Living the Gimmick

by Ben Peller

  Pro wrestling offers a wonderfully simple distraction from the messy complexities of human nature. People are given the power to cast aside the horror of ambiguity when they enter a pro wrestling arena. Any doubt or fear in their lives can be squashed by their love for their heroes and hate for their villains. I often noted the curious fact that for the most part, the people who cursed me most violently weren’t truck-driving “simple folk,” as one wrestler referred to them. The people who hated me most were the middle-aged businessmen, housewives, and those most desperate for a break from the tyranny of their lives. Wrestling provided them with a fantasy world where they could love and hate and scream and yell with no repercussions.

  At first, the sheer volume of hate mail I received gave me a temporary jolt. Mixed with the many grammatically challenged tirades was the occasional death threat. These especially worried me, until other wrestlers showed me some of the death threats they’d received. One wrestler, Jesse James Tolliver, had laminated some of his favorite hate letters and used them as place mats. The one he was most proud of read:

  Dear Mr. Tolliver:

  Billy “The Prince” Rampart’s gonna whip your ass good, boy. You need it, too, you fatassed pansy dickwad. You’re a jerk. You think you’re so sexy but you’re really A FATASSED FREAK! You can’t wrestle, and the only way you’ll beat The Prince is to cheat like the dog you are! I hope The Prince makes you lick his boots, and I’ll be there to cheer when that fine day comes.

  Sincerely,

  Jane Hoover

  “It was a fourth grade class assignment,” Tolliver explained as I smiled down at the letter, a spoonful of chili poised before my mouth. “All the kids had to write letters. I got about four others from that class,” he said proudly. “The way I look at it, to make a child tell you how much they hate you . . . that takes some doing.”

  Tolliver, of course, had no children of his own.

  The night of Saturday, June 25th, found me crouched underneath a ring in Rough Arena, where the temperature hovered around eighty degrees. The latest angle in my feud with Rampart involved me interfering during a cage match. Cage matches, called that because the ring is surrounded by fifteen-foot-high strips of chain-link fence, are billed as “the ultimate confrontation” because there is no escape and no possibility of interference. But I, as head SWA heel, was going to set a precedent by hacking my way into the ring with a machete. I had stationed myself underneath the ring a half hour before show time, and spent the next three hours listening to the terse explosions of bodies hitting the canvas above me. After an hour, my entire body was drenched in sweat. The darkness beneath the ring took on a more sinister feel. I was in one of the sweltering caverns of hell, while above me, God dispensed claps of thunder to the riotous approval of ten thousand sweating worshipers. I recalled crawling underneath the bleachers at the Rosemont Horizon, making my way among candy wrappers and empty cups as rats scurried just out of my sight, all to sneak backstage and meet Sonny Logan. That night, I had imagined the crowd the same way: a group of people cheering mightily as gods battled in the ring. Now, five years later, I was ready to attack one of these gods in his own kingdom. This incident would be featured in Pro Wrestling Monthly, the same monthly magazine whose editor, Buck Dipter, I had written an unanswered request to for the names of pro wrestling schools. Now, his magazine had been tipped off that something big was going to happen tonight, and I was that something big.

  A walkie-talkie by my side squawked: “Go for it, Wildman.”

  “Ten-four,” I replied, and started chopping at the ring boards with my machete. The narrow space beneath the ring made full arm movement impossible, but after several swipes the board finally split and I was able to get a clear shot at the canvas. The first shot ripped the canvas apart and spotlights shocked my eyes, which had grown accustomed to the darkness beneath the ring. Blinking rapidly, I cleared a portion of canvas away and climbed into the ring. There was Rampart, his opponent Jesse James Tolliver, and ten thousand hostile faces locked outside. All as it should be.

  To the extreme horror of the crowd and delight of the magazine photographers, Tolliver and I started methodically going to work on The Prince. At one point I had Rampart in the corner and we were both stifling laughter as a photographer snapped a picture of me giving him a series of crotch-shots.

  Rampart had joked previously that, far from being “the most dangerous match in professional wrestling” as advertised, cage matches were probably the safest. “The cage protects you from the friggin’ marks,” Rampart had said.

  Now, as thousands of voices screamed angrily for my death, I realized what he’d been talking about. “Boys, we just might have a riot on our hands!” Rampart announced gleefully, making a smile look like a grimace as I choked him. No doubt he was anticipating the boost to ticket sales this would have for August’s WrestleWar, an SWA wrestling extravaganza scheduled to be held at an outdoor stadium near Nashville. Looking at the pure rage on some of the faces milling dangerously close to the ring, I began to wonder whether I would live to see it.

  “I’d better start coming back,” he whispered, as I threw a half-hearted punch that grazed his bloody forehead.

  “What marks want, marks get.” With that, he launched out of the corner with a double clothesline that flattened both Tolliver and me. Instantly the arena was filled with wild cries of approval. Rampart slammed us against all four walls of the cage. Then he just stood there in the center of the ring and waved goodbye until the house lights finally came on and people realized that the show was over.

  The audience filed out with the dazed movements of disenfranchised lemmings, leaving their hero standing alone inside the cage over his two temporarily defeated adversaries. Rampart looked down at me. “This night’s gonna make you famous, Wildman,” he murmured with a smile.

  “Be careful,” Shawna warned me a few nights later, “too much exposure can be hazardous.”

  They were both right.

  As my feud with Rampart tore through Southern towns, I began responding to the hostile behavior of fans in a manner more befitting of a Wildman. I expanded the variety and amounts of steroids I ingested in order to increase my aggressiveness. “Don’t you think you might be gettin’ a little out of control, doc?” B.J. remarked one night after watching me growl at two teenaged girls who had meekly requested an autograph.

  “Screw ’em,” I barked back. Whenever I happened to glance into a mirror or stare into the window of my Chevy while unlocking the door, the person I saw was indeed a wildman. Though the transformation felt right, I was disliking that person more and more. Whenever I brushed my teeth I closed my eyes so as not to encounter any reflection. Muscular Mike had loved mirrors. I recalled this with the fondness people use to remember the annoying habits of old friends who are no longer a part of their lives.

  I spent the last Sunday of July on the road leading into Arkansas, watching and sketching the sunset. The air was mild and the sunset lacked its usual harshness. I was able to keep my eyes open while drawing, and I captured details my memory had never been able to reclaim. Birds were gliding inches above the water, their wings perfectly still. Then with one flap they ascended into a blue playground on fire. The liquid surface of the fields swarmed with vegetation. Mysterious ripples shot up in evidence of microscopic revolutions taking place below, armies of organisms seeking the unrestrained promise of air above. An occasional car passed but after only a few moments their interruptions faded into thin air, its whisper already so alive with bird cries and the earth’s patient growth beneath the water.

  The picture was one I had never drawn before. Its shapes and colors had been felt and seen rather than assumed. After it was done, I examined it until there was no more light. A car’s headlights swept past and I became panicked, caught in something forbidden. I rolled up the sketch hurriedly and put it in the trunk. Before I left, I sent a howl out across the dark beds of water.

  When I got home I noticed a car parked against the curb f
acing the opposite direction of the street’s traffic flow. Its defiant presence impressed me; I waved at the front grill as I pulled into the garage. Climbing the steps to the front door, my knees throbbed in rebellion to the movement. “Get ready for arthritis at forty,” Shane Stratford once warned me with a smile.

  I was feeling very old as I straggled into the quiet foyer. The floor was tiled and a chandelier hung just above a row of dirty copper mail slots. On a small chair just inside the door was a thin-lipped woman wearing large glasses. She pulled up from her hunched position and stopped me with a look of naked distaste. “Wandering Wildman,” she spat accusingly, “you’re bad.” The smallness of her face and hurt in her voice made her seem childlike.

  But Wildman didn’t give a damn. Just another mark. I waved her away with a motion adopted for dealing with fans. “Get lost, idiot,” I snapped as I barreled past.

  “You’re a bad man!”

  Her words were infused with enough venom to make me stop and turn. My knees locked up at the sight of a butcher knife clutched in her twitching hands. Her eyes glowed with true steady hatred. “If I killed you it wouldn’t be a bad thing,” she murmured in a trancelike tone. “God wouldn’t punish me!” she cried, reinforcing her words with a few aggressive steps in my direction.

  I knew I should be alarmed, but Wildman wouldn’t show any fear. “Yes, He would!” I shouted blindly at her. “You would burn in hell for all of eternity!”

  “No!” she looked around in a confused manner, as though God were seated nearby ready to argue. I lunged and grabbed her wrists. Her scream made me wince. I slammed her hands into the wall. The knife dropped, chipping a tile an inch away from my foot. “No!” she screamed, the pain in her voice biting into me, “No! You’re bad!” The sorrow I felt for her angered me and I shoved her back against the wall. She sank down and pulled her knees to her chest. I snapped the knife up from the floor. Her next wail was so intense it sounded like she was trying to vomit out her own heart.

  “Shut up!” I shouted at her. “Just shut up!”

  “What the hell’s going on out here?” A gruff, tobacco-torn voice from my left made me turn. In the doorway to an apartment stood a tall stout man, his bloodshot eyes wide as he took in the scene before him. “What are you doing to her?” he demanded, focusing on the shine of the butcher knife in my hand.

  “This woman tried to attack me,” I said loudly, then had to repeat it as a shout in order to be heard above her crying.

  “I know you,” he pointed a shaking finger at my orange mohawk. “I seen you on the television.” His head nodded in a determined appraisal of the situation. “Oh, I’ve seen you,” he added ominously.

  “Goddammit, call the police!” I yelled. “I don’t want her to get away.”

  The woman paused momentarily, then unleashed another piercing cry against some unseen horror. I closed my eyes. “Shut up!” I commanded. After her shriek subsided, I opened my eyes and saw that the man had disappeared back into his apartment.

  “Why did you do this, lady?” I asked her desperately, hoping she would tell me before the police got there. But she only continued to sob, quietly now, as though that last shriek signified a final failed defensive stand.

  When the police finally arrived, a tall ponderous sergeant explained that they had to take me in for questioning. Finally, at about two in the morning, the sergeant came into the interrogation room where I had been sitting by myself and informed me that they’d tracked the woman’s family down. She was a paranoid schizophrenic, and technically a ward of the state. Apparently she lived with her mother and sister (the father had died), helping out in their mail-order goods business by knitting blankets. While she worked alone in her room she watched television; her two favorite programs (both of which, according to her family, made her sob violently) being soap operas and professional wrestling. The last three Saturdays, she had snuck the car out and driven to Nashville. Then she had followed me home after the shows to find where I lived. I was usually drunk and numbed with Valium after these shows, so it didn’t really surprise me that I never noticed.

  “We found this in her car,” he said, flashing a copy of Pro Wrestling Monthly. It was open to the page that featured me giving Rampart one of many crotch-shots. I could tell instantly that it was one of the shots in which Rampart and I were both stifling laughter. A big red “X” had been scrawled over my howling figure.

  “What’s gonna happen to her?” I asked quietly.

  His eyes flicked over me in a glare as impassive as the room’s four white walls. “Her mother and sister are gonna have her committed to an institution up north,” he answered flatly.

  I lowered my eyes to the rounded edges of the metal table. “I see,” I said.

  “You’re free to go.”

  “Two percent,” I mumbled.

  “Do what now?” he frowned, suspicious of a veiled confession of some kind.

  “Nothing.” I pushed myself to my feet.

  On my way out, I recognized a few cops from the shows. I held my breath, waiting for one of them to ask me for an autograph. Thankfully, none of them did. I checked the backseat of my car, then spent the drive home scanning the rearview mirror for tailing headlights.

  Sunrise found B.J. and I sitting out on my deck, each of us with a beer. We drank and passed a joint back and forth in buzzing silence. “Are you feelin’ okay?” he asked finally, “I mean, really . . . okay?”

  “Really . . .” I took the joint from him, had a hit, and exhaled. “I don’t know.” My eyes stung as the sun began glancing through night’s stubborn haze. “I don’t know how I feel.” I lied. Then I blurted: “That could’ve been me.”

  “Say what?”

  “That woman. She was so . . . obsessed . . . with wrestling.”

  “She was nuts, man.”

  “So am I,” I pointed out with a mirthless smile. “Remember?”

  “That’s just a gimmick,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed. But even as I said the word I was running the smooth cool neck of my beer bottle along my inner forearm. The marijuana licked at my brain, teasing out fears and paranoid thoughts. That woman had been as determined as me to find some kind of meaning in pro wrestling; the only difference is she had no choice but to do it as a fan. I wanted to talk to her, to ask her if maybe she was conscious of something inside her that made her act in ways she couldn’t control. If she had killed me, would that have silenced her demons?

  But there was no way I would ever be able to ask her these things, to talk reasonably with her. We were enemies, separated by the very search for control that bonded us.

  Later that afternoon when I informed Rampart that I was turning face, he sighed knowingly. “Wildman,” he began, “these things happen. The woman was disturbed—”

  “Billy, I’m turning,” I said. My voice was trembling a little, and he looked up at me. “I have to,” I pleaded.

  He sighed again. “Shit,” he said with a shrug.

  That night, for reasons of my own, I saved Rampart from a brutal attack and became a face.

  Two weeks later, I got a call from an executive of the World Wrestling Organization. He invited me up to the corporate offices. They would be happy to fly me there and back, first class.

  “There’s a flight next Sunday that leaves at 7:00 in the morning and gets here at 10:30, New York time. We can have you back by 9:00 the same evening.”

  “Sounds like you people have done this before,” I said and smiled into the phone.

  “We know you boys have a grueling work schedule.”

  “All part of the business.”

  “Depends on how you’re doing business,” he pointed out. “The World Wrestling Organization likes to give its wrestlers a little more time off. Our national television exposure makes it possible for us to do that.”

  “So do you send me a ticket or should I pick it up at the airport?”

  There was laughter. “We’ll send it to you. And we’ll hav
e a limo waiting for you at the airport.”

  The World Wrestling Organization’s main rival was International Championship Wrestling. They were like the Coke and Pepsi of the pro wrestling business. Superstars jumped from one promotion to another with regularity, often pitting the two of them against one another in hopes of a bidding war. It was common knowledge in the business that the sole reason most young wrestlers like myself endured so much of a grind in the SWA was to gain necessary exposure in order to make the leap to one of these “Big Two.” Rampart was opposed to this, and reserved a special hatred for the WWO. He didn’t want his wrestlers talking to “those goddamn Northerners,” as he referred to the WWO front office. He particularly detested the owner of the WWO, Thomas Rockart Jr., who had bought the WWO from his father and then proceeded to build it up into a national promotion. “Was a time,” Rampart would say meditatively, his speech a little jumbled from the wad of tobacco lodged between his cheek and gum, “when this business was run on honor and respect. You didn’t promote in another man’s territory. Then this goddamn yankee comes along and fouls it all up. Runs wild over others’ territories, no respect for the old way.”

  I didn’t respond with what I considered to be simple logic: Thomas Rockart Jr. was following the way of the 1980s. The bigger you were, the more exposure you got, the more you could spend to get top talent like “The American Dream” Sonny Logan. It was apparent that Rockart, who was beginning to exploit the then unheard of cable avenues such as pay-per-view, represented the future of professional wrestling. That was where I wanted to be.

  Of course, I didn’t mention this to Rampart. When I landed at JFK on Sunday morning at 10:30, the limousine was right out front where they said it would be. We slipped easily through the streets of New York, its buildings much taller and darker than the ones I was used to seeing in the South. The driver’s East Coast accent sounded as exaggerated and foreign as the Southern twangs I had been introduced to sixteen months ago. A sense of déjà vu overtook me: stranger in a strange land.