Stanley Elkin - Boswell

This was in the early days of the baroque wrestler and Bogolub’s maneuver was very successful. Now it was arranged for me to win fairly regularly. Bogolub explained the motivation. Why, after all, would a millionaire playboy like myself continue to wrestle if he lost? He would have to be a pretty good wrestler. Bogolub was pleased with his invention, and I began to have more and more dates on the West Coast. Once Bogolub explained to me that my masquerade was actually helping free enterprise and capitalism. There was far too much crap going around about the working classes, he said; if Americans were made to see how tough and down to earth a rich man’s son could be they would sit up and take notice and it would be good for business.

For five months I toured, climbing the country in busy, sooty eastern and central tours, a wrestler in industrial towns, a loser, comic relief for the day shift. Making the more leisurely long, low southern lope, a whipper of Wops, a Spic scourger, Hebe hitter, Polack pounder — the White Hope of God Knows What. Then the western trip. Quick — off with the horn-rimmed glasses, into the cape, the mask, the white shoes. The Capitalist’s Friend, Free Enterprise’s Prize. A Masked Playboy who didn’t need the money but beat up guys to show he was regular. Like Christ, really — who couldn’t use the death but died anyway to show he was regular.

All this was in the preliminaries, of course. Alarums and excursions without. In the anteroom of history, as it were — the man who fights the man who fights the man who fights the man who one day saves or kills the king.

Then one evening, six months after putting on the silk mask in Los Angeles, I was having dinner with a promoter in Columbus, Ohio.

“I was out with Barry Bogolub a couple of weeks ago. He came East on a scouting tour. You work for him, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, he was telling me. Seems you got this gimmick going for you in LA. Mystery Playboy or something.”

“The Masked Playboy.”

“Yeah, that’s right, he was telling me.”

“What about it?”

“Nothing. It sounds good. Next time you’re in Columbus, bring your mask.”

So, gradually, the real Boswell began to fade. Long live Boswell. I wrestled increasingly as The Masked Playboy. In hick towns there were write-ups in the paper. I gave out interviews. I’d sit in my hotel room drinking expensive Scotch, a silken ascot around my neck, my legs crossed, staring democratically at the reporter across from me.

“Yes, that’s right. Educated at Cambridge. But I told Father at the time that I shouldn’t be content with a sedentary rich man’s life. He thought it a youth’s threat, of course, and meanwhile I developed my body to what you see now.”

“Were you actually in the Four Hundred?”

“Well, not actually. There was some nasty business some years ago about an uncle in trade. If I had to place the family, I’d put it somewhere in the low Five Hundreds.”

“I see,” the reporter would say, tiredly. Then, “You’re not supporting the family now, of course — it hasn’t…”

“Fallen on harder days? No, I should think not. Otherwise I might be able to take off this damnable mask. No, no, the Van Bl— whoops, I mean the family, the family is monied.”

“They’ve got a lot of money,” he’d say, writing it down.

“Oh, Lord yes, I should say so. But a fellow likes to earn a bit of his own, you know.”

“Of course.”

Of course.

Articles began to appear about me in the magazines. There was an editorial in Ring; my sort of “showmanship” might proliferate, it warned, and bring about the further vulgarization of a once noble sport. Other magazines, the body-building books and that sort, took the story — or pretended to take it — at face value, passing it on to their readers (who were those people anyway? more boogie-woogie winkers, I suppose) so that it actually gained in translation. I wrestled, they said, only in those towns where I had factories or brokerage offices or banks.

I was bigger now, more important than I had ever been as myself, and the lesson was not lost on me. For the first time I began to take the wrestling seriously. As the months went by I gathered more and more of a reputation; there was even talk that one day I would be a serious contender for the championship. Which brings me back to St. Louis and my first appearance in a main event.

Bogolub had told me on the night he wanted to throw me out of wrestling that I might one day have been a contender, that he’d had his eye on me. Perhaps it was true. I doubt it, but perhaps it was. Probably he said it to add a fillip to my loss, to start in the young man’s mind the old man’s myth, “I could have been the champion—” We are instinctively ironists, tricky tragedians. But if it was not true when Bogolub said it, a year later it was.

I got a call from Bogolub one night when I was in Fargo, North Dakota.

“Boswell? Barry.”

“Yes, Mr. Bogolub?”

“Peter Laneer broke his leg in Philly last night. He was supposed to go against John Sallow in a main event in St. Louis Friday but there’s no chance of his making it. I want you to go down and take his place.”

“I can’t do it,” I said. “I’m fighting in Des Moines Friday.”

“Called off, Jimmy.”

“What about the forfeit fee?”

“Jimmy, you’re talking about peanuts. This is a main event in St. Louis I’m talking about. You’re big time now, Jimmy. Give me a call when you get to LA.” He started to hang up.

“Mr. Bogolub. Mr. Bogolub?”

“Come on, Jimmy, this is long distance. Fargo ain’t Fresno.”

“What about the arrangements?”

“Oh, yeah, in my excitement I forgot to tell you. You lose.”

“What’s that?”

“You lose. Routine number thirty-eight. Give them a show, you understand, you’re an important wrestler, but you lose. I can trust you.”

“Mr. Bogolub, the last time I was scheduled to meet him I was supposed to win.”

“He’s the next champion, Jimmy. Be a little patient, please. Give me a ring as soon as you get to LA.”

“Mr. Bogolub, I don’t want to fight him. I don’t want to fight him Friday.” I was talking to myself. Bogolub had hung up.

I went down to the National Guard Armory. I don’t remember who I wrestled — which is odd for me; I never. forget a name. I stumbled through the routine and it was a lousy show, even though I won. The crowd was booing me. “Hey, Masked Man, go get Tonto,” someone shouted. “Hey, Keemosavee, you stink.” “Take off the mask, Prince. The ball is over.”

In the locker room, afterward, the fellow I beat sat down next to me. “What’s wrong, Jim?” (The wrestlers, of course, knew who I was. In a way the wrestlers were wonderful. They always played to the other fellow’s costume.) “Don’t you feel good?”

“Ah, Bogolub called before the match. I fight The Reaper Friday in St. Louis.”

“That’s terrific,” he said. “That’s really great. Main eventer?”

“Yes.”

“That’s marvelous, Jim. That’s really terrific.”

“I lose.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, that’s different. That’s too bad. That’s a tough piece of luck, Jimmy.

He thought I felt bad because I was supposed to lose. I was a comer, a contender. One day I was supposed to be strictly a main eventer: The Reaper already was. If I was scheduled to lose to him in my first appearance in a main event it probably meant that Bogolub was narrowing the field, was dumping me. I was better off winning the little matches, better off even losing some of them, than losing the big ones. It was too soon for me to go against Reaper and lose.

But I hadn’t been thinking of my career at all. This was personal. I was thinking about John Sallow. John Sallow, The Grim Reaper, was the wrestler I had been scheduled to fight in LA just before I disappeared out there as Boswell. Sallow had been fighting under one name or another for years. He had been a wrestler before I was even born. He had wrestled when the sport was a sport, before it had become an “exhibition.” At one time in his career he had beaten Strangler Lewis, had beaten The Angel, had beaten all the champions. He had fought everywhere — Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, the Americas, everywhere. It was impossible to know how many fights he’d actually had, partly because many were in days and towns when and where they did not keep records, and partly because of his many changes of name.