The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  Among the sky-rises glaring their gap-toothed windows against the twilit basin, I told Mina how strange I found it to have a woman in the passenger seat. The cognac and the cigarettes were still burning in me, and my face was broken, but I made the effort to speak. Traffic swept all around us on the freeway, but we were moving. Mina was telling me where to go, and I was free as I drove to notice every sun-popped blister of paint in the reflective lane-dashes clipping by, every little shadow of gravel. It was almost paralyzing, noticing so much passing so quickly, and it was during one of these flashing dashes that I realized I’d forgotten Fuji at the jeweler.

  But by then we were already near our destination, far away, in Long Beach. Mina told me to pull into a metered spot outside a florist, where she bought a bouquet of white orchids. “We’re almost there,” she said, handing me the flowers.

  “Thank you,” I said jokingly, but it came out sincere. “They’re beautiful.”

  The next time we got out of the car, we were in the parking lot of an assisted living facility called Home Again.

  Inside, Mina asked the young woman at the front desk for the room number of a person whose name I didn’t recognize, and we were led to the elevator and to the second floor. Everything there smelled severely of lemon-scented cleaners, and the laminated hallway floors gleamed and squeaked under our shoes. I followed Mina into room 242, where the first bed was empty, and where, on the other side of the opened partition, near the window, a second bed lay bent into a forty-degree angle. In it, a woman of immeasurable age was spooning Jell-O against her gums and glaring up at the television set.

  Mina went to her. The old woman was balding in patches, and when she looked at me with an enormous, toothless grin, I excused myself to find a vase for the flowers.

  Out in the hallway, I found a storage closet with some empty mason jars. I took one and filled it with water at a drinking fountain. The flowers were a bit tall for the jar, so I went back down the elevator to the front desk and asked for a pair of scissors.

  The young woman said, “I’m sorry, I’m new here. Are you a Home Again community member?”

  I straightened my ponytail. I said, “You think I’m that old, huh?”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean— Well, it’s just that, well, I can’t give scissors to a Home Again community member. Safety precautions, right? I’m new here, so I just wanted to be extra cautious.”

  “I’m not going to stab a senior citizen,” I said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Oh, I know,” the girl said. “The rule’s in place because of self-harm, actually. With your injuries on your face and neck, well, I thought maybe— Well, I haven’t seen it myself, but there have been instances of self-harm.”

  I lifted the jar of flowers high. I said, “I’m just looking for a stem trim, that’s all.”

  “I hope you’re not offended,” she said. “I actually think your hair is great.”

  I thanked her, even as she insisted on cutting the flowers herself.

  “I am not your brother,” The Brow Beater had said, and the Catalina broke down on our way to the East Coast. We didn’t speak more than a few words at a time. While he paid his half of the check at a diner near Atlanta, I found a phone booth outside and called Johnny Trumpet. I said, “Tell me why you’re looking for The Brow Beater.”

  “I could bullshit you,” he said, “but I won’t. I got a guy looking for him. Little guy in glasses and a suit, seems important. I’d have said IRS or some shit, but then he offered money if I could lead him to your guy.”

  “Money? For Avo?”

  “Illegal shit, sounds like. I don’t think your giant’s as green as we thought he was.”

  “Must be a mistake.”

  “Money’s real either way. Look, I could’ve gone out of my way to find the kid, keep the money for myself. But I know you’ve got love for him, so I thought I’d let you decide whether or not to tip off the guy looking for him.”

  Through the large panes of the diner, I could see The Brow Beater paying his bill. He was shaking hands with the young man behind the register, making him laugh. Everywhere we went, people would stop and ask him how tall he was or if his eyebrow was painted on. And I used to bark at them to leave the big fella alone. But The Brow Beater never got tired of it. He always stopped. He always made people feel good. It was bad for kayfabe, and I told him to cut it out. But he enjoyed it, seeing people, being seen. In a few years’ time, I have no doubt, he could’ve been great. He could’ve been an all-time great.

  When I returned with the jar of flowers to the room, Mina was painting the old woman’s fingernails. I placed the bouquet on the windowsill, and Mina said, “She’s saying you’re very handsome.”

  “Is that so?”

  “She’s not seeing a man in a long, long time.”

  “Or maybe the swelling and bleeding are improvements I should hang on to.”

  When I finally asked who the woman was, Mina told me she was the wife of a former backgammon instructor. I suppose I’d been expecting a closer tie than that, because Mina was quick to add that this woman—the widow of a man called Tigran—was like family, especially since the earthquake.

  Maybe I was getting too comfortable. I said, “Did you lose anyone?”

  Mina blew on the old woman’s fingernails. “Everyone,” she said. “Galust’s mother, my mother, my father, my sister, her husband and children—everyone was living in the same building.” Again she dried the polish with her breath. “The tallest building.”

  The TV was on, and for a long time, I kept my eyes on it. When I looked back at Mina, she’d finished painting the old woman’s nails. The color of the nail polish was the same shade of red as the fanny pack around Mina’s waist. I didn’t realize it until Mina set the bag on the woman’s lap.

  Slowly, Mina removed every arrowhead and shell, every coin and token and stamp, and set them at the foot of the bed. Then she reached into the bag and removed, one by one, the collection of dice.

  The old woman took each die in her palm. Dozens of them. Red and black and white and yellow, pips of every shade. Glass and ivory and jade. More than I’d ever cared to count, more than seemed possible to fit. They tumbled from the bag into her palms, out onto the blanket and then the floor, rattling and rattling until they stopped.

  “I was making a promise to her,” Mina said. “I would find them. But I couldn’t. You had them.”

  The final wrestling match of The Brow Beater’s career took place in front of twenty-two hundred fans in the Greensboro Coliseum Complex Exhibition Building in Greensboro, North Carolina, and ended at nine minutes and thirty-three seconds in a count-out victory over Ty “Bona Fide” Wilmington. The win came largely because of my opportune interference, choking Bona Fide out with my gimmicked halo just as the referee turned his back. Under a torrent of jeers and flying garbage, The Brow Beater lifted me onto his shoulders, and we celebrated all the way down the ramp to the curtain, behind which, after a final bluster of devilishness, we disappeared.

  Afterward, the boys made themselves at home in the hotel bar, and I watched with a bit of surprise and a touch of pride as The Brow Beater held court at the center of the rail. I don’t remember the jokes, but I remember the laughter, the sense I got that The Brow Beater wasn’t the greenest guy in the room anymore. At one point, he saw me watching him from the other end of the bar, and he lifted his vodka, and I lifted my beer. Our hellos.

  And our good nights—because pretty soon after that I was up in our hotel room, way before the party had ended, and lying in bed. Four or five hours must’ve passed before the door came unlocked and a column of light broke into the room. I lay on my side facing the other way, where The Brow Beater’s enormous shadow stamped the wall.

  “Bro,” he whispered. “Bro.”

  But I went on pretending to sleep. All night, I pretended.

  In the morning, he got up before me and started running the shower. Once I knew he was behind the curtain, I steppe
d into the bathroom and said, “Morning.”

  “You disappeared, bro,” he said over the curtain, over the hiss of the water. “You good?”

  “A little sick, I think. Stomach bug.”

  He turned off the water and wrapped himself in a towel. When he was dressed, I asked if he’d do me a favor and run over to pick up some medicine for me at the corner drugstore. “That way,” I said, giving him some cash, “I can shower and be ready to hit the road again when you get back.”

  “Sure,” he said in that way of his, that way that meant certainty. “Sure.”

  Soon he was gone. I tied back my hair. I knew there was someone waiting for him outside the corner drugstore and that I wouldn’t see him again. I washed my face. I packed my suitcase. Only then did I see the red fanny pack beside his bed. Unzipping it, I expected to find all the money he’d saved in our two years on the road. But there was only about three hundred dollars in that bag of his, most of which was filled with the stupid talismans he’d collected, arrowheads and dice and key chains.

  I left the money for the cleaning woman and went to the lobby to check out.

  “And your friend?” said the man at the counter.

  I’d snapped the red bag around my waist, and I couldn’t pull the strap any tighter without ripping it in two. I said, “My brother, believe it or not. We don’t look alike, but, well, in any case, he’s already in the car, waiting for me.”

  On the way back to her apartment, Mina asked if I thought we’d ever find out what had happened to Avo. I told her no, I didn’t think we would.

  Here’s what we did know: Avo returned to Mina in 1983 and told her what he’d gone through to get back home. Torture, hell.

  “He went through all that?” I asked.

  Yes. And still Mina turned him away.

  “Why?” I asked.

  There’d been a lie, she said, that revived a painful incident when they were younger, and she couldn’t imagine circumstances changing enough that she’d want to forgive him. But then everything she couldn’t imagine changing, changed. “I’m in a new country. My husband—his memory is being disappeared. My children are speaking a language I’m not so good using. I’m afraid I’m embarrassing them when I’m taking them to school, talking with other parents. And then in December, the earthquake in Armenia, and I’m feeling it right here, right here. Everything, everyone I left, gone. And so all I’m thinking is what happened to Avo. I’m at library, I’m at city hall, searching. I’m finding your name, and I’m coming to you for help. You’re coming all the way here. But look at us. We’re still not knowing. Was he there during earthquake? Is he buried in rubble? Or is he leaving the country as soon as I tell him to go? Is he alive? If we’re not knowing, can we miss him?”

  “We can miss him,” I said. I had more to say, but I knew I couldn’t speak another word without hurting. “Mina,” I said, close to her in the cab of my truck. We were parked in front of her apartment, where her children were waiting. Stars were invisible but not the moon. “Mina,” I said, and in the gray flood of its light, I asked for her forgiveness.

  24

  Kars, Turkey, 1983

  On the train west from Kirovakan, the conductor waltzed from one car to another until he arrived at Avo’s, humming a tune, checking tickets, making small talk, rambling about the histories of the cities they had left, the cities they were headed to, the places he wished they’d all return. When he arrived at Avo—crunched in a seat at the back of a car designated for luggage—the conductor’s tune spun naturally into a whistle. He said, “Anyone ever ask how you got that scar?”

  “You’d be the first,” Avo said. He reached into the valise he’d taken from the shop in Mersin and emptied all its contents onto the empty seat beside him. He’d kept some Turkish money in Mersin, and the papers Kami had forged for him. He had a pen and a little spiral notebook he’d purchased at the train station, filled with a few mediocre but heartfelt poems. And the train ticket.

  “Leaving Armenia, huh? All the way to Kars, huh? You know they’ll have to check your papers at the border.”

  “I understand, yes. I was hoping to spend some time in Leninakan first. Will the train wait there for a while?”

  “Just three quarters of an hour, I’m afraid.”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  “You can’t be a minute late, you understand? The train won’t wait. You’ll have to buy an entirely new ticket from there if you miss it.”

  “Sure. Sure.”

  “Good, I just want to be certain. I know how big men sometimes believe the rules will bend to suit them. But you seem to have the heart of a much smaller man. I mean that as a compliment.”

  “I’d like to be alone now, thanks.”

  “Certainly. Long journey ahead of you, seems like. Between us fellow Armenians, I must say I don’t know why you’d go to Kars. Like a graveyard, that whole city. I once visited when I first started working this line. Never again will I get off this train in that place. A graveyard, the whole city. I swear, the people there pretend Armenians never existed. It’s quite surreal. You can see that some of the building blocks of post offices and cafés are actually old headstones. Literally stolen from graveyards that no longer exist. I was eating a meal outside a café and I saw it—the faint etchings of an Armenian name and dates. Upside down. Those headstones are just rocks now. I pointed it out to my waiter, and he turned cold. Didn’t even return with the check. I swear, the people are nice until you ask about those stones, those etchings in the stones. Then they shut off, like you’re a phantom they’ve lost the ability to see or hear. Just shut off, that’s what happened to me. I’ll never step foot in that city again. A graveyard, the whole place. Much happier to be on this train. Can’t move without me, so no one can tell me I don’t exist. And yet you’re going there. To Kars, huh?”

  “Not for long,” Avo said, feeling the need to explain. “From there I’m going farther west, and south. To Mersin. And then to America.”

  “Wow, quite the journey. I’ve heard it’s beautiful. Mersin, I mean. The sea and the chapel for Saint Paul. And maybe the Turks there are more honest about the past than they are in Kars. I don’t know. More openhearted?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And America? I’ve heard stories, of course, but never been. Do you know it?”

  Avo took back his ticket and repacked his valise. He was heading to Mersin for a last favor. His papers were only a diplomat’s passport between Turkey and the USSR; in order to fly back to the U.S., he’d need one final forgery from Kami. He said, “Everything you’ve heard is true, everything you’ve heard is false.”

  At the stop in Leninakan, he’d planned to drop in on his old boss from the factory, but the shorter-than-expected delay on the rails didn’t leave enough time to travel across the city and back. So instead of hailing a cab across town, Avo took the short walk down the steps from the train station, down Ghandilyan Street, which he remembered vaguely from his childhood except for the cemetery, which he remembered in great detail, just south of the train station.

  Some of the graves were marked by monuments, enormous headstones engraved with the faces of their treasures and long paragraphs of achievements. But most of the graves were simple flat plaques in the ground, dark absences of grass, maybe the size of glossy magazines. Among these flat stones, in the shadows of marble angels and columns, lay his parents. How much of them? Not much. Charred bodies if bodies at all. He knelt at their headstones, at their names.

  One night at a bar in Ypsilanti, Michigan, he’d broken up a fight. Max Ravage, a fellow wrestler who wore orange face and body paint, had refused to take off the paint before going to the bar. He’d become the butt of the locals’ jokes. He never told Avo his real name, and had grown to believe, as his character did, that the orange paint on his body was the source of his strength. More likely sources—large quantities of cocaine and amphetamines, for instance—failed him that night in Ypsilanti, because as Avo went to help him, Max Ravage
was being ravaged.

  After the bar cleared out, Angel Hair met Avo at the bar, bought him a beer, and issued a warning. “That right there—when a guy loses sight of the line between his real life and the role he’s playing—we call that living the gimmick. Most dangerous thing in the world, my friend, to become a mark for yourself. Don’t let it be you.”

  After boarding the train again, Avo began writing a poem in his notebook. It would be a long poem, he thought, about all the gimmicks he’d tricked himself into living, and all the rest he couldn’t wait to try.

  It seemed impossible that the train would pick up momentum again, but it happened, slowly, heading southwest through the countryside toward the border. There, Avo felt another grinding trundle to a stop. Out the window, he could see parts of the machinery that made up the checkpoint: a barbed wire fence stretching into the horizon; a collection of military vehicles parked at different angles; a few green-capped patrolmen ambling along the tracks. Finally, two of the patrolmen, one led by a leashed dog, came through the train, checking papers.

  Avo emptied his valise a second time, and the dog sniffed its contents.

  The gendarmes—Avo couldn’t help thinking of the patrolmen this way—took turns examining his documents. One of the gendarmes was old, and the other was young. They spoke in Turkish, which Avo had never learned. While the old one had his eyes on the papers, the young one seemed to be sizing Avo up as if estimating his vitals. He seemed nervous, this young, fat Turk, almost charmingly so, like the marks who waited in the parking lots for autographs. The Turk craned to look over the papers in his partner’s hands. Avo caught a flash, beneath the jacket flap at the patrolman’s hip, of his gun.

  At last the old gendarme returned his papers and led the dog away. The young one lingered for an awkward beat, which no one but Avo seemed to notice. Then the gendarmes moved on to the next car, and Avo put away his things again, thanking Kami under his breath for the quality of her forgeries.