The sound, it's like no other. It's not even the volume, it's the noise, the sound itself. It's the roaring, filling my ears, whether it's fifty people or five thousand. It's the flashbulbs, it's my entrance music, it's the anticipation.
The anticipation of going out there and putting on a show, of bleeding and being in agony for days, weeks afterwards, but knowing it was all worth it. The anticipation of them, out there, waiting for me, ready for me to wreak absolute king Hell havoc on some match, on some fool. Just to have everything snap into focus for one moment I can absolutely read.
It's why I wanted to be a wrestler when I was a kid.
It's why, after forty-five years, a hip replacement, seven concussions I remember, five bad enough that I don't, and way, way, way too many miles on my crappy little hatchback, I'm still a wrestler.
It's certainly not the money that keeps me in. Even back in the territories, I wasn't a big name, not one of the boys who got scooped up with the Fed', or even sent around all that much. "Hot dog and a handshake," people joke, but I've lost track of the number of times I've had to sleep in my car in the middle of nowhere.
But the sound, it keeps me going.
Voices raised in song, all demanding one thing.
Blood.
The match isn't great. It never really is. But that's not the point.
You go there because you want an excuse to get trashed on a Friday that doesn't involve drinking alone. You go because you love the little morality plays that they can only put on in matches that are fifteen, twenty minutes long, not like the weekly stuff you can see on TV. Or you go because you just want to see someone bleed. Just bleed. You want some mayhem, because your life is, well, it's just ordinary life, and this puts some color into it.
But you go, and you have a good time. A pretty great time, really. You get to see a nice mix. Old veterans, indie kings, deathmatch legends, some new guys fresh out of wrestling school, a few new guys who clearly have never heard of wrestling school, and assorted freaks and mutants.
Halfway through a spotfest where they guys aren't even bothering to cover up going from one planned flip to the next, you're wondering whether it's time for the seventh inning stretch. Use the bathroom, get another beer, or maybe slip out for a minute and light up that joint you just remembered you have in your pocket.
The guy in spandex is standing in the middle of the ring, acting dazed, acting like he's not waiting for the masked guy to climb the top rope and do his signature move that you've never heard of. That joint is sounding real tempting right now.
It's then that the music hits.
You just need the first few notes to lose your ever-loving mind. The hundred or so other folks in the audience do the same. The crummy speaker system they have set up here struggles to drown out the sound of the cheers. The clapping and stomping.
It's him, running in from back stage. All in those torn up jeans you remember from so many photos, so many old matches, dating back from before when you even born. Because you, and everyone in this old American Legion hall know exactly what he promises when he shows up.
Hell on wheels. Mayhem. Total violence.
Blood.
There's nights where the crowd is electric, where they cheer you when you show up because they're already in the mood, ready for the next act of the production.
This isn't one of those nights.
This is one of those nights where I get the cheers, but they aren't for me. They're for something new, anything. A reprieve from what it is they're currently watching. Something violent and exciting and insane.
I oblige.
The light tube shatters against the masked kid's head, a nice, sharp tinkling sound they can hear in the cheap seats. Between the fabric and the kid's hair, he'll barely even feel it. It takes a second, but he spasms like he's been shocked full of volts before keeling over. Not the best sell I've ever seen, but not the worst.
A few seconds later, the spandex guy climbs up the top rope, ready to do a frog splash on his opponent.
Big mistake. I toss the tube aside and grab a bat wrapped in barbed wire. The downswing catches him square in the back, driving him down onto his friend on the floor. The wire's gimmicked, and he'll probably bleed more from the glass shards on the floor than from the actual blow. Still, he's getting smacked with a no-kidding bat right along his spine. The writhing in pain isn't an act.
I am there, alone. Triumphant. The final man standing.
Nothing.
A few scattered claps that wither on the vine. Some coughs
Nothing.
I can feel it in my bones. What the crowd wants.
So I give it to them.
Blood.
You're watching this guy, the guy you grew up watching, standing there, trying not to show just how gassed he is, even after just, what, one, maybe two minutes? Last time you saw him was maybe four or five years ago, but he's lost a step. Or three.
For a moment, there's just calm, no one sure what to do.
Then, he reaches down, and picks up the guy in spandex he just hit. He grabs him by the hair and pulls his head up, until the guy's almost standing. You can hear him crying out in pain, and it doesn't have the intonation that oh-I-am-in-agony wrestling pain does.
This old guy, standing in the middle of the ring, he takes out a razor from his wrist band and slits the spandex guy across the forehead. Blood fills the guy's face from a thin line as he cries out in confusion.
And the old legend spreads his arms, waiting to bask in the applause. Like he didn't just maul a guy for no reason, no story. As if he didn't just produce a razor like some greenhorn trying to blade himself, and did it in front of everyone. Like this is the sort of thing that excites you.
And you feel cheap. You feel ugly and awful, like there's something clinging to you, inside of you. You're aware that you're in small room in some podunk town that hasn't mattered to anyone for thirty years. You hate that this wrestler, this *man*, has made you think about the things you want to escape, if only for a couple of hours. You are an individual, with individual problems.
Someone in the crowd shouts "Lame." The wrestler looks dazed, stands there for a second. This isn't the Rough Beast. The Barbed Wire God. This is just some loser, old and sad, and standing in the middle of the ring for no good reason.
You turn your anger on this man.
You don't know who starts the chant, or if anyone even did. But it comes from the crowd.
"GO!" *CLAP* "AWAY!" *CLAPCLAP*
It catches. Soon, you're shouting it and clapping it with a few dozen other people, then the full crowd. Not just because the wrestler was the drizzling shits, but because you came here to lose yourself, and here's the chance. You taunt the old man standing in the ring, and your problems melt away once again.
You're united in booing him as he lets go of the spandex kid, still bleeding. He shuffles away, defeated. A fat guy who might be playing the ref, or might just be the promoter, goes to check on the two wrestlers still in the ring. The canvas is soaked through with their blood.
Even after the old man leaves, you're still chanting, united in your delight that you can chant. Gradually, the two wrestlers leave.
But the ring is still slick, and will remain so for the rest of the evening. You try to look away from it, and the thoughts of how small and alone you felt in that moment. From what he thought you wanted.
Blood.
When I was a kid, I had an auntie who used to read the Bible. A lot. My mom didn't like her very much, or at all, but more than a few times, when it was the auntie or the shelter, she picked the auntie. Not always, but enough.
And she always liked to lord it over us, in her small little ways. Letting us know what a favor she was doing for her deadbeat sister. That she was so Christlike and charitable. She always liked to rattle off scripture to us, parables and psalms and lineages. Most of it just washed over my six year-old brain, but there were a few that always stuck with me, if only through sheer repetition.
"You have been measured and found wanting," always recited with a smirk like a butterfly knife.
She never knew it, it was at her place that I actually discovered wrestling, watching with the sound off after everyone had gone to bed. Baptized in the blue light.
But "you have been measured" always stuck with me. And I have been.
When I have a dozen or fifty or a hundred or a thousand people booing me, hating me, I'm bigger than I've ever been. There is no space between me and the crowd. It's their hatred of me, of what I embody.
But then there's this. The clapping, the jeers. They're different. It's not me, the Rough Beast. It's me, the performer. There is nothing but space, a void that separates them and me. I'm no long the force of destruction or anything. I'm a man, standing in the ring, drenched in blood. My muscles deflated, chest heaving. It's all that I am.
I try a few poses, try shouting out some canned lines, but I know it won't work. And it doesn't. And their boos sink into my skin. I feel cheap, and pathetic, because I am.
Just an old man, sweating, in a crappy wrestling ring in the middle of nowhere. I shuffle out. As I leave behind the curtain, I wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. Looking down, I see it.
Blood.
The old, tired man flees, and the other wrestlers slink off. The crowd fills the silences with chants, each just a few dozen people taking up and trailing off. Rhythmic claps. "THIS IS BULLSHIT! *CLAP CLAP CLAPCLAPCLAP*" Dueling chants "WE WANT WRESTLING!" "THIS SUCKS ASS!" A few wits calling for CM Punk.
You're still there, and you're still you. Vaguely upset, mostly pissed off about the match earlier, chanting it out. It's not bad, but it's not why you came. If you wanted to just holler, there's a sports bar closer to your apartment that doesn't card and has $2 wells on Saturdays.
Finally, another one of the names you came here to see, this time an indie darling, oozes to the ring and begins hurling a litany of abuse at the audience, at your hometown, at "the poors." Boos, and more than a few drinks, rain down on him as he smirks his way through his list of reasons he hates everything you like.
You light up as you hiss abuse at this evil. You cheer like hell as your new champion for the evening cuts him off and launches into his own tirade about how when he was down and out in this very town, someone picked him up and dusted him off. The rest is lost in mixture of cheers and boos, the crowd happy to play its part once more.
All the same, that joint is feeling really good right about now. You detach yourself from the crowd, sidling out as it gazes rapt at the violence unfolding. You're at the door when you hear the bell ring. The fight begins, and the crowd howls for the champion to defeat the evil. Even as you leave, you cheer for it too.
Blood.
There are a few halfhearted "sorry"'s but mostly people try to avoid meeting my eyes. Even the two young bucks I gashed give me just a couple of half-hearted "fuck you"'s before storming off. They can smell it, like it's something they could catch from me. I don't blame them, honestly. I remember when I started out, watching the beaten down old men, trying to hack it way past their glory days. I wouldn't want anything to do with me right now either.
Once I've felt it, that cheering, that booing, where I'm something more, I can't ever go back. I recognize it, and it recognizes me. I can hear the voice, the one, unified voice of the crowd.
And I can hear its when it's not there too, like thunder.
It's not just my ring psychology, or my character, or my moves. It's me, embodying something, being something that it likes and that it can digest. I can hear its teeth gnashing and smell its hunger. I can hear its song.
I wish I could explain it. I wish I could speak to it again.
I go outside, sweat steaming in the cold black night. The brick feels hard in a good way as I lean against the wall by the dumpster and light a cigarette. Inhale, exhale. The smoke drifts up, washing out the stars.
I scratch my head, and a snowfall of glass, sand, dried gore, and dried sweat falls down. For a long time, I just look out into the night and think of nothing.
The sound of one of the giant doors at the side of building opening wakes me. It's slow and drawn out, like someone's struggling to do it. A kid rounds the corner, not more than twenty at the absolute most.
They're wearing a black shirt with an illegible band logo. That kind of awkwardness that comes with having their entire life remaining but not having figured out most things yet. They're leaning against the wall, lighting a joint, not paying attention to the smoking old wreck by the dumpster.
"Hey kid," I say, "C'mere." I feel the razor, still tucked into my wristband. I take a few steps towards. I see less and less of them, and more and of it.
Blood.
You're taking a drag when you hear a voice calling to you. You look over, not bothering to hide the joint. It's an old man, standing shirtless in the cool night. It takes you a moment to place him, before you realize that it's *him*. You've never seen him this close before. The savage fighter. The larger than life brawler who has defined so many matches and eras.
But there's something different about him. Even though he's closer, he seems smaller than before. You realize that you're seeing the man, not the wrestler.
From inside, you can hear muffled cheers as the crowd watches some amazing move. You shiver.
He approaches you, expectantly. For some reason, you just hope that he's not angry about you jeering him earlier. It wasn't anything personal, not really.
By way of a peace offering, you gesture towards him with the joint. If nothing else, the time you smoked out the Rough Beast himself will make for a hell of a story. He takes a hit, then passes it back to you.
You're about to ask him something, say you're a big fan, something, when he lashes out at you. You barely feel it. A sharp bite across your throat.
There's no time to react, not that you would.
You have no idea what even happened, just that it hurts. He puts a hand to your mouth and you feel the rough callouses of his palms against your lips. His expression is blank.
You stand still, your brain trying to process what is happening in this moment. You can feel it spilling down the front of your shirt.
Blood.
They look confused as it happens. Even if I didn't have a hand over their mouth, I don't think they would make a sound. The red looks like black in the dark, cascading down, onto the shirt.
Maybe I should feel guilty about this. But I don't.
I've bled so much for this sport, this show. I've broken my body more times than I can count. Most mornings, I can just about get out of bed in under thirty minutes.
I've given my life and my body and my passion to this business. I've seen friends, good friends, ground into dust, broken down, lose themselves to drugs or alcohol to keep the pain at bay.
What's one more body for the crowd?
I've cut myself enough times to know that it doesn't hurt. Not the way a fracture does. Not the way a broken neck does. You can almost ignore the pain, if you try.
They sputter a little bit, and their eyes droop, and within a few seconds, I am just propping up dead weight. I've had guys twice my size sandbag me, and it's never been a problem. It's not even a hard lift to toss them into the dumpster. I stub out the joint and toss it in along with the razor blade. A few trash bags on top, and it's like they were never here.
I look down at my hands. New blood mixes with old, wet and fresh over dried and flaking. My fingers twitch involuntarily as I feel it. I head inside, careful not to push the door with my bloody palms.
This time, I wait. I see the perfect moment in the headline match, and I take it. The heel, dazed after being thrown through a table he set up. I can feel the energy of the crowd crest. That's when I enter, upsetting the preordained ending, slamming the face into the ring post. I am carnage incarnate, chaos made flesh. I pummel the face, then beat the heel while he's down, making it clear that I am no performer, no wrestler.
A force of nature. A god.
Later on, I will be yelled at by the promoter for going into business for myself. My cut will get distributed between the two guys I'm attacking. I'll get blacklisted and never get hired here again. But right now it doesn't matter. There are no faces, there are no heels, there is no show.
There is only the crowd, and me, the wreaker of violence. I can hear it , and it can see me. The song of its demand, unending hunger with its wordless tongue. Me embodying the thing that it demands, that it needs.
Blood.