Edsel (13 page)

The arena smelled of Milk Duds, new and ancient sweat, cigarette smoke as old as the building, ammonia from the pipes that made the ice the Red Wings skated on during the season, stale urine, bad breath, Old Spice, rotten apples, Evening in Paris, sardines, Juicy Fruit, coffee, blood, sweat socks, mildew, Vicks Vapo-Rub, henna, horseshit, wet chickens, burning rags, skunk collars, scorched hair, dirty wool, mustard plasters, Polish sausages, rubber galoshes, Crackerjacks, muscatel, Band-Aids, hydrogen peroxide, piccalilli, bunion pads, Brilliantine, boiled bedpans, moldy wood, and popcorn farts. When you broke that stench down to its elements you wondered how it managed to worm its way so deep into your bloodstream, bringing you back and back and making you wish you were there whenever someone opened a neglected hamper or a toilet backed up. If they bottled and sold it as cologne, no pair of lovers would ever be separated again, provided neither of them minded risking a hockey puck in the teeth. Love’s like that. Everything worthwhile is. It’s no wonder newborn babies cry so loud.

The man in the wooden seat next to mine was rushing the season in a Madras shirt and canary yellow slacks with cuffs as wide as a manhole cover. He had a Dutch Masters bolted in the middle of his face, paper band and all, that was in danger of going out as soon as the saliva that had darkened two thirds of its length reached the glowing ash. This he flicked off from time to time without removing the stogie from between his teeth, showering his paunch and lap with gray flakes. One of them, still burning, scorched a hole near the crease of his slacks while I was watching. He had a big waxed-paper cup of beer in one fist and a crumpled program in the other. Neither item interested him as much as what was happening in the arena, about which he appeared to be some kind of expert, judging by the loud and profane advice he was directing to the three men in the ring.

Slanting down from just below the rafters, the double tier of seats described an inverted bottle with the arena in the narrow opening at the bottom. The management had deactivated the refrigeration system and laid a temporary floor on top of the pipes, but there were puddles on the surface where the moisture had seeped through the spaces between the boards, and fresh planks had been placed end to end from the locker-rooms to the ring, forming a bridge to prevent wet feet on the part of the featured attractions.

The ring itself was a hastily built affair, fourteen feet by ten, of blue-painted plywood nailed over what were probably two-by-fours with canvas stretched across the top and professional-looking posts, turnbuckles, and ropes erected above, equipment that likely traveled with the company. At the moment, a Cro-Magnon in fur trunks and bare feet was grappling inside the enclosure formed by the ropes with a slightly less ugly specimen in laced-up boots and a black leotard, with platinum-colored hair to his shoulders; or to where his shoulders would have been if they weren’t pressed against the canvas with his head doubled under into his sternum and his legs waving in the air like the feelers of some huge disoriented insect. This position was the artifice of the caveman, who was braced on one knee with his arms curled around the blond’s heavy thighs and his face planted firmly in his opponent’s crotch. As I watched, the third occupant of the ring, bald and thick-waisted in blue worsted trousers and a red-and-white-striped shirt with short sleeves, knelt with his broad buttocks in the air and his ear to the canvas, placing his face on a level with the blond’s, and thumped the springy surface three times with his right palm. The bell clanged and the caveman leapt to his feet, grunting loudly and pounding his chest with both fists. Half the crowd was standing at this point, hooting and throwing balled-up programs and crumpled beer cups at the figure parading around the ring.

“… in two falls out of three,” bellowed the stripe-shirted referee, hoisting the caveman’s right arm with one hand, “the Missing Link!”

My neighbor spat out his cigar at last. “Attaboy, Link! Ship the faggot back to Toronto in boxes.”

Most of the audience’s attention was concentrated on the man in fur shorts, who had shaken off the referee’s hand to promenade with his arms aloft, and away from his longhaired conquest. Having slowly uncurled onto his back, the blond turned over with an effort and crawled on hands and knees to the nearest corner, where he hauled himself upright with both hands on the ropes. There a rodent-faced man in a tight black suit with a single Arabic eyebrow across both eyes—evidently his manager—climbed up to hold the ropes while he stepped between them. The vanquished wrestler lowered himself to the floor and, leaning on his manager, shambled down the aisle between erect, cursing spectators toward the visitors’ locker room. I never saw him again, in person or on television during broadcast matches, and I assume he quit the business soon after. But I’ve thought about him a great deal, usually when I hear somebody dismissing professional wrestling as pure chicanery. There are no easy occupations.

“… this corner, weighing in at two hundred and sixty-six pounds, Ivan Kohloff, the Beast of Borodino!”

The Beast was a ringer for Khrushchev, down to the skinhead and broken nose, which helped to explain his reception. The audience, on its feet again after a short calm following the Missing Link’s exit, had run out of things to throw, but its verbal abuse was highly inventive at times, going back three generations in the Kohloff family in search of four-legged materfamilia. His choice of tailoring did little to knock the edge off, from the fuzzy Cossack hat he wore to his long scarlet coat with gold frogs and, when he removed it, red trunks decorated with black hammers and sickles. His black boots laced up to the knees and had glittering steel toes filed to razor-sharp points.

“… his challenger, for the title of Heavyweight Championship of the World, weighing in at one hundred and ninety-seven pounds, Detroit’s own Anthony Battle!”

The crowd’s reaction turned inside out. It struck me, as the man I had come to see strode along the bridge of planks from the home locker room, that if Jesus had inspired this level of widespread adoration, we would have no Easter. Standing and craning my neck, I could see only the top of his head among the fans straining forward to shake his hand and pat him on the back. Even the lump in the seat next to me had risen in the midst of lighting a fresh cigar to shout something unintelligible but encouraging in its tone. Detroiters supported their own as enthusiastically as Americans on the whole denounced Russia and Communism.

I got my first decent look at Battle once he was in the ring and out of his robe. He was well built, solid and chunkily muscled in contrast to the other three wrestlers I had seen that evening, who ran toward plain bulk overlaid with a barely acceptable amount of flab; much of the action during the bouts had to do with the motion of loose flesh some moments after the principal parts of the body had stopped. In street clothes this one wouldn’t have attracted much notice except for the coarseness of his features. He had angry eyes and a protruding forehead that would naturally inspire a young man out with his best girl to cross the street when he approached. His skin was medium dark and his hair, cropped close to his skull, was black and tightly curled. It would break any ordinary comb.

The bout, two out of three falls, came in at about forty percent honest wrestling to sixty percent showmanship and shenanigans, nearly all of the latter belonging to the Beast of Borodino. I was Greek enough to appreciate Anthony Battle’s grasp of the fundamentals of honest wrestling, and knowledgeable enough from my betting days among the cash-fisting mobs pressing in around the naked grunting brutes at Greco-Roman tournaments in what was now the lounge of the Round Bar Cafe in Hamtramck, to recognize that he would make short work of Kohloff in any genuine match.

As a main event it was anticlimactic, and would have been over much sooner had the bald Russian (if Russian he was; at one point, suffering in the grip of an expert step-over toehold applied by Battle, he cried a distinctly Polish curse) refrained from throwing illegal forearm punches and lunging off the turnbuckles and producing foreign matter from inside his trunks to throw in his adversary’s face. Battle, employing tactics that would have passed inspection at the Olympics, pinned the Beast the first time within three minutes of the opening bell and after running the gauntlet of hoary old tricks from the Bad Guys’ Manual was well on his way to a second (and final) fall when an exhausted Kohloff disqualified himself by deserting the ring and stalking up and down the aisles reciting Lewis Carroll backward until the clock ran out, voiding the match. In effect it was his bravest act of the evening, because a number of fans had by this time ingested enough watered-down beer to take Battle’s job into their own hands. The old lady I’d seen outside, for one, fetched him a blow alongside his shaved cranium with her handbag that should have raised the salary of the ticket-taker who had had the foresight to disarm her of her stiletto-like umbrella. In any case the Beast trundled out of the arena with a purple bruise on his temple and his championship belt still firmly buckled around his waist.

When Battle started out I headed for the balcony exit. The crowd was thick at ground level and by the time I got through it and around a Canadian television crew from Channel 9 and its two tons of camera and cable, security was well entrenched in front of the entrance to the home locker-room.

“Press,” I told a beer-bellied guard in a gray uniform with a Sam Browne belt, and tried to push past.

The belly blocked my path. “Let’s see your credentials, Dad.”

He had icy eyes and a blue chin. I snapped open my wallet, giving him a glimpse of my press card, but before I could flip it shut he grasped my wrist and tore it out of my fingers.

“This expired in January 1934. Any wrestlers you get to see retired under Roosevelt.”

“What’s the rumpus, Sid?”

The newcomer had twenty years on him, with white side-walls under his uniform cap and Wyatt Earp handlebars.

“Just a kid trying to duck under the tent, Captain. This one’s in his second childhood.” He showed him the card.

The older guard read it and squinted at me. His eyes were pale behind the underbrush of his brows. “Connie?”

Warm relief crept up from my bladder. I couldn’t place him, but his tone was friendly. I nodded.

“Fred Scheffler. I was a sergeant with the old Prohibition Squad. You and me investigated a couple of dozen blind pigs, I guess.”

I remembered. “We were pretty dedicated. Most of the incriminating evidence turned out to be in the bottom of all the bottles. I didn’t recognize you behind the whiskers.”

“It’s okay, Sid.” The blue-chinned guard moved a shoulder and edged off. “That crooked son of a bitch Kozlowski busted me out for drinking on the job,” Scheffler said. “I figure a penny on every beer I bought wound up in his pocket.”

“I ran into a relative of his recently.”

“I hope it was in your car. What you doing here? I thought you’d be retired by now.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said about me in a long time. Usually I’m dead. I’m not with newspapers any more, just doing someone a favor. Trying to get in to see Anthony Battle.”

“Shit, why’n’t you say so? Follow me.”

He shouldered his way through the press of bodies, toward the nearest exit and away from the corridor leading to the locker room. He was a lean old cob with long legs and I had to scramble to avoid losing him in the crowd closing in behind him. We came out into the chill air on Grand River and I followed him around the corner to an unmarked fire door with another guard standing in front of it, who at a signal from Scheffler rapped and spoke to the guard who opened it from inside. Two seconds later we were in the mildewy-smelling locker room.

“Did Battle leave yet?” Scheffler asked the guard inside.

“Which one’s he?”

The captain slapped my shoulder. “You’re on your own. They generally bug out as quick as they can, to avoid the loonies. If he’s in here you’ll find him.”

“Thanks, Fred.”

Left alone, I surveyed my desert island. A mist of steam and shower spray dampened the air, puddles stood on the tile floor teeming with God only knew how many varieties of microscopic life. A number of athletes in sundry stages of undress stood in front of open lockers and sat on the wooden benches pulling on socks and fastening buttons. One, as large as the Fisher Building, with a helmet of tight golden curls and tattoos spread all over his shoulders and upper arms like blue ivy, straddled the aisle leading to the showers in just his jockstrap, curling a rusty eighty-pound dumbbell in one hand; on the upswing both his biceps and his immense penis swelled as if pumped full of air by a bellows. I tore my eyes from his crotch and spotted Anthony Battle emerging stark naked from the shower.

The weightlifter blocked my path. Before I could call out, my quarry had vanished on the other side of the bank of lockers to my left. I hustled that way, banging my shin on a bench. The pain came slowly, like the reverberation of a big bell. I was limping by the time I reached him.

“Mr. Battle?”

He swung open a locker with his surname stenciled on a strip of masking tape on the door and threw his towel in it. When he moved, each of the muscles involved demonstrated its function. I thought of a stamping machine I had seen at Henry Ford Museum, a working exhibit with part of its outer skin cut away to show the various moving parts in action. He was six inches taller than I, with large hands and broad meaty feet. I tried to ignore other parts. There is no greater feeling of exposure than to find oneself fully dressed in a room full of naked members.

“Who are you?” He turned toward me, squaring off. His eyes were as hostile as any I’d seen. Even the juvenile thug’s had been dreamy and impersonal all the time he was beating me up.

“My name is Minor. Fred Scheffler got me in here. He’s—”

“I know Fred. He a friend of yours?”

I couldn’t tell if he thought that was a good thing or not. I leaped. “Yes.”

After a second he nodded. “Fred’s okay.” He turned away and stepped into a pair of white boxer shorts. “You see the bout?”