(I don't keep good records of things, but this was in some issue of Carbon 14 magazine, which is a fine glossy periodical full of smut and wrestling and whores and rock-n-roll.)
I’m old school, so sometimes I like to just lay in the bathtub and read something or other and try to talk my wife into scrubbing my back, which she never does because she’s got a convoluted post-liberation notion that scrubbing your life partner’s back is submissive in some way. So I usually just lay there by myself, reading whatever’s come in the mail lately. The other night I was digging into this article in the March 2007 issue of Skin & Ink magazine, that had a long in-depth retelling of Captain Don Leslie’s life as a tattooed, sword swallowing, circus freak, who’s now dying of mouth cancer and at the end of a long, winding, and colorful life – with all of those adjectives meant literally as well as figuratively. The early part of his life, he had joined the circus and was just working a performers’ concession stand, but he had become captivated by watching the sword swallower work, to the point he would sneak it to watch the dude every day, not because it was fake or to figure out the trick or anything like that, but just because it was such a great thing – to swallow daggers and swords in front of these local bumpkins who had shelled out hard-earned dollars to watch the freak parade.
Eventually, that particular circus’s sword swallower taught Capt. Don the work, but this first sword swallower apparently was not so great, as Capt. Don, even though he didn’t need to, would feign chocking and gagging sounds as he thought that was how it was supposed to be done. A few years later, when being at his own gig, a midget freak watched Capt. Don and was shocked at how amateur his performance was, so told him he’d set up a fellow sword swallowing friend who would be performing nearby to come and check things out. This guy was Alex Linton, who at the time was the Guinness Book of World Records sword swallower. (Ahh… that childhood dream we all had to get into the Guinness Book for something, whether dribbling a basketball or growing our fingernails or eating a bicycle – it called the inner-carny in all of us.) Linton took to Capt. Don, taught him better techniques, and they developed a friendship that carried on into winter lay-offs from individual performing circuits where they would reconnect in Sarasota, where a lot of freaks wintered, and Linton would tell Capt. Don of great sword swallowers from the circus circuit’s past. At the time, Linton was a good thirty-some years the elder to Capt. Don, and he was passing on the stories of these legendary performers who were thirty-some years his own elder – an oral history of people who were near-perfect at something they had dedicated themselves to wholeheartedly, and whom no written word probably had ever been printed over.
This got me to thinking about the concept of the secret oral history and shared secrets involved in carnival-based performances, and how this relates to wrestling, or more specifically, how this relates to my recent conclusion that I don’t really care too much for the professional wrestling, itself a carnival-based performance at its root.
Pro wrestling lost the “It’s real!” charade, publicly, in the past twenty-five years, but that veil had been ripped away long before that 20/20 expose where John Stossel’s little weasel-voiced head got the hearing knocked out of one side of it. (To be fair, John Stossel is just as carny as any wrestler ever was, pretending he helps and cares in his role as fear-mongering household television journalist, and I guess he deserves credit, because his con will probably far outlast any con the wrestling industry can repackage itself into in the coming decades.) I doubt seriously the people of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s thought of a Harley Race or Ric Flair as an athletic parallel to Muhammad Ali or even Larry Holmes. People have known, or at best at least suspected, that wrestling was fake all along for quite some time. But the performance was executed in such a manner that… I don’t know, you just wouldn’t question it because so much had been put into doing it, I’m not sure what made people just go along. I guess that’s what’s drawn me to the wrestling all along, the WHY is this happening?
Post-kayfabe-breaking, the wrestling fan in the past decade or so has dwindled in the tangible world, but has thrived online, so that at most wrestling events, you can break the crowd down into two separate forms of retarded people – one half is physically retarded and probably still has the mental capacity to believe it’s real shit going on inside the squared circle, and I guess they help me enjoy the live wrestling experience a bit, because the other half is the social retard, chanting and yelling clever insider quips, and generally tweaking my own nerves a little too much. This is most likely a results of my own egotism, thinking I’m too good to hang out with the internet wrestling nerd who tends to be the type who loves comic books and actually knows the name of theme songs to Jap cartoons.
The internet wrestling nerd accepts the fact that the professional wrestling is not, nor ever was, real in any sense, and tends to take a scientific approach, considering himself (always himself, and usually not a very attractive himself) a student of the pseudo-sport, and often will be heard saying he “needs” to see this obscure match or some Best of So-and-So in Amarillo 1977 triple DVD set, which is nothing more than absolutely every appearance of So-and-So that the dude who put the collection together could find, with no actual attention being paid to what was best or not best, just a gluttonous grand buffet of one freaky slice of the pseudo-sport.
Within the internet-based Wrestling Nerddom, this creates a backlash where others abandon this scientific attitude and become the ironic lovers of the more strange and stupid gimmicks like Umaga or The Boogeyman, simply because it falls outside of the realm of science, and causes these contrarians great glee to have the analysis-based nerds struggle to explain something.
And with me being, unfortunately, a denizen of the Wrestling Nerddom myself (www.deathvalleydriver.com), I have at times complained about how shitty the wrestling now is compared to whatever it was when I used to still see whatever it was I saw in it. I’ve never really been able to figure out why this was, because it wasn’t as simple as people still pretended it was real, though the easy admission of it not being real combat certainly did add a homoerotic bad taste to sitting around watching sweaty men grapple with each other. But while reading the piece about Captain Don Leslie, I realized that what it is that made me love wrestling, and why I probably hate it now, is not the real or fake, or how it’s done, but the WHY was this happening? And this applies to whether it be pro wrestling or slight-of-hand magician or a sword swallower at the freak show. WHY were these things happening? Why would people pretend to swallow a sword to make a bunch of local bumpkins “ooh” and “ahh” for fifty cents a head? Why would two big guys actually beat each other in a simulated athletic competition, and why would all these other people sitting ringside be so captivated by it? Why was all this happening?
This got me to thinking further about the freak show, featuring sword swallowers and bearded ladies and strong midgets and the such, which would have been run by a promoter. I am assuming the freaks made a decent enough living for being freaky, but I doubt any of them were living high on the hog at all. It was scraps of money – nothing great – but you got to travel around and look at a bunch of weird-looking people be shocked or awed by what you did. And the dude who made the real money off this was the promoter or circus-owner or whoever was running the whole set-up. And it seems the performers were drawn in with a cult-like religious aspect to what they were doing – complete with the passing of inner-secrets and traditions, to make one feel like they were a part of something small and select. And reading about Capt. Don talk of hearing thirty-five years ago from Alex Linton about great sword swallowers from thirty-five years before that… and all this happening outside of earshot of anybody else who need not know these things, that all added to the Why. It allowed a performer like Capt. Don to completely believe in what he was doing, even if what he was doing may not have been what it was perceived to be exactly. This is not to suggest all carnival-based performances are faked, but just that when you add history and cult religion undertones to the performer’s mind, it becomes far more than just what he is doing on the stage, which separated jobs like this from just being a Starbucks or Kinko’s employee or someone sitting in a cubicle shuffling numbers back and forth. One was there to make the bumpkins believe in what was happening, or at least if they didn’t believe it, do it in such grand and well-executed fashion that they dare not ask if it wasn’t really what it looked like, because you’d be insulting the freak carny wrestler midget dagger eater by doing so.
And I would think it’s safe to say that with the professional wrestling being well-established cable TV programming and not something set up in a tent in a field on the outskirts of town, it’s far more of a regular business now than it would’ve been when closer to its circus roots. But even up into the ‘80s, before 20/20 feigning newsworthiness, wrestling’s traditions were carried on in the same way. Wrestlers heard stories from others and learned the subtle details – how to say this or that to an old lady in the front row or how to fall flat on your face on concrete directly in front of little kids – and the old-timers passed these lessons, and these legends of previous purveyors of this secret art, onto the next generation. Some people learned from really shitty old wrestlers (like Capt. Don’s first sword swallowing teacher), and some learned from better ones. Sometimes the guy who looked great in the ring was barely coherent when it came to teaching anyone else what must have just come naturally to him. And sometimes a guy who never did much more than work a three-town circuit for ten years might’ve been the best at laying out the subtle nuances of that little circuit. And the promoters promoted it all to the public, while promoting the special cult-like secret of it all to the wrestlers, to pull them into the religion of the wrestler. Thus, the promoter could make his money off both ends of the bargain – public and wrestlers – to varying degrees, but everyone went home happy at the end of the day. (And who gives a fuck about the end of the life? You have a good run riding the roads and get some ass and scars and great stories out of it, in my opinion, you’re better off than having a padded bank account.)
But we’re twenty-five years removed from this line of thinking, as if it being real or fake was the entire point of it all – the answer to Why – and it’s moved to more of just a merchandising machine, with indie promotions not as concerned about live audiences as they are with DVD sales. I think this misses the whole Why, which like I said, is probably unexplainable, and that frustrates peoples. The unexplained is why we have religion and science, to keep our little minds from fretting over things like this. But still, twenty-five years removed, wrestlers are far more casual about chatting with internet fans on how things are laid out, and pretty much anyone can pay a wad of money to a plethora of wrestlers with varying degrees of personal success to “live their dream” and be trained to be a wrestler or referee on a smaller level. And this has created more and more wrestlers who know it’s fake and never feel the need to ever pretend otherwise too hard, which is fine I guess, but they go through the motions of a wrestling match and try to make it look beautiful to the filter of an analytical mind, turning it to science, abandoning the Why.
This reminds me of this dude who is friends of friends – Penn Rollins – who’s some sort of celebrated minor figure as “seminal member” of math rock (prog punk?) bands from years ago. For Rollins, playing guitar has little to do with feeling or spirit; it’s just points on the guitar that he’s assigned numbers to so he’ll learn a riff, memorize the numerical sequences to put these together, and then proceed to follow the sequence on his guitar neck, to a tee. It allows him the ability to add different mathematical sequences that might seem odd or intriguing to the average musical ear, but there’s no magic or muse involved in the process whatsoever – all pure analysis. And to the analytical mind, it sounds awesome and seems like dude is the greatest guitar player who never got known on a large scale.
This is the wrestler of today – numbers in a sequence strung together so that analysis will find it to be highly acceptable.
And that’s how I realized why I hate wrestling now when I used to love it, because there is no more Why to it anymore. What is happening is far too obvious, and it doesn’t matter how hard two guys actually hit each other in the jaw or kick each other in the back, it’s still all too obvious. And that makes it looks fuckin’ stupid.
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