A wrestling ring is a square gate to elsewhere misnamed for the sake of tradition. Once you step between the ropes, if the armory or union hall crowd picks you up in its hundred hands of noise, the square dilates into a circle and the circle becomes a road; and if the road’s long enough and the timekeeper’s hand is slow enough, you can walk yourself from one kind of body (your own, nothing special) into another (a local legend, a star, larger than life).
That was the teaching Eddy “Flap” Jacks received when he was young enough to believe what old men say because they’re old and because they’re men and because the ritual wants attendants. He kept that rule of thumb like a razorblade under his tongue, chewing it smooth as a lozenge through the 1960s and 70s, when a man could still be champion for six weeks and come home with a dented belt and a suitcase of wrinkled banknotes and consider himself elected to life.
He aged into a rule of thumb himself. A man of enlarged joints and shrunken illusions, laced boots like a fireman and trunks that never once matched his mood or were allowed to sink below the novel of his capacious midsection. He had the grace of a catapult, as he liked to put it, and the balance of a loading dock. He performed dropkicks that made 1000 heavyset boys believe they might fly if they could jump with both feet at once and think of nothing but the impact. When he was a true world champion (once for six weeks, then again, ignominiously, for five days), people said he had a kind of weather around him—he brought storms that only the promoter could predict.
He also had a son.
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Eddy Jacks, Jr. wore his father’s surname like an inherited belt he could not resize. The first time he walked the aisle—Hartford Civic Center, cheap uniform concrete work that remembered the 1960s as the avoidance of war and the 70s as mood rings and horoscopes—he felt the square go circle in his gut and thought, foolishly, that the gate recognized his bloodline. He had a college linebacker’s hips and the cheerful pain tolerance of men who lifted iron for the approval of their fathers and their futures. People trying to describe his face always fell back on weather metaphors, too: fair-to-partly, heavy in spots, bright with a chance of thunder.
He was a Next Big Thing for 15 minutes spread over fifteen years. He held the (regional) Canadian Wrestling Alliance’s (regional) Northern Lights Title like a mason holds a level—carefully, and always waiting for the bubble to betray him. The Internet gossip boys (they were always boys even when they were men) kept star charts of his work-rate and cross-listed his faults with his virtues like actuaries. He could wrestle; he couldn’t quite be believed. He could talk better when failing than succeeding, a bad habit that promoters love right up to the moment they fire you.
“You wrestle like a man carrying a sofa up a spiral staircase,” his father once told him, not unkindly. “You think too far ahead and the turn takes you.”
•••
In southern Ontario’s Juniper Valley (which mapmakers forgot because farmers and vintners refused to point to it), there’s a Fairground Pavilion that has, so far, hosted every kind of assembly—from revival to rummage—but is happiest with the smell of popcorn oil and athletic tape, and happiest of all when the ring’s put square in its middle like a sundial at noon. The Pavilion knows that the ropes are a four-sided timepiece. Outside them the night goes its way; inside them you get 15 minutes to be complicated.
On a certain Midsummer Eve, advertisements went up on telephone poles insisting that this would be the last booking of Eddy “Flap” Jacks. “A Living Legend Bids You Good Night,” one said, and a passerby drew a brown streak across Jacks’ trunks with a schoolboy marker, and the line drew laughter from the pole itself, which has its own sense of humor if you drive staples into it long enough. The old man had soiled himself in the ring a few times, you see, because he was getting even older and couldn’t do a thing about it.
“I’m 75,” he said, being 71 in his head and right in neither place. “I promise you I will go out under a light that makes me look like a fresh lie.”
•••
Amid the boards of the ring, there’s an assembly of scuttling custodians with hands as small as pennies who hold court in the gap between plywood and apron. The veterans know. You can hear them when the house is quiet, eating the crumbs of blood and resin, voting by secret toe-taps on the order of the spotted acts and the degree of mercy to be shown to men who disrespect the boards by landing wrong. Their minutes are kept in the warp of the canvas that tops them, a palimpsest written in sweat.
Eddy Sr. had dealt with them often. Yes, the brown-streak business; yes, the famous accident that became a shareable story and then a chant and then a kind of forgiveness. “They like burnt offerings,” he told Jr. once, convinced that the bump he’d taken safely on his rear demanded tribute that night. Some, like Samuel Pepys and John Knox the Supreme Court clerk, record the past in their diaries; he had recorded it in his diarrhea.
Jr. rolled his eyes and learned to land flat and respectful. He talked at the curtain as one talks to one’s own unreliable shadow: if you can’t be with me, at least refrain from being against me.
•••
In the early part of his career Jr. won that Northern Lights strap with holographic plates of the aurora borealis (a piece of foolishness promoted as a national treasure) and engaged in eight weeks of tedious feuding with a British bad guy who was neither particularly British nor particularly bad (or good). To wrestle as the All-American against a cut-rate European heel is to be forced to tell a story in which faded empire argues with faded empire and the audience asks for the racing form instead. When the feud died the death of a carnival tout at WrestleWar XII, Jr. was pinned fair in the middle of the world, and the crowd made a noise like a steel roof cooling after rain.
Curiously, his approach to the business improved once the strap was gone. He could talk about being nothing with a charming fluency. The bookers at the CRA, now renamed the Simply Canadian Rasslin’ Alliance because this was the late-1990s and that had more attitude, smelled that rare comedy that comes from fitting tragedy in a cheap suit and brought his ancient father back to be his corrosive tutor. They called the pairing Jacks Family Values, and there were brass knuckles in a coat pocket and there were Mutt-and-Jeff sketches on the road and there were old women who hadn’t watched in years who said: oh, that big old one’s the real one, isn’t he? and the younger one is some attempt at a copy like you get when you put carbon paper under a letter and press too hard.
He became beloved as a coward, a failure, a screw-up who needed big daddy to save him. And that stuck.
•••
When his contract lapsed, no reasons were given for his release because causes don’t have to be explained to effects, especially when the effect of SCRA’s rebranding was that the organization went bankrupt. Jr. went on the road where the road ends at an empty bingo hall in a remote town in the Canadian prairie, the name of which sounds like the noise a truck makes when it downshifts. There were nights he left with $300 and a forearm that would never quite stop singing. There was a barbed-wire night, one night only for an upstart mudshow in Japan, where his eye hopped out like a stage prop and the spirits below the ring clicked approvingly because this was the strongest style entertainment and the old forms want their blood.
What else? A rotator cuff that spoke in tongues; two toes that became the absence of toes; a moonsault that failed to mature into a landing and hatched instead into a crutch. He was 37 when he retired by accident.
He would’ve told you the dream: the perfect match seen from everywhere at once, the one in which he lost in the middle at the too-long count of three and then erased himself cleanly, leaving a memory like a watermark on the program that you only see if you tilt it in the right light. He didn’t want to live as a rumor but wanted to be believed the way rumors are.
He didn’t get that match. Most of us don’t.