He dubbed himself the “Lady-Killer,” stitched across the butt of his white tights in red cursive letters. On his crotch, a faded broken red heart split into two. That was his gimmick—the pretty boy who’d check himself out with a compact mirror as he strutted down the metal ramp. There would be an actress, an aspiring local planted in the front row of each show. He’d lean over the barricade, place both hands on her cheeks and plant a kiss worthy of daytime soaps, then slide belly first through the bottom rope and snatch the microphone from the ring announcer.
“Hide your ladies, fellas. They might die from watching this.” He’d put his hands behind his head and gyrate his hips, twirling an invisible hula hoop. Lips puckered behind the porn star ‘stache.
Management plucked him out of wrestling school too early. He generated cheap heat from the crowd but was still green. At a show in Albuquerque, when The Sandman locked him in a basic sleeper hold, he was supposed to elbow out and kill another nine minutes. Three times the referee lifted his arm over his head, and three times he let it fall limp. The ref had no choice but to call for the bell. The Berserker didn’t know what to do but pin his body. The crowd hurled water bottles and beer cups. Backstage, The Berserker, ordinarily the consummate professional, delivered a punch to the liver that brought TLK to his knees.
Then, at a TV taping in Louisville, he attempted a powerbomb. His opponent was Boris Asimov, The Russian Sickle. TLK dropped him on his head, all three hundred pounds. Fans swore they could hear the crunch of vertebrae from the first row. The announcers tried to cover it up by labeling the move a piledriver. TLK kissed his biceps, used the Jumbotron to fix his hair.
“He’s too cocky to go for the cover!” the pro-face announcer said.
“He’s just admiring his handiwork,” said the pro-heel announcer.
But The Sickle wasn’t getting up. The higher-ups backstage got on the ref’s earpiece, ordered him to end the match and declare TLK the winner. The fans booed and screamed. It wasn’t right. Jobbers weren’t supposed to beat someone of The Sickle’s caliber.
On the stretcher, The Sickle complained how his delts felt like they were on fire, as if someone had rubbed Icy Hot under his skin. Off-script, his manager went after TLK with a sledgehammer. He shouted threats in Russian as the boys held him back. I hung back. No one ever invited me to join a side.
TLK should have been fired, but the boss saw a potential marketable commodity. He cut a deal with TLK, booking a match between him and me. In the storyline, I’d begin a jealous crusade against the more handsome wrestlers, starting with the prettiest of them all. As the announcer would phrase it during the telecast, “The Giant would put him out of commission,” when he was really returning to wrestling school for more in-ring training.
The suits would have called me something more racist if it weren’t for my size.
“Yang-Tease?”
“The Asian Persuasion?”
“No, he’s a big guy. That’s as funny as the Chinaman shit. There’s gotta be some aspect of giant in his name.”
“Mount Fuji?”
“The Great Wall of China.”
“The Giant,” I’d said, slamming my balled-up fists on the table like two hammers. “Just The Giant.”
When TLK and I tangoed, I admit I was a little rough with him. The Sickle said, “Put a chink in his dink.” I hit him with stiff body shots that left purple bruises. I drove him face first through the Spanish announcers’ table. He barely flinched. On the ground, hidden behind hair and splintered plywood, he took out the razor concealed in the tape of his fingers. He was supposed to cut a clean, shallow slice near his headline. But he cut too deep and busted open. Gave himself a gusher. The blood, thinned by aspirin, made it look like someone had poured a bucket of red paint over his head.
“Time to go home,” the ref said.
I stood behind TLK, pushed my thumbs directly into his temples, my other fingers on his cut, and lifted him up. If it had been anyone else, I would have flexed my forearms to sell the illusion. For him, I pressed my hands against his head like I was deflating a soccer ball. His legs dangled in the air. I thought he was overselling the move, but his legs stopped pumping during the hold. Passed out for real. He was the first wrestler not to verbally give up to my special move, The Cranium Crush. With a barber clipper, I shaved off his precious hair. We had matching chrome domes. I released his head and the back of it bounced off the canvas. I wiped his blood off my hands on his tights.
When he finally came to, the unexpected happened—the fans cheered. And not the type of polite applause fans offer a boxer recovering from a devastating knockout. The crowd’s reaction was an unexpected twist of fate. Two referees pulled him to his feet. He gave the crowd a thumbs up. His pearly whites looked even brighter behind that crimson mask.
I wondered why a guy whose mug was his moneymaker would volunteer to scar up his face, but I think it was in part to prove to the boys and himself and the fans that he was more than a suburban trust funder with a narcissistic streak.
I met Audrey in New Orleans in my ninth year on the pro circuit. The Battle at the Bayou, where workers stacked dented steel chairs and scraped thumbtacks off the backs of the hardcore wrestlers. In the locker room, clowns washed off face paint while the boys had their cuts stitched, comparing and trading painkillers, or rested in tubs full of ice. I took the strongest stuff I could get my mitts on and popped them in my mouth like Tic Tacs. Ice baths weren’t designed to accommodate men over seven feet tall and five hundred pounds, I reasoned, but I also knew management saw me as a bit player rather than a star. I took what I could get.
“So you’re The Giant,” she said. She checked out my size twenty-two black boots, my open duffel bag of black singlets. I had wanted to wear a ring outfit that made me appear less like a caveman, but that was the entire point, the boss argued.
“What’s your real name?”
I could tell she wasn’t some mouthpiece for someone who couldn’t cut a proper promo, a diversion for drunken horndogs. She wore her brown hair up, and even her neck was beautiful.
“First rule of the business: don’t break kayfabe.”
“Wow, your voice is like a bass speaker,” she said. “What’s kayfabe?”
“Keeping fans in that dream world bubble. Some of them still believe this is all real.”
I posed for her like I did for promotional pics: my fingers squeezing an imaginary skull. People were afraid I’d squash their hand with a handshake, break their ribs with a hug.
She smiled. “How about a tour of the ring?”
It had been so long since I’d walked down the aisle of an empty arena. A cascade of boos usually surrounded me. She pushed the top rope of the ring down and jumped over like some parkour practitioner hopping a rail, ran across the canvas, bounced off the red ropes, then backflipped and rolled.
“Come on in,” she said. “The water’s fine.”
I climbed onto the apron, lifted one leg over the top rope and then the other. It felt weird to be in the ring in my tailored sweatpants. I wanted to impress her with some moves of my own, but I didn’t have anyone to demonstrate them with.
“Let me try a move on you,” she said.
She had me lie down near a ring corner. She climbed the top rope, her back facing me, then turned, stretching her arms out like she was on a balance beam, and took a few prep bounces. I thought she was going to try something simple, maybe a diving double foot stomp on my torso. Instead she jumped and executed a backflip in mid-air, knees pressed to her chest. For a moment, she seemed to defy gravity: we locked eyes in midflight. Then she landed on my chest in gravity’s full grip, and I could smell the sweetness of her hair as it brushed my face. I still hadn’t taken a breath. Something shot through my heart, but it wasn’t pain.
“You’re harder than you look,” she said. She stood up and grimaced. “I thought it’d be more like falling on a giant stuffed panda bear.”
“What do you call that move?” I asked.
“A shooting star press,” she said.
From then on, I tried to pretend it was coincidence when I bumped into Audrey backstage, but it’s hard to be subtle when one stomps rather than walks.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” she’d tease. Still, she made me forget my bulging forehead, my protruding underbite, my chronic back problems and aching knees.
I woke early to catch her at the breakfast buffet while the other wrestlers slept, hungover from drinking with me. Management put most of us up at cut-rate motels next to freeways. Geriatric road trippers gawked at my appetite, which Audrey shooed away with a delicate wave.
Her kindness made me open up. I told her which seamstresses were the best, how to deal with rowdy fans, that sort of thing. Which guys to look out for when the cameras stopped rolling.
“What about the muscle guys?” she asked.
“Juicers,” I said. “Prone to roid rage and unwanted shrinkage.”
“That British guy?”
“Fake accent. Born and raised in Tucson.”
“The lucha libres?”
“Got herpes from tag teaming some ring rats.”
When she asked about TLK, I replied, “The name’s literal. His ex-girlfriend died under mysterious circumstances.” Rumors were as much a part of the business as steel chairs. I had one too. Freaky fans asked to see if I was giant everywhere and winked.
Audrey was never curious.
“You have it the easiest of all of us,” TLK told me once. “All you have to do is whip it out.”
Only much later did I realize that by “it,” he’d meant my championship belt.
She made her debut in the Mile High City. She went by her stage name, Miss Audrey. She wore long black gloves and a crown in her hair like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The boss even splurged and gave her a decent budget for little black dresses. A rockified version of Moon River played as she walked towards the ring, the electric guitar thrumming scuzzily over “dream maker” and “heart breaker.”
“What an elegant beauty,” one announcer said.
“Needs to show more skin,” said the other.
She was up against the Amazonian, who had a square jawline and a mustache. ‘Roids. If the crowd wasn’t in love with Audrey before, they were after the match. With the hurricanrana, she wrapped her legs around The Amazonian’s neck and flipped her. She Irish whipped her into the turnbuckles, backflipped her way towards her, gave her a back elbow. She finished her off with a backflip off the top rope. The announcers called it a moonsault. The crowd oohed and aahed, and so did I watching it on the TVs backstage. I told myself I would ask her out.
When The Berserker jumped into the ring and shoved Audrey away from The Amazonian, I had no idea what the angle was. Were they really going to make her go 1v2? Then he came out to save her. TLK flew down the entrance ramp and slingshotted his body over the top rope. I barely recognized him with his short spiked brown hair. He had ditched the spray tan lotion and the ‘stache.
He’d been out for two months, but he showed no signs of ring rust. He attacked with spinning kicks. Backflips from the top rope. He was quicker. Faster. Before, the pro-face announcer called him arrogant. Now he called him self-confident. The pro-heel announcer used to say he made the ladies tremble. Now his voice trembled in anger over his sissy acrobatic moves.
To me, he was just as cocky as ever.
To the fans, he was the next big thing.
I couldn’t believe he was the guy whose head I had shaved. I had crazy thoughts that his buzz cut made him aerodynamic. That if I hadn’t beaten him down so bad, he’d still wrestle in low tier matches that happened while fans searched for open parking spots.
The kicker was when he did her move. On TV, it looked like he was levitating in the air for a second before he fell from the sky and on The Berserker. The crowd went bonkers. Bananas.
And the look of gratitude she gave him for rescuing her—she really should have been in the movies.
When he kissed her, the fans flew out of their chairs and went ape shit.
TLK had turned babyface.
The Greatest Drunk on Earth. My true identity.
I went to the bar with the goal of breaking my record for beers. Forty-five. A rack and a half. I took up two stools. The Japanese wrestlers came along. They illuminated that Asian glow within a matter of minutes.
Everyone wanted to talk about TLK’s sudden rise.
“He’s just a glorified stuntman,” I said.
“Rasslin’ is fake anyways,” some drunk at the end of the bar said.
“Is it now?” I said.
“Like how you punch. You stomp your foot on the ground to make noise.” He got up and threw a jab with an exaggerated front step.
Now if I were sober, he and I could’ve had a thoughtful discussion on the matter. I could’ve shown all the scars I had picked up and told him the story behind each one. List off the names of wrestlers who had died too young sacrificing their bodies for this business. I could have asked if he ever thought about how everything in the movies he enjoyed was fake, the CGI, the props, the actors. Explain the concept of suspension of disbelief. But I was around my thirtieth can. I offered him a deal. The most expensive bottle of wine in the bar if he could withstand my signature move for ten seconds. He drunkenly agreed. He sobered up when he felt how real the pain was.
I missed my chance. Or maybe I never had one. But I couldn’t feign apathy as Audrey’s star rose.
Nothing ever got by the boss. But I’m sure we were all guilty. Who knows. I’m sure to him I looked like the King Kong to her Ann.
Maybe the boss knew when I asked him if I could retire a good guy. I wanted to know what it felt like to hear fans cheering for me. Really though, I wanted the possibility of her in my corner. Bad guys didn’t get girls like Audrey.
“You have to understand something,” the boss said. “You can’t not be the bad guy. People don’t root for Goliath. You remind them of the bullies who swirlied them in high school.”
This was laughable. I’d been big my entire life, but that hadn’t kept me from being teased.
“Joe Shmoe can’t relate to you. They root for the Rockys, the Rudys, you understand? Guys with heart.”
“White people,” I said.
“What did you say?”
“Nevermind.”
The creative team stuck me with the crusade against pretty boys angle. The company hired good-looking jobbers for me to toss around, wrestlers who had no gimmicks and forgettable fake names like Stanley Thompson who hailed from places like Aberdeen, South Dakota. They served as living props for me to showcase my signature moves. One of the moves was a bearhug, the simplest of them all, yet ironic in that an embrace so close and intimate appeared as if I was crushing my opponents’ ribs.
“I think he needs a new name,” Audrey said. “TLK is too misogynistic. I was thinking something like The Model? The Daredevil? The Ladies’ Man?”
“How about The Narcissist?” I said.
“Come on, be serious,” she said.
She’d invited me back to her motel room to talk away from her fans and harassers. It had twin beds. I was laying down on her spare bed, playing my Nintendo. My legs dangled off the edge. I pushed buttons with my pinkie. Video games were what I passed the time on besides drink. I liked to escape into another world where I could be an Italian plumber instead of myself.
“That’s it,” she said when she saw what I was playing. She snapped her fingers. “Kid Icarus.”
I hoped he flew too close to the sun.
The one thing about the business is how easily fans forget. When one gimmick doesn’t work, abort it and try another. Change names and hometowns and origin stories. Become an entirely different person. I never had that privilege; it’s not like I could have shrunk. When I started, they billed me as a gentle giant. Jobbers punched my stomach and injured their hands. Bad guys hit me with a folding chair only to have the chair ricochet back and hit them in the head. Nobody cheered for me. They didn’t like the angle of an aloof simpleton who won matches by virtue of just being huge. After a few weeks of that, the boss decided I had to be a bad guy and I was one ever since.
“With a mug like yours, I don’t know why we tried to make you a good guy in the first place,” he said.
He booked me in three-against-one handicap matches, but they had as much a collective chance in beating me as they would in a drinking contest. I bashed two of their foreheads together into the third guy like a Three Stooges routine. I started yelling at the ref to count to five instead of the standard three. The fans got tired of my dominance. But there were no good guys who could capably beat me. The last time they tried to push somebody it was a former weightlifter, but he tore his lats in real life trying to lift me up for a bodyslam.
Kid Icarus scattered magazines of the two of them all around the locker room. The headlines:
The Meteoric Rise of Kid Icarus and Miss Audrey.
The Heavenly Bodies.
The Shooting Stars.
While Audrey graciously signed those magazines and pictures for the fans, Kid Icarus let the fame get to his head. Refused to sign autographs for the other wrestlers’ kids who were fans of his. Renamed old moves like the frog splash to the five-star frog splash and claimed to have invented them. The private limos and presidential suites the boss booked them must have been cutting off circulation to his brain.
The boss planned to push him as the undisputed number one contender. There had never been a challenger deemed worthy of taking my title. The business couldn’t have the equivalent of The Lady-Killer beating The Russian Sickle. It would be breaking kayfabe.
The storyline the boss envisioned: Kid Icarus wanted to test himself with other big men before getting his revenge on me. He would go on a tear of big men. The boss made wrestlers who had dedicated years in this business go over for Kid Icarus. It didn’t go well with the rest of us who thought he hadn’t yet paid his dues, but the boss put his foot down. In my story, The Giant wanted to take him out not only because he was jealous of his looks and sudden success, but also because he wanted his girlfriend.
“It’s simple. Good guy wants something. He wants your belt. Bad guy wants conflicting something. You want his woman. You fight for it. Rinse and repeat,” the boss said.
I never did find out what Audrey did before. She was coy with her backstory and never could keep it straight, sometimes claiming she was a trained gymnast, other times a stunt performer for movies. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything that could prepare her for the carnie lifestyle we lived. The federation was on the road forty-five weeks out of the year, from places like Gastonia, North Carolina to the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Performed shows in a dreamlike autopilot, whether it was because of lack of sleep or a hangover, all of us sharing that feeling our bodies would always ache. Waited for backstage personnel to pack the essentials on the bus: steel folding chairs, sledgehammers, brass knuckles, fire extinguishers, razor blades, thumbtacks, Kendo sticks, nunchucks, nightsticks, handcuffs. Waited for the juicers to pack their needles and syringes. Waited for the boys to pack their feather boas, do-rags, headbands, robes, unitards, Viking helmets, metal chain necklaces, fangs, kneepads, jock straps.
On an off-day, I ran into her at a strip mall and it looked like she hadn’t slept in days. It was the first time I hadn’t seen her in makeup. She had a crescent moon scar on her right cheek.
“I don’t feel right,” she said.
“You look fine,” I said.
“Sometimes I wonder if anyone would recognize me without makeup.”
“Sometimes I forget what’s real and what’s fake,” I said.
Kid Icarus blurred the lines of good and evil, performing tactics once only exclusive to bad guys. He was the only good guy to cheat in matches. He used Audrey to distract his opponent with her beauty. Then he’d hit the guy with a chair from behind.
“He has his eye on the prize!” said the pro-face announcer.
“Using his old lady to win matches. Real tough guy,” the pro-heel announcer said.
With the announcers switching their allegiances and all the promotional hyping the boss instructed the writers to do, the crowd ate it all up. They chanted “holy shit” after he wowed them with his high-flying moves. And if that wasn’t enough to convince the audience, Audrey would interfere and moonsault the higher caliber bad guys as KI moved up the ranks. She was the Bonnie to his Clyde.
When she did those high-risk flips, the other wrestlers had to grab her in mid-air, make it look like she hurt them when, in reality, they were protecting her. There would be consequences if they were the one to mess up and hurt her. Still, no matter how fleeting, they got to feel her body pressed against theirs.
He was going to get what he wanted, the boss decided. His destiny was predetermined.
Kid Icarus cut promos some said were revolutionary. He started calling himself the Giant Slayer and talked about how he had a never-before-seen special move he would unveil to slay the giant. Which was fine, but then he crossed the line. He ad-libbed remarks about how small “it” was. He kept referring to me as the Oriental Giant. As if being giant and stared at all the time wasn’t enough. He mocked my famous pose by putting his index fingers close together. Fans played along and shouted “needle dick” behind the barricades and security officers. He encouraged them to chant “We want egg rolls!” clap, clap, clapclapclap. “We want egg rolls!” clap, clap, clapclapclap.
I complained to the boss about it once, but he just shrugged.
“Just deal with it. The Iranian guy has it a lot worse than you.”
But the thing that got to me the most was how he flaunted her. If I bumped into the two of them, he’d make sure to kiss her in front of me. He sensed how much I wanted her. He knew I would have nothing once he took the belt away from me. I’d just be a giant freak. The rumors were they were a real-life couple, but nobody knew for sure.
I finally asked her if they were really seeing each other.
“First rule of the business,” she said. “Don’t break kayfabe.”
On the way to the stadium in the City of Angels, I saw the billboards tagged by graffiti. They spray painted a Confucius looking mustache and goatee on my face.
The headline: The unstoppable force vs. The immovable object.
An ex-jobber headlining the biggest pay-per-view in sports entertainment. Who would have thought.
“This match is scheduled for one fall and is a ladder match! No countouts or disqualifications! Whoever retrieves the belt is the champion!”
KI’s theme music played. It had a heroic quality, an adventure movie soundtrack. He glided down a zip line from the rafters. Pyrotechnics and fireworks shot up from each corner of the ring. He stood at the center, turned his back to the main camera, and pointed both thumbs to his new tattoo: a pair of angelic wings across his shoulder blades. Audrey was in the ring waiting for him, radiant in rented diamond earrings. When she and KI kissed, the audience screamed.
I stepped through the curtain to the bleak sound of my theme music. The sound guys sliced my bassoon-like evil laugh into the song’s hook. The Jumbotron behind played a looping clip of me crushing skulls and headbutting wrestlers into oblivion. Sweaty bald men who wore yellowed tank tops booed; women in mullets booed; tweens in t-shirts of their favorite good guys booed. They pointed their thumbs down and pinched their nostrils as if my evil was a stench. Orchestrated chants of “You suck” echoed in the arena. Fans held up neon homemade signs like “The Giant isn’t giant DOWN THERE,” with a stick figure drawing of me and an arrow pointed at where the legs connected.
I approached the kid the boss had planted in the front row. He wore a sky blue Kid Icarus shirt and held a white poster board that read, “A Giant Loser.” I ripped the sign in half and threw it to the ground, then I spit on it. The boy cried on cue as instructed. I egged the crowd on to boo louder. I cupped my ears as if I couldn’t hear them. My job was to incite the crowd, make the fans hate me as much as possible, and I was the best there was at it.
The bell rang. Fireworks smoke still hovered. We stared each other down at the center of the ring. The top of his head barely reached my chest. The championship belt – a strap of leather and fake gold attached to a wire – dangled high above the ring. I’d never much cared for it until now, when I would have to give it up.
I started the match as the aggressor, to establish my dominance. I gave him a suplex, backbreaker, atomic drop. I put him in abdominal stretches, headlocks, camel clutches. Then it was his turn. He chopped my chest, which incited customary screams of “Woooo!” from the crowd. He kicked my knee brace to weaken my base to set up his aerial attack for later. As much as we might’ve hated each other, we were supposed to look like we beat the crap out of each other without truly injuring each other.
I went outside the ring to grab the steel ladder. “Your fat ass is going to break the ladder!” I heard. I pretended to limp.
The original plan was for me to beat him down and bring the ladder into the ring as if I were going to climb it to jump onto him. But I’d grab my knee brace and pretend I could barely walk to stall, so that he could recover. He’d hit me over the head with a steel chair five times and steal my ladder to prepare a front flip off of it while I lay on the ground. For added drama, I would recover just as he gingerly climbed the ladder and started to tilt it over as he reached the ladder’s apex, right before he could grab the dangling championship belt. At that point, Audrey would jump in and plead for me not to hurt him. Say something along the lines of, “If you really love me, you won’t hurt him,” loud enough so the cameras and the pay-per-viewers could hear. I would let go of the ladder and storm off to the locker room as they embraced on the Jumbotron.
I was slapping his chest in the corner when KI went off-script and hulked up. Bad guys weren’t allowed to gain strength from pain—only good guys. But he wasn’t a strong good guy; he didn’t have the privilege. Still, he shook his head as if each strike didn’t hurt, making me look like I lacked power. For all the fancy moves he learned when he went back to train, he was still clueless about ring psychology. I punched him right in the mouth, no foot stomp required. The corner kept him upright as he held onto the ropes. He swished his mouth and spat blood at my face.
I tried to stay professional. I’d dealt with idiots like him before. I called “bodyslam” to him as I whipped him across to the opposite corner. But when he got back to me, he sandbagged me. He let his body go limp, made it harder for me to throw him. Who did he think I was? I could deadlift nine hundred pounds. I was the fucking champion. I lifted him up and turned his body upside down for the bodyslam. He struggled. He pumped his legs like he was riding a bicycle and tried to wiggle his way out from my shoulder. He punched my crotch, which was against our unspoken code. I squeezed him like he was a zit. His head stuck out further than it should, maybe six inches below the bottom of my legs. But I was enraged. I fell down on my knees and spiked the top of his head on the canvas. The crunch was even louder than when he botched the powerbomb against The Sickle.
“I can’t move,” he said, barely audible.
There wasn’t a ref to tell me what to do. No possible curtain drop. I obeyed the first rule of the business: maintain kayfabe.
I stood over his motionless body, squatted with my crotch over his face. “Not so small now, huh?” I said.
The crowd murmured, uncertain if it was part of some angle. I pushed away any guilt. I didn’t think. I played my role—the giant who destroyed all challengers blocking his path. I acted the way expected of me, to keep the fans in that dream. The same way I pretended not to love Audrey when I saw her, so that she couldn’t see it.
I was only doing what I had done for years. My duty to the business. I couldn’t pin him or walk away. I ran around the ring and flapped my arms like a wounded bird. A fan in the front row held a sign that read, “If The Giant wins, we riot.” I set the ladder up at the center of the ring and climbed to take what was rightfully mine. The ladder felt wobblier the higher I went, the steps more slippery with each rung. Cameras flashed from the stands like a field of stars. I could sense an entire stadium wishing for me to fall. When I looked down and saw her, crouched with one hand touching his face, the other hand clutched to the ladder—the way she looked at me, her mouth agape—that was the only time I had seen her terrified, seen anyone realize the monster I truly was.