RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Friday, May 16

12-Pack Review: CWF 11/30/02

BEER ONE: If it weren’t for the snow, I would’ve drove my ass down to Roxboro, North Carolina tomorrow to see the Carolina Wrestling Federation in action, live. But with snow, the Pearson High School basketball tourney got moved to the weekend and ruined the CWF’s plans. Plus, I ditched my car the other night where both driver’s side wheels were off the ground and had to get a tow truck to come because the dude’s tractor from the top of the hill couldn’t do shit for me. Of course, three drunks, two of them looking like different uncles or aunt’s boyfriends of mine, showed up in an old-fashioned tow truck. Not a rollback like you usually see nowadays, but the Orville Bedo special, complete with that giant rubber contraption thing I never could quite figure out. They used a two cables attached to wenches to pull my ass out, which made me thankful, because I think new rollback tow trucks only have the one wench on them. It was nice to hear the bottom of my car scrape against asphalt and rock, and then know I had to dump my car in a church parking lot and catch a ride with my bro-in-law back to the crib. He’s a fuckin’ med student, and was in his hospital blues with a stethoscope around his neck, having just got off from working on fuckin’ brains. It was nice to drink a beer and slide through the snow with a man in his position. My bro-in-law, he’s a real egghead, but he’s a good egghead. We’ve done enough stupid shit together that I can respect him and he can trust me with his younger sister. Shit, the only time I’ve ever been out of America was in a boat with him to go across the St. Lawrence River to get cheap cases of beer in Canada to bring back to our vacation “cottage”/hut with sunlight visible through the siding on the New York side. We also drank and drive at night to Alexandria Bay, like an hour’s boatride away, and were lucky not to die. But that’s the thing about life, if you don’t risk it, it sucks. It’s like saving your money instead of spending it; you end up a stuck up white motherfucker in a too-tight shirt with a stuffy tie around your goddamned neck. Fuck all that nonsense. So let’s get ready to rumble…in this corner we got the fuck body snatcha. This is at the CWF Dojo in scenic Burlington, North Carolina, in a strip mall I’m sure. I would wager half my life that there’s a check-cashing joint within a quarter mile. There are two rows of chairs on the camera side, pure indy, and they call out a young guy, Brad Attitude, in a Jack Daniels t-shirt, with a bottom lip-piercing, and nonsense. They are calling out the young lions of Carolina indy sleaze, as also Kamikaze Kid and Brass Munkey and Stephen O’Hara come out as well. All four are part of the Rising Generation League tournament, going at each other in two contests tonight. The main event was gonna be a four-on-four elimination match, but Amber Holly was injured in Pennsylvania, and out comes that fucker in the Hawaiian shirt. This guy kills me. He’s like the fat kid who throws up in that stupid fireside story in Stand By Me all grown up. Brad Rainz is out in the dark for the first for-real match of the night, and he’s wearing a black wifebeater, psychologically suggesting double heelness. His opponent is The American Steel Ninja, who I’m sure drinks Steel Reserve fortified malt liquor and was trained in the Frank Dux school of ninjitsu. The small crowd is sometimes awesome, as you can hear some smartass say, “Did it hurt?” and the wrestler will answer him. Rainz smacks Ninja, then does some Karate Kid mockery shit, getting a laugh out the crowd. This is like a keg party without the keg, and the ring squeaks, and it reminds me, to an extent, of the OMEGA days when the Hardys and Shane Helms and Shannon Moore and Serial Thrillaz and all these guys you never knew of were doing their thang. Except CWF ain’t afraid to have some heavyweights in there, too. The CWF has three flags hanging from the wall – an American one, a North Carolina flag, and I don’t know what the third one is, and I can only hope the CWF has it’s own battle flag. Being it’s North Carolina, shouldn’t there also be a Confederate flag, and maybe even a #3 Dale Earnhardt flag. It might make them have to put a third row of chairs in the Dojo if they did that. Man, it would be great to be in Roxboro tomorrow. My uncle used to take me when he couldn’t get anybody older to tag along to the drag races, and we’d take the Mason Racing Vega stationwagon down there on a Saturday afternoon, and there would be, on a good weekend, maybe thirty cars, and on a great weekend, like fifty or sixty, and some local boy would always win. I remember one time, my uncle won the race, the computer print-out they give the drivers at the end actually proved it, and he went in a huff to the track owner to complain while I loaded the car back on the trailer, and he came back and said, “We won.” I asked why we didn’t do anything about it, and my uncle laughed and said, “It ain’t nobody but you and me here, and you’re 13. Plus, your daddy would kick my ass if I got your ass kicked in North Carolina.” Ahh, Uncle Ricky, I still miss you, you crazy fucker. The only family member I have with a racecar doing a burnout on his tombstone. American Steel Ninja wins with some kick move. Next up is a tag match with Kenny James, the volunteer firefighter, and his partner Xsiris, a masked man in the team of mismatched men, vs. Hangtime, a black dude in a basketball gear, and one half of the Southside Playas, J-Money. It seems natural to me that Hangtime, being a basketball guy, should have a serious feud with those volleyball players from the last CWF tape I watched, who I later found out to be the unmasked Black Skull of OMEGA fame, along with Cham Pain, who has obviously lost his fuckin’ mind.

BEER TWO: This is a casual match, as everybody seems to be in sneakers. Actually, J-Money has wrestling boots on, and of course, Xsiris has a mask on, I’m sure a Highspots special. Hangtime looks as if he’s straight from a pick-up game at UNC-Greensboro, putting on elbow and knee pads on his way to the Dojo. THIS IS THE SQUEAKIEST RING I’VE EVER HEARD! It’s sort of enthralling, like the first time you saw Georgia Championship Wrestling on TBS and they had that extra tinny sound to their ring, unlike most wrestling you’d ever seen. Xsiris does a kick at a fan, then a springing senton onto Hangtime. The CWF should think about doing one of those one-night tourneys, featuring their guys and a few outside names, of light heavyweights, because there’s some decent dudes down in Cackylacky right about now. Of course, that’s God’s Country; Flair’s Country; and motherfuckers love some wrestling. There are wrestling churches. I saw one, in some town, run by the Italian Stallion in a strip mall, and even the half-crippled fat black dude in a Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirt with cross-eyes because a battery blew up in his face wasn’t down with it. God wrestling could be great if they had somebody really research the context of religion, as opposed to just having wrestling matches in a parking lot, then offering to testify for folks. You preach to the converted that way. If you had some evil Sam Hayne character throw fireballs and still get pinned by George South’s old ass, with the spirit of Jesus in him more visible than ten Hulk-ups combined, then you might convert some pagan delinquents into your collection plate. I don’t mind this match anytime Kenny James is not in it. He is just too volunteer firefighter for me to get into. James and Xsiris win the match via some chicanery, of course. Goddamn, bastards. That Kenny James is one overweight, pasty, heel motherfucker. Okay, Tomk of the Death Valley Driver Video Review is all about this Brass Munkey cat, and he’s up next. Tomk is one weird motherfucker and seems in tune with what I’d enjoy, even though he’s only met me in real life once, and on a night I ended up drunk and getting in a fight with some chump at a warehouse party who was wearing one of those ‘70s style thrift store brown leather jackets. Tomk sent me like 12 hours of Sid & Marty Krofft nonsense, and I think I owe him big-time, and there’s actually a couple of tapes here with his name on them, if only I had the proper combination of motivation and money. It seems I always have one, but not the other. Stephen O’Hara has this odd little Alfalfa sprout on the front of his hair, in MTV punk rocker style. Munkey has a giant unfilled tattoo of a cross on his chest, suggesting he ain’t nowhere close to the type of Christian my grandma would approve of. Munkey was not afraid to deliver the shittiest of stiff kicks to the back of O’Hara, completely more violent than anything yet. Munkey goes to the top, and some old drunk yells, “Come on Munkey, get funky!” Munkey is pretty good, and has that young redneck mustache that suggest the mad smoking of blunts in Ford Escorts in IGA parking lots. IGA what, IGA who.

BEER THREE: Man, Brass Munkey is not afraid to be wickedly vicious with a kick or clothesline or slap. He misses with the frogsplash, obviously because it goes against his monkey nature. INDY DOUBLE CLOTHESLINE STALWART! And the ref counts. He hits the Munkey Wings, aka Christopher Daniels’ thing, for the win. And the combatants hug. You know why? Because this is an indy tournament of cruiserweights and nobody knows any better. I will cheer the day somebody ruins the fuckin’ honor of an indy tourney by smashing the trophy over somebody else. Brad Attitude vs. The Kamikaze Kid is next up, yo. The Kamikaze Kid, visually, is very Willow the Wispish. Size-wise, he’s very Shannon Moore-ish. Which makes him the bump-master early on, as he’s a munchkin, and has to use wizardry and thinking skills to outmaneuver the bigger Attitude. You know, Brad Attitude could be Ric Flair Jr. in the ring, and I’d have trouble with it because that’s a stupid fuckin’ name. At least be Tad Attitude and act like a rich kid. Or Chad Attitude and act like a rich kid, just not so rich as Tad. But Brad Attitude? Man, that’s tough to swallow. The thing I love about a guy like The Kamikaze Kid, just like with the old OMEGA masked guys, is I can only hope they are like 15, and wear a mask to conceal the illegality of their actual professional wrestling. Laws are stupid. I remember reading at Indy Insiders how Kamikaze was just in a mask vs. mask match with somebody, probably Xsiris, and I can only hope both of them are under-age, but one of them just turned over-age and legal, and thus lost a mask match, to show their face, and accumulate rat notches on their travel bags. Attitude teases throwing the Kid into the crowd, but instead throws him out the side of the ring against the brick wall, in a wicked bump. I will drink in honor of that shit.

BEER FOUR: The ref does a super-slow count until Kamikaze shows signs of actual functional life. As he appears on the apron, the girls in the crowd scream, because North Carolina girls have been raised to appreciate the wrasslin’. Kamikaze is out, and Attitude picks him up for a Razor’s Edge type thing, and the Kid doesn’t come to until he’s about to get planted. Then he busts a double-pump frogsplash, barely getting an extended second pump out. That’s great and all, but I’d still put it behind the over-exaggerated single-pump splash of Art Barr and Eddy Guerrero. However, to the Kamikaze Kid’s credit, I’d put the double-pump ahead of the seven thousand single-pump ones most motherfuckers do. Corey Edsel comes out as the CWF champ, and he’s fuckin’ good, and big. He won a certificate, an actual certificate. That rocks. Not a trophy, but a certificate, as best singles wrestler of the year. And he talks on the mic about how great the fans are, and how it couldn’t happen without them and thanks for supporting the show. It’s beautiful, and perfect. This is indy, with a British and Canadian flag on the wall as well. Ahh, all these certificates are the Independent Insiders awards. That’s a great website for keeping up with Carolina indy wrasslin’, but I can’t remember the addy. Do a google search for “indy insiders” and “Carolina” and you’ll be there, fool. You know, now that hippies have been inundated with hip hop culture and started wearing baggie homemade patchwork corduroys, wrestlers are the only sub-culture left that still wears fanny packs. I loved going to a show and seeing a show somewhere and having the hip hop and hippie cultures combine in a hot, young, dirty hippie chick, with sagging baggy pants, like a hip hopper, and no underwear, like a hippie, showing her ass in a way that my uncle telling me to “stop showing your ass” would never understand, were he to be resurrected from beneath his tombstone with the burn-out.

BEER FIVE: Hey, it’s Otto Schwanz in the ring, the bestest wrestler in North Carolina who should be on your TV screen had the people in charge of putting wrestling on your TV screen cared about wrestling. His opponent is Corey Edsel, who is better than you’d ever expect from looking at him. My dear reader, imagine a guy who’s like PN News brother, but can actually wrestle a match instead of kicking a wack-ass pre-written “freestyle”. Otto Schwanz is the best over-seller in the business, and were wrestling the way it was, he’d be making a fat paycheck as a glorified jobber in Atlanta every Saturday night. Otto is the King of Over-Emphasis, which would make my last statement even more true. Schwanz is controlling the match, with Corey getting little bursts of comeback here and there. Schwanz keeps hitting the figure-four, which harkens back to the Carolina wrestling roots of future Governor Ric Flair. Of course, in true modern urban Dusty fashion, Edsel reverses it. Edsel is one of the better big men I’ve seen in recent years, but he should lose some weight, because he’s faster than his weight suggests and he can’t keep kicking ass like he does with his girth. Then again, the motherfucker lives in North Carolina, home of Hardee’s peach milkshakes, and he’s doing shit I ain’t doing at half his weight, so fuck me. I’m just saying, go far, big man, go far. Edsel wins with a powerbomb pin on Otto.

BEER SIX: This has been a pretty shitty review, and I’m not even drinking heavily enough to sleep through the night, and there seems to be only one match left, so fuck, I don’t know what to tell you. I might just mail it in. It’s not like more than nine people read these fuckin’ things anyways. And the more I write this dumb shit, the more chance I stand of some wrestlers deciding I’m a little too fuckin’ smart for my own good and kicking my ass in a parking lot somewhere or another. I mean, I can hold my own, I’m six foot one, 230 lbs. But I’ve also had my ass kicked enough times in my life to know, that no matter how good you can hold your own, sometimes you will get your ass knocked the fuck out, and when it’s like four on one, you better just look to break one nose for face value before you get super destructed. I haven’t had my ass kicked, shit, I haven’t even been in a fight since my kid was born, like four years ago. There are times, when you mostly bottle your emotions like I do, being a cockshit Southern man and all, that violence cleanses. You might beat some other dude’s ass, or he might beat your’s, but the winning and losing is not so much the point as the violence that cleanses the pain of everyday existence, the shitty jobs and cheatin’ women and overdue electric bill and suspended license. That’s why oftentimes dudes who you see fighting in some run-down backroads pub will be buying each other beers half an hour later – they’ve bonded in that experience, and publicly no less. I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying; I just hope this last match has some of that senseless soul-cleansing violence that the wrestling is supposed to give me. I don’t mean blood and guts with light tubes sticking out your ears violence; just some wholesome down home fisticuffs to the forehead grudge match hatred. This jank is a Survivor Series Elimination Match, handicap style, with Mikael Yamaha, The Gemini Kid, and William L. Cross, the commissioner of CWF, facing off against Slick Ric Converse, NiteStic Eddie Brown (who rules), Kurt Solo, and that goddamned Hawaiian shirt stoner manager Brad Stutts. GeeStar is part of the evil entourage, and I dogged her out as a fat chick in the last CWF review, and I heard through the grapevine she was pissed, because I judged her physically and not by how good a wrestler she was. I’m not one to go back on shit, but I’m hitched to a pretty feminist ol’ lady, who does makes empowering herbal tonics and all for herself, inapplicable to men, and has studied under serious femi-naturalist kooks like Susun Weed, and on top of that, I have a four-year-old daughter, and we’re very conscious about raising her with enough self-esteem that hopefully we can immunize her from falling for the date-rape, bullshit, you-suck-my-cock-but-I-ain’t-eating-no-cooch frat thug crowd that seems to grow in number every year. Shit, my daughter was wearing a shirt with GODDESS across her belly when she was 2. So I hate to be considered some asshole misogynist. However, that being said, America is a fucked up place, run by the aforementioned shitty frat thug men who have gotten older. And women are judged by looks first and foremost. Look at fuckin’ wrestling itself. Vince McMahon may be convinced some indy chick is the greatest wrestler this side of The Dynamite Kid, but he’s gonna make her get a tit job before she’ll appear on WWE TV once. It’s gotta suck, especially when you’re doing this for love. Well hell, same goes for the men, because if you don’t have the “Look” that Vince wants, you’re shit out of luck. Unless you take “nutritional supplements”. Look at The Hardy Boyz in their OMEGA days, and look at them now. Shit, if somebody put together a yearbook of WWE Superstars, before their stardom, during their stardom, and after they were squeezed of every dime of merchandise and catch-phrase value they could be squeezed of and tossed aside, you’d have mad motherfuckers calling for the head of Vince McMahon. I mean, shit, the dude allowed his own daughter to get breast enhancement surgery. He may not have asked her to do it, but he certainly ain’t afraid to show what he paid for on his TV shows, now is he? And that sucks, way more than me judging by looks. I mean, I’m some dude sitting here, like any dude, always thinking about sex. I don’t add any violence to it; I don’t add any weird control issues to it; nothing. I am down for mutually beneficial getting’ it on, and that’s it. So I say to you GeeStar, wherever you are, my bad. But by me hearing what you’re saying and being sympathetic, that means I don’t fit in the power structure of America in general, and wrestling in particular. Look at ECW. Look at the WWE. Shit, TNA’s biggest female participation is girls dancing in cages. When my daughter gets to be a teenager, I am gonna be shooting off the front porch nightly, just to scare motherfuckers away. Men suck, and I know this, because I am a man. Okay, okay, enough diatribe…back to the wrestling.

BEER SEVEN: The Gemini Kid is absolutely fuckin’ awesome because he’s an indy wrestler in North Carolina wearing a 1000% Guapo t-shirt. Stutts is doing a great fatboy Jim Cornette not-quite-comfortable in the ring schtick before the match with the ref checking him. Of course, the ref finds foreign objects. My favorite all-time pre-match nonsense was Thunderfoot who would let the ref check his left boot, then spin around and lean on the ropes to let him check the left boot again, leaving the dreaded loaded boot unscathed. The ref keeps pulling gimmicks out of Stutts’ apparel. Cross and Stutts start out and Stutts does some serious stalling, like only a childhood fan of Tully Blanchard could do, then he tags out to Eddie Brown. Yamaha tags in as well. Eddie Brown’s facial expressions are fuckin’ great. Not many even fuckin’ attempt to do facial shit in the ring, but look how much it’s helped guys like Steven Regal. Blah blah blah. You know, it’s easy to overlook the fact there’s a kid wrestling in dirtbike gear, but when you think about it, that’s fuckin’ perfect. North Carolina wild kid dirtbike indy wrestler. I grew up with like nineteen dudes who could’ve been Mikael Yamaha. For as small and pure babyface as he is, I gotta give Yamaha love because he might be the only guy in the ring that knows what Team Hessian is. And I bet he had a Jeremy McGrath poster on his bedroom door when he was 12. We’ve got Kurt Solo in the ring now against The Gemini Kid, and they look far from your average Monday night wrestler, but they’re great. It’s so odd that styles will place a thing, because you wouldn’t see this assortment of motherfuckers in a Jersey ring or Texas or Indiana. This is pure Southern shit right here. The heels are doing rapid-fire tagging and beating-upon of Gemini, and all these guys sell pretty good. Usually that’s what makes an indy show so indy, is the inability to pretend to have actually been hurt by twelve minutes of punishment before you jump up and do a corkscrew plancha through three tables off of a girder in the ceiling. Gemini is beaten down and they tag in Stutts for the pin attempt, but he only gets two, and then ducks out in true heel manager coward fashion. New style and old style ring-gear displayed, as Kurt Solo, in some swank-ass trunks, shiny and evil looking even in their white with touches of blackness, beats on The Gemini Kid, who has black trunks with GEMINI in big plain letters down the side, and wrestling boots with a simple black star on them. Gemini pins and eliminates Kurt Solo, and then Eddie Brown comes in to advance the carnage. Three on three now. Great heel suckerage going on there, as Stutts gets caught in the ring after another two-count on Gemini, he stalls and does the whole time-out bit, then when the crowd gets hot for the tag to the commissioner to come in and give Stutts his, Stutts suckers him into the corner where he tags out and then the commissioner, strong by coward manager standards but weak by actual wrestler standards, is forced to get smacked around by Eddie Brown and Ric Converse for a while. He Crosses Up though, and gets the hot tag to Yamaha.

BEER EIGHT: Eddie Brown gets behind a beaten Gemini, holds his arms up and pumps them, chanting “Ge-muh-nye” in pseudo-redneck twang, and then drops him on his head. And he does one of those great, lengthy upright suplexes of his as well. A sudden small package by Gemini eliminates Eddie Brown, though. It’s now three one two, with Slick Ric Converse, the CWF champion, being the last protector of that cock-sucking, stoner, Playstation 2 time-wasting, Gen-X coward manager, Brad Stutts. The crowd, only two rows deep, is fuckin’ loud by this point. There are no more of those completely silent moments I mentioned earlier. Converse is working on a plethora of weird ways to drop Yamaha on his head, until Yamaha rolls him up in a reversal for the pinfall, leaving coward manager all alone against all three of the other dudes. Stutts, of course, tries to split, but Yamaha and Gemini trap him ringside, do the duck in a row getting punched, and throw him in the ring for the vengeful wrath of Commissioner William Cross. Stutts attempts to repent for his wayward activities of the past, but Cross ain’t having it, and he pins the dude after a DDT. The good guys win the main event and everybody can go home happy. I hope they don’t get tricked into one of those stupid six-dollar burgers at Hardee’s though. That shit’s a rip-off and a half. Sort of like me calling this a 12-Pack Tape Review and only drinking seven and a half beers on it.

EPILOGUE: FIRST STAR OF THE TAPE: Nite-Stic Eddie Brown. The motherfucker is money, and the fact that guys like Brown never even get considered for an opportunity in those bullshit over-hyped northeast smart mark indies is the reason I don’t like those bullshit over-hyped smart mark indies. A bunch of sheep, worshipping CZW. SECOND STAR OF THE TAPE: Brass Munkey. The motherfucker probably ain’t old enough to buy beer yet, though I’m sure he does, and he’s fuckin’ bad ass. Plus, he misspells monkey, which means he’s down, knowwhatumsayin. THIRD STAR OF THE TAPE: The Gemini Kid. Really, I could’ve picked anybody – Kurt Solo or Corey Edsel or Otto Schwanz or The Kamikaze Kid, but I pick Gemini because motherfucker has simple iron-on looking letter spelling GEMINI on his pants, and a Los Guapo t-shirt. You can’t beat that. I’ve gotta ride down to Cackylacky one weekend, see if Boomer is still alive, and catch these fuckers live. And though it’s family oriented wrestling, you know there’s a good bar not too far away, one with some AC/DC on the jukebox, because it’s motherfuckin’ North Carolina daddy.

No comments: