by Jason Ridler
Laughter tumbled out of me. I couldn’t stop it. It rumbled and rolled and tickled my ribs and grabbed my guts and shook me like a pox fever as I tried to grasp my breath, but it was useless. Wave after wave of ridiculousness crashed into my funny bone until I was rolling on the ground, in the dark, dressed like a homeless superhero amid the piss, blood, and sweat, and all the while a man who saved my life was in a coma and would be soon be dead without knowing I’d caught the sons of bitches who had killed him. A debt to a dead man is a lifelong mission of suffering, and Cactus was a joyless fellow who hated my card tricks and patter as much as he hated how I cleaned my burp gun, a man whose courage had torn me from death’s maw, a man whose only hope for a peaceful afterlife was me—me, convulsing on the floor with unstoppable laughter.
The door opened.
“That’s it, you son of a bitch!”
The lights flashed on, then it was over. I laughed as they tore my arms and legs and neck, a cavalcade of holds from faceless monsters who thought I was gloating over ruining a man’s life, ripping me in ways almost as bad as Edgar’s training, but no man on two legs without a dirt soul could unleash that kind of hell on another human. Not that it mattered one iota, as they made sure I knew these receipts were for fucking with Kodiak, messing with family, screwing one of the boys—and all hope and sanity of convincing them otherwise had flown out the cuckoo’s nest. The pain was like a buzzer on a game show and all of my answers were wrong.
“I’m sorry!”
Neeeh!
“He went batshit!” Neeeeh!
“I just wanted to help!”
NEEEEEEEEH!
It didn’t help that I was laughing and screaming in the exact same tone of voice. Someone whispered Shemp’s name and I dropped to my knees, streams of blood running like a busted faucet from my nose, turning my chest crimson.
“Uncle,” I said with two fat lips that misted the air pink. “Uncle!”
A knock at the door.
I barely got to a standing position before my ankles and wrists, sore from being nearly torn apart a moment ago, began to throb. They were starting to swell and discolor. Hunched over, I opened the door, and smelled the gag before I saw it.
There was my gym bag, mouth open like a torture victim, and resting within was about five pounds of shit sprinkled with liters of piss.
Here was the icing. Beating me was just the cake.
I reached underneath the suit and pulled out the one thing they didn’t damage.
In my hand was the mask of the Assassinator. I had to imitate a dead man to make the gladiators of pretend tell the truth about the drug that was killing their kin and my friend.
Holding the mask, the laughter finally died.
28
ICARUS’S BLOODSTAINED BLACK-AND-WHITE TIGHTS and blue boots had to go, but with Jack’s costume ruined by wrestlers’ excrement, I needed new attire. Poking around the dressing room uncovered some tights and trunks in a tasteful solid black. Didn’t equal the gold-and-silver glitz of Jack’s mask, but they say you can’t go wrong with basic black. The black boots I found actually fit better than the blue ones and didn’t smell half as bad.
After donning the new duds, I sat across from the door—lights on, mask tight—and listened for the approach of another attack while my body tried to mend my tattered fleshly coat of many bruises, welts, and one or two bites. But the goon squad must have been ordered to go easy on the mark, because I saw none of the grapplers even so much as peek around the door. Not even the main attractions, Bikini and Dynamite. Wherever they were, they had no more to do with the riffraff or the masked man. After a half-hour, I was able to grab my nose and grip it shut to stop the bright red puddle from growing at my feet.
“James?”
My hand dropped.
“That’s . . .you? In the mask?”
I nodded.
Herc was at the door, pale as moonlight on milk. “Oh god, they did this to you?” He craned his head to look down the hall, color returning to his skin. “When I find out which of those son of a bitch-bitches did this I will stretch them like a torture rack and feed their bones to my mutt.”
He ducked back inside. “I should have been here.”
I waved away his guilty conscience. “Boss had something on you. I get it. Plus, I kinda deserve it.”
“No one deserves a schmoz in the dressing room. Chicken-shits should have gone at you one at a time.”
“They don’t like to lose.”
He sat next to me, and I was itching to know just what Shemp had on my friend, but alone time in the backstage of any performance is a rare and I didn’t want to bother with carny slang. “The guy who is pushing drugs. Mick Butler. You know him.”
“Yes. Drugged-out mustache and skinny bones.”
“Tell me everything.”
“He started showing up six months ago. Hangs with the dumb bells.” I assumed that meant the weight lifters who were growing in number within the ranks of the wrestling world. “I know he hung at the gym. Those guys, James, they’re not real culturists. They cheat with drugs. They pop the pills. They inject stuff like dopers. Or smoke it like hippies.” Smoke? Kodiak had gone for a smoke. I wouldn’t put it past folks in this trade to use their talent like guinea pigs. Hell, they worked them like dogs and drove them like horses, why not lab rats? “The kind of growth that takes years, especially in pectorals and lats, by god, it was growing overnight. Guys who couldn’t press their shoe size were now shaking the weight benches and demanding more.” He shook his head. “And in the ring? Lazy, dangerous. Tossing each other around without a care. No idea about holds or how to take bumps. Half the young guys are told to bow before Bikini because Shemp thinks he’s the future.”
“And he’s one of Butler’s boys.”
Herc leaned forward, cupping his hands. “He was a good kid. Dedicated. Did what I told him and saw results, but, James, this generation wants everything fast, everything now, and they don’t care how they get it. Pills. Smoke. Needles. Probably have suppositories.”
I chuckled. “Where did Butler come from?”
Herc shrugged. “Don’t know. But I bet Bikini knows. Number one customer. They probably have each other on the Rolodex.”
“Shemp?”
Herc turned to me. “Yeah. Nothing happens here without him. And I think he’s made some kind of deal with that roach.”
“Deal?”
“Most of these guys are new. Too many injuries. More and more don’t know how to shoot. Which means they’re dead in the hands of strong buffoons like Bikini. They want to be Bikini. The next Bikini. And I think they want whatever it is Bikini is taking.”
“Jack Lumber was one of them?”
Herc nodded. “He didn’t even need them. He could scrap, go long; his cardiovascular system was so strong he could have been the next Verne Gagne, but without a shitdirt personality.” His hands shook. “Instead he’s dead. And I know why.”
“Tell me.”
“Ever hear of steroids?”
“Sure. Doctors use them to help you heal after surgery. Took them after Korea while I still had near-torn knee.”
“They’ve been around even longer in gyms and bodybuilding. They’re made by big chemical companies. Made from all sorts of things, but mostly testosterone, as if these creatures need more reason to lose their marbles.” He leaned back. “But it’s not the anger that’s killing them. It’s not the rage. It’s not the giant arms. James, it’s their hearts.
“These drugs help all muscles grow. Not just biceps. Not just thighs or glutes. The heart is a muscle, the king muscle, and I think these drugs are making them grow too fast. A friend of mine, a strongman from Lithuania named Zlados the Mighty, he had a stipulation that when he died his body would be donated to a medical school. The miserable Balt made me the executor of his will, and so I had the joy of signing off on his body being torn apart and having them send the reports. I knew he’d been injecting things, the sap, but I had no idea the cost.”
He looked at me and I stopped breathing so hard through the mask. His gaze was that cold.
“It was black. Covered in scar tissue. A human heart made of scars, all to win some trophies and die before you turn fifty.” He spat, as only the Greeks can, with the accuracy of a career slob and the authority of an Athenian general.
“Heart attack,” I said. “That’s what killed Jack Lumber.”
“No man in that kind of shape should die at his age,” Herc said, “unless his heart was made of scars.”
Black Lotus was now the steroid of choice for the lab rats of the Olympic. And this new version of the ancient drug had to be refined and manufactured by someone. Someone in the pharmaceutical industry. And who was one of our guests at the Legion Hall? Alan Carruthers, of C&C Pharmaceuticals. If he was the target, the attack was set up by who? Rivals in the big business of solving all problems with a pop of a pill and swig from a sifter? But the agents of destruction had been on the drug. Maybe a black-market lab of Black Lotus? Damn. I hated when clues just made things more complicated. I needed more information.
Shemp’s waddle-steps echoed in the hall. He entered, that last twenty in his mitts, his fat face smiling. “Showtime, masked man. Go make me some money.”
Herc and I stood together and I blenched from all the ouch and ack and barf that my body was sharing with me.
“Where are the main attractions?” I said. “No one told me the match.”
“You’re spry,” he said, as I walked toward him. “They’ll call it in the ring. Just listen, do what they say, and don’t you dare go off book again. Whatever Kodiak’s problem, we can’t have a repeat performance. Get into the launch position and wait for the Assassinator’s call.”
Nose to nose, he squeezed the twenty, then thumbed the bill into his palm, snapped his finger. He stretched out his hand to reveal the bill had vanished.
“Wow,” I said. “A promoter who can make money disappear.”
He gripped my collarbone and I could feel the marrow shake. “For my next trick, I’ll make you disappear if you fuck with me again.” He let go, and I dropped to the floor.
Then he turned to make his exit, but he wasn’t as fast he used to be. He never felt my hand dart like a viper’s tongue, two fingers flitting into his sport coat sleeve as his arm swung back.
As soon as Shemp was out the door, Herc helped me up. “You were always full of brine,” he said. “But now, James, you have a death wish.”
I coughed. “Maybe.” Then I lifted my closed fist. I unfurled it to reveal the smooshed twenty Shemp had sleeved with his pretty solid vanishing act. “Or maybe I know opportunity doesn’t knock if you don’t kick her door first. Can you give this to Sam?”
Herc took the bill and shoved it down his shirt. Even Satan himself would think twice of testing the old man’s ability to protect himself. “You know they will try and hurt you. Hurt us.”
We started to walk down the concrete hallway. “Of course. Which is why I need to hurt them first.”
29
ONE MORE WALK DOWN THE AISLE AND THE WORLD would think James Brimstone was a runaway bride.
“Ladies and gentleman. We are at our final match, your evening’s main event!” The crowd was back to piss-warm status and the announcer was trying to ramp them up. “However, there has been a change in the match. Due to severe injury, Kodiak Slim will not be able to compete in tonight’s tag-team extravaganza.”
A dark booooo filled the world. They weren’t indifferent. They were hungry for the kind of real suffering I’d given them in the first match. The hunger for blood and pain that helped stain the sands of gladiatorial arenas, fed the Samurai Ikki-uchi, and the spectators around the world’s fighting pits.
They hungered for blood and horror. And they were going to get it. Just a different flavor.
“Instead, tonight’s match will be a handicap match!”
The audience grumbled approval as I tied my right boot tight, keeping my wallet safe for the beating I was about to lay down.
“Introducing first! He comes from Parts Unknown!” A mild titter. “Weighing in at two hundred and seventy-five pounds.” I thought of Jack’s physique of caked-up muscle on an already-taxed frame and figured the announcer was once again full of shit with reading of the scales. “He is the Master of Disaster, the Monster of Monstrosity, the Human Killing Machine. . . the Assassinatoooor!”
The curtain swayed before me. I cracked my knuckles in each hand, then yanked the curtain open like Batman tossing his cape.
“Flex,” Herc had said to me as we walked to the launch position. “And keep moving. Jack was best known as a skinny baby face who couldn’t sit still, but he was popular because of the muscles he’d injected.”
I did my poor-man’s Charles Atlas routine while spinning 360 degrees on my heel, realizing how puny my natural physique must look to those who were expecting Jack Lumber. Breathing in the crowd’s cheers, I was also smacked with a wave of sickly nostalgia for my last case, where I also ended up in a mask and a pit, on a porno movie set that damn near cost me my life and birthed a demon that would have turned these spectators into an opiate-fed trough of goodies for nightmares yet unborn.
“I love my job!” I screamed, then ran to the ring. I strutted around the floor before reaching for the ropes, the crowd’s mixture of excitement and hunger for something with more blood and guts giving me gooseflesh. They were brooding, angry, and lit—a three-day pimple waiting to pop, but holding their time until the juice was right.
I waved to the deadly granny brigade. “Tonight, I dedicate my victory over two dead men to you two beauties!” Three, two, one—
“Fuck you, faggot,” said the lead one, hatpin in her brutal fingers, but she was smiling. “And make that deviant Bikini kid and his boy-toy pay for their sins!”
How people could hate men or women whose only crime was finding comfort with their own sex was something I never understood, except if it was a form of self-hatred.
So I smiled. “Tell you what, Beautiful. I’ll do it for you, and for all your girlfriends!”
The Century Sam-smoking fellas behind them cackled in delight until the Elder Women’s Auxiliary of Wrestling drew their pins and turned their attention to the lesser chromosome before stabbing the space between them. I waddled around doing triceps flexes until I came upon the glazed and confused countenance of Kevin and his crew. “Wake up, kids! The main event is here!”
Kevin, the only lucid one, smiled. “Good luck topping the first match.”
I gesticulated wildly with histrionic poses. “Those chumps? They’ll only be talking about me in tomorrow’s sports pages.” You know, if local papers actually covered wrestling. “Watch and learn, junior!”
“Our money’s on Bikini and Dynamite!”
I slid through the ropes, reasonably certain that Kevin didn’t know it was me. Which boded well for the con of the match. Either way, with what I had planned for Bikini and Dynamite, this would be my very last match. It would make Kodiak’s jaw look like a skinned knee.
The stains on the canvas were like oil blots on a popcorn bag. A little blood slicked things, but there was no shit-and-ash tang of Black Lotus here. The drug had started and, I expected, would end the night. Herc had come to the ring and pushed me toward the corner, checking my trunks and boots.
“If they turn this work into a shoot,” Herc said, “I’ll tear them five new assholes.”
I nodded, keeping my plan to myself, wondering what the hell I was going to do when Herc saw me turn this work into a shoot. I’d had my fill of assholes.
“And his opponents,” cried the MC.
The whole place lit up as blazing guitars drenched in more fuzz than a shag carpet in a pimp’s five-star penthouse tore through speakers I hadn’t even realized were in the Olympic. I couldn’t tell if it was one of those spooky metal bands like Black Sabbath or Dust or the ridiculously named Grand Funk Railroad, which some of the gang at the Thump & Grind would sometimes b
lare while the girls did a busty routine with a lot of ass and shake, but that didn’t matter. All the kids screamed louder than the disapproving hisses and tsks of their elders.
“From Venice Beach, California!”
I laid my back against the ropes, realizing that Shemp wasn’t a bad promoter. He’d saved this trick for the last, and sure as shit the audience was already forgetting the blood and thunder an hour before.
“Weighing in at three hundred pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal.”
Music. Rock and roll. The dangerous outlaw image. Rock and wrestling were natural bedfellows, and if Shemp could reach the youth through spectacle that spoke to them, wrestling had a future. Which meant guys that didn’t look like their daddy’s wrestlers.
Guys like . . .
“And your Western U.S. Heavyweight Champion of the World . . .”
“Western U.S. world champ?” I said. “As if the world needed another non-sequitur from people it considers illiterate.” Herc shrugged. “All the best names were taken.”
“Bikini Atooooll!”
I walked to the center of the ring and made the gimmie-gimmie motion, half-expecting them to run out like Kodiak did, Black Lotus running through them like high-octane fuel.
While heavy metal thunder turned every kid into a shaggy haired victim of electrocution, heads banging back and forth as the song picked up steam, Bikini’s massive hands parted the curtain, and before I could yell, “Oh shit,” Herc said, “Fuck me.”
Bikini walked slow, a six-foot-six slab of muscle, sweat dripping off him as if he’d just stepped out of a shower. Like me, every muscle was flexing. Unlike me, it looked as if each muscle group had been pumped full of cement. He wasn’t so much bigger than before, just more solid, dense. The slow, careful walk and the slab arms rustling back and forth like the tether from a stray hot-air balloon gave the impression of a man who flicked Buicks into the sky with his fingers.
The crowd adored this god of concrete and deadlifts. This was how cults started, I thought. Charismatic image, confident with indifference. Bikini’s attire had made him the ridicule of the old guard in the back, dressing in a bikini bottom that barely contained his dirty Roscoe. The closer he got, the bigger one part of him flared. Not the trunk-arms or mastodon thighs. Not the bull neck or monster chest. His eyes. Bugged out. Cartoonish. Intense and ridiculous and visible all the way back in the cheap seats.
