Read by Clive Greenwood - final story in podcast, here.
“Well I'll be a ... The Granite Grappler. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.”
The Granite in question was very much as his name would suggest: greying, unyielding, cracked, eroded, like he'd been dug from the earth with the bluntest of shovels. He comprised more than four-hundred pounds of callused unshaven meat, every blubberous fold shot with rosacea, sagging from all the wrong places, and tallied with blade marks – and these were just the glowing characteristics.
“Never thought I'd see him in colour,” the manager muttered as The Grappler, arduously, continued his slog down the gym's creaking staircase. “Shit, I've seen sacks of coal emptied down a chute with more finesse.”
If only to underline the manager's derision, The Grappler trudged his way across the gym with all the grace of a volcanic continent. When he stepped his mass upon the ring apron it bowed like a trampoline. He hunched himself between the ropes.
“Like a hunk of hard cheese through a grater.”
Once inside the ring, said cheese's exhibition did not improve; when he leaned his bulk into the ring ropes, testing their fortitude, they came up short – or rather long. The ropes yielded with such elasticity that The Grappler practically cracked the back of his skull on the gym floor.
“Remind me again. Why in the Sam Hill are we giving that a try out?”
“Nostalgia,” the executive said plainly, lost to the scrolling of his feed.
The manager cocked an eyebrow. By his reckoning, the only demographic that would remember The Grappler fondly were those seeing out their final years in a retirement home. Or dancing the Mamba with the worms.
“Come on,” was the nub of the executive's pitch, repeated viewing of The Wolf of Wall Street paying dividends. “See if the big man can still work five minutes. An attraction match. That's all the shareholders are asking.”
Relenting to the executive's silver tongue, at least before it went any further up his ass, the manager surveyed the bevy of mid-carders whose contracts were coming up for renewal. “Fine. I'll do what's good for business. Brother...”
In comparison to the moulting stag that was The Grappler, the two wrestlers of the manager's choosing were proverbial bucks cut from bronze: tanned, brazen, gleaming with tribal-tattooed six-packs and Brazilian dick roots. They were shredded so low on the body fat index one could practically see the sperm paddling in their nuts; there was probably more fat under The Grappler's chin. Or the chin between his chins.
“So why you wanting us to go over, huh? For that?” the bucks bemoaned indignantly, hands on narrow hips.
“You like getting paid?” the manager asked, eyes of steel, a fist of the same persuasion. “Double-time says you'll go five minutes with him.”
The bucks conferred between themselves. “Double time? Each?”
The manager shrugged.
“And a shot at the belt?”
This fantastic condition almost caused the manager to choke on his toothpick.
“We'll keep it in mind,” the executive placated with a salesman's wheedle, as opposed to his colleague's whip.
Convinced that another rung up the ladder toward fame and lucrative movie deals had been surmounted, the two bucks practically skipped to the ring. Awaiting them in the corner, like a great sack of bills just begging to be laundered, leaned The Grappler.
Barely able to contain their snickers, the two bucks sprang into the ring. If only to parade their prowess, they each performed ever-more impressive stretches. No ballerina, his tendons about as flexible as a wrecking ball's chain, The Grappler's routine began and ended with a roll of the shoulders and a sharp cracking of the neck. The grind of bone against bone sounded like a locomotive's crank.
“This is going to be a train wreck,” the manager muttered to himself. Nonetheless, with a cursory nod to the hands at ringside, he signalled that the bell was rung. Its peal lingered around the gym like a death toll. It had barely finished reverberating and already The Grappler was sweating bullets.
While his partner stalked the outside, the lead buck strolled across the centre of the ring towards The Grappler. As tradition dictated, The Grappler offered his hand; the buck considered it as one might a gravedigger's mitten. Cocksure bastard, he shoved The Grappler square in the chest. The Grappler tumbled backwards and fell stiffly against the ropes.
The manager nearly fell into a coma.
As sympathetically as a sailor pulls a body from the water, the buck took The Grappler up by the straps of his foul-smelling leotard and shoved him back across the ring. The Grappler staggered the full length of the ring before colliding, gut first, with the corner post. By the time he'd lurched his winded mass around, the buck was declaring. “'Bout time we gave this lamb some chops!”
Said chops came in a barrage of the knife-edge variety: back-hand forearms served hard and flat across the chest. Each smack cracked like a whip, causing every man and woman within earshot to wince; none more so than The Grappler. His expression fixed in a yearbook grin, the buck called across the ring to his partner. “I reckon it's about time we got this boulder rolling.”
Taking his opponent roughshod by the arm, the buck gleefully launched The Grappler into the ropes; like a reluctant heifer encouraged by the pointy end of a prod to the nether regions – or in this case, a spank from the second buck in the same place – back The Grappler rebounded. With a matador's poise the buck swerved the charging Grappler, expertly accelerating him into the opposing ropes with a shove in the not-so small of his back. Rope stretch, rebound; The Grappler sprang back.
Worried that his expensive ring may flip over at any moment, never mind the whole damn building, the manager was thankful when the buck stepped in front of The Grappler and delivered a text-book clothesline: straight arm, stiff, just below the sternum. The Grappler took it like a biker colliding with a tree. Those at ringside rubbernecked.
“You had enough nostalgia for one day?”
Sip-sip. Scroll-scroll. “We've all got our masters, brother.”
The manager spat a splintered toothpick to the floor. “So be it.”
By this point a crowd of spectators had begun to amass around the ring. Clamouring morbidly at the edge like drunkards goggling at a freak show, they laughed openly at The Grappler's ruination. Ringside phones were hoisted, cameras aimed, #asswhooping soon to be trending. Rising to his audience, a clown before his rabble, the buck teased the big man for all to hear, slapping him around for all to see.
“You wanna take a nap on the outside, gramps?”
Stoic to a fault, The Grappler shook his head; he looked the buck square in the eyes, and offered up his chins.
“Chrissake, man,” the manager willed, a heartfelt whisper. “Stay the hell down.”
Never. Be it pride or pig ignorance, the man formerly of stone took his beatings with all the compliance of a hanging side of pork. From behind a flurry of potato jabs, one buck said to the other:
“Hardly seems fair. We should let him even up the odds.”
“Nah. Fair's fair. He's literally twice the man we are!”
“No shit,” the manager sneered.
Had there been a referee present he would have taken one look at The Grappler, signalled an 'X', crossed himself in the name of the Father, and called for a mortician. But since neither saviour nor undertaker were anywhere to be found, the manager took it upon himself to intervene, bringing a halt to the buck's frivolities before they turned into a ritual slaughter.
The wolves climbed off their kill. Unsteady as a calf with half its entrails littering the Savannah, The Grappler hauled himself to his feet, rope by rope. Exhausted, swaying like an oak one axe-swing from being felled, he wiped the sweat and blood from his face. He regarded his trembling, bloodied palm with Shakespearian contemplation, peering off past the ropes, to the horizon, the last soldier observing a sunset over the trenches. Time inside the ring seemed to stand still.
Without their knowing it, an organic hush had descended over the crowd at ringside. In spite of themselves, shyly, several aged spectators cheered words of encouragement.
Gradually, single voices, more followed.
Someone clapped. More followed.
The Grappler's glaze seemed to lift, his eyes brightening. With a determined straightening of his back, so many weathered vertebrae stacked like stones, he slowly righted to his full imperious height. Eyebrows lowered, bleeding frown, he narrowed his gaze in the direction of the two bucks. Their spunk having deserted them, the bucks were as motionless as two strays in the headlights of a hauler.
Regally, The Grappler brought a great bloodied hand to the shoulder of his leotard. He puffed out his chest, widened his stance–
And dropped a strap.
The toothpick fell from the manager's mouth.
“The comeback...”
“Huh?” the executive said, peering up from his phone.
“The comeback, kid. The god-damn comeback!”
A right arm from The Grappler, swung with all the might of an elephant's trunk, landed stiff. The buck never even saw it. He hit the ropes like a rag doll hurled against a barbed wire fence. Before he knew what was happening he found himself in The Grappler's clutches, held aloft like a trophy kill. In a single effortless motion, The Grappler rolled his shoulders and tossed the buck like he was nothing. Over the ropes the buck flew, face-first to the floorboards, landing in a heap of defeat at the shoes of the astonished crowd. The buck received no attention, either medical or sympathetic; lost to their basking, everyone inside the gym beheld The Grappler with the type of wonder reserved for solar phenomena.
The Grappler rounded toward the second buck, who receded into the ring's corner, his lean little nuts shrinking up inside him.
The second strap was dropped.
That was when the real cheering began.
Not wishing to go the same way as his partner, the second buck put up more of a fight. He lunged at the oncoming Grappler. The manager grinned.
“You dumb mark. Now you're for it.”
It came in the form of a big left. Then a big right. Left, right, left, right. Big boot! Big elbow! And how about another just for luck, why don't cha?! But the beating had gone on long enough. It was time. With a subtle raising of his arm, timepiece precision, The Grappler signalled his finisher.
“The Hammer...” The manager wanted it so badly he could taste it.
Happy to oblige, The Grappler clamped a huge paw around the buck's throat and lifted him up toward the heavens. Here The Grappler held him, displayed him; then, to an orgasmic pop, the crowd hollering, back down to earth the buck came. The entire ring shook as though impacted by a megaton bomb.
Smooth as butter, The Grappler dropped for the pin. One! Two! Three!
The manager parted the throng and rang the bell himself.
The crowd exploded.
Triumphant yet without a trace of arrogance – nor, the manager now noticed, even a shortness of breath – The Grappler pulled up his straps. He waited magnanimously until his audience had concluded their applause.
“And that,” he said, “that is professional wrestling.”
Comments