Beer, Blood and Cornmeal (eBook)

1 MOVING IN WITH THE SASQUATCH WRESTLERS GO CRAZY. That's what they do. You have to be a little crazy to get into the ring in the first place. That goes without saying. Sure it's fake, phony, staged, whatever. That's beside the point. If you get up on that top rope and fall the wrong way or you jump expecting someone to catch you and they aren't there, you can end up in a wheelchair sucking plankton through a tube and shitting in a bag for the rest of your life. That's always a possibility. It's always there in the back of your mind. But that's not the real reason that wrestlers go crazy. Wrestlers navigate between their mundane realities and a fantasy world ofass-kicking and bloodletting. For some, that fantasy world where they can solve all of their problems by wrapping a steel folding chair around another man's skull is just too appealing. Those wrestlers become the characters that they play in the ring when they're just standing in line at the Dairy Queen waiting for a chocolate dipped cone or withdrawing a few twenties from the ATM. It makes some kind of sense for a freak like the Macho Man to morph into his in-ring persona. He made millions of dollars off the wrestling game. He's wrestled in front of thousands of people and television audiences of millions more. 'Macho Man' Randy Savage doesn't have a day job. He doesn't have to be anybody else but the Macho Man. That's why he can walk around with his muscles flexed to the point where it looks like every vein in his body is about to explode. That's why he can speak as though every syllable he utterssomehow causes him internal bleeding, or at least constipation. That's what people want out of him. That kind of behavior gets him product endorsements. Being a spandex-wearing nut job 24/7 helps him step into a Slim Jim ad and collect the residuals. What was really fucking nuts was when the guys from Incredibly Strange Wrestling started to leave their real selves behind in favor of becoming their purposely ridiculous alter egos. We were rated the worst wrestling promotion year after year by The Wrestling Observer Newsletter until Time Warner's wcw was able to wrest that distinctionfrom us by spending millions of dollars producing some of the worst television imaginable. A guy in a chicken suit and El Homo Loco were our biggest stars. We had a Scientologist boy band and a Mexican Viking. People threw tortillas at us. The promoters actually passed them out before the show and encouraged the boozehounds, party girls and retro hipsters that pressed themselves up against the ring to fling them at the wrestlers. Nobody was supposed to take this shit seriously. What's more, we all had day jobs. We weren't exactly neverbeensor also-rans. Incredibly Strange Wrestling was the hottestshow in San Francisco during those years when the 20th century collided into the 21st. We started out in the South of Market club scene and ended up selling out the Fillmore more times than many rock stars. We toured the U.S. and Europe and landed ourselves on tv and in newspapers. Your typical ISW show combined two sets of surreal satire dressed up as masked Mexican wrestling with raucous post punk sets by bands like the Super Suckers, nofx, the Dickies, and the Queers. The Donnas once opened for isw when they were still just fresh-faced schoolgirls from the ritzy suburbs of Palo Alto. Afterthey finished their set of bubblegum arena rock, they had to suffer the indignity of sharing the backstage with a bunch of half-dressed flabby wrestlers. The wrestlers had to strain to avoid leering at so much musical jailbait.