Up Up, Down Down: Essays - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cheston Knapp is the managing editor of Tin House. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon. Up Up, Down Down is his first book.

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Up Up, Down Down

Faces of Pain

Bell time for the Keizer Klash was 7:30 p.m., sharp, and Scott and I had arrived early according to plan, after the hour drive south from Portland. It was October and already dark out and GPS directed us down the kind of driveway I thought only existed in horror movies—murdersome’s the word. But there at the gravel’s eerie end we found the Lions Club. A beat-up moving truck was parked next to the entrance, and by the halogenic glow of an exposed bulb we could see that its side was stenciled with DOA PRO WRESTLING. Turns out the acronym doesn’t stand for “Dead on Arrival,” as I first assumed, but “Don’t Own Anyone,” which, although it has a certain Wild West and existential laissez-faire, primarily refers to the promotion’s business model, the fact that it doesn’t put the talent under contract and so doesn’t limit where they can wrestle. With at least three other professional wrestling organizations in Portland, not to mention those up in Seattle, the wrestlers hereabouts have options. But boasting is a big part of the business and when we spoke with them, the managers of DOA were quick to assure us that theirs was the “premier” outfit in the Northwest. One went so far as to call their competition “just half a step better than backyard.”

We made our way into a spacious wood-paneled hall that was haunted by the smells of America’s past, an olio of boiled hot dogs and stale Hydrox and orange-flavored Tang. Scott affixed a flash to his camera and started to work the scene. He’d been talking about this for months, about how we should team up on a project, a combo of words and pictures à la the Agee-Evans opus Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Thanks in large part to my reluctance—I’d settled into a prevailing MO of irresoluteness—this had all remained remote and abstract, idle chatter after tennis, that is until a few days before, when Scott put the screws to me and convinced me to attend the Klash.

“It’ll be fun,” he said. And after a lengthy silence, he added, “At very least it’ll be an experience.”

I stood off to the side and made some notes while Scott orbited the hall. He shot the swag table, the staff, the gathering crowd. He shot the ring, which sat under a ceiling low enough to preclude top-turnbuckle action, it seemed to me. Empty though it technically was, you couldn’t help but feel it was full of promise, potential. It teased the imagination like a missed opportunity, like preingested drugs. The wrestlers themselves were out of sight, behind a makeshift screen of black fabric hung across an oversize portable clothes rack, on top of which were perched an assortment of party lights that looked like they’d been bought on clearance at Spencer Gifts. In 1999.

The card for the Klash looked promising. There was Draven Vargas, “the Plus-Sized Playboy,” vs. CJ Edwards, “the Little Chocolate Drop.” Rockin’ Ricky Gibson was set to tussle with Eric Right. For the heavyweights, J_SIN Sullivan was tasked with wrangling Dr. Kliever, “the Lean Green Love Machine.” And a tag team match would end it all: the Left Coast Casanovas vs. the Illuminati. It was struggle enough to keep one’s imagination from overheating.

We were then met by a member of DOA brass. He referred to us as press and we soon found ourselves being escorted through the black fabric and into the Lions Club’s kitchen, which is to say: backstage.

Not counting my elementary school plays, I’d never been backstage at anything before, and I immediately understood the thrill. The wrestlers were giddy, full of antic aggression. Every couple minutes one of them would peek through the screen to check on the crowd filling the hall and then he’d beat his chest or beat the chest of a compatriot or jump up and down or jump into another wrestler or pump his fist. One rapidly slapped his head with both hands like I’ve seen legit Greco-Roman wrestlers do, in high school and the Olympics. Watching them amp themselves up, I remembered I’d experienced something similar back when I played lacrosse, when my teammates and I would bang our helmets together and roar testosteronic roars while listening to backward-R Korn—in what feels like, and what I often wish were, another life.

Maybe it was because we were in a kitchen, but after the initial thrill wore off, I started to feel less like I was backstage and more like I was at a Halloween house party. Or in the Castro. Or at a Halloween house party in the Castro. J_SIN Sullivan’s baggy pleather pants had flames down the sides and he was wearing a T-shirt that read GLADSTONE RUB-A-DUB, which I learned was an allusion to an old-school Northwest wrestler and not a business that specialized in car washes and hand jobs. Rockin’ Ricky Gibson dressed like he was in a Twisted Sister cover band. They’d both bleached their hair the way skaters I hung out with in the nineties used to. “The Plus-Sized Playboy” Draven Vargas’s face paint smacked of the Insane Clown Posse and he’d brushed his hair forward and styled it into a fine fin that rose from the front of his head. Bald but for a sad little island of hair at the top of his forehead, “Loverboy” Nate Andrews, the other half of the Left Coast Casanovas, had also styled what hair he had into a fin, which you could see only in the right light, at the right angle. Wearing a shiny pleather pin-striped blazer, a purple-sequined shirt and matching hat, and googly black sunglasses, Mister Ooh-La-La, their manager, looked like a cartoon villain. Dr. Kliever lists his weight as “242 lbs of surgical steel and sex appeal,” and his signature moves include the Autopsy, the Wheelchair Bound, and the Morphine Drop. He had a Marvin the Martian Mohawk so thick and meticulously coiffured that I swear you could do trigonometry on it. It was dyed a shade of neon green I’ve only ever seen on psychedelic posters and maybe, for that matter, on certain psychedelics. Somehow even those who weren’t seemed shirtless.

Scott focused on Dr. Kliever. When “the Lean Green Love Machine” noticed the camera, his arms shot up reflexively, as though an electric charge had passed through him. He flexed his muscles in the classic strongman pose and smiled a smirky and startling and weirdly handsome smile. “The World’s Sexiest Doctor” was missing prominent teeth.

“Don’t get a picture with me and him together,” J_SIN said, pointing at Dr. Kliever. “We’re wrestling tonight.”

Wouldn’t want to spoil the notion that the show’s all real, not staged and scripted. Not a “work,” as they say. In the world of pro wrestling, sustaining this illusion of reality, this suspension of disbelief, is called “kayfabe.” The word’s etymology is uncertain but it’s often said to be a corruption of the Pig Latin for “fake,” and all the accounts I read traced it back to carny culture, in which professional wrestling has its historical roots. The opposite of a work is a “shoot,” as in “straight shooter.” The improvised moves and holds the wrestlers perform on one another in the ring, that is, the pain they inflict and endure—that’s the shoot. The tension between this reality of the match, the shoot, and what the public knows or believes to be...