The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  “No,” I said. “Just the one.”

  “Huh,” the mark said. “Couldn’ta been a Don Owen guy. Musta been someone you corralled outside the territory.”

  “Met in Los Angeles, matter of fact.”

  “No hints, no hints. Wasn’t a tag team, was it? Wasn’t, maybe, Psyche and Fathom?”

  “Look,” I said, “there’s no shame in not remembering,” though of course that was a lie. What greater shame was there in the world?

  “Los Angeles, huh? Musta been Chavo, or Tolos, or, hell, I wouldn’t be struggling if the guy’da been a star like that, I suppose. Go on and tell me,” he said. “It’ll drive me crazy now if I don’t hear you say the guy’s name.”

  That was when I agreed to relieve his pain if he bought one hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.

  “The Brow Beater,” I said, counting the money and then studying the mark’s eyes for what wasn’t there, the shine of recognition. I tried all the gimmicks Avo Gregoryan ever wrestled under, but the mark didn’t know those, either. He didn’t know The Ugliest of God’s Creations, or The Biggest of God’s Creations, or The Meanest of God’s Creations. He didn’t know The Unique Unibrow, or The Brow Bruiser, or, simply, The Brow. He didn’t know Harry Knuckles, Harry Krishna, or Hairy Harry, and he didn’t know The Shah, The Ra, or The Beast from the Middle East. He didn’t know Gregor the Ogre, Killer Kebob, or Bravo Avo. He didn’t even blink at King Kong of the Caucasus. He didn’t remember Avo at all.

  “What happened to him?” the mark finally asked.

  “No one knows,” I said. “We were just about to make real money, and he—poof, straightaway—disappeared.”

  And so it was in this state of mind—beleaguered and involuntarily reflective—that I received, just last weekend, a phone call from my old associate, the vulgarian Johnny Trumpet, asking me to go back on the road.

  “I hear you’ve been poking around about the old days,” he said, “and it got me reminiscing, too, especially about that favor I never called in.”

  If he’d phoned at any other time in my life, I would’ve hung up and ignored him forever. I said, “What do you want from me, Trumpet?”

  “Your cheeriness continues to dazzle. You do know that the business is booming, right? Hogan and Warrior up in New York, trickling down the golden age of our sport? Even the yokels I’m working for—who sing fuckin’ homilies about the territory days—even they have to admit the new monopoly’s been good for wrestling. What I’m saying is I’m calling in a favor that’s actually going to end up costing me money. I’m calling in a favor that’ll actually get you paid, you understand, because I know you, I trust you, I don’t want to rub your dick under a bridge or anything, but I like you, and I’m financially unwise and exceedingly generous, and besides, I’m willing to buy anecdotes like these to be used by my future biographers, all right?”

  “Get on with the favor itself,” I said.

  “So I’ve got a bunch of tongue-tied motherfuckers down here in the California desert who could use you as a mouthpiece. I thought California would be smarter than Kentucky, but I find myself in confederado territory, all cowboys and Indians, both of which have to formulate and remember what the English fuckin’ language sounds like before saying a goddamn word. You can practically see them diagramming sentences in their heads as they speak. Right now I told ’em all just to grunt—at least that has feeling. I still got athletes to book, though, and if you can get ’em talking all right, they might be able to draw real money. I need you here Thursday.”

  “This Thursday? You’ll send me a plane ticket?”

  “That’s the favor part of it, motherfucker. The territories are dead. Our travel budget is zero. All our work’s done in-studio, straight to VHS. That old Catalina still running?”

  “Traded it in for a truck years ago.”

  “Good, so you’ll make it. What I can offer is a place to sleep when you get here. I got a bungalow out in the desert with a mustard-colored veranda. Brand-new cedar decking, really a beautiful job.”

  “Thursday? You know tomorrow morning is Tuesday, yeah? From where I stand, I’ve got about a twenty-hour drive, no stopping.”

  “Don’t stop, then, and you’ll be here a whole day early. Besides, you miss the road, I bet.”

  “I really don’t,” I said.

  “I’m sure it misses you.”

  And so here I am, steeling myself against the undoing of all my best forgetting. Tuesday morning, I left about as early as a man my age can leave a place he calls home, just before the light flared up in the east. A hard rain had started in the night, and I swaddled Fuji, the only cat I hadn’t sold or given away, out to the Ranger under my coat. The truck rumbled. The wipers waved goodbye to the barn house. We backed up and turned our wheels and drove.

  Almost immediately on the slick Washington lanes, I remembered an afternoon downpour in Alabama. The deluge was so biblical we had to pull over to wait it out. This was in 1979, a full decade ago. I was surprised to see The Brow Beater get out of the car, all six feet six of him, bald-headed and unibrowed, wearing nothing but a Gold’s Gym tank top and a pair of track shorts that, on him, looked like a napkin auditioning for the role of a tablecloth. I watched from the dry safety of the car as it thundered in Tuskegee. When he crunched back in beside me, drenched, The Brow Beater said the storm reminded him of home, of the green hills of Armenia, where the rain fell so thick it felt feathered.

  In the two years I spent with him, that was about as much as he ever said about home. Much more interesting to him was the question of America, of Americans. Again and again I told him he was in luck: there was no better way to get to know his new country than through professional wrestling. People would claim baseball or football, I explained, but our sport was the true American pastime.

  He winked his Soviet eye and said, “Why, bro? Because it’s an elaborate fiction staged as honest competition?”

  “Don’t be cynical,” I said. I put it to him this way: What was the American Dream if not the ability to trade gimmick after gimmick until you got one over? Life as a citizen of this country was an “I Quit” match, I said. The only way to lose was to give up.

  He pawed his heart and belted the national anthem.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” I said, “but I’m going to turn you into a patriot yet, big fella.”

  The truth was I hadn’t talked that way about my country since before my brother had set sail for Korea. But that was one of the effects The Brow Beater had on me. His company somehow got me excavating versions of myself I’d forgotten I once believed in. The question of whether or not he found my refurbished patriotism convincing, I don’t know. But he laughed a lot, more and more often the longer we spent on the road, which boded well. Maybe it was different in the Soviet Union, but in America it was easier to believe someone if you found him entertaining. That could be dangerous in the wrong hands, but it’s a lesson I’ve been glad to know. With The Brow Beater, I could tell when he believed me because he had this wheezing glee about him, and sometimes he’d cap my skull with his enormous mitts and befoul my trademark hair. I was his manager, already past fifty, and he was just this big foreign boy, twenty-three, I guess, greener than the hills where he came from, stashing all the money we made together in a cheap red fanny pack manufactured for tourists. He never let that fanny pack out of sight (it became a trademark of mine, wearing it at ringside as he wrestled). There in the squared circle—brow down, arms outstretched and wide as history—he’d look down at me to make sure I hadn’t lost the damn thing from around my waist. When he disappeared, he’d spent the money but left that red fanny pack in my truck, where it still remains, cash replaced with knickknacks and little nothings he must’ve collected from around the country.

  There it is, nestled beside my cat on our trip south to Johnny Trumpet’s bungalow, where I’ll finally repay the favor I owe. In the meantime, I ask Fuji to help me keep my focus on the task at hand, but he rolls onto his side, facing the other w
ay. He’s not ignoring me but paying attention to something else, already under the spell of the road.

  3

  Kirovakan, Soviet Armenia, 1971

  Despite what she sometimes remembered, Mina didn’t grow up with Avo, not at first. At first she lived with her family on the ground floor of the tallest building in the city, while Ruben, the only other backgammon student invited to the grandmaster’s home after practice, lived with his parents in a rain-soaked village in the surrounding hills. For a long time that was it, despite what she sometimes remembered. Mina in the city, and her rival, rain-soaked, in the nearby hills.

  It wasn’t until Mina and Ruben were fifteen—already grown, really—that Avo arrived, bigger already than every man in the train station. That was in the winter of 1971. Earlier that morning Avo had shaken his uncle’s hand and boarded a train in Leninakan heading east. The uncle, Avo told Mina later, smelled so strongly of bulgur that the train carried his wheaty scent at least through Spitak. He was the same uncle who’d told Avo at the citywide dedication service a few months earlier that Avo should be proud of the way his parents had died. “You know our people,” the uncle had said, laughing. “We have a long tradition of dying in big group catastrophes. A factory fire? Take pride in that, son—at least your folks died like real Armenians.”

  “Sure,” Avo had said, watching but not hearing the chairperson of the Executive Committee of Leninakan deliver his speech at the podium. The freezing wind screeched louder than the microphone, and it carried the smoke of a hundred cigarettes into Avo’s nose. When he sneezed, his uncle raised a handkerchief to his towering nephew like a flag up a pole. He was right to make a joke of the whole ordeal—Avo’s parents were only two of fifty-nine casualties, after all. It was selfish to focus on individual grief in circumstances like those, to confuse a national tragedy for a personal one. In Avo’s defense, it was almost impossible to tell the difference sometimes, especially if he stayed in Leninakan and moved in with his uncle, as was the plan. It would be easier to split the two, he hoped, in a place where no one knew his past, in a city of strangers.

  “How far away is far enough?” his uncle asked a few nights later, after finding Avo skipping sleep to study a map.

  To his amazement, Avo learned he had family in places as far-flung as Lebanon and Syria and Iran. He even had a third cousin once removed living in a place called Fresno, USA. Any of those places would work, he told his uncle, but could they first try the family in Fresno, USA?

  His uncle spent long weeks writing letters and making long-distance phone calls with a lurching operator acting as a third rail on the line. But the results were dim. Most families couldn’t afford to bring Avo in, and others never even responded. Finally, a cousin of a cousin, the mother of a boy of fifteen—same as Avo—offered her home enthusiastically. It was as if, Avo’s uncle said, “she’d always wanted another son.”

  “Where is she?” Avo asked. “Beirut? Paris? Fresno, USA?”

  “A little closer than that,” his uncle said, beating the dust out of his hat.

  And so Avo boarded the train in Leninakan swathed in the pearly scent of bulgur, leaving home on a meager one-hour ride to a smaller, neighboring city. To him, Kirovakan was known only for its green hills and its overly sensitive and gullible people. “Here,” his uncle had told him in Leninakan, “every joke has a punchline. There, an explanation.” Still, technically speaking, Kirovakan was somewhere else, and Avo was grateful to the men who’d laid down these tracks. He’d shaken his uncle’s hand and boarded the train as if he were one of them—a grown man—as if he were leaving not only a place but a time in his life.

  As soon as the train slowed into the station, extended families of clouds gathered in the sky and burst forth into rain. A skinny ticket officer threaded down the aisles, announcing the fact of their arrival—“Kirovakan!”—without the sweet pretense of a welcome.

  “Let me help,” Avo told the small woman who’d come to get him at the station, and he took the umbrella from her and lifted it high above them both. “Cover him, too,” she said, and pointed to a little bespectacled boy tagging along behind her. Avo had been told she had a son his age, but this couldn’t be him. Avo had reached his father’s height at age twelve, and was used to being larger than his classmates, but this boy—a relative, no less, however distant—was barely the size of a girl. And he looked bitter about it—the scowl he wore beneath the large frames of his glasses gave him the look of an old man cursed to live in a child’s body, and Avo felt a sudden need to turn back toward the train and ask his uncle to forget his plan about leaving. Instead, the little bitter kid stuck up his hand for a gentleman’s shake, and Avo took it gingerly. This was the boy his age he’d been promised. This was Ruben.

  It was some time before Mina met Avo herself, but she heard about this first meeting at backgammon practice. Along with Mina, Ruben was the top student of a beloved grandmaster named Tigran. In addition to their daily morning lessons before school, the two students spent time at Tigran’s home for dinner and practice three nights a week. They were the only two students invited to his home, and for many years Mina never saw Ruben without Tigran’s supervision, never heard a word from Ruben that wasn’t spoken over the painted fangs of a backgammon board. But when Avo arrived, things changed.

  Early that first year in Kirovakan, Avo’s new life at home in the village above the city was peaceful and easy. School hadn’t started, and the other families were kind and welcoming, and the rain fell constantly, turning the glass in the windows fogged as a dream, and the sound of the rain pelting the roof calmed and comforted him at night, and he slept as well as he’d ever slept. Ruben’s father went around the house calling Avo a specimen, applauding him for his past junior wrestling achievements, and gawking at him while he ate. More than once Avo noticed the man comparing him to his own son, whose meat had been pulled from the bone by his mother before serving, and whose fingernails she clipped with a tender precision. Avo enjoyed the surrogate father’s pride, even as it came at Ruben’s expense, and he relished his seeming inability to do any wrong in the house. He was even free to browse the collection of books Ruben’s father kept on a high lacquered shelf. Ruben had taken the large history textbooks to bed, so Avo was left with only the slimmest volumes. He stretched on a blanket on the floor beside Ruben’s bed and stayed up listening to the rain, reading those impossibly skinny books. They were all filled with poems. Pushkin, Nekrasov, Mandelstam—all in Russian, with handwritten Armenian translations in the margins. Avo was glad not to find Tumanyan among them, as if finding the one poet his parents could name would have turned him away from the bookshelf altogether. These other poets wrote in another language, and Avo had to turn the books this way and that so he could read every slanting line of translation. He took pride in decoding and understanding each word individually. Still, he never came away with a whole, and he feared the possibility that Ruben might look down at him from the bed one night over the spine of one of his giant histories and ask, out of the blue, what those little books of his were about.

  In fact, Ruben hardly ever asked Avo a question at all, which was fine by Avo because it meant they naturally avoided talking about the death of his parents. The boiler explosion and the resulting fire—the 1971 Leninakan Textile Meltdown—must have made the news in Kirovakan, and so, in a way, his angle on the story would’ve felt redundant. Instead, whatever stilted conversations they had in those early days consisted mainly of Avo asking questions of Ruben, and Ruben bringing those questions back to one of his three main interests: backgammon, history, or the possibilities of an afterlife. Of the three, backgammon seemed to Avo the least grim, so he tried as often as possible to steer the conversation in its direction.

  “It’s the greatest sport there is,” Ruben once told him, adjusting his glasses over the board he’d pulled out from under his bed. “Unlike chess, which is strictly strategy, and unlike dice, which is pure luck, backgammon combines both skill and circumstance, and
in this way it’s the sport that most resembles life.”

  “You come up with that yourself?” Avo asked, and just from Ruben’s hesitation he could tell the answer was no. The grandmaster, Tigran, had come up with it.

  “But I agree wholeheartedly,” Ruben added, as if the ability to recognize genius were genius itself.

  For fear of switching topics to Ruben’s other two interests, Avo didn’t press the issue. He didn’t even contest the idea that backgammon was a sport. He just kept listening to his cousin’s cousin explain the rules, dice as big as walnuts in his tiny, boyish hands.

  Exactly in the middle of his first summer in Kirovakan, Avo woke to the sound of a plate shattering in the next room, followed by a terrible yell. Ruben’s parents were fighting. Avo sat up and checked the bed above him, but Ruben went on sleeping. Or pretending to sleep.

  Once the first fight broke out, it became unusual to go two nights in a row with peace.

  Ruben’s father, who once called Avo his son, now grumbled between meals, between drinks. How could his wife have agreed to this arrangement? Taking in another boy, especially one who occupied so much space, who gobbled up more food than the rest of the family combined? Ruben’s mother would hush and then scold and then beg him to keep his voice down, warning that Avo might hear. But of course Avo had already heard, and after a few weeks during which Ruben’s father practically drew a family tree to litigate how Avo was his wife’s burden and not his, Avo reached up to nudge Ruben awake and said, “It’s good news, in a way. I don’t know what I did, but I got your father to stop liking me more than he likes you.”

  Ruben turned on his side to face him. “You have nothing to do with it,” he said. He didn’t get up, but he reached for his glasses and held them to his face. “They stopped sending him work. Textbooks to translate. He thinks it’s because of a sentence his editor cut from one of his histories, a line about American aid after the genocide. But he drinks, he misses deadlines. Everyone knows it.”