Doomsday, Destroyer of Worlds
What if I told you that a bunch of us got together and wrote some dope short fiction about professional wrestling?
If you’re reading this right now there’s a very, very good chance you’ve already heard me talk about “The Territories,” a really fun shared universe fiction project that I worked on with a bunch of other writers I like and admire. The ebook of that joint is available now here and here, with the hard copy coming later this month.
In the meantime, I thought I would send you the first couple pages of my story in the hopes that you might read it and think, ‘Damn I can’t stop with just this short excerpt, I need the whole thing!’ Then you might spend $9.99 – which, come on, you can barely even get a decent sandwich for that price these days – to support this group of writers doing their own thing outside the confines of the mainstream publishing industry, which is villainous and dumb.
So here’s the first few pages of my story, in which a guy who was once a famous pro wrestling manager in the Memphis territory reflects upon the most difficult and controversial figure he ever worked with, a guy who had a lot of physical gifts and also a lot of character defects. Hope you like it, because I had a lot of fun writing it. Even better, it resulted in this awesome trading card, made by one of my favorite artists, Marco Bucci.
Doomsday, Destroyer of Worlds
Goddamn Internet
Thing I can’t stand now is these messageboards. People on there, they just beat all. Act like they know everything about everything. Elise tells me that if it bothers me so much I should let it alone, don’t go on there. She’s right, same way she is about most things. But there’s one of these messageboards where they only talk Memphis wrestling and so I pop my head in there every once in a while to see what they’re saying. Sometimes they post links to videos. Sometimes it’s stuff I plum forgot about.
I don’t tell anybody on there who I am. I don’t need that kind of attention. But the things people say on there, it gets hard to keep my mouth shut.
The other day they had a thing going about all the wrestlers who got their start in Memphis and then went big nationwide after. It always surprises people to hear some of the names. I don’t know why. I suppose they can’t picture how different things were then. Or maybe Memphis just sounds like some redneck backwater to them.
Back when Terry Austin had the whole territory humming in the ‘70s and ‘80s, though, people thought different. I know the boys all did. There was real money in Memphis wrestling then. Our phone rang every week, people wanting to come work in the NACW. Still these knuckleheads on the messageboards act like they can’t believe it when they find out Mac Savage, J.J. Wild, Jason Cumberland and Hito Tanaka and about a dozen others I could name all came through there at one point or another.
Anyway, there they go talking about wrestlers who were nobody when they showed up in Memphis then got big later. And one of these jokers brings up Doomsday.
How is it they had him in the mid-80s and couldn’t do shit with him, he says.
Maybe because Doomsday always sucked even then, says another.
Another guy agrees with that one. Way overrated, he says. Nothing but steroids and face paint.
This comment, mind you, got about forty likes.
Still, the first guy says, one of the biggest stars Sonny Da Silva ever had. Memphis had him five years before that and no one even knew about him.
I mean, can you believe that? No one even knew about him. You got to be kidding.
But that’s the internet for you. The blind leading the stupid.
Hard Business
Know how long Dooms was in Memphis? Just about six months. Know how I remember that? It was basically the entirety of my time as a bachelor. Well, in my adult life anyway. I was born and grew up in Corinth, Mississippi. Left home when I was 19 years old. Up till then my momma had cooked all my meals, washed all my clothes. One day I told her I was moving up to Memphis to become one of the wrestlers on TV and she got this look on her face I’ll never forget. Like I’d just told her I thought I could fly and was going to prove it by jumping off the roof.
“Don’t you reckon that could be a hard business to make a living in?” she asked me.
I told her, momma, you know me. What wouldn’t be a hard business? Dogcatcher would be a hard business for me. Garbageman would be a hard business. At least wrestling was something I loved. And at the time, I believed I understood it pretty well. You couldn’t even begin to guess how wrong I was on that. I was as bad as these knuckleheads on the messageboards now. Hell, I was worse.
Smart
My first job in wrestling they told me, be at the office tomorrow morning. You’re going to drive Downtown Joe Dempsey to Tupelo and referee his match with Hito Tanaka and then bring him right back.
Referee! I couldn’t believe my luck. Told myself, hell you must be living right.
I remember Downtown got in the car and sort of squinted at me, this string bean kid behind the wheel of an old Ford Falcon. He asked me, “You smart?”
I wasn’t a brainiac but I wasn’t dumb either. I said yeah, I was pretty smart.
Downtown asked me what I knew about the finish for that night’s match. Nothing, I told him. Match hasn’t happened yet. How am I supposed to know anything about how it’ll finish? He just looked at me.
“You ain’t smart,” he said.
That was all we said to each other the rest of the drive. Had my mind in knots all the way to Tupelo. Wasn’t until I got in the locker room and heard some of the boys talking about their matches that I started to put it together. Did I think all this stuff was a pure shoot before that? I surely did. I know I’m not the only one, either. But the thing you have to understand is they played it all different back then. I was in need of an education, and on more than just wrestling if I’m telling the God’s honest truth. I had to get smart quick. Maybe I got some of that education a little too fast, but that part was different then too.
Year or so later I was married, baby on the way, working regular in the territory as “Rev ‘Em Up” Eddie Ray. I asked Terry Austin where he came up with that and he said, well, look at you.
“You’re so damn high strung you make other people nervous just being in the same room with you,” he said. “Might as well lean into that however you can.”
I was a shade under six feet. I weighed maybe 140 pounds after a big meal. I’d check into hotels and tell them I was there with the wrestlers and they’d laugh and say, yeah sure me too, kid.
What saved me was learning about the mental side of the business. Ring psychology, they’d call it now. I never missed a chance to listen to the old-timers talk about it. I was always watching how crowds reacted, what worked on them and what didn’t, trying to pick up every little bit I could. One of the first things I learned was that, a skinny guy like me? If I work it right the audience will end up dying to see me get flung from pillar to post. But you can’t give that to them right away. You’ve got to make them wait.
So I’d dance around on the outside, throw out some open-handed slaps to a boy who outweighed me by 75 pounds. Pause every once in a while to look around at the crowd. I’d make a face like, see how good I’m doing? Then just when this ol’ boy was about to get his hands on me I’d slip through the ropes or tag in my partner. Build that tension.
It was understanding some of those things that got Terry Austin to keep me around even after a lot of other promoters would’ve put me on a bus and told me not to write. One day Terry pulls me aside and out of nowhere starts telling me a story about a time when he’d asked his son’s Little League coach if the boy was any good at baseball.
“That man thought real hard and told me, well, he has a good head for the game,” Terry said.
Terry explained: This was what people said when you were smart enough to know how something should be done, but not good enough to do it yourself.
“If someone were to ask me about you,” Terry said, “I’d tell them you have a real good head for wrestling.”
He let me sit with that for about three seconds, just long enough to see my heart breaking into a million pieces, and then he laughed. He told me, don’t worry, he wasn’t dropping me just yet.
“You think I’m telling you that you can’t work in wrestling, but I’m not,” Terry said. “What I’m telling you is, right now you’re trying to do the wrong job in wrestling.”
This was the start of my career as a manager, how I became Fast Eddie Ray, the smooth-talking city slickster who’d shake your hand and have you checking to make sure you still had all your fingers. Course, that’s where I made my name. Anybody knows me now, that’s what they know me for. What career I had, Terry Austin gave me right there on that very day.
But at the time? Well, I just about wanted to cry…