They say
you always remember your first fight.
Your first
fight and your first fuck.
I
sure-as-shit remember mine. I was at the carnival, watching the kootch show,
when Alvin Lupus broke his right wrist and four fingers on his right hand
trying to shatter my jaw. I didn’t blame him – he had just found out that I had
fingered his older sister up against the Crippled Civilians’ clothing donation
box the previous Saturday night.
I was only
14 at the time.
The carnies
dragged him off and beat him with cut-down baseball bats in the woodland behind
the wrestling tent. A few people said that they murdered him, and buried him in
a shallow grave along with a couple of rabid dogs, but I later found out that
he had hitched down to Mexico in search of a wrestling promoter with deep
pockets and lax moral standards.
Most guys I
knew who fought in Mexico came home in a box or in a wheelchair, but Alvin was
different. He came back tougher, meaner. Every time he got suspended, for some
infraction or other, he wound up down south: dick-deep in senoritas and
wrestling like his life depended on it. His hook-up down there was a fighter
known as Gringo Starr – an old juicehead who liked to get drunk and slash faces
like some men slash tyres. Those two boys were tighter than a nun's pussy.
On my 17th
birthday Shriek Watson told my father that I was too short to be a wrestler, so
Daddy bought me a crate of imported Metandienone for my birthday, and had me
chopping logs and digging drainage ditches for a full year. I don’t know if the
‘roids helped, but by the time I was 18 I was as tall as any boy in Testament.
Shriek
still wouldn’t train me, but by that point I didn’t give two shits – I was earning
real coin fighting men twice my age in parking lots and abandoned factories.
I didn’t
cross paths with Alvin again until we met in prison. He had been convicted of a
stabbing and a shooting, although nobody died. I was just passing through jail
on a vagrancy collar. By 1989 I was back fighting, and got my big break in the Deep
South Wrestling Association, fighting under the name Tiny Diamonds. I was a big
man, obese, but not morbidly so, and I still knew my way around the canvas.
When Alvin
got out of the Big House he looked me up. He was meaty with prison muscle, and
looked fucking dangerous. My weight had ballooned by this point – underactive thyroid,
my physician said – so I was grateful for a tag-team partner who was willing to
work up a sweat on my behalf. We had a good run, even picked up a couple of
belts along the way. We earned a reputation as men who would go the extra yard
for a promoter. Blading was commonplace, and by the end of our first summer working
together, Alvin’s face looked like a roadmap of hell.
Not long
after, we joined the Testament Wrestling Alliance – as a result of a hostile
takeover. When people ask me what a hostile takeover is, I tell them it is just
like a regular takeover, but the guy signing the papers has a sawn-off shotgun barrel
between his teeth. Our new boss was a guy named Fingerfuck Flanagan. Never liked
the man, personally – he walked like his balls were too big for his fucking
pants.
I was
mostly used as a jobber, but Alvin was a headline draw. By this point he was
using the name The Jazz Butcher, and Fingerfuck had him wearing more make-up
than a deformed hooker. Alvin hated gimmicks, hated costumes, and he especially
hated wearing face-paint. One evening – shortly before he was due to fight
Freddie Regal in a Punjabi Prison Match – he put on his duffel coat and walked right
out of the auditorium, past the ticket-taker, past the queue of fans, and drove
away in his shit-coloured jalopy.
Fingerfuck
called me into his office. He was twitching – sweating like a rent boy in
church. I thought he was having a heart attack, until I saw a cut-price hooker under
his desk, working him with her misshapen mouth. I was worried that he was going
to ask me to fill in for Alvin in the Punjabi Prison Match, but he had other
plans for me.
“Tiny, you will
never eat lunch in my canteen again, unless you track down that creepy bastard
Lupus, and bring him back to Testament.”
I spent a
month trawling carnivals and bareknuckle fights, slaughterhouses and dive-bars.
I drove as far north as Hellbelly, as far south as Crooked Timber. When I
eventually tracked him down he was working as a bouncer at Short & Sweet, a
midget strip club in a shit-hole town called Small Pond.
The
alleyway behind the strip club was piled high with discarded appliances. Alvin
was sat atop a rusted A/C unit, wearing a bomber jacket and a bolo tie. His
lank hair had been scraped back with its own grease. He grunted when he saw me,
and flicked his half-smoked cigarette toward my face.
“I’m not
going back, Tiny. I fuckin’ like it here.”
A couple of
the midget strippers were watching from the fire exit, cigarettes dangling from
their tiny painted mouths.
I rolled my
shoulders, and Alvin was all over me like a cheap leotard. He reached between
my legs, hoisting me into a powerslam, and upended me onto a pile of rubble.
I felt
something give way inside of me, and a brief bubble of pain evaporated on my
chalky lips.
The midgets
started to applaud, and Alvin took a bow.
I looked
down at the jagged shard of metal embedded in my fat gut as my shirt started to
turn crimson.
Lousy fuckin’
Alvin. He always was a Goddamn crowd pleaser…
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