Short Bus Hero (3 page)

Stryker thinks that Gemini has become more secretive in recent weeks, hanging out more with friends from other wrestling promotions. He used to bullshit with Stryker about the wrestling game, hanging out with him down the South Side, but he’s been growing distant. What’s up with that?

There is much in his thoughts that I cannot read, as I said. It’s weird.

Stryker does his best to shrug it off and enjoy his win. Even though victories are pre-determined in their world, winners are still allowed ample celebration and undisputed bragging rights. After years of jobbing it, Stryker has finally been chosen by the powers that be. It is his turn in the limelight.

But, alas, the party is short-lived.

Barry Goldin, Stryker’s business manager, enters the locker room, barrel chest forging ahead, lips pursed, eyes lost in a squint like a thoughtful general. In fact, when Goldin had been a wrestler, he was known as The Golden General. He steps in front of Stryker and peers into his charge’s beaming face.

“General! We finally did it, man,” Stryker shouts, smacking the General on the arm. Goldin looks down at the wet spot that appears on the sleeve of his sharkskin jacket and frowns.

The General is the best face manager in the AWG. He’d come over from the World Wrestling Coalition after suffering a ruptured Achilles’ tendon on the eighth hole at a Palm Beach golf course. A face manager’s job is to do his newer, or less-charismatic, charge’s trash talking and to get him into bigger and better matches, and there is none better than The General. He’d finally had a breakthrough with Stryker, officially “putting him over,” cementing his rise in status, with tonight’s match against the always-popular Gemini.

A “face,” in case you are not up on that aforementioned carny speak, is a good guy. It’s short for “baby face,” for some reason. He’s the wrestler who the fans like and want to see win. He’s usually the big draw. His opponent, the villain, is known as the “heel.” Stryker was hoping to break into a big face position, after working for a number of years in a regular journeyman or “jobber” role (those are the guys who fight in lesser matches and who are not the superstars—yes, there will be a test later). This match against Gemini, the league’s biggest heel, was Stryker’s big break.

“Yeah, great,” Goldin says. “Don’t get too excited, though. It may be the first time, but it’s also the last.” Off-camera, well away from the eyes of the fans, The General has little use for drama and bravado. He comes straight to the point with his charges: no shouting, no popping veins, no cords standing out in his bulldog neck, just a businessman’s cool detachment. 

Stryker looks around the room, confused. Gemini and the other guys have stowed their smiles, scenting blood in the air like trained dogs. The General is also Nyxxa’s and Stryper’s manager, and those guys—Stryker’s allies, his “brothers”—exchange a guilty look which Stryker catches but is unable to interpret.

“Listen, kid,” the General begins, squinting at Stryker’s face, “I hate to tell you this, but the Guild is going down the crapper. We jumped the shark, boys, it’s over.” He glances around the room, addressing everyone present. Even though no cameras were around, He’s gone theatrical, giving Stryker the brush off. “Got word this morning from the higher ups. Nothing we can do, we’re all gonna be on the street if they can’t strike some kind of deal with the Big Boys.” The “Big Boys” being the WWC, of course, The World Wrestling Coalition.

“Well,” Gemini pipes up, winking at Nyxxa and Stryper, “Not all of us.” He waggles his eyebrows at Stryker and whistles off to the shower, ignoring the General’s glower.

Stryker stomps his bare foot.

“You’re shitting me! I finally get put over and the whole fucking thing is collapsing?”

The same news is received by Ally herself, the following morning.

3. Metathesiophobia /
met′ă-thē′sēō-fō′-bē-ă / fear of changes

“N
ooooo-ho-ho,”
she howls back at the bearer of bad tidings.

The television doesn’t care. It sits in a small niche carved out of the jumble of rubbish crowding the Forman’s living room. Ally’s despair slides right off its slick black bezel, its old-fashioned glass window reflects her angst directly back at her, magnifying and distorting it.

That is, after all, television’s job, isn’t it?

Ally’s mother, Lois, yells from the kitchen, not fifteen feet from her shouting daughter. “What’s the matter in there?” Lois looks up from the pile of magazines she’s sorting through on top of layers of newspapers, dirty paper plates, and empty pizza boxes on the kitchen table. The magazine covers feature Pittsburgh sports heroes, 1980s to the present. To most people, it’s a load of garbage. But, to Lois, it’s a stack of important reminders of a life well-lived. Look, here’s Sidney Crosby holding up the shining Stanley Cup dated the day Ally joined the union at work. Here’s Big Ben looking very GQ on the day Lois had her mammogram. Here’s Mario Lemieux on the day Earl retired from the mill. She cannot bear the thought of parting with any of these treasures. And she won’t. Everything in her cluttered home is either a treasured memory or a key to bringing back the life she had before everything had gotten so complicated. She had started collecting stuff seriously the day Ally was born. It didn’t become compulsive hoarding, though, until the day Ally had gone to work.

Ally slips to the floor and thrashes about, unleashing a furious staccato of fists and heels upon the matted shag carpet. Lois does not enter the family room until the melamine coffee table is flipped on its side with a loud thump and Ally begins screaming.

“…is engaged in talks with the Worldwide Wrestling Coalition, to discuss the possibility of a buyout,” a plastic woman on the cable news finishes. “In other news, yet another strange creature has washed ashore in Mon…” Lois aims a remote control, scavenged from beneath a pile of unraveled yarn (which had once been an afghan knitted by some stranger) on the couch, and silences the woman. She turns her attention to her screaming child. Ally, my Dear One, is twenty-four years old. She has been throwing tantrums for twenty years. Oppositional behavior is common among our kind. Lois is highly experienced in such situations. She pulls the coffee table away from Ally and moves a worn plaid wing-back chair to a safer position, deeper into a pile of abandoned clothing.

Then, she waits.

Her eyes pass over the jam-packed bookcase, absolutely crammed full of broken-spined paperbacks, some dating as far back as her high school days, a bazillion years ago. She gazes at the tower of old vinyl record albums in the corner. Why they keep those, she doesn’t know. That’s Earl’s collection (his only one). They don’t even own a turntable, for gosh sakes. But, she supposes, like the magazines, they all mark some long dead time that they risk forgetting if they throw them out. The end table next to the chair houses her collection of coasters: coasters stolen from corner taverns, bowling alleys, purchased at Disney World and Cost Plus. You can’t close the drawers all the way because the damn things stick out everywhere. She really needs to find someplace else to put them. But where? Every horizontal surface is already piled high with stuff she keeps because she is convinced that she’ll need it the second she throws it out.

Ally wears herself out. Her screams become intermittent. Her drumming slows. Tears dry on her cheeks and neck, and her eyes open by degrees. After two minutes and forty-one seconds, her wailing has been reduced to a dry hitching, and she sits up, a scrap of notebook paper stuck to her ear. She wipes a bubble of clear snot on the back of her pudgy hand.

“Ready?” Lois asks, peering at her over the top of her glasses.

Ally’s father, Earl, enters via the kitchen, squeezing along the goat path through the adjoining dining room. A rectangle of duct tape clings to his sneaker and makes a little “pppt” sound with every step he takes, until it catches a plastic shopping bag, which Earl bends down to remove and tosses onto a pile of old broken dolls. He’s been in the garage, sorting the recycling. That’s probably where the duct tape came from. As a recent retiree, hanging out in the garage and recycling have become Earl’s favorite hobbies. He’s begun to sneak some of Lois’s collected trash to the dump, thinking she doesn’t know. He only takes a few things at a time—a short stack of newspapers, a couple pairs of shoes, a broken lamp from a hiding spot in the rafters above the garage. He wonders how long he can keep it up before she notices. If he hadn’t started that, they would have had to move out of the house a year ago. He lives in fear of the day that she looks at him and says: “You know, I’ve been looking all over for that duck decoy lamp we bought at the flea market. I know I put it up in the attic over the garage.” Oy.

Earl stops short when he sees Ally, red-faced and snot-wiping, on the floor. “What’s wrong with her?” he asks Lois. Lois shrugs her shoulders and turns back toward Ally. Earl wouldn’t understand even if she could tell him why Ally was freaking out. It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s just that he’s not Mom.

“What happened?” she asks.

“He’s- He’s-” Ally’s mouth locks in a stutter, a white clump of spittle clings to the corner of her lips. The Formans call this “getting stuck.” Ally’s stutter turns into a ratcheting jaw, fluttering eyelids, spinning eyeballs, and a desperate flapping of the hands. Ally gets stuck often. It frustrates the hell out of her. She knows exactly what she wants to say, it just won’t come out. “He’s going to get fired,” she finally forces out in a rapid shout.

“Who?” Lois asks.

“Stryker!” Ally cries, pulling at her hair, crawling over low mounds of junk to the comfort of her mom’s embrace.

Lois is not surprised by her daughter’s reaction. She knows how Ally loves Stryker.

All her life, Ally has gotten extremely attached to various people and objects. They come and go in waves, but Stryker has lasted much longer than anyone or anything else.
The My Little Pony
, the
Blue’s Clues
, the Luxor Mummy trading cards, the whole pirate thing. The wrestler has outlasted even the timeless Barbie dolls that Ally collected for years and just recently started playing with again.

Ally’s attachments are classed by some as part of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Others are of the opinion that such behavior is merely another manifestation of her Down syndrome existence, like the white flecks in the rings of her blue irises, or her flat facial features. No one knows for sure, but strong emotional attachment to various people and objects is not uncommon amongst the Down syndrome set. Ally is just a little more extreme. Lois has learned not to question it. “It is what it is,” she frequently repeats, silently and aloud. Ally’s family deals with it, ignores it, integrates it into their lives.

Lois holds Ally as she weeps. Earl retreats to the kitchen, in search of a Bud Light, leaving his wife to comfort his daughter. He isn’t much good at that kind of thing. Driving to the mall, fixing broken computers, sorting the recycling, that’s what he is good at. He shows affection by doing things for his family, providing for them, taking care of them. He leaves the coddling to Lois.

Ally wipes her nose on Lois’s shoulder, leaving a wet smear like a snail’s trail on her mom’s black Steelers sweatshirt.

Most people are surprised to hear that large numbers of the Down syndrome community are avid wrestling fans. It’s totally true. Go to any match and look at the VIP areas, the accessible seating. Ally and her friends not only attend performances in their home city, but they regularly trek to neighboring states for matches. They spend every cent of their meager wages, earned at menial job placements, on pay-per-view events, t-shirts, action figures and dolls, officially licensed notebooks and bed sheets, DVDs, magazines, anything they can find with their heroes’ images on it. Those Dear Ones visit the official websites, the unofficial websites, post in the wrestling forums, obsessively check match results, blog, tweet...

Wrestling is essential to their lives. Vitamin W.

Ally’s typical day involves bagging groceries at a local supermarket where she is teased by a nasty pimple-faced stock boy, pitied by well-meaning cashiers, and mostly avoided by customers who don’t want to catch her stupid. Her family treats her like a child and her mother tells her what to do every minute she isn’t at work. The only thing out there that gives her release from the tedium, the only thing that lets her pretend she’s one of the unremarkable cheering crowd is…

Wanna guess?

Yes, the wonderful world of wrestling!

Ally comes home from work, always before eight o’clock, and either gets together with her tight group of friends, the Cool People, or she chats with them online. And what do they love to discuss more than the next
American Idol
and
Twilight
? You got it, wrestling. They spend hours talking about Nyxxa pounding the snot out of Dandy Dean. They go on and on about who won the most matches ever in the city of Memphis. They know who is the heaviest heavyweight. They speculate on who uses steroids and who lives up to their own standards of eating clean and working out hard. They trade pinups from magazines and decorate their bedrooms.

Ally’s room not only contains photos and posters of her beloved Stryker; she has an actual championship belt, a laminate hanging from an official AWG lanyard, and pictures of herself with almost every top wrestler in the business. Not uncommon among the disabled. Those kids get to meet all the stars, man. It’s just about the only perk they enjoy.

She and her friends just can’t get enough of the wrestling scene.

So, why are these Dear Ones so consumed with this “sport”? Tough to say. Perhaps it is a fantasy involving physical perfection and strength. And the good guys, those whose hearts are pure and true, always win in the end, no matter what the odds (well, that was true in the olden days, anyway).

You could say pro wrestling gives them hope.

Waste of time? Um, not as much as you might think.

But, what’s Ally going to do without Stryker?