The Characters We Play (Sights from an Indie Wrestling Show)
All right so I’ve got to fit the theme of my blog in some way, but mostly I just want to tell you about some of the wackiest things I’ve ever seen in a night. It took me a long time to find the proper adjective too. A mix of craziness and skills that one wouldn’t think people would refine for the skill's own sake, it wasn’t quite the most “amazing” thing I’ve ever seen, but it deserved a similar superlative.
The story begins at a Chicago style pizza place in Las Vegas called “Amore’s”
A friend of mine, known as Dink(y) to most, invited me to go eat with him and “a pretty wrestler.” I had haphazardly promised him that I would attend one of the pro wrestling shows he promotes, and I had surmised that soon the bill on that promise was coming due. You’ll find out that I’m not the best with a calendar or the events I fail to stencil in one. So I walked into Amore’s to meet Dink and “Christina," later to be known as “Christina von Eerie.” The three of us talked for a little while about life, and she told me about how she used to play bass in a touring band but has since settled down with her husband and a quieter life of marriage and superplexes off the top turnbuckle. This is Christina in wrestling character:
When Dink told her I’d be going to the show sitting front row, she stammered out “Um, can you cheer? Cheering is good. Clapping is good.” Now I didn’t tell her that this chap with the neatly placed hair and dark rimmed glasses who’d been chatting about politics and culture for the past hour was just one of the many characters I played (omg the article title), but I assured her I could show up and show out for the wrestlers working their asses off to give us a little entertainment on a weekday night.
Without being able to compartmentalize these manifestations of our psyche into characters, we would go INSANE. Sure I’m a slightly different character of myself at the poker table or playing in a rock band or sitting around home. A girlfriend once asked me how I was always able to “turn on” at the poker table. I explained that i didn’t want to sit in a boring poker game so I turned off the parts of me that wanted to discuss my stack-to-pot ratio or combos-in-range (or even the parts that cared about winning and losing) so that everyone else and I could have more fun in the game. I turned on the parts that cared about telling stories or playing music or having arguments about whether Lebron or Jordan is the greatest ever. It isn’t complicated, but for so many people it seems to be. Even though I’m not an avid fan of indie pro wrestling, I assured promoter and talent that I was able to actually care about the outcomes of matches with characters I’d never seen, and I didn’t mind when four sweaty men went barreling over the top rope into my neatly arranged bag of Cracker Jacks on my lap . . . yes that actually happened.
Anyway I’ve covered the relation to the blog, back to the story…
I drove, by myself, to a random business address that ended up being a mini-warehouse stocked with a pro wrestling ring and characters that looked like this:
He (and everyone else for that matter) called him “Joey Ryan.” His special “talent” was that his penis was exceptionally strong, and that he could use it to throw opponents to the ground . . . if he could talk them into grabbing it. His opponent was one “Priscilla Kelly,” seen at the business end of a tropical patterned wrestling boot here:
***WHAT I’M ABOUT TO DESCRIBE IN GRAPHIC DETAIL ARE THE EVENTS OF A WRESTLING MATCH THAT COULD QUALIFY FOR A PORNOGRAPHY CATEGORY ON PORNHUB***
As the match began, Joey Ryan beckoned for Priscilla to grab his crotch which I assume would have given him a definitive advantage, as he claims to be master of “dong style.” They traded some of the classic wrestling moves and some jokes. At one point Joey took a blow pop out of his wrestling shorts and made his opponent put it in her mouth. At another point, she took the same blow pop, placed it inside her shorts, and eventually placed it in his mouth. This same blow pop eventually bounced out of the ring where it was snagged in midair and finished by a fan. Yes, really. The pair traded some decent pro wrestling moves for a few minutes until Joey Ryan picked Priscilla up in a kind of fireman’s carry and spun around multiple times with her on his back. After she escaped, the two found themselves stumbling around in dizziness until he, in her lack of defense, was able to once again place her hand on his penis. Except this time she wasn’t thrown to the ground by his deadly phallus (how many synonyms am I going to have to find for this word…). In front of my eyes and 150 other people, Priscilla Kelly pulled his waistband toward her and vomited some concoction of god-knows-what into his shorts. Shortly after, she won the match.
I could not make this up. The whole reason I wrote this blog was to let someone else know that this happened. Talk about suffering for your art. My hat is off. Sure I didn’t like playing the same song every night for years as a musician, but I pretended to like it because I was playing a character for people. I’m not always in a good mood at the poker table, but I’ll put one on because I like having a good time; and I think other people do too. All those characters pale in comparison to what i saw that night. Not only by these two either. Every wrestler laid it on the line (including my friend, Christina) for their art, so people could have a good time. I’m hoping to have her on the podcast for an interview in short order too, so stay tuned for that. And like I said, my hat is off. Bravo to all!
