Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“That must be it.”

“Sure,” Alconi said. “You need the old smash.” He ground his fist against his palm. “The old kaboom. The old grrr-rr-agh.” He pulled some air down out of the sky, cradled it in the crook of his right elbow, and strangled it. “The old splat cratch.” He kneed an invisible back. “The old fffapp!” He grabbed handfuls of invisible hair and gouged invisible holes in invisible eye sockets.

“With all due respect, Mr. Alconi, that’s not what I need,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been getting. What I need is to learn to protect myself against that.”

“Sure,” he said. “I understand, kid. Only I’m not your trainer, you realize. As your manager I get thirty- four per cent of your purses. As your trainer I’d be entitled to another”—he considered my bruises—“fifteen per cent.”

“Sure,” I said.

“That would still leave you with fifty-one per cent of yourself. You’d be in command.”

“Chairman of the Board, as it were,” I said.

“Yeah,” Alconi laughed. “That’s right, Chairman of the Board.”

I slept on it. The next day I went up to Alconi again. “Who’d pay expenses?” I asked. I had been paying my own.

Alconi frowned. “What the hell,” he said, “we’ll take the railroad expenses off the top, the gross. We’ll split.”

“Okay,” I said.

We signed a new contract and I went back to my hotel and renewed auld lang syne with a pharmacist I had been keeping.

In the morning Alconi called me over to his office in the gym. “Boswell,” he said, “Jimmy, you lucked out. I got a class of ladies starting Monday and I’m registering you.”

“Ladies!”

“Girls. Female wrestlers.”

“You want me to train with girls,” I said.

“Jimmy,” he said, winking evilly, “it’s better than bar bells.”

“Sure.”

“The coming thing,” he said expansively. “Lady wrestlers. The wave of the future, Jimmy. I can foresee the time when they’ll be girl tag teams, girl midgets, interracial girl wrestling, mixed matches with men.”

“Interracial mixed matches with men,” I said.

“Let’s go slow, Jimmy,” he said.

At first I was shy. After all, it’s an odd feeling to see the world strapped across the thick, broad shoulders of some nubile young lady, an extraordinary concept to be struggling for air nuzzled against the breast of some matronly female giant. But I got used to it, and soon began even to enjoy myself. This was frequently and embarrassingly apparent even to the young ladies. Ultimately, for everyone’s protection, Alconi’s male instructor had to put me on a private crash program. It wasn’t the same.

Training with ladies, however, even for as brief a period as I did, had an oblique side effect on my style. For a long time I was reluctant around the area of my opponent’s chest. Understanding the cause, I. attributed this to some innate though grossly misdirected sense of decency on my part, but it was noticed by the fans and their explanations leaked back to me. “He’s a chicken,” some said. “No,” said the others, “he killed a man once in Canada with a bear-hug and he’s afraid he might do it again.”

I emerged from my training somewhat better prepared for the professional knockabout I had engaged for. I had learned, as Sandusky put it, to fall. This is useful knowledge, as everyone knows.

For a year I wrestled everywhere — earning, curiously, different reputations in different parts of the country. I was too small-time, you see, for it to matter much. In the Southeast, for example — the Memphis-Nashville-Mobile-Birmingham-Little Rock-Jackson-Biloxi-Jacksonville-Tampa-Savannah-Atlanta circuit — I nearly always won. (Alconi explained why. I was, as Bogolub was to tell me later, clean-cut, a Protestant, Mr. Universe type, Anglo-Saxon all the way.) But in the coal mining Middle Atlantic states I always lost, for the same reasons that I was let win in the South. Elsewhere it was the same pattern. Here a winner, there a loser. I was earning a little more money now, though the fact that the instructor had to give me private lessons upped Alconi’s take a couple of per cent and I was no longer Chairman of the Board.

It went like that, as I say, for about a year. But at about the time I had the row with Bogolub in Los Angeles, Alconi suddenly died. He left no heirs, absolutely none, and my contract reverted back to myself. It was like having my salary doubled, and when Bogolub threatened to cut me off in Los Angeles, and perhaps wherever he had influence in the West, I stood to lose something for the first time in my life.

That’s why I had apologized.

Bogolub explained that if I assumed a new identity I could no longer wrestle on the West Coast as myself. “That’s all right,” I said. He looked at me narrowly. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Some guys mind.”

He wanted me to stay over in Los Angeles a few. more days to talk over plans, line up new matches (most of them with men I was already scheduled to meet), and sign new contracts. I had to cancel matches in Sacramento and Berkeley. Bogolub was so excited about launching a new career for somebody that he agreed to split the forfeit fee with me. When I saw him two days later he asked me if I had any ideas.

“About what?”

“About what? About the costume!”

I hadn’t thought about it, but I remembered something Sandusky once told me about his Wild Man of Borneo days. I used that as a base and made up the rest as I went along. I tried to seem enthusiastic. I would paint my body green, I told Bogolub, and wear a monster mask. There would be fangs, and saliva could drip down from them like stuff coming off stalactites. I could call myself “The Wolf Man” and explain my complexion by the fact that I was raised in a cave in Bavaria until I was eighteen.

Bogolub listened to me and seemed to be considering it thoughtfully, but after a while he frowned.

“It’s no good,” he said at last. “It’s too corny.”

“Gee, I liked it,” I told him.

“Nah,” Bogolub said, “what’d happen when you sweat? The green paint. It’s no good.”

“How about an executioner’s mask? I could wear an executioner’s mask that goes all the way down to my shoulders. With big holes for the eyes and the nostrils.”

“You ain’t got the body for it,” he said professionally. “You got a young body. That’s what we’ve got to start with.”

I nodded gravely.

“Sure,” he said. “We got to work on that angle of it. We can’t make you into something horrible when you ain’t.”

“You can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse,” I said brightly.

Bogolub didn’t answer; he was lost in thought. After a while he smiled and patted his stomach affectionately.

“Have you got an idea?”

“I think so, I think so. How would this be? We put you in a white silk mask — like The Lone Ranger’s, only white. And you wear white trunks and a beautiful white silk cape. And white shoes. Nothing else. Very simple. You’re The Masked Playboy. You wear the mask because you’re really a millionaire’s kid and you don’t want your parents to know that you’re wrestling professional because it would break their hearts. ‘THE HIGH SOCIETY WRESTLER! WHO IS HE?’ How’s that?”

So I became The Masked Playboy. I remembered the reaction in the picture when José Iturbi played boogie-woogie. It was our instinct to applaud such acts, to wink at Carmen Miranda with Dickie Dobber when the time came. The secret handshake of the eye. Classical was only fancy, but popular was good. And when we said good we meant good, God’s good. Little was big and weak was strong and poor was rich. The ultimate, the crowning glory, was what I was to stand for, to demonstrate behind my silk mask — like The Lone Ranger’s, only white — that rich was poor, that alive will one day be dead. Applause. Cheers. Winks.