half-jokingly referred to as “getting my own apartment”). My apartment was a 1985 Chevy Cavalier. I had bought the car in Memphis from a dealer who had given me a special price because I knew “The Prince” Billy Rampart. The exterior, no doubt white when it was new five years ago, had been infiltrated by a cancer of dirt that seemed to have spread even to the windshield. No matter how much I scrubbed, its glass still appeared muddy. This peculiar brand of filth seemed to infect all of Memphis; every street, every building, even the billboards advertising The Prince’s weekly call-in radio show were glazed with a layer of grime.

  Although dirty, the Cavalier ran well, got decent gas mileage, and most important, had a comfortable driver’s seat that tilted all the way back. During the first four months we wrestled for the Southern Wrestling Association, B.J. and I lived in our cars. We showered at gyms, did our laundry at Laundromats, and became intimate with every rest area between Tennessee, Indiana, and Kentucky.

  There was an unexpected upside to all this activity, and to adopting a gimmick like the Wandering Wildman. Because Wildman was so energetic in the ring and his traveling schedule so fierce, I was in a state of perpetual exhaustion that made it hard for me to worry whether or not I was real. Wildman’s very active existence sapped any doubts as to my own. The way people looked at me as I slammed my head against the turnbuckle was satisfactory proof that I was no shadow. Sometimes when drifting off to sleep in the car, I would focus on a large section of the ceiling’s cloth covering that had already been torn away. Secure in Wildman, I had no need to pick at the roof’s wound.

  Because of this security, I sought to further immerse myself in Wildman’s gimmick. One Saturday afternoon I went to a barber and got the sides of my head shaved. I dyed the remaining patch orange and spiked it up into a fearsome Mohawk.

  “Now you really look like a wildman!” Rampart said gleefully when he saw me.

  “Yeah.” B.J. laughed. “You’d have to be out of your fuckin’ mind to get your hair cut like that.” I took a playful swing at him.

  “I am out of my fuckin’ mind!” I roared.

  From that night on, the fans reacted to me with greater intensity. I was loathed and cheered by an equal number of our fan pool; the former group was made up mostly of older people who called me “a no-good punk” while the latter consisted of teenagers who flashed signs at me with such slogans as Anarchy Rules and Youth Gone Wild scrawled on them. I was working mostly with “Hayweeds” Duncan, an old-time country boy who stood about 6'3" and whose advancement into his mid-forties had pulled most of the bulk that once occupied his chest down to his mid-section. His beard was perpetually soaked with juice from an ever-present mouthful of chewing tobacco (I began making him take the wad out before matches). Whether relaxing backstage or dueling it out in the ring, his face remained flushed with a convivial red that furthered his look as a hillbilly Santa Claus. I enjoyed him. He had been wrestling in the SWA for twenty years, but still enjoyed working stiff and “going ballistic, as you younguns would say.” As my lunatic character became more and more defined, I began to brawl more with Duncan outside of the ring. Oftentimes I had Duncan order the people in the first row to surrender their seats so he could then hurl me into the vacated row of chairs. This never failed to pop the crowd. Of course, hand in hand with this growing abandon for my safety came the injuries. During my first six months in the SWA, I broke my pinky and forefinger, sprained my right wrist and both ankles, dislocated my shoulder again, and accumulated countless bruises and cuts. One time I bladed myself and cut a little too deep and had to go to Memphis General for twelve stitches. The nurse who sewed me up recognized me and said, “My son watches wrestling all the time. You’re the crazy one, aren’t you?” True to form, I responded with a growl and several barks. She seemed shaken. “Wow,” she whispered. “You really are crazy, huh?” Her remark made me glow inside.

  “Just think, Wildman,” Duncan said to me in the locker room the next day, “some day you can tell your psychiatrist about how you once drove three hundred miles a day to abuse your body for fifty bucks a night with no social security, no pension, and no benefits.” It was official. Even I was beginning to happily doubt my own sanity.

  That Christmas I felt ready to go home and see my mom. Before I did, though, I sent her a photo of myself that had appeared in a recent wrestling magazine. In doing this, I hoped to prepare her properly for my altered appearance. When I pulled up in my car, she was standing on the front steps with a big smile despite the sub-zero temperature. As soon as I emerged, her lips plunged into a frown. By the time I reached the top step, she was shaking her head. The shopping bag that contained her Christmas gift suddenly seemed heavy enough to pull my hand through the porch.

  “Hi, Mom,” I began, “did you, um . . . get the pictures I sent you?”

  “A wig.” She hurled the word at me. “I thought it was a wig. It looked fake.”

  “Fake?” I stammered.

  “Fake!” she repeated, as though the word were a key piece of evidence in a trial. “Fake! Fake! Fake! Like everything else in that . . .” Her voice trailed off in search of a proper description for her son’s chosen profession. “Thing,” she finally declared.

  “Pro wrestling’s not fake,” I snapped reflexively. “It’s known as a work.”

  “What are you doing to yourself?” she asked, once we got inside. I growled in response. It seemed easier than actually trying to explain it to her. “You’re getting way too big,” she complained.

  The picture of the sun approaching the small building was hanging in the same spot. I howled at it.

  “And what is with these sounds you’re making?” she demanded.

  “They’re part of my gimmick.” I shrugged.

  “This is what you’ve turned yourself into?” she shrieked. “A gimmick?”

  I looked back at the picture to seek a refuge from her eyes. “Dawn or dusk?” I said.

  “What?” she asked in annoyance.

  “Dawn or dusk?” I repeated, more audibly this time.

  She glanced up at the picture, her face overcome with a frustrated incomprehension. “I don’t know,” she said
finally, all anger absent from her voice. “I don’t know.”

  I caught up with Bryan and Marty on the day after Christmas. Both of them found great amusement in my new hairstyle. I filled them in on the life of a pro wrestler, and they told me about life in the apartment they had rented down at University of Illinois for their sophomore year. “What are the parties like?” I asked.

  “Just people hangin’ out,” Marty said. “Twenty-five-year-old seniors goin’ after eighteen-year-old freshmen girls. What about pro wrestler parties?”

  “Mostly a bunch of big guys taking pills, drinking, and passing out,” I said. When described like this, my life didn’t sound so thrilling. But Marty was intrigued. He questioned me as to the type of pills and the quantities in which we consumed them. Bryan shook his head as I ran down the list.

  After I finished, Marty whooped and showed me a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which he kept tucked in his back pocket. He liked to have a copy always on hand so that he could reread passages at any time, and he informed me proudly that he had read the book from cover to cover at least twenty times. “They take all kindsa pills in here,” he said, tapping the cover lightly, as though he didn’t want to disturb the world inside.

  When he went to the bathroom, Bryan informed me in a subdued tone that Marty had been reading a lot lately. “Some real crazy shit,” he whispered, casting a suspicious glance at the bathroom door. “He’s hangin’ out with kind of a weird crowd. I told him I didn’t want some of them in the apartment. I haven’t really seen that much of him.”

  When Marty came back from the bathroom he sunk to the floor cross-legged and began studying me intently. “What?” I finally snapped. Marty just nodded.