It's all fun and games.
Until somebody loses their innocence.
Until somebody loses their innocence.
Hellbelly by Tom Leins
 |
 |
In
Testament, most boys my age lost their virginity in a nameless cinderblock cat-house
run by an old lady named Luanne. It was halfway down the dirt track that
bisected Old Testament and New Testament like an ugly scar. Someone had painted
the phrase liquor in the front, poker in the rear across a rotten plank
outside, but I didn’t get the joke until Curtis Corliss explained it to me. He
said his Daddy took him there on his thirteenth birthday, and paid for him to
fuck a woman who was almost as fat as Horace Pigg.
Things
worked out differently for me. I lost my mine in the back of Norman Gorman’s
bile-coloured Crown Vic, with an oily rag in my mouth and the cheap, greasy
metal of his tag-team championship belt pressing against my lower back.
***
My
Daddy was one of the first wave of fighters to throw his lot in with the Testament
Wrestling Alliance. This was back when Mr. Flanagan ran it out of a high school
gymnasium using a borrowed wrestling licence. Daddy fought under the name Mondo
McGraw, and he was just about the most popular guy in town—for a few years, at
least. He was also the first man in the bar and the last one to leave. His body
became swollen with drink. Towards the end of his stint in Testament, his huge
belly hung over his canary-yellow trunks like an obscene threat.
A
lot of guys of that era disgraced themselves in some way, and ended up getting
shit-canned by Mr. Flanagan. Daddy was different, though. He just kinda faded
away, melted into the background like a drunken ghost.
***
Mr.
Flanagan let me hang around the auditorium long after Daddy stopped turning up.
I sold t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other merchandise. It just about broke my
heart to see my Daddy sat outside on the tarmac, bumming smokes off fans, but
Mr. Flanagan made it clear that I wasn’t to talk to him on fight days if I
wanted to stay involved. By this point, Daddy had lost a foot to gout and had a
well-worn wooden stump in its place.
My
favourite wrestlers back in those days were the Gorgeous Gormans, a tag-team
that feuded with a pair of carnies called the Chainsaw Brothers. Neither team were
actually brothers, but the Gormans were supposedly second cousins, which was
close enough. They were called the Gorgeous Gormans on account of their long
blonde hair, despite the fact that Garry had a mouth like an exposed turnbuckle
and a face that was scuffed up like second-hand canvas. Norman was the more
charismatic of the two, but even he had the creased face of an old man.
The
Gormans were cool guys. They let me travel with them between TV tapings. Their
car was an ex-taxicab, with ghostly patterns on the doors where the decals had
been peeled off. Norman told me fight stories and that he was my Daddy’s
biggest fan.
“When
I was younger, I would have cut off one, maybe two, of my fingers with a rusty
kitchen knife for half your Daddy’s natural wrestling ability.”
It
made me proud. It made me grin.
When
we stopped for gas, Norman offered to show me some of his new moves in the back
of the car.
I
later heard that the Gormans met in prison, while serving
hard time for being caught transporting a minor across state lines.
***
Daddy
didn’t find out until the end of the month: laundry day. He was checking the
pockets of his pants for loose cigarettes when he found my bloody underwear
crumpled into a ball. He sobered up quick—like he had just drunk a pot of scalding
coffee—and then he hobbled down the block to use the Pacific Bell phone booth
outside the Korean bodega.
Daddy
tracked Norman down, moonlighting at a carnival freak show two states over, in
a town called Hellbelly. The sky above the carnival looked stone-washed—the same
colour of Daddy’s denim vest. He made me sit in the car with a bag of potato
chips and his snub-nosed Colt Cobra. I wiped the grease off the window with the
sleeve of my corduroy jacket and saw Daddy prodding Norman in his barrel chest.
Norman spat in Daddy’s face and it turned into a slug-fest.
Daddy looked wobbly, like he did when he had been drinking, but Norman
couldn’t knock him off his feet… foot. Eventually, Daddy grabbed him around the
waist and locked him in tight. Norman stuck his thumbs in Daddy’s eyes, but
Daddy twisted him into a belly-to-belly suplex and launched him into the gravel.
Only Daddy got up. Norman looked limp, like a rag-doll that had been chewed by
a dog.
When
Daddy returned to the car he was breathing like a horse. Must have caught his
forehead on a broken bottle, as his face was stained red with blood. He kept
wiping it out of his eyes and the car was splattered with red. He scooped a half-empty
bottle out of the glove compartment and drank it down like it was Gatorade.
When his breathing slowed, he put the car in drive and rolled down the rutted
track.
After a few minutes, he braked hard and nosed the car into the weeds next
to the dirt track. He struggled out of the bucket seat and hobbled back towards
the carnival without saying a word, leaving nothing but his bloody handprints
on the steering wheel. I pulled the door shut and buttoned my jacket up to my
throat. Then I retrieved the rest of the potato chips from the footwell.
