The Itch

Dylan’s dad watched wrestling. He was, himself, an old wrestler. Not a former wrestler, he’d correct anyone who said it—most of all Dylan’s mom—because he said there was no such thing as a truly retired wrestler, and even though his back was broken from a decade and a half in the ring, the latter years of which had cost him much time with Dylan as a baby, as a little kid. Hell, I’d lived next door to them my whole life, and didn’t understand that Dylan had a father until we started talking in grade school—that his dad was more than his mom’s friend who came around a few times a month.

The VCR was a boon to Dylan’s dad, on the front end of the tape trading enterprise that saw him not only watch the regional wrestling shows, but record them faithfully, then sell or swap them among a network of fellow fans in other locales throughout the country.

New tapes arrived each week, but he re-watched matches and shows that he called historically important time and again. “That’s Pat Patterson,” Dylan’s dad pointed at the screen, meaning not the bigger names—Hulk Hogan, Mr. T, Roddy Piper, or Paul Orndorff—in the ring, but rather the gray-haired referee. “People think the referee’s only there for window dressing, to make it look more like a legitimate sport. But he has to be in the right place not to block the camera, to act like he doesn’t see the heels cheat. And a match like this, Madison Square Garden, a million people watching on closed circuit, and Mr. T doesn’t know an arm bar from his asshole—Patterson’s directing traffic.” He took a bite from his doughnut. Dylan’s dad never had a doughnut far from reach, usually plain, cakey ones, though occasionally he’d indulge in Devil’s Food or Boston Cream. “People forget how good Pat Patterson was.” He gestured his hand at the entire screen, as the camera panned our to capture the full crowd in the arena, all of it. The big picture. “A guy like that. He gets the itch for wrestling and it never leaves him. Wrestles twenty, thirty years, then helps with the writing, helps with matches like this.”

Dylan’s dad had had the itch, too. Maybe he still did those lazy afternoons in front of the TV. He was a talent. A close-call. He worked a handful of matches as a jobber for the big companies—a skilled worker, paid to anonymously take a beating in the ring from bigger stars to make them look like a million bucks. He even had one match that aired nationally, available in the hands of an unknowable number of fellow tape traders. A tag team bout, in which he and the partner he met hours before the match took a shellacking from The Strike Force—Tito Santana before his bull fighter gimmick, Rick Martel before he played a fashion model pretty boy. Dylan’s dad didn’t like watching that match. Rather than celebrating his most watched match, he lamented it as the match that closed the door on him ever getting a shot at a full-time deal, at getting to play a cowboy, Indian, or biker himself, relegated instead to a generic singlet or trunks each time one of the big companies booked him. His partner for the match was rough in the ring, awkward and clumsy, and Dylan explained when he showed me the match that that partner had missed the spot where he was supposed to tag in his father, thus costing him his opportunity to shine, thus meaning the powers that be lumped him in as no more talented than the jabroni he was teamed with.

I was less interested in Dylan’s dad’s work or the 1970s and 1980s than what was happening in the moment. What would become known as the Attitude Era.

The Attitude Era. Late nineties, early two-thousands. Steve Austin hitting the Stone Cold Stunner on The Rock, The Undertaker throwing Mick Foley off the roof of Hell in a Cell, and sultry Sable becoming a villainess in live TV because she spoke the precise truth that the women want to be me, and the men come to see me.

There was something more to wrestling than half-naked people rolling on the mat in staged combat, and never was it more palpable than the Attitude Era. This was the time when wrestling became water cooler talk in offices, when kids unabashedly wore wrestling t-shirts to school because it translated to anyone with a pulse.

I wanted to taste a moment of what Triple H and Eddie Guerrero and Jeff Hardy all must have felt at that time.

Dylan and I started wrestling when we were younger, when we really were just friends. We tried holds. What kind of best friends didn’t try out the Sharpshooter, the camel clutch on one another? We discovered the figure four leglock did hurt, though it was near impossible to apply without the benefit of a willing victim. We discovered the cross face chicken wing was, in fact, deadly; that the bearhug required more force than the wrestling on TV would have you believe; that the Boston crab was mostly harmless if you bent with it, unless the person applying the hold put the pressure on the recipient’s neck like Chris Jericho did.

We graduated from experimenting with holds to a mix of actually grappling and collaborating to recreate sequences from Bret Hart vs. The British Bulldog and Shawn Michaels vs. The Undertaker.

Our parents told us to stop when they caught us. I’m sure some of it had to do with thinking we’d hurt each other, but particularly when Dylan’s mom broke us up, I got the distinct sense she was more concerned about a sweaty teenage boy grabbing a sweaty teenage girl, bodies all squeezing and friction against one another on his bedroom floor.

To be fair, we did end up making out for the first time when we were wrestling.

Wrestling was dangerous. Even the disclaimers at the starts of shows warned us not to try it at home.

I choked out Dylan one time, when we were wrestling more competitively. Just after we started necking, just when our bodies had grown big enough to be dangerous. Big enough he gave me a head start. Let me start on top of him or start with a hold applied. I put him in a triangle choke hold I’d picked from a tape of Japanese wrestling, threading his neck and arm between my legs, thighs collapsed around him, my right foot in my left knee pit, not least of all choking him with his own arm itself. As much as we had hurt each other—accidentally or on purpose—Dylan was never willing to tap out to a girl, so he got choked and choked until he really was out, and I asked my father for help because I was worried I’d killed him. Dad lifted Dylan’s legs in the air to get the blood flowing to his brain and he woke up in a few seconds. I felt sheepish, figuring he’d probably have woken up on his own without the intervention and I’d needlessly let Dad in on that we’d be been wrestling.

Dylan and I started frequenting the tennis court. It started with tennis—really, it did—when Dylan’s mom found a pair of old rackets when she was cleaning out the attic and bought us a roll of balls from Walmart and suggested we play. Minimal attempt to mask that she was posing an alternative to wrestling. Something else athletic that even involved hitting something to relieve our teenage energy reserves, without the same implications of sex or violence. So we took the rackets and balls to the park a half-mile from our street. I expected we’d take turns trying to hit the balls at birds, or over the fence at passersby until all of the balls were suitably lost, then go home and say we’d tried.

But that fence. I’d never noticed it until we went to play, but then I really saw it—twenty by thirty, maybe twelve feet tall, all steel mesh. No fence at all.

Our very own steel cage.

I don’t know how else to describe it but love at first sight.

We left the rackets and balls alone. We wrestled. There was a sense of play, bordering on make believe, in remaking this place in our image. But even from that initial play, I had visions of what this space was itching to be.

We came back every day. Spent hours. Mercifully, no one came to play tennis. We started taking down the net altogether, because it only got in our way, and then stopped putting it back up. No sign that anyone cared. No sign anyone put it back up. I liked Dylan’s theory that maybe people played tennis when we weren’t around, then took the net back down to restore our disorder.

We kept up the pretense of bringing our racquets and balls. Even went so far as to bounce balls to dirty them and leave one behind every few days to sell the idea we really were playing tennis. Dylan’s mom bought us a fresh roll of balls and complimented us on our suntans. Dad asked which of us he should call Venus, which Serena when we told him we were going back to the court.

Dylan caught word from one of his guy friends who worked at a hotel that they’d thrown away a whole floor’s worth of mattresses. We borrowed another friend’s pickup and drove to the landfill to recover them. We drove them back in fives, tied down with bungee cords I found in our basement, until we filled that tennis court with our own mats, until, despite Dylan still hedging, he watched me climb up to the crossbeam of the cage, six feet up, and caught me when I dove down. It wasn’t a picture-perfect cross body block, but I dare say it was a hell of a lot better than we’d managed with my leaps from the pitiful heights of a bed, a couch, and with nothing softer than a shag rug to break our fall.

That first dive, I felt reassured. We could realize my vision.

We drew up flyers, advertising Cage Wrestling War, coming to a location to be announced soon. I’d thought it through. Don’t give enough lead time for anyone to go looking at the park and asking questions about permits and old mattresses in the tennis court. We hooked an audience, though, emphasizing wrestling and free show and Shermantown. No entertainment ever came to a Shermantown, least of all free.

Dylan’s dad made mention he’d heard about a show coming. That got me nervous, until his old time wrestling fan instincts kicked in. No names on the card. Probably a bunch of backwoods hillbillies punching each other for real. No thanks.

We watched cage matches for research. Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart at SummerSlam 1994 in the greatest bloodless cage match ever. I wanted to bleed a little to make our match worth the while. But Dylan said no blood. At least no blood intentionally.

There were limits. He had to have his way sometimes.

Dylan’s dad showed us his favorite match from the last few years. No cage, but a man and a woman. Referee Bill Alfonso vs. valet Beulah McGillicutty. It was a bad bootleg tape with wavy lines cutting through the picture three or four times each minute.

It was no technical masterpiece. But it was a believable fight. Dylan’s dad said that, in real life, Alfonso was on the outs with the company. That he wrestled at all was his make- good—an apology, a comeuppance, a proving ground that he was worth keeping employed. Neither he nor Beulah knew how to wrestle, but they brawled with intensity, hitting one another hard, doing their best takes on wrestling moves men twice their respective body weights did in more traditional matches. Intense enough to believe it was a real fight—the clumsy way that neither quite knew how to use their limbs in combat only enhanced the effect.

They sweated and even cried, but not because they were soft. Because they were gritting their teeth and fighting through submission holds.

Dylan and I started to itch. Lying in the middle of our steel cage following an afternoon session, sweating, breathing hard, my calf crossed over his shin, he admitted the undeniable truth out loud. “I think the mattresses have bugs.”

Of course there was a reason the hotel had discarded mattresses wholesale.

Of course we wouldn’t stop.

We watched the classic. The cage match everyone talks about when they talk about cage matches.

Madison Square Garden. Don Muraco, the statuesque hulk billed as “The Rock” before Dwayne Johnson commandeered the moniker. Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, the barefoot Samoan wrestling with an island wild man gimmick. Muraco won, but it’s the aftermath everyone remembers. In his righteous indignation, Snuka dragged Muraco back into the cage, battered him to incapacitation and left him sprawled on the middle of the mat. Superfly scaled the cage, flashed the universal hand signal to say “I love you,” to the fans, leapt all the way off the top to crush his rival’s broken body.

History is a liar. People will tell you Snuka won the match with that splash, but the final bell had already rung—it wasn’t the winning maneuver, but rather an act of vengeance after Snuka lost. It also wasn’t the first time someone leapt off the top of a cage; Snuka did it a year earlier, a bad guy then, except the hero, Bob Backlund rolled out of the way, only to escape the cage and win.

But here, Snuka hit the splash. Here, Snuka was the hero. In an era when no one had flipped backward into a moonsault or flung anybody with their legs in a hurricanrana, or put someone through a table, Snuka was the innovator of violence. Muraco was the man who trusted him enough to lay still and take the ultimate blow. I backed up the video to watch him leap again and again and again.

“You’re not doing that,” Dylan said.

Again.

We advertised an intergender wrestling match. A little extra intrigue to draw an audience, complete with a photo of me and of Dylan, each with the brightness turned way down via the magic of the image software on the library computers. We were little more than silhouettes, an eye here, an arm there, enough to sell that I was thin and might be attractive. Enough to communicate that he was bigger and this might be a mismatch and what red-blooded wrestling fan could turn away from the spectacle?

We’d have to come up with names. It wouldn’t do us very well to try to fly under the police and parental radar to broadcast our real names for everyone to hear.

I made the decision.

“You’ll be Hansel,” I said. Innocent. Boyish. A hero to undermine expectations about a young man doing combat with a young woman.

“I suppose that makes you Gretel?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m The Witch.”

We picked out theme music.

I chose “Paradise City” by Guns & Roses. I’d dated another boy, in between spells with Dylan, who idolized Axl Rose and grew out his hair to look something like him. This song was my main takeaway from our few weeks together. I remember his comment, as the opening played in his garage, that a human being couldn’t hear that initial kick drum and not have it pump your nads. Never mind that I didn’t have nads. I understood when my body couldn’t help but rock to the sound. The power.

We drew a crowd. It was hard to tell park-goers from people who’d come for our match at first, when teenagers showed up with brown paper bags they may just as easily have been coming to our match as expecting to have drank from the privacy of a sleepy Saturday night at the park.

But they all surrounded the cage. Full-on grownups, too. Some kids with their parents, because maybe they took wrestling to be synonymous with the kind of wrestling Dylan and I had grown up on of Hillbilly Jim hip tossing Rick Rude, then dosey-doe-ing with Mean Gene Okerlund in celebration. But maybe because they’d come to see us. Maybe because of the flyers. Maybe because their curiosity lured them from their original intentions in coming to the park.

Maybe because nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

There had to have been a hundred people in the grass surrounding the tennis court. Maybe more.

We crouched on the far side of the bathrooms that had been marked out of order for as long as I could remember. Dylan stripped down to his tank top and pulled up the long, shin- covering socks meant for soccer, that night meant to simulate the length and look of wrestling boots. I wore a black thrift-store dress, skirt slit high so I could move, over a black one-piece something like what an old school lady wrestler would wear.

I wrestled barefoot. Like an old school wrestler who couldn’t afford boots. Like Jimmy Snuka.

I’d burned a two-track CD my and Dylan’s songs on the family computer—a waste of a disc not to fill the seventy minutes available, but I didn’t want to risk playing the wrong track. I loaded new C batteries to fit the boom box my father blared music from while he worked on his car in the garage.

It had sounded so loud in the garage.

It didn’t sound like much in the open air of the park, hardly audible over the chatter surrounding the cage, talking, laughing, speculating about what they were about to see. Dylan had to elbow his path to the cage door as our fans began to take notice the show had started.

Dylan looked small. And nervous.

I was smaller. But I was coming to the cage after Dylan. No reason not to bring the boom box with me. Its energy. Its noise. Its kick drum. I got a smattering of cheers. It got louder when I started climbing the cage.

I’d decided I’d enter by going over the top, and hadn’t warned Dylan about it because I knew he’d try to talk me out of the extra risk of hurting myself before the match began.

I didn’t factor in how hard it would be to climb one handed, the other still carrying the boom box. Adrenaline got me to the cross beam, but I was struggling with balance and my left, climbing hand throbbed from the effort of holding on tight and supporting disproportionate weight of my body.

Another ad lib: I threw the boom box, as hard as could, over the heads of the onlookers beneath me, crashing broken to the grass behind them.

Louder cheers.

Dylan looked worried. When I got to the top of the cage he positioned himself, as if to catch me if I fell. As if to catch me if I jumped.

But I climbed, swung one leg over the top, then the next and scaled down, light and easy then as the cheers shifted from excitement over “Paradise City” and the crash and the climb to anticipation of the fight.

And there we were, just like we planned it, each standing in a different mattress, each standing against opposite corners of the cage. Dylan gave me a look that asked, do you really want to go through with this?

I charged him and nailed him with the enzuguiri we’d planned. A little stiffer than we’d planned.

I played the stick and move offense of the outsized wrestler. Leap frog, drop down, arm drag, drop kick, drop kick, drop kick, back into the corner into the monkey flip.

Dylan took over on the heat segment. The bigger body clamping mein a bear hug, transitioning into a sleeper hold, then an abdominal stretch. These were known as rest holds. Time for the wrestlers to rest our bodies, stiller, only acting as though these squeezes and contortions hurt. Rest for the fans so they might quiet and be ready to pop when the action started again in earnest.

Dylan applied the Human Torture Rack. I leapt into position, timed to his lift, up onto him, stretched across his shoulders, his neck, spine bent. It did hurt a little, but mostly it was a challenge not to escape the hold. To writhe while maintaining balance rather than sending us both crashing to the mattresses.

Then the comeback. The punches to his gut. The punches to his face, the first landing a lot harder than I’d meant, but what could I do? The crowd was rocking. There was blood. My knuckles. His forehead. I didn’t know the point of origin. I knew I had to keep going.

We moved into the closing sequence.

I scaled the cage.

I was supposed to climb as high as the crossbeam and dive off. Dylan could take the blow. He’d catch me as he fell backward, as I fell forward, as we threatened to break through the stuffing of the mattress below. It would be a good ending.

I climbed higher.

Dylan called after me. First a hey and then a get back down here and then some sort of taunt, keeping with our roles as competing wrestlers, something I couldn’t quite hear because the crowd was getting louder and I was getting higher.

He called my name.

I reached the top.

A hand signal. The international sign for I love you to Dylan and to the people who’d come to see us and to the police siren I first heard in that moment and to the flash of red and blue light, all bound to break us up, but I loved it for coming too late and for the chaos it added.

I leapt. Body at full extension. Climbing higher into the sky, thirteen, fourteen feet up before I peaked and started coming down.

I imagined my father, who wasn’t there, who didn’t understand wrestling, who might have worried about me breaking my neck. I imagined Dylan’s father, too. Talking about the itch. Recognizing that in this moment, I scratched it.

I crashed, bumpy skin on bumpy skin, sweat on sweat, blood on blood and puss and spit and bone and love.

Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He authored the short story collections You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue from Duck Lake Books, Circus Folk from Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, and most recently The Long Way Home from Cowboy Jamboree Press. Visit him at miketchin.com or follow him on Twitter @miketchin.