Jimmy Townes

Piper kicks Hogan. Note former's...intensity.

There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre.

— Roland Barthes, Mythologies

I threw the paper into the corner and turned on the TV set. After the society page dog vomit even the wrestlers looked good.

— Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.

— Barthes, ditto

I can beat anyone up. And I can walk and talk too.

— Hulk Hogan

Hogan and Piper in the ring

Jimmy Townes

Okay, get out your notebooks. This here is lecture time. Wrestling Goes Mainstream. An outcome that is vile, it’s loathsome, it may even cause cancer — don’t laugh, this is serious. Somebody help me wheel out the blackboard . . . where the hell’s my chalk? Okay, pens and pencils ready: I HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT.

1. By plugging right smack into the Master Program, wrestling has gone from being something uniquely fake, archetypally fake, paradigmatically fake for real, to something nonironically fake per se, standardly fake like Everything is fake: movies, TV, “real” sports, fashion trends, heart transplants, national elections.
2. An all-too-willing conspirator in the Ruse Writ Large, it is no longer the needle-threading, universe-belching master of its own persona, ceding (in all ways crucial, for a mess of potage) the Grand Generatrix of its own awesome face to the cloning yuck — for shame! for shame! — of demographics.
3. Where once upon a not so distant past wrestling proudly mucked and traded in all that was Low — as in geeks, carnies and bathos — its current sense of market is defined wholly and simply by that lowest of common Denoms: children, hipsters and morons (principally Caucasian).
4. Formerly (same time frame) the incarnation of Bombast/Pure/No Limit, it has reeled in its oompah, chiseled its swagger, to coalesce with the twin towers of topical cowpoop strut, Get! Down! and U!S!A!
5. Not in the wrestling lifetime of any of us under 50 have even the most impressive of good guys exhibited the consistently commanding Presence, or been ultimately as Interesting, as your average bad guy, 50th percentile and up. And while roleplay flexibility, including the option of 180° reversals on a dime, has always been a vital part of the trip, bad-to-good transitions have become an all-too-prevalent fact of life, as witnessed by the surrender-of-self of far too many Significant Malevolents in the last couple annums: Hulk Hogan, Sgt. Slaughter, Superfly Snuka and — saddest of all — Lou Albano. (Reagan Era culture death at its most chilling.)
6. With its own entertainment I.D. no longer that of the bad guy — or even a bad guy — wrestling hooks up with the perennial bastion of choreographed insincerity (a.k.a. telegraphed sincerity), itself once Quite Bad but recently born again Good (“We Are the World”; Cyndi Lauper for Cystic Fibrosis), the festering megacorpse of mainstream rock. Underlining even more than the preeminence of Product over Art, this alliance made in Suburban Hell officially certifies our current megadistance from a world in which, massively, minutely or otherwise, art (or daring) ever really, truly functioned.
7. A TV staple since virtually the medium’s birthing, wrestling for 35 years had the firmness of mission to ignore the insidious beseechings of any and all cathode Style Sheets, serving up the rawest and (possibly) most steadfastly life-affirming of broadcast gestalts: seamed and seamy—but such (ah!) is Life. Today, TV-ized to the gills and snout, it is seamless, sanitized, canned-featured, digitally animated, color-commentated, slo-mo’ed and SLICK — as suffocatingly awful as Wide World of Sports (or the bloody Super Bowl).
8. With the WWF running, basically, the whole entire show, and the NWA, AWA, etc. reduced collectively to less than a sliver of the pie, wrestling’s once mighty Pluralism — its infrastructural one-up on all-American athleto-monistic hooey — has been sent the way of the horse, the buggy, the Bill of Rights.
9. More a geo-conceptual problem than an econo-monopolistic one, today’s centralized national setup all but banishes Geographic Mystery from the stew. To wit (for example), where in New York ’73 it was announced that Stan “The Man” Stasiak had wrested from Pedro Morales the then-WWIPF championship off camera in Philadelphia, and it was debated by bemused cognoscenti whether in fact Philadelphia existed (i.e. as a WWWF outpost), it would be downright fruitless to any longer doubt our Phillies, your Boises, Buzzard Creeks — the WWF blankets us all. To wit number two, “Parts Unknown,” the hearth and home of Mr. Wrestling II, The Spoiler, Spot Moondog et al, is (as any kid up on the “new math” will tell you) finally inside the bubble!
10. As the breakdown/ abandonment of regional promotion becomes more or less complete, local non-televised wrestling cards, once the quasi-lifeblood of the whole dang whatsis, tend to suffer most (proportionally) of all, especially with the goddam Hulk so unassailably entrenched as the Big Cheese-Designate and coast-to-coast hogger of hype. The Hulkster and his immediate foes can only fight so many nights a year, see, and with no local first units to draw from — such folk having either been absorbed nationally, shipped to jurisdictions unknown or locked out to rot — towns large and small are too often stuck with national second units that essentially stink, so great is the disparity of urgency (at Choreography Central) between Hulk-level horseshit and everything else. And without loser-leaves-town matches to occasionally fall back on (as there’s no longer a “town” to leave)…gosh
11. Okay. Here’s one for laughs. Time was muscles, make that muscles without accompanying fat, were the exclusive domain of “narcissists,” sissyboys — in any event, some kind of weirdos — and bullies. Muscle creeps were hideous monsters, good guys never had them, certainly not the swollen fibrous crap you’d see in muscle mags, and even strong good guys, those to whom strength was their thing, had about as much flab sticking out their trunks as your average beer slob. * Nor was there ever the faintest need for flabless abs, pecs or delts to even alternately serve as any sort of mat-tempered Fitness Metaphor, for what was fitness but the sick joke of joggers? Okay, fine, great, amazing: a wrestling iconographically fair to the natural slob in Everyman. So what happens but Fitness Chic erupts like a case of the hives, inshape Olympic dipshits, hundreds of ’em, grab the national scrotum without subtlety or mercy, Schwarzenegger makes a couple (*Only exceptions: those rare bozos whose not-half-bad overall physiques were really no more than corny general echoes of acceptably overdeveloped anatomical trademarks — Antonino Rocca and his “educated” bare feet; Pepper Gomez and his stomach that could withstand Killer Kowalski’s claw hold; etc.) pics with and without his shirt — so what’s wrestling go do but ruthlessly pander-to-trend. Possibly the sickest hallmark of the New Wrestling is rippling goddam fibers across the board: from bad guys as always (Paul Orndorff, Brutus Beefcake) to principal good guys (Hogan, Snuka) to peripheral stiffs (Ricky Steamboat) to even — wouldja believe it? — announcers (Jesse “The Body” Ventura). Add to this all those hokey ersatz training tapes (“. . . pumping iron with Dick Wazoo in his Gym”) and what we’re faced with is Slob Disenfranchisement of the most nefarious ilk. Pshaw!
12. By shilling for itself on priorly occupied turf (Letterman, Saturday Night Live, the sports sections of major metropolitan dailies), wrestling actually finds itself in a position to catalytically undermine an incredibly stupid and docile nation’s belief structure re Everything, to effect the removal of the Master Program ring from a people’s collective nose as it were. A NOUS LA LIBERTE - wrestling style!! But such is far, far from its bag of intentions — and it sure don’t want snot on its hands.

Let’s be fair. Not everything stinks about today’s wrestling, not even that practiced by the essentially repugnant World Wrestling Federation, formerly the World Wide Wrestling Federation, which according to a recent Village Voice cover story has penetration rights to a whopping 87 per cent of U.S. TV homes — and climbing — and is so Johnny-on-the-nosering it even puts out its own wrestling mag, kind of the equivalent of a hit sitcom marketing its own TV Guide; Freddie Blassie (for instance) does not stink at all. In fact he is coming up roses.

During the hype hoedown which preceded MTV’s “Rock & Wrestling Connection” whizoff between Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan, for inst, while everyone from Little Richard to Gloria Steinem was delivering cheesy well-rehearsed cliche in support (mostly) of Ms. Lauper’s cultural sugardad Hogan, Classy Fred, nonpartisan to a fault, went straight for the corporate jugular, bellowing a mothereffing gem of from-the-hip truth & concision: “WHAT GOOD IS MTV???!!! THEY NEVER PLAY ‘STARDUST’ OR THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM!!! ” Indeed, indeed, and howzabout a couple months back when, prodded to explain how as a loyal American he could give succor to “Communists and Iranians,” namely his tagteam charges Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik, this top-five all-time master interviewee (the others being the pre-sold-out Lou Albano, the late Grand Wizard, and the long-gone John Tolos and Killer Kowalski) exclaimed simply, “I support WINNERS!!!” - inspirational or what? (Up there, in the author’s opinion, with Ron Delhims’ voice-in-the-wilderness characterization of Jimmy Carter’s ’80 Olympic boycott, which he was one of only something like maybe two-three members of Congress to refuse to endorse, as “hysterical” — Great Moments in Keeping the Faith.)

Age-demographically (and otherwise), your typical '85 audience.

Jimmy Townes

Then there’s master interviewer Roddy Piper, he of WWF insert Piper’s Pit, one talkshow host who really knows How. Former house villain at (L. A.’s own) Olympic Auditorium, a likable hack whose principal shtick never amounted to much more than aggressive cowardice, Roddy has finally graduated to a task that suits him, beating out-of-ring good guys (qua naive, unsuspecting talkshow guests) with chairs, smashing bananas in their face. “Sympathy,” he’s been quoted as saying, “comes after stupidity and suicide in the dictionary.” Talkshow hostility carried to its logical, inevitable conclusion (and the only leap in either tenor or scale — from Old Wrestling to New, from local dungeon to national slick — which seems to have been worth the effort, the gamble, whatever the hey).

Actually, though, to be really fair, Vince McMahon’s macro-talkshow TNT, formerly Tuesday Night Titans, has also had its moments, including probably the big world-is-watching (hundreds of thousands? over USA Cable) moment of ’em all: the Butcher Vachon wedding. While the WWF kingpin’s sense of Manifest Bombast has too often of late been that of a golfing banker or nonironic (barely even cynical) pesticide lobbyist, those rare occasions when he’s let the empire’s hair down, and trusted the thing to communal autopilot, have been purt near transcendent. The Wedding: collaborative improv/sequential pluralism on a par with some of your better Battle Royales, or Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (for instance).

And Kamala, the three-hundred-some-odd-pound Ugandan Giant, he of few teeth and fewer traditional holds, a true innovator, he just kind of knocks ’em over, falls on ’em and eventually gets up, too pure for the WWF so now he’s out in the boonies of something called the Mid-South — anyway he's okay.

And King Kong Bundy, 458 lbs. of monster metaphor/mixed (radiation-sick colossus meets shaved-head vampire meets world’s largest amoeba meets lab animal that fucks-your-mom), wrestling’s ultimate genetic accident (in the hands, no less, of the mad, post-scientific WWF) and master of the 5-count pin (3 is for simps, wimps and earlier phases of the beast): as okay as it gets.

And someone I’ve never actually seen wrestle, just his photo in the ‘‘Mat Mania!” issue of Sports Illustrated, this guy (?) with stupid hair and face paint called the Missing Link, no idea where he wrestles but I’d bet he’s alright. I would bet ten bucks.

Otherwise — suddenly I’m feeling generous, I don’t know why, but let’s give some points to Big John Studd, Ken Patera and Bobby Heenan for clipping Andre the Giant’s healthy head o’ sheep hair — otherwise, and I’ve been watching this junk since 1956 (so I know), otherwise nada,’s an average lame era at best, the EMPEROR’S NEW YUPPIE THREADS — and I’m being fair. I am.

I’ve been watching the shit since 1956, actually earlier; have followed it since around ’56 — more or less continuously. Some multi-year gaps here & there, sure, but also some great big hunks of uninterrupted focus, bigger than for 2/3 the things in my life. I’ve been to it live at least 200 times in various cities, or let’s say 175-180. I’ve seen 8 or 9 battle royals. Wrestling was the first sport (by any definition) that meant anything to me, like I’d catch the world series or a bowl game most every year but so what. Discovered and learned the whole sporting pot pourri in sequence to it, first bought The Ring ’cause they had maybe 2-3 pages of wrestling in back, eventually read the boxing up front and started watching, hadda then buy Sports Illustrated and Sport to widen my boxing horizon, in the process managing to additionally notice (in sequence) football, hockey, basketball, baseball, etc. [Where the author is “coming from.”]

Around ’53 or ’54 I remember my grandfather watching on a tiny black & white, sweat dripping, seegar jutting/jerking in his twisted mouth. In turn-of-the-20th Russia he himself had wrestled, or so he claimed, taking on smalltown bullies (Greco-Roman style) for a bottle of vodka. As half a century later wrestling could not help remaining a matter of honor, this almost-an-anarchist nobody’s-fool would yell at the screen, “Use your hammerlock!” — affairs of honor can scarcely be faked.

[Germplasmic source of a cultural postulate. ]

Independent of gramps I hooked into the whatsis somewhere during my first semester of junior high — a couple months after hooking into rock & roll fifteen years before it was pan-corporate slime by catching Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Krazy music (from then on) I could always catch — the home radio’d all but been abandoned in the wake of TV — but krazy ringside hi-jinx I had to (appropriately) fight for. All they had on in New York back then was Thursday night wrestling from D.C., promoted, interestingly enough, by McMahon’s old man Vince Sr., which since it shared the slot of bran’new goddam Playhouse 90 meant I hadda fight the folks to even catch five minutes. (A compromise was eventually reached: alternating weeks. Which meant, in one typical stretch, them missing part one of the Playhouse 90 “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and me missing Mark Lewin & Don Curtis losing the U.S. Tag Team Championship to the Graham Brothers, Eddie & Dr. Jerry, while they lucked into catching part two.) By the time I was in the 9th grade I was so gaga for wrestlin’ I even wormed my way into a car with ten or eleven relatives I couldn’t stand ’cause they were headed down D.C. for Easter where they had this 6-man whoosis they weren’t gonna televise—Lewin, Curtis and 601-lb. Haystacks Calhoun vs. the Grahams and Johnny Valentine — and jesus was it a lulu. In the second fall the Grahams refused Valentine’s tag, he wasn’t their brother so they let him get his ass beat. He got pinned and some stretcher guys carried him out but then midway through the third fall he came running back out with a bandage around his head swinging this long fucking pipe at all five of the rest of ’em, eventually pinning Haystacks (kayoed by a chair) while the others were busy swinging stuff at each other, the only time (though I could be wrong) the big fatso was actually counted out, shoulders to the mat 1-2-3 — and I was there. And I was there, 1974, seventh row ringside, Madison Square Garden, when Freddie Blassie actually punched Bruno Sammartino in the balls — without (hey hey?) a script?—and I’m such a sap I’ve even gone to, and sat through, midgets in Texas. [Evidence of abiding affection. ]

And I’ve seen Blassie, ’71 at the Olympic Aud., biting John Tolos’s head for must’ve been 10-15 minutes of just biting — nothing else! — until he just kind of relinquished his grip and the bloody bit-up Tolos fell over flat ’n’ inert like so much dead red meat, ONLY TO COME BACK STRONG AND COP THE THIRD AND DECIDING FALL - so I know comebacks. And this current whatever it is Wrestling Writ Large is supposed to be undergoing is not (not) a comeback. ’Cause, writ large, it’s never been “away.” Or particularly “down.” I mean yeah, some regional promotions had dried up ’n’ out from their own flaming ineptitude (the Olympic’s LeBells for inst), and the mass consumption of Hulkamania t-shirts does represent some kind of “advance,” but truly, writ Large, with or without the glitz, the thing has been superpopular for decades. Or some such duration.

Like I’ve got this page clipped from a mid-’73 Wrestling News. It says: “Professional Wrestling Is Our Number One Sport! — we have statistics to back this up!” And the stats have Pro Wrestling at 35,000,000, ahead of College Football at 33,000,000, Major League Baseball at 30,000,000, College Basketball at 25,000,000 and so on, down to Pro Boxing at a crummy 5,000,000. This is “1972 U.S. Sports Attendance” they’re giving, not as profit-ledger significant as paid attendance maybe — and certainly no bottom-line plurality without concurrent sales of caps, headbands, bumper stickers and bobbing-head dolls — but significant nonetheless. “Amazing But True!” exclaims author Norman H. Kietzer but I’m neither amazed nor incredulous; I wasn’t then and I am not now.

’Cause what’s the 35 million ultimately represent? Let’s say you’ve got a hardcore of 10 million wrestling fans, or had one in ’72, a low estimate either way but all you need to pack in 35 is each of ’em hauls ass and goes live 3.5 times a year — a reasonable assumption. I mean even marginal fans go at least once per average year (to a battle royal, for instance), more than has gotta be the case for baseball, football, tennis or whatever. Factor in all the occasionally gung-ho azzholes like myself (I went, for inst, to every Island Garden care.in West Hempstead, N.Y., from ’57 fo ’59, every Madison Sq. Garden show from ’72 to ’75, every weekly Olympic bash from late ’75 to early ’77, and though I currently watch maybe 80 football games a year I’ve attended but one since ’78) and 3.5/per is a no-sweat cinch — and we’re not even talkin’ those hundreds of thousands of weird fucks who’re so beyond cycles of interest they (and their families) go every every time. And you want availability of product? These guys still wrassle 300 times a year; draw a circle around any major burg and there’s gotta be (even post-dryout) 5-10 shows a month within 100 miles; probably more. Multiply dah dah dum by dah dah dee . . . you get the picture. ’72, ’85, whatever: demonstrably superpopular.

All that’s going on is Vince Jr. performing insidious thus-&-such with this legitimate mass popularity as its base, structurally redistributing the remaining world’s access to its variables & whatnot ’til he gets to have it All and Then Some — conspicuously. VHF, UHF, cable, closed circuit. Ads for jeans and Valvoline. Headbands, sweatbands and posters that fit exactly on the bedroom doors of suburban New Age 12-year-olds. Aesthetically coequal competitors — many of whom his dad even played quasi-friendly ball with — cringing, sighing, crying in his New Age megacapitalist wake. Which, apropos of comebacks, is akin to Columbia Records buying out WEA, MCA and Polygram (or undermining their promotion, distribution, etc. ’ they’re down ’round the scale of India Navigation and SST), prodding Springsteen, Michael Jackson and whoever-the-fuck to record five albums/each a year and listing them at $22.50 (everything else, $18.95). . . and hailing that as a glorious comeback for American Music.

THE FUTURE OF AN ILL ’LUSION — more of Same at least until winter. Saturday Night’s Main Event, subbing monthly for Saturday Night Live reruns, spring/summer, NBC; a Hulk Hogan cartoon (isn’t he one already?), Saturday mornings come fall, CBS.

But a backlash may be brewing. The entertainment-industrial complex is not, as a unit, all that firmly behind its new partner-inschlock’s center stage aspirations. David Letterman seemed ten times as snotty with Mr. T the “wrestler,” guest-promoing WrestleMania, as he’d conceivably have been — at his existentially most ill-tempered — with T the “actor,” promoing some shitty movie or a new season of A Team. Even on Saturday Night Live, guest hosts T and Hogan served as little more than token-trendy walkons, showing up in no skits except as themselves, even though Hogan in particular, in spite of all the bug-eyed grandiosity, is a far better comic actor than any current SNL regular. Like he well may be (from certain angles, in certain lights) an overinflated, hyperventilating Martin Mull doll, but he’s still got it all over your Martin Shorts and Billy Crystals — therefore use him but subdue him.

King Kong Bundy, an iota more sensitive lookin' than usual.

Jimmy Townes

And then, the topper so far, the belated foofaraw of Richard Belzer (rhymes with Meltzer) after Hogan, in the process of demonstrating a sleeper hold, dropped the fatuous comic, host of cable dogshit Hot Properties, on his head. Speaking by phone the following day over Stanley Siegel’s America Talks Back, Belzer presumably stumped for All Entertainers when he said: “Our only weapons are our wit and our minds, and we never physically impose ourselves on others.” Yeah, but didn’t his ma ever teach him not to trust his person to monsters?

What soon may make for problems, however — Real Problems — is the glaring fact that in the ring, one-on-one with the biggest and baddest of professional opponents, the Hulkster is no less imposing. With the possible exception of King Kong Bundy, who’s either being groomed as his longterm Rival Apparent or merely being readied for a round of patty cake with Andre the Giant, he really hasn’t got dick to square off with. Even Piper, as delightful a fuckface as one could demand in a foe, is just too relatively puny — 231 lbs. to the Hulk’s official 305 — to continue commanding Hulkoid credibility without the Orndorffs, Ortons, whoevers forever woven into the plot. And let’s say, for argument sake, you take the search outside the cozy confines of the WWF to peruse, for a Hypothetical Contender of suitable dimension, the register of the nearest promotional rival, Verne Gagne and White Sox owner Eddie Einhorn’s Pro Wrestling USA. Okay: WWF bailout Sgt. Slaughter, 310, physical enormity plus sado-military oompah — perfect. Only he’s a good guy now, and will be as long as soldiers of the red/white/blue are regarded by schooltots as he-ros. He’d never pull a First Strike on the Hulker, and how else could the thinning blond Come Back in all his bug-eyed, calorie-scorching awesomeness? Okay: Ric Flair, Jerry Lawler. Baaad guys, fine — at least the last time I looked — vainglorious muhfuhs to the frickin’ gills . . . but not much bigger than Piper. 243 and 234, respectively. So I dunno, even on imaginary drawing boards it’s a Problem. Bigger Lies will hafta be concocted. (Or maybe I’ve watched too much boxing.)

Which is why I prefer wrestling INTERVIEWS: all voice boxes are anatomically equal. Or close enough.

PHONY OR FAKE? - John Stossel still can’t know the half of it. Goes up to David “Doctor D” Schultz in the waning moments of an embarrassingly deadpan wrestling-is-fake segment on ABC’s 20/20 and coyly solicits the 6-6, 270-lb. on-off switch (always locked in on): “I have to ask you the conventional question . . . ” — as if the guy reads Derrida or subscribes to the New Yorker — “is wrestling fake?” For which, not surprisingly, he gets whapped in one ear, then the other, after which he claims “loud buses” make his head ring; Babwa Walters commiserates. Poor John.

JUST IMAGINE, on the other hand, if he’d slithered up instead to some ABC windup stooge from Dynasty or Matt Houston, or some same-network movie of the week about teen pregnancy or white-collar alcohol abuse, and axed ’em, right after they’d shot some typical maimer of the human spirit (on the income from which they would wine, dine and toot far, far better than the king & queen of Belgium), “Lemme just hit you with this one: How do you um uh relate to the possibility that you have, just now, willingly participated in the complete, utter, wanton and systematic falsification of Reality as even a cactus would understand the term?” I mean not every recipient of the query would punch the dork’s lights out (or even snarl menacingly), but automatons do not have their pride, and after this one even Babwa would not be around to commiserate.

How role-playing robots behave under sudden fire is hardly the issue, though. Nor is the “veracity” of newsman Stossel’s presentation (fixed! fixed!) before getting whapped. As umpteen-year wrestling partisan Bill Liebowitz puts it: “Why doesn’t he do an expose of Doug Henning? So it’s done with wires and mirrors! So he’s not really a sorcerer! I mean come on.

Come on, indeed; some targets are too fat even for a laugh. The nightly news, for instance — show me a more malignant forcible orchestration of metarealities. Wrestling’s 200 worst Reality crimes are benignly pale in comparison. But fat is fat, and I won’t touch it. What it does behoove me to touch, however, and get all testy about is Letterman’s treatment of T in sequence with the rest of that night’s show. Right after T they had this newcomey actress person, some raving ditz I have still not seen in her fucky-wucky feature with Madonna so who am I to comment, but she sure seemed like easy ditz-fodder for David to mock the living fluid out of two minutes after doing same to T, Rosanna Arquette. I mean maybe in fact she’s a veritable bee’s knee of the big wide silver screen — anything’s poss — although nothing like that ever stopped him from lickety splitting for obvious jocular jugulars, never stopped him before and here he had all these cues flying in his face and all he did was act POLITE, CHARMING and APOLOGETIC (for a joke he rescinded). Like maybe she was just his week’s quota of gals to be nice to, but it seemed purt near obvious, what with her and T juxtaposed like that, that when the chips were down, with personal squaresville “image” on the line, Letterman the Not-So-Nihilistic could always be counted upon to ally himself— on a dime — with one convenient strain of showbiz sham, one fly-by-night manufactured reality, over a slightly more topically disposable other. Contempo cinema over ringside pus indeed!

At which point T if he was any sort of real wrestler would’ve surged back onto the set & split massive hairs for the viewing world to see. Realer wrestler (and realer actor!) Andy Kaufman would’ve done it automatic.

ANDY KAUFMAN: the Rosebud in rassling’s attic. Who, you may recall — apropos of talkshow hokum—once got himself a late-night “busted neck” (courtesy of real live actual wrestler Jerry Lawler) the so-called authenticity of which we may never truly know — ’cause now he’s dead. Everybody’s got a theory; mine stems from when Allan Arkush set me up with the guy while directing him in Heart Beeps. I had this treatment I’d done years before with my pal Nick for a blaxploitation wrestling pic called Soul Stomper, and Arkush thought Andy’d be interested. Would’ve been—maybe — only the thing (7 sketchy pages) didn’t stress, quite to his satisfaction, didn’t underline enough that wrestling was f-fixed. A structural purist, he wanted things right-on correct from the gitgo, nothing a neophyte could read as ambiguous. So my own initial read on his getting piledrived by Lawler was he’d either (a) misread the extent to which the other guy’s “knowing that he knew the code” would make things functionally palsy-walsy (wrestling-as-dealt being to Andy the selfsame matter of Honor that wrestling as primal grope had been for my gramps), affable enough on a de facto co-insiders’ plane for his brother-in-spirit not to betray him (a slight variation on Stossel/Belzer) or (b) he’d already opted to become wrestling.

Hogan, Piper, outside ring

Jimmy Townes

When, in the last year or so of his life, he began appearing regularly as a wrestler on local Memphis TV, occasionally in the ring as a sap bad guy who could not do zilch to save his pipsqueak ass, but more importantly as a great interview (“You’re all rednecks! I’m from Beverly Hills!” — i.e., carpetbag archetype city), the half-guess of (a) became more and more a vanity of cranky Empiricism. With his neck-grudge against Lawler fully in context as an utterly Romantic rite of wrestling passage, and with King Kong Bundy’s present manager Jimmy Hart as his squeaky-intense “advisor,” Kaufman tossed off some all-time wonders of squared-circle shtick. Like I’ve seen this tape of what’s gotta be his own greatest public moment, something so amazing that Richard Foos at Rhino, who’s already got distribution on the great-enough (despite crummy sound) My Breakfast with Blassie, oughta waste no time in securing home-cassette (if not theatrical) rights to, a testament to Hope — and Glory! — which our Culture-deprived world of pain could surely use a dose of.

What happens is this. Kaufman, in regular boring street clothes and a silly, stupid rhinestoned crown, paces aimlessly outside the ring during a tagteam throwaway involving some Hart-managed local bozos when suddenly Lawler himself emerges from the wings to wantonly hurl “fire” in the face of our carpetbag anti-hero. He writhes on the ground. Hart’s boys leave the ring — and are instantly disqualified — to selflessly come to his assistance. He writhes some more, hands covering his face; (first rule of First Aid) they strategically restrain him. After much delay a stretcher arrives to bear him away. “Hospital reports” are flashed over subsequent matches. Finally at card’s end the hospital-treated Kaufman appears, burn marks (cum mutant-film radiation festers) here and there on his never-exactly-handsome mug, conventionally bound “scripts” in his tense-with-message mitts. “DeNiro . . . Pacino . . . Robert Redford” — he bitterly lets ’em drop — “all of them wanted me in their movies” — gasp, pant — “but because of YOU, Lawler, I will never work in Hollywood again!! ” Followed by an obligatory “I’m gonna GET YOU!” and who knows, maybe he never did get to make another pitcher.

Anyway the real Rosebud in this monkey farm is did he or did he not already know he had cancer? Because clearly, absolutely, Wrestling was hardly just another warmup for him, another coldreading class, a craft-honing actperson workshop — or even a more radically advanced waiter gig at the Bagel Nosh. That sort of hooey might have had meaning for the Andy Kaufman of Breakfast with Blassie, a journeyman bloke (with a strong sense of irony) role-priming his licks as Stanislavskian setups for rants by the Great One. Taking the plunge, committing to Wrestling as IT, he became Blassie — or a screamingly brilliant facsimile. So what we need to know, vis-a-vis possible death-knowledge, is was this (by choice) his literal Final Stand?

Someone must know.

HOLD THE PRESSES -Orndorff too. Has just fired Bobby Heenan & become a good guy. Abandon all hope — the show is over.