Living the Gimmick

by Ben Peller

  My bloody face hovered in the mirror. Michael Harding would never do anything like this.

  Touch your reflection. Touch it.

  I slowly undid my belt, looping it through the air like a lasso. A metal Coca-Cola belt buckle gave it substantial weight. I had bought it years ago because it reminded me of a title belt. Now I held it aloft for a second as though it were one, and in the next moment I whipped the buckle end out into the mirror. A crack split the mirror in five separate directions. Sections of glass tilted my reflection and offered pieces of my face to different angles of the bathroom’s light.

  I had the dream again that night. But after I pinned the masked man I was able to pull the mask from his head and finally see what had no doubt always been there: my own face staring back at me with wide lifeless eyes.

  8

  8

  A few of the security guards temporarily surrender their scrutiny of the crowd to turn and find out why I haven’t passed them yet. When they see the stalled ring, surprise and amusement infiltrate their impassive faces.

  I climb out of the mini-ring and begin to navigate the rest of the way on foot. My hands reach out blindly and find others. “Go for it, Michael!” a voice manages to leap free from the chorus of thousands.

  I am almost to the ring when I pause before a security guard who is blocking the view of a young girl. I snatch the red cap from the security guard’s head and put it on my own. Both the guard and the girl stare at me. “I love you, Michael!” she screams.

  “I love you back!” I tell her, then grab her hand and kiss it. My chin leaves a small pool of sweat on her fingers. She screams again and brings the hand to her mouth, kissing it all over. Others are reaching out and touching my shoulders, biceps, and forearms. Their fingers explore eagerly, gliding over my skin’s veneer of sweat. I look at the security guard, wink, then take off his cap and fling it out at the crowd. This elicits more whoops. I’m breaking the rules for them.

  Only a few rows away from the ring area, I spot a tall thin man with a round moonlike face. He has a shock of hair so blond it is almost white. In his hands is a large coffee jar.

  As I get closer he looks up and howls. I can’t look away. Bits of tobacco, dark and rich like growing moss, infect his teeth. As I pass, he spits tobacco juice into the coffee jar but makes no move to throw it at me. He probably emptied it out when he tossed it all over Stud Hoss Mauler. I let my hand wander past his face and knock his glasses off. He yelps but by then I am already past him and circling the ring.

  With any luck, his glasses will be crushed by someone’s foot.

  Tug Tyler’s voice echoes inside me: “Be a champion for those people? Who needs it?”

  “Bit off season, aren’t you?” the portly clerk joked in response to my request for a hockey stick, goalie mask, and jersey.

  “It’s never off season for hockey, eh?” I said in a Canadian accent. I was on the outskirts of Des Moines, where the WWO was scheduled for that night. I had left the motel early that morning, having taped a one hundred dollar bill to the mirror. All they had as a record of my stay was a receipt with an unintelligible scribble for a signature.

  I reached the Des Moines Municipal Auditorium at around four in the afternoon. Ricky Witherspoon and Jimmy “The Python” Jugular were already in the dressing room sipping beers. Jugular always carried a seven-foot python to the ring with him. The python’s name was Choker, and Jugular would lay Choker across his opponents whenever he was victorious. When I walked in, Jugular and Witherspoon were lazily discussing how many “Chokers” there had actually been.

  “They usually only last about a month,” Jugular said with a shrug and began downing a beer. “Had one that lasted almost three. The fucker seemed to like gettin’ stuffed in a bag and carted off to different cities in the back of a plane.”

  “How long has this one lasted?” I asked, causing both of them to glance up at me with surprise.

  “Umm . . . about three weeks, I guess.” Jugular threw a grin at a burlap sack in the corner. “Hear that, fucker?” he called tauntingly. “You only got about a week left.”

  “What’s with the hockey stick?” Witherspoon asked me.

  “I’m trying out a new gimmick tonight.” I smiled.

  “You turn Canadian overnight?” Witherspoon asked. I had applied a thick accent to the word “out.”

  “For this match I did,” I told them. By then both were gaping uncomfortably at my forehead. It couldn’t have been a pretty sight—swollen skin ballooned out over dried red slits. I turned and headed outside. I found Hippo Haleberg fiddling with the controls for the sound system with one hand while trying to balance a slice of grease-soaked pizza in the other. After I proposed the gimmick I wanted to adopt, he didn’t seem too enthusiastic.

  “A chameleon?” he asked, nibbling cautiously on his pizza. A moment later he cursed sharply and began fanning his tongue.

  “Yep,” I said and nodded, “I’m going to take on my opponent’s personality, their speaking patterns—”

  “Their gimmick,” he concluded.

  “Their gimmick,” I confirmed, “and I’m gonna make it mine.”

  “I don’t know . . .” He frowned.

  “Let me try it for tonight at least, eh?” I smiled. He managed to swallow a careful bite of pizza.

  “What do we introduce you as?” he asked, taking a bigger bite

  “The Chameleon. From parts unknown. Weight unknown,” I said. “The Chameleon.”

  “Chameleon, huh?” he mused, then tilted his head back as though noticing me for the first time. “Jesus, what the hell happened to you last night? Looks like your brain exploded.”

  “Part of the gimmick,” I rumbled proudly. “Paying dues.”

  When I returned to the dressing room, I saw that Staffer had arrived. As I walked in, all conversation ceased momentarily before being resumed in an awkward rush. I went over to stand by Witherspoon and Jugular. Staffer approached me with a guarded smirk. “What’s up with the mask and stick, eh?” he asked.

  “You’ll see,” I replied shortly.

  “How’s the back?” he asked.

  I turned to face him. Either my glare or my freshly scarred forehead must have taken him aback because for a moment his mouth groped unsuccessfully for words. “Hell, kid,” he finally allowed with a chuckle, “last night was just a little initiation.”

  “I’m not your fuckin’ kid,” I snapped back, “and from what I understand, you’re an asshole all the time.”

  These words silenced the rest of the room. Staffer frowned, suddenly very aware of an audience. “So,” he asked in a whiny mocking voice, “you wanna go over some spots?”

  “Spots!” I yelled. “Yeah, I got a spot. I knock your ass out of this fucking sport, needle dick!” My Canadian accent on the “out” was thicker than Staffer’s.

  He frowned as everyone in the room fell into an excited shuffle. He turned and stalked back to his space. I changed into my jersey and waited for match time.

  When I was announced, I backed out to the ring in case Staffer tried to Pearl-Harbor me. Sure enough, as I was halfway to the ring, I saw through the slits in my hockey mask that he was peeking out the curtain. I raised my stick and his masked face disappeared. It was like seeing my own head being enveloped by a red cloaked mirror.

  Again people were unsure whether to boo or applaud for me, but this time I didn’t care. I was a chameleon, able to stand motionless in the ring while the crowd buzzed in confusion. No need to touch or feel anything.

  Staffer once again charged down the aisle as he was introduced, but then stopped and climbed carefully through the ropes. My legs twitched as I remained rooted in the center of the ring with my stick poised for battle. I could taste my own hot breath trapped in the mask.

  Staffer approached me. The crowd’s noise trickled through my ears as though it were coming from someone else’s dream. Staffer reached out, pulled my mask forward, and let it snap back against my flesh. I didn’t cry o
ut. I did the same thing to him, and by the time he raised his stick, I was already swinging mine. The flat end hooked him in the rib cage. He grunted and bent over. I brought my stick down again, and this time he howled as the hard wood collided with the knuckles of his right hand. His stick fell, and I tossed mine away as well. I tore the mask off his head and hurled it away, then slammed my masked face into his nose. Through the crowd’s flood of cheers came the sharp crack of a broken nose. I knew that a psychotic hockey player would live for sounds like this and true to form I felt my heart kicking ecstatically. So easy to act like this. As a chameleon, able to become anything I see. Nothing could touch me.

  I whipped off my mask and tossed it away. Staffer was down on one knee, and I threw a forearm up under his chin. His head snapped back and the arena lights bore straight into his glazed unblinking eyes.

  No mercy, put him out of the game—these words blazed through my mind—out of the game. I shoved his wobbly form into the corner and unleashed three more short uppercuts against his jaw. I was ready to do this forever. After two or three more blows, Staffer’s head went slack and sagged against his shoulder. Leaving him slumped against the turnbuckle, I backed up ten paces. The referee (the same one from the previous night) retreated to the side and made no move to stop me.

  I bolted toward Staffer and jumped into a dropkick, driving my two feet into the side of his left knee. The bone gave way with surprising ease, but the sound was sudden and a little frightening. A giant balloon bursting. This explosion flew into every corner of the arena, transforming the moderate crowd rumble into a unanimously excited oooohhh. If the sound of Staffer’s knee breaking wasn’t enough to please the fans, then no doubt his cries of agony were. As he lay on the canvas wailing, I stood on the second turnbuckle and glared out at the crowd. They roared their approval at The Chameleon, who had given someone a permanent injury in his very first match. I stared at their faces, feeling the familiar hatred from the night when Muscular Mike first bled in the ring at a rock-and-roll club in the San Fernando Valley. Yet now there was also a gap, an unreclaimable distance from the very people I once so desperately sought approval from. I looked with scorn upon this sea of marks—faces pathetically eager for something, anything, that would help draw them out of the everyday monotonous battle of their own lives.

  The bell fired off a hollow call for order as the referee waved frantically for a stretcher from the back. I hopped out of the ring and strolled back to the curtain.

  Backstage, several of the wrestlers congregated around me. The general atmosphere was congratulatory; most whispered to me that Staffer’s comeuppance had been a long time coming. Then the red curtain parted hastily and a pair of anxious paramedics wheeled Staffer back on a stretcher. The agony in his moans excited me, drew me closer. In the next instant I was overturning the stretcher and snarling at Staffer’s flailing form on the pavement: “I knocked you out of the game, you needle-dicked fuck!” The paramedics stood in frozen horror as Ricky Witherspoon and The Soultaker each grabbed one of my arms. A pair of hands clamped around my chest. I glanced back and saw Rob Robertson’s feverish eyes. He was pulling me backward, pressing his body against mine. I allowed myself to be guided away as the paramedics scrambled to get Staffer back onto the stretcher. Then I finally shook loose and shoved Rob to the floor.

  “I am The Chameleon!” I shouted. “Whatever you give me out there is what you’ll get in return!” I took a deep breath and exhaled the line that would become my trademark in all interviews thereafter: “When you face The Chameleon, you face what you fear within yourself.”

  With this declaration, I turned and vaulted into the hallway. Sonny Logan was coming out of his dressing room. “How ya doin’, Dream?” I said to him with the same gruffly affectionate voice he had asked Michael Harding that identical question six years ago.

  His eyes were wary, but he offered a smile and took my extended hand. “Pretty good, brother. How about you?”

  “Pretty good,” I echoed, then strolled back to the dressing room as my future identities milled behind me, whispering uncertainly about both my gimmick and my sanity.

  “I like the gimmick, Michael,” Thomas Rockart Jr. told me two weeks later in his office atop the Crystal Ship. Outside the window, a gray day was pelting New York with rain. The drops buffeted the window silently, the glass was soundproof. “It’s going over,” he determined, leafing through some proof sheets of publicity stills that had been taken that morning in a studio downstairs.

  The photographer had introduced himself as “Ivan, with an I,” while breaking into giggles for no discernable reason. He was a man with huge shoulders and an immaculately trimmed five o’clock shadow. Though his hair was slicked back, it still managed to escape into unruly cowlicks.

  Ivan became immediately distressed over what he termed my lack of identity. He had been forced to raid the “has-been closet,” which contained costumes from now defunct gimmicks. “This was Super Ninja’s,” Ivan cooed, delicately admiring a black ninja suit dotted with chalk white Japanese symbols, “before he became Typhoon Witley. Now he wears a hideous plumber’s outfit.” Ivan permitted himself a brief shudder before casting a scrutinizing me. “This is your size,” he concluded. Then he doused the outfit in black spray paint, effectively eliminating all traces of white.

  True to his word, it fit perfectly, clinging to me like a thin film of sweat. He then stationed me against an all-black wall. “What kind of pose should I strike?” I asked him.

  “You’re The Chameleon, buddy,” he grunted, suddenly all business as he fiddled with his camera. “I just shoot pics here.”

  I ended up crossing my arms over my heart and gazing at the lens with unrevealing eyes and tightly pressed lips. “Your eyes look a little whacked.” Ivan frowned. “Can’t you lighten ’em up a little? Make you look a little less nuts.” But every time I tried to allow a bit of feeling in my eyes, they burned from the heat thrown off by the lights. “Jesus, you look like an alien,” Ivan would protest, spurring me to once again barricade my eyes with an unfocused intensity.

  “Just take the picture,” I snapped. “I don’t give a damn how crazy I look.”

  “Fucking wrestlers,” Ivan mumbled, and began snapping away.

  “These’ll work.” Thomas Rockart Jr. was nodding at the sheets. “You look a little insane, though. Aren’t chameleons supposed to be . . .”

  His voice trailed off as his eyes searched mine expectantly. I let the silence join the soundless rain falling outside. Then I coughed and suggested, “Chameleons mimic their environment. They aren’t supposed to be anything. Except maybe a mirror. And aren’t most marks a little nuts?” I added, trying to smile. He frowned.

  “That’s one of the myths the World Wrestling Organization is trying to dispel. Professional wrestling is family entertainment. After all,” Rockart intoned, “families will always spend more on a night of entertainment than a group of drunken yahoos will. Kids sixteen and under are the ones who purchase the most “T-shirts and souvenirs.” He scrutinized the photos for another few seconds before nodding and announcing, “But these’ll work. I can have Ivan touch up the eyes in development. Make ’em look more . . .” He regarded me. “Human.” He was laughing as though he just discovered the punch line to a joke that had previously eluded him. Since his laughter seemed to be a cue, I joined him.

  He set the pictures down. “This wasn’t the only reason I asked you here today, Michael,” he remarked with a fluent shift into a more promising tone, as though we were about to become coconspirators in a grand scheme. “Doctors have ruled Staffer as unfit to wrestle for at least six months,” he continued with his smile intact. “He’s collecting on a policy from Lloyds of London.”

  Lloyds of London was an insurance company that issued policies that covered the physical attributes that celebrities deemed necessary for their continued success. These included movie stars’ eyes, pianists’ hands, models’ lips, and also professional wrestlers’ backs and knees. “
He’ll stay out for the full twelve months the policy is paying him, and his contract’s up in nine.” Without taking his eyes from mine, Rockart removed a yellow envelope from a drawer and slid it across the desk. “You saved this company the hundred thousand dollars it would’ve cost me to buy out his contract,” he stated. “We take care of employees who help the company.”

  I resolutely reached across the desk, took the envelope, and pocketed it. Then we stood and shook hands. My grip matched the firmness of Rockart’s.

  As I drifted through the outer hallway, I thought about the first time I had heard the term juice money when B.J. and I had cut ourselves for an extra fifty bucks. What could this be considered? I hadn’t just pretended to put someone out; I had really done it. Blood money, I mouthed to my reflection in a slanted mirror stationed just before the elevators. A young man stared back at me, a young man with a bonus in his pocket (ten thousand dollars in hundreds, I would discover back at my hotel room). A young man who had no need to touch his own reflection. So be it.

  I did what I had to do, and I will continue to do so.

  I felt the envelope tucked securely inside my jacket pocket, an excited buzz climbing into my temples. I was ready to ascend this very unique corporate ladder, where at the top waited not only the WWO World Heavyweight Championship but millions of dollars.

  The timing was perfect; I was due to start a series of matches with Ricky “The Billion Dollar Baby” Witherspoon the night after next.

  9

  RICH MAN NOW

  At ringside they are all on their feet. The only security here is provided by the waist-high metal barriers and two security guards seated at either end of the ring. Even the fans wearing T-shirts that bear the champion’s name and logo reach out to try and touch me.