The Gimmicks Read online

  All of life is an accident, or it isn’t, I’ll never know.

  I was parked one block away from the dive bar where, in 1978, I’d discovered The Brow Beater. I was one block away from The Gutshot.

  Back in the spring of 1978, my top guy, Mickey “Makeshift” Starr, and I—for reasons I won’t get into here—ended our working relationship. For several weeks I floundered where he left me, in a barbarous neighborhood of North Hollywood, plotting my next move. Getting old and nursing a half-healed neck that had turned me from wrestler to manager a decade and more earlier, I was left with two choices: retire from the wrestling business altogether, or find a replacement for Makeshift who could lead me back to money. I gave myself until the end of the month to decide.

  By the final week of my self-imposed deadline, I’d given up on finding a new top wrestler and started searching instead for the city’s most generous bartender. That’s how I found The Gutshot and the bartender there, named Longtin. Although he’d gone gray early in life, he was my junior by many years and had just become a father for the first time. He’d quit drinking since the birth of his baby daughter, and seemed to pour his would-be share of bourbon into my cup, right on top of mine.

  On the last night of my deadline to choose between the wrestling business and home, Longtin opened himself a can of pineapple juice and clinked my bourbon to salute the decision I’d made: I was moving to Tucson, I said, to be near my ex-wife. All of Longtin’s talk about his baby daughter had inspired me. There I could forget about the mess I’d made by marrying my ex-wife in the first place, and remember that she was the closest thing I had left to family. Already she and I were past fifty, and maybe she’d started a family of her own, I didn’t know, but I remember thinking: It’s not too late to be kind to her.

  So it happened that I’d just made my declaration to quit the wrestling business and was hoisting my glass to Longtin’s can of pineapple juice like some gesture of numinous fortune when I first laid eyes on him, The Brow Beater. I won’t deny that what initially caught my eye was his size, and I won’t deny, either, that my reconciliatory spirit must’ve affected what I saw when I looked.

  Two enormous shoulders had established themselves like kingly epaulettes on either side of his wide neck. Even the dishwashing apron knotted stringently around his waist couldn’t disguise the strength in his body, which didn’t appear collected so much as kinetic. When he yawned, he seemed to do so from his innermost core; he probably sneezed and farted, I thought, with a firm efficiency. Finally, he turned just so, and I recognized what would become his signature feature: one solitary eyebrow, black and dense, which signaled to me almost immediately the names of several auspicious gimmicks. It was impossible to say if the two eyes flashing underneath that unibrow brought to mind a pair of snakes coiling in the weeds or a pair of gems concealed in the rough, but that confusion only worked to further enthrall me. Whether they were the eyes of terror or the eyes of grace, they were money eyes, theater eyes, eyes with the power and range to sell.

  His size and look caught my attention, to be sure, but what kept me staring was something altogether else: the strange work he was at, and the almost loving focus with which he was doing the job. He was reaching up with a piece of chalk to the chalkboard set high behind the bar, up near where the expensive bottles lived, and he was drawing little wayward shapes. The bar was closing—I was among the last at the rail—and I could hear him, this giant on his toes, humming a tune while he looped together whatever lines he was making. Finally, I said to Longtin, who had his back to me as he balanced the register, “Are you aware of the large, ugly fellow tagging your beer list?”

  “He’s kind of like a foreign-exchange worker,” Longtin said. “We call him Bravo.”

  I looked back to the chalkboard, but the big man was gone. Where he’d been drawing, I saw a string of shapes that must’ve been letters in his alphabet, must’ve been words. Later, when I told The Brow Beater the story, he said he didn’t remember what he’d been writing. We’d been on the road for a few months by then, and I think he trusted me enough to tell me the truth. “Maybe I was translating the names of the beers,” he said, and laughed. I said, “The words looked more meaningful than that,” and he said, “That’s Armenian, bro. Every curse looks like a prayer.”

  That night at The Gutshot, I knew right away that he was my ticket back to the wrestling business. So as soon as he bulldozed back through the service doors, wielding a mop, I sprang off my barstool and tied back my hair.

  “Hey there,” I said as he rolled the bucket past me.

  “We’re closing, bro,” he said without stopping.

  “I’ve been told I should introduce myself to you,” I said, shadowing him, and only then did I take the time to consider who it was I might appear to be introducing. To him, I probably looked—middle-aged and tanned, wearing my bleached-blond hair down to my busted C7 vertebra, a bowling shirt unbuttoned to my heart—something like a Hollywood phony. I adjusted my tone to seem realer than that. “Usually I introduce myself as Angel Hair,” I said, feathering the evidence, “but I’m also just, you know, a regular fellow.” I couldn’t tell if he understood a word I’d said. I threw out a hand for a shake. “Terry Krill.”

  One of his monstrous hands flew off the mop to shake mine, and then he went back to work.

  From behind the bar, Longtin called out, “Just about time to go, Terry.”

  I ignored him and got to asking Avo a hundred questions. Nothing stopped his mopping until I asked if he’d ever considered wrestling before. He said he’d been a Junior Olympic wrestler once, and I beckoned him low so I could whisper into his ear, “That’s great, kid, but I don’t mean shoot wrestling. What I mean is professional wrestling. You know the difference?”

  He didn’t, and so, in what amounted to one of my most blatant betrayals of kayfabe, I described it to him this way: it was entertainment, the kind of wrestling I was recruiting him to do, and the only two things that were real in pro wrestling were the money and the miles. Leaping Lou Albano had taught me that, I said, but the name meant nothing to Avo.

  I asked him how much Longtin was paying him, and went on to paint extravagant dreamscapes involving the money we might be able to make together. But he just kept repeating that the bar was closing, and kept on mopping, right up to the toes of my loafers.

  A long time passed before I realized how little the money weighed into his decision. Back then I kept harping on it, the money. Maybe I would’ve dug up other promises—fame, girls, or the singularly heady phenomenon of manipulating a crowd of strangers to adore or despise you—but before I could, Longtin interjected again from behind the bar: “What happened to driving off to Tucson?”

  And that’s what did it. That’s what got Avo interested. “You’re leaving Los Angeles?” he asked.

  There were those eyes of bothness, shining different.

  “The job I’m recruiting you to do,” I said, “would have you living out of hotel rooms and cars for years on end.”

  He wanted to know how soon we’d hit the road, and that’s when I knew I had him.

  “First thing in the morning,” I said, rattling my car keys in my pocket, and when he said he’d need until noon, I pretended it was a real burden before agreeing. Sure enough, right at noon the next day, he walked up to my Pontiac Catalina with that red fanny pack around his waist. A fresh welt bled out on his forehead, and I said, “Did Longtin punch you on the way out?” I didn’t blame Longtin, me taking his big barback out from under him like that. But I’m glad I did. I was, anyway, for a good while, glad I did.

  To return to The Gutshot after so many years felt like a trespass, but at least I was the one trespassing into the memory rather than the other way around. Since I expected never to be in the neighborhood again, I figured I’d go inside and see if Longtin remembered me as well as I remembered him. His daughter, Harper, would be twelve now. Who knows why certain names stick. The Gutshot, and Longtin, and Longtin’s baby girl—he
r name was Harper.

  Having left Fuji in the truck with a window cracked open and a can of tuna I’d pocketed at a gas station in Buttonwillow, I followed the familiar alleyway to the five steps descending into the yellow door of The Gutshot.

  The bar—portraits of the Tombstone Gunmen hanging at odd angles on every wall—hadn’t changed much in the years since my last visit, but right away I noticed the major difference: the young man behind the bar—pink-haired and pierced—was certainly not my old friend Longtin.

  I took a stool at one end of the rail, opposite a group of four kids who were clearly—metal in their skin—friends of the bartender’s. I asked for a minute to consider my order and a cup of coffee creamer in the meantime, which I knew Fuji would enjoy.

  “Longtin?” said the punk before I was even through asking. “Never heard of him. You gonna order a drink?”

  I’m old, but I’d like to think I still intimidate people. I tie my hair back to showcase the main feature of my face, the glossy vertical runs of scar tissue on my forehead, which I got blading myself year after year in the wrestling ring. The art on my forearm—a pair of crossing cannons stamped onto me in the navy in 1946, when I crossed the equator for the first time—has been misconstrued as a prison tattoo, though I’ve never been locked up, not in that sense, anyway. What I’m saying is, for the past thirty years, shoppers in the supermarket have leaped out of their way to avoid the aisle I’m in, but this new generation, these punks, they aren’t intimidated in the least. They seem to recognize me as one of their own.

  I said, “My ex-wife once told me, if you don’t have enough money to tip, you don’t have enough money to drink. So, no, I was just passing through. Good night.”

  The punk filled a mug under the tap and told me to sit down a minute. He was a good kid, and I told him so. I could hear in his voice that all those piercings and dyes, all that traveling in gaggles and packs, were balms for some great fear in him. In that way, I suppose, we were of the same ilk. I thanked him and pulled the beer to my lips.

  The punk left me to drink alone. I was halfway through when he returned from his pack of friends at the end of the rail and asked me, “You said his name was what, now?” Then he called to the back, “Raul—come out here!”

  From the kitchen came a man wearing what might have been the same beige apron The Brow Beater was wearing when I’d first seen him eleven years ago. This new donner of the apron, Raul, wore the strings more loosely around his waist and neck and hardly lifted his feet when he walked. “Huh?”

  “This old ponytail is looking for someone who used to work here.”

  “Longtin,” I said.

  Raul scratched at his goatee and said, “Damn, I haven’t heard that name in a minute. I worked with him a long time back.”

  “When did he leave?” I asked.

  “Shit, like ten or eleven years ago?” Raul untied his apron, coming over to the bar. “Our girls used to play together with the jukebox.” He draped his apron over the stool next to mine and told the bartender to pour a beer for him and another for me.

  “I can’t tip,” I said, but Raul waved that away like smoke.

  “So there’s a story with Longtin,” he said after a gulp, mustache all foam and drip. “He was opening the bar one afternoon, and this guy knocks at the door.”

  “Oh,” the bartender said. “This is the guy who got held up at gunpoint and quit the next day?”

  “Kind of,” Raul said. “Only it wasn’t a holdup. The dude with the gun didn’t take any money, nothing like that. In fact, the dude looked rich. He was a small guy but dressed real nice. Suited and booted, the whole nine.”

  “Like a gangster,” one of the other punks said.

  “So what did the gangster want?” I asked.

  “He was here for the same reason you’re here. He came looking for someone. Don’t ask me who—I think it must’ve been someone who worked here before I did. Maybe another hermano, I don’t know, because Longtin said the guy had been directed here by this woman who used to teach English around here.”

  That’s when I remembered Longtin telling me how he’d hired The Brow Beater in the first place. A regular of his, an older woman, taught English to immigrants. In her Southern California youth, she’d studied Spanish, the language of almost all her students, but she’d also worked with a select group of immigrants from Soviet Armenia, the country her own parents had come from. These students were personal projects, she said, and in addition to helping them learn English, she tried whenever possible to arrange for them some semblance of an American social life. Hobbies, sporting clubs, volunteer work. Her most recent Armenian student—“An enormous but entirely sweet-hearted boy”—might make for a strong bouncer or handyman, she said, at The Gutshot. When Longtin agreed to hire her student, she brought him a warm dish of homemade honey-dripped baklava.

  “You remember the name of this woman,” I asked, “the English teacher?”

  Raul nodded while he finished his beer. “Val-an-teen,” he said. “She used to come in for a drink every other night. Had a rat-sized dog with her that Longtin always let in. She used to give me an ESL business card every time she talked to me, and I’d be like, Bitch, first of all, we’ve already met, like, a hundred times, and second, we’ve been talking in English.”

  “Racism,” chimed in one of the punks, the only white one.

  When the door came open, signaling the arrival of new customers, our impromptu symposium broke gently apart, and we each returned to our rightful spot. I watched Raul head back to the service doors, knotting his apron behind his back. Out of curiosity I called after him, “You don’t happen to have one of those business cards of hers still lying around, do you?”

  Only the money and the miles were real, I’d told The Brow Beater the night I’d discovered him, but of course time was real, too. In our sport, there was no off-season, no sick day, no union regulating the hours we worked or the pay we received. No insurance, no pension. As contractors, we were freelancers in almost the medieval sense of the word, fighters and jesters for hire, traveling from territory to territory so that our gimmicks stayed fresh to the rotating audiences. It wasn’t unusual to fight nine matches a week in five different cities, doubles on the weekends, gyms in the mornings, and highways between them.

  Time was too real, too fleeting, to train The Brow Beater in any real sense of the word. He learned on the job, in the ring, and we’d practice promos on the road. His English was pretty good, but he couldn’t speak without thinking, so I did most of his promos for him. On top of that, I’d give him a few basic pointers—how to take bumps without busting his spine, for instance—and then we’d go over his matches in detail in the car to the next city. His Greco-Roman background helped with his footwork and his endurance, but otherwise I told him to forget all that grappling.

  “You’re a giant,” I told him. He had to fight like one—lumbering but strong, invulnerable to punches and kicks, almost impossible to take down to the mat. It was all psychology, I told him. Who are you in that ring? Who’s your opponent? What’s the story we’re telling? I told him he was too big to show pain unless he was gouged in those buried eyes of his. “That’s your only downfall,” I said, “those eyes under that big brow. Nothing else, you understand?”

  He understood—for a while, he understood. But soon he discovered that pain was real, too. Trying not to hurt each other, we hurt ourselves instead. The Brow Beater was still green, after all, and nothing wreaked havoc on a body like being big and green at the same time. I watched him pay his dues, just like we all did, wrestling through a broken thumb, a dislocated shoulder, a torn meniscus, at least two concussions, and enough mat rashes and bruises to make the hairs on his chest hurt. There was a time, about four months after I’d discovered him at The Gutshot, when I was absolutely sure he would quit. And that’s why I started telling him so much about my brother.

  For those first few months, as we traveled from Los Angeles to Vancouver, I’d be rambling
on and on about psychology, about the business, and I’d look over and find The Brow Beater staring out the passenger window of my Catalina, half-listening at best. Eventually, I chalked up his distracted nature to a lack of interest. One day in the car, after a particularly long stretch of silence on the road, I said, “No shame in getting out of this business, big fella. I would’ve done the same a long time ago, I bet, if it weren’t for Gil. He’s the only reason I got into wrestling in the first place. Gil’s my brother.”

  I swear—The Brow Beater turned so fast in his seat, the Catalina changed lanes without my steering.

  “Bro,” The Brow Beater said, focusing on me for the first time. “You have a brother?”

  “Had,” I said, and pretty soon I was telling The Brow Beater the story of the Sportsmen’s Club in Bremerton, Washington. It was the venue where I’d seen my very first wrestling match, back in September 1945 (The Brow Beater—“The hair, bro”—couldn’t believe how old I was). Back in 1945, I told him, just after my eighteenth birthday and while most people were celebrating the end of the war, I was getting ready to leave home for the navy. Back then, Gil was only twelve, and he’d embarrassed himself a few weeks earlier by begging me not to leave. I’d struck him with an open palm—lovingly, half-jokingly, I thought—but he cried and embarrassed himself even further. After that he saw a poster for a professional wrestling event at the Sportsmen’s Club, and I decided I’d take him to see it. I was feeling pretty guilty over the way I’d ribbed him into tears, and I guess now I can say I was probably feeling, too, a kind of longing for our time together as boys. So I bought two tickets and surprised him after school.