Good Afternoon. I have shared excerpts from my novel 'Death Match', starting with chapter one. A main protagonist was introduced preceding that chapter. It seems logical for a reader to know what our lead character is being trained to do and the challenge he will accept by facing a massive assassin intent on mauling, maiming, and murder.
Born and bred a killer, Oki Azara relished dealing death. His father and father’s father had been modern-day ninjas, assassins for hire, and he had learned the lethal trade at an early age. Ten years old when he first went along on a contract killing, he had witnessed his father’s expertise at murder seven times before he was twelve. Following an especially notorious killing in Japan, the elder Azara had taken Oki with him to Hawaii to wait for the furor in their homeland to wane. Late one night, a drunken American marine wandered into an alley off Prostitute Lane in the Japanese sector of Honolulu. Oki Azara beat the man to death on a whim and savored the power he felt holding life and death over another human being in his hands. He was thirteen years old at the time. Now, twenty years later, he had killed many times, and women and children who had gotten in the way had also known his fatal brutality. At four inches over six feet in height, he was uncommonly tall for a Japanese male. He weighed three hundred and thirty pounds and because he carried no fat on his heavily muscled body, his extraordinary bulk was unmatched anywhere in Japan. He could run at three-quarters speed for a mile, half-speed for ten, and walk for thirty-six hours with no rest. He was expert at karate, kung fu, judo, kick boxing, wrestling, brawling, garrote, sword, knife and firearm, and very few men in the world could stand up to him one-on-one. He worked as a Japanese professional wrestler, but had no interest in the vocation as a career. It was merely a cover—his true-life work was murder. Like his forebears, he was an assassin for hire and had honed his skills until he was a killing machine. Infamous for the death of Japan’s greatest professional wrestler in a match with him a decade earlier, Oki Azara now kept his lethal abilities well hidden when he was in the ring. Avoiding the limelight, he wrestled at odd intervals and spent most of his time serving as front man, enforcer and assassin for the top criminal boss in Japan.
Oki Azara is not my kind of guy. My name is Mick Michaels, and until a few days ago, I spent most of my time helping youngsters become better athletes. I also taught them to respect themselves and one another, to demonstrate fair play and good citizenship, and to do their best at all times. Under normal circumstances, my path would not cross that of a monster like Azara in three lifetimes, but these weren’t normal times. A vicious criminal conspiracy menacing our country made it essential for me to become a professional wrestler and placed me directly in the killer’s sights. A little more than twenty-four hours after I began my new career, in only my third professional match, I was facing my own assassin in a wrestling ring. The Yakuza mob boss sent Oki Azara to kill me!
"Stick that handshake in yer ear, you puke!" roared the raging giant,
brutally whacking my hand aside. Already too close for comfort as he loomed over me, he jutted his murderous face to within an inch of mine and sent a shiver down my spine when he growled, "Yer not in the Olympics now!"
From the feeling my hand took on, the place I would be sticking it might be into a plaster cast. At the moment, that was the least of my worries. Offering me this snub was a professional wrestler named Tarzan, owner of three hundred muscular pounds packed onto a six and a half foot frame. In addition to being humongous, he was also very convincing with his imitation of an out and out maniac, and I decided his insult was one I was going to ignore.
Massive of shoulder, chest and thigh, he foamed at the mouth as he glared at me with bloodshed in his eye. Not about to take my eyes off him, I studied the nasty scars strewn over the head and upper body of the brute. These marks of past violence looked directly connected to the boiling temper he made no effort to hide.
Shuffling from side to side, he moved around in front of me, as if he couldn't decide where to start with whatever mayhem he planned. I'd never laid eyes on this brute until thirty seconds ago and had no idea why he was so pushed out of shape, but saw he seemed convinced he could do anything he wanted to about it.
Here I was, Mick Michaels, at any moment needing to protect myself from, by Tarzan's look and manner, assault with a deadly wrestler, working undercover as a Secret Service agent on the lookout for funny money. I sure didn't see any on Tarzan and also detected nothing counterfeit in his appearance as a man about to go berserk.
Backing away a couple of steps, he pointed at me and took a wide sweeping look at the spectators. "I'm gonna rip this punk's head off" he thundered, looking insanely eager to commence ripping.
Tarzan showed no lack of confidence when he broadcast his game plan to everyone in the building. I scanned the densely packed fans sitting fifteen rows deep around the ring and saw no one challenge his claim; instead, I noticed a number of them nodding in agreement. It seemed they were as convinced as he was of his ability to mutilate my essential body parts.
Standing six feet tall and weighing two hundred twenty pounds ranks me among the larger members of our species. I was skilled at amateur wrestling and the martial arts and normally felt big and tough enough to handle physical face-offs with anyone. Tarzan looked a foot taller and twice my size. Even so, I knew I could defend myself except for one small detail. I couldn't use my fighting skills!
If l used amateur wrestling moves to take Tarzan off his feet and control-ride him until he calmed down, I would never get another match or, if I did, it wouldn't be any time soon. I had been told this by almost every one I'd come in contact within this business. The man who trained me had been first to warn me, followed by the promoter who hired me and finally, by every wrestler in my dressing room. If l just wanted to be what they called a shooter and use amateur wrestling moves to control professional opponents, any match I was in, compared to what pro fans were used to seeing, would be extremely boring.
Boring matches turn fans away in droves, gate receipts plummet, and wrestlers and promoter suffer in their bank accounts. I was being given a chance to develop into a professional wrestler. If I wasn't willing to forego my amateur training and learn the ropes as any other apprentice would, I could return to the amateur ranks.
I had been given this advice over and over, even while making it clear I understood the conditions, was putting my amateur background on the shelf and moving on. I was vexed to learn these new colleagues deemed my hard-earned status as Olympic Champion a negative and treated me with scorn because of it. I'd decided not to tell anyone I was also skilled in the martial arts, and knew, if I was going to succeed in my undercover work, I couldn't use those abilities either.
In amateur wrestling or martial arts matches, all I'd had to do was go out on the mat and use moves and techniques developed from many years of practice. I'd never worried about what onlookers were thinking; in many intense bouts, I had forgotten they were even there.
In this situation, it was the audience who would decide if what they saw was any good or not. With only four days of training in basic professional holds and moves under my belt, and no experience at showman ship, I had no idea how to have a professional wrestling match that would please or impress the fans. That was the main reason for my jitters although the possibility of being assaulted didn't help.
A savage hazing in the dressing room brought me to the ring in an uneasy frame of mind. When Tarzan made his scary arrival thirty seconds after mine, unease flared into outright alarm. Mainly worried about making a fool of myself during my first match, I hadn't anticipated the need to defend myself against a gigantic psycho.
Now, with me unable to use my fighting skills and the match about to start, lack of experience paired with no knowledge of what to expect were a nerve-rattling tag team busily putting a boot-stomping to my composure. Why hadn't I been warned about a nightmare like this in professional wrestling school?
Only twenty-four hours past my final class, Ire called no lessons mentioning violent mental cases as potential first foes. During four full days of intense training, my instructor, after lecturing me ad nauseam to forget my amateur skills, focused only on technique and constant drilling on the be ginning holds and moves of the pro-style. As killed and patient teacher, he took great pains to teach me how to fall without suffering serious injury when knocked off my feet.
From the Gorgeous George era, the old pro grooming me learned his trade during a twenty-five year career as a masked man named "Doctor X." Photos lining the walls of his wrestling school gym showed him matched against many of the stars of his time. Shots of him being drop-kicked by a youthful Argentina Rocca, arm-dragging WWF World Champion Buddy Rogers, and being slammed by NWA World Champion Lou Thesz, backed up his claim of having been, as he put it, one of "the boys."
His face still a vicious mask, the tone of his voice told me the outwardly raging Tarzan wasn't as mad as he looked. Feeling more at ease, I moved off the ropes into another lock up and, without a clue as to how, acquired a headlock on my opponent. When I tried to improve on this puzzling advantage, I made a surprising discovery.
Despite what it looked like to the fans, Tarzan was in total control of the situation. Though I clutched him around the head, with his blond crew cut sticking up through my clasped arms, his left hand gripped my left wrist, blocking the exertion of any real pressure to his head or neck, but also holding my left arm snugly in place around them. At the same time, his right arm was clamped tightly around my waist, allowing him to hold me in place or move me around the ring at will. Basically, it was he, not me, who had him in my headlock.
Butterflies chased away the sinking feeling I had in my stomach when the match began, making me a bit more confident. Despite predictions of doom from the wrestlers in my dressing room, I was still disaster-free, standing in the center of the ring with a headlock of sorts on Tarzan. Baffled as to how or why I appeared to control this powerful man, I began to see merit in the theory that ignorance is bliss.
That I was even here seemed unreal. Five whirlwind days ago, I stood in my martial arts studio, fifteen hundred miles away. With no intention of leaving the area any time soon. I had been refusing employment from the very man I now worked for.
"Thank you for your offer, Mr. Luttrell," I replied. "Florida would be a nice place to live, but I'm just not interested in becoming a professional wrestler."
This was the fourth telephone call I'd received from a professional wrestling promoter wanting to know if l was interested in turning pro. I don't know much about his business, have nothing against the sport, but have too much on my plate and worked too hard and long toward my own goals to drop everything in order to do something else.
My amateur wrestling school, Mick Michaels Academy, is flourishing. It was doing only so-so before the Barcelona Olympics; my return from Spain with a gold medal in my pocket triggered heavy enrollment that remained steady even now, eighteen months after the Game.
Due to my own interest in the martial arts, six months ago I offered classes in that discipline. I soon learned many of my wrestling students were, as I had been as a youngster, also keen on developing self-defense skills. Added enrollment of boys and girls attracted by martial arts training had happily forced me to expand the Academy.
I gave the promoter a cordial good-bye, hung up the telephone and looked at the spacious new studio around me. Mats covered the entire floor, with one mirrored wall and the other walls padded for sparring sessions. It was an ideal set-up to practice the disciplined movements of martial arts training.
I faced the mirrored wall and assumed a tae kwon do fighting stance. Looking back at me was a well-built young man with shaggy blond hair, blue eyes in a rugged face, with a small scar bisecting one eyebrow and a nose that looked like it had been broken once or twice. I'm six feet tall and still compete at my Olympic weight of two hundred and twenty pounds, top limit for light heavyweights in international amateur wrestling.
The Academy is not my only reason for wanting to remain in East Lansing. I grew up here, and most of my family members live in the area. Amateur wrestling has given me a chance to see what the rest of our country looks like, but I still find Michigan the most beautiful place in America.
In addition to family, I have many close friends here, one of them a sweet young lady who has become more than just a romantic interest. Her name is Janine and we have been dating one another since high school. Being away for two months of training camp, then five weeks of Olympic Games competition taught me I don't want any separation from her longer than a day or two.
I've hired advanced students as instructors to run the Academy several nights a week. On those evenings, I am learning the detecting business. I have a degree in Criminal Justice, but not time or desire to become a member of state or city police organizations. Instead, I am interning with a local detective agency. It is an interesting trade and a way to further my education. No, I'm not going into professional wrestling or anywhere else.
That was five days ago. Since that time, I have gone from part-time private detective to full-time undercover agent for the U.S. Secret Service. It wasn't cheating husbands I was after now, but expert counterfeiters passing American dollars on a massive scale and committing vicious murders in the process.
"When are you jokers gonna quit playin' around and start kickin' butt?" asked a nasal, high-pitched voice from ringside.
On the heels of this lament came a few complaints of "boring" from the audience. I ignored them all. Ticking off Tarzan might create my own boredom while looking back on how badly I fumbled the only real chance anyone had, before it was too late, to track down the criminals posing a dire threat to our American way of life.
"Hey! Tarzan! Will you quit screwing around, kick that rookie's butt and get it over with, so we can see a real match?" came from the same high-pitched voice, followed by laughing and hoots from other members of the audience.
Pro wrestling fans were another new experience—much more vocal and demanding than those from my amateur days. During my brief walk to the ring, I'd heard a dizzying variety of loudly proposed tactics to use against my foe during the match. Ranging from a slap in the face to different forms of bloodletting, most of the suggested actions were, if done on the street, crimes calling for a prison term.
Seeing Tarzan's savage green eyes look me up and down for the first time, I'd been forced to wonder how handy he was at applying the horrifying moves I'd been urged to use on him. Happily, my foe's threats of ultra-violence had so far been just that, all talk and no action, and I felt my blood pressure begin to ease a little.
Any sense of well being was abruptly lost when Tarzan spun us both ninety degrees to the right, violently shoving me forward at the same time. Though he moved with me, and stayed in the headlock, I was totally off balance and in danger of falling on my face. Sticking out a foot to act as a brake, I clung desperately to his head.
I felt myself begin to go down and wondered if Tarzan had planned things this way all along. He had both my arms clamped, leaving no way for me to break my fall. Was he going to be the one doing the breaking, perhaps a few of my bones, by the simple act of falling on them with his massive body, then happily head home for a few beers to celebrate his short night's work?
In the next instant, Tarzan pulled me upright and suffered an attack of some sort. Bellowing like a bull in the grip of a castration team, he let go of me, shot out both arms and waved them wildly in the air. Startled, I almost let go of the headlock to see what had happened to him. The referee quickly stepped in, winked at me and loudly made an amazing inquiry.
"Do you wanna give up?" he yelled urgently. "Give me the okay and I'll stop the match!"
With just the three of us in the ring, I figured Jerry had to be talking to my opponent, making me again want to step away from him to see what the problem was. Tarzan removed that option by re-clamping his thick right arm around my waist. At the same time, he waved his left arm up and down in some kind of semaphoric signal to Jerry, who crouched with an expectant look on his face, hand raised to signal for the bell, giving every indication he expected Tarzan to throw in the towel at any second.
Complaining of boredom only moments before, the fans energetically responded to whatever it was that had happened to my huge opponent. From all sides of the ring came cheers, whistles, applause, hoots, boos, and catcalls. I even heard a repeat of some earlier advice. "Tear off his stinking head and shit down his neck!" screeched a hate-filled voice.
Still crouched in front of me with arm raised, Jerry winked again and asked, "Whadda ya think, boy? Is that head buster you got on ol' Tarzan gonna make him give up?"
"Say what?" I asked.
"Why do ya think he was hollering like a stuck pig?" Jerry said with a sarcastic grin. "You got him so tight by the head, he's about to pass out!"
"Mind yer own business, Meyers," came from the area of my left armpit in a deep, familiar growl. "The puke's confused enough as it is."
While that assessment was a valid one, I saw the light about Tarzan's puzzling problem. What he had done was make it look to the fans like he tried to escape by shoving me away from him, but my headlock was so powerful he could not free himself. To the contrary, if he hadn't used his prodigious strength to hold me up, I would have taken a sprawling face-first flop onto the mat. This realization led to more confusion. Why did he want to make me look good to the fans?
"Will you please rip off his head and shit down his neck?" While appreciative of this indirect support, I soon learned that not all the fans rooted for the underdog good guy. "Come on, Tarz, tear out his gizzard and hand it to him!" came from one of Tarzan's fans.
An eerie thought arose from hearing such an extreme suggestion. While I was pretty sure this sort of thing was not allowed, or a normal strategy used by pro wrestlers, the reason it was being suggested to Tarzan might be because he had done it before.
I assumed even the savage Tarzan would not go to such lengths, put it out of my mind, and was proven right when my opponent ignored the gruesome advice. Fortunately for my frayed nervous condition, Tarzan's admirers were in the minority and lacked the volume to be much of a factor in the match.
Even though for a hidden purpose, my move into the pro style had been intriguing to look forward to, but it had proven in one major way to be a letdown once I started training. My amateur wrestling abilities were not only of little use in pro wrestling, I was told not to use them at all! Though called by the same name, the two sports were as different as oranges and orangutans.
Amateur wrestling is nonstop action and allows no damaging holds or moves risking injury to either wrestler. Showboating is heavily frowned on, and matches even at grade school level have several officials to ensure safety and accurate scoring. I was leaving the code of that rigidly run sport to insert myself into a profession where flamboyance was a mainstay, with few rules to govern what went on. Even so, I had the chance to do a service for my country and, at the same time, pay back a brother I owed everything I had achieved. I intended to do both, whatever it took.
"Tear his stinking head off and shit down his filthy neck!" was heard again. The unusual nature of the request, paired with the venom-laden voice making it, drew my attention to its source. I looked to my left and saw an obese woman, overflowing a pair of ringside seats, wearing what appeared to be a chartreuse tent. She accompanied her command with twisting motions of her hands, showing me the method she wanted used for the head removal. My inspection of her ended when Tarzan decided he wasn't going to give up from our headlock and cut short my decapitation lesson by steering me into the ropes facing the large woman's seats.
"Taking yer lunch break so soon, boy?" Jerry asked, sternly eyeing me as he patted me on the shoulder and went on, "Why don'tcha let go of the hold while yer at it?" Before I could tell Jerry he was talking to the wrong person about any hold alteration, Tarzan demonstrated my mute point when he simply let go, then shoved me roughly away from him.
"You better shut yer big hole!" he roared. Bellowed in a deep, growling voice, the warning blasted my eardrums and must have been heard everywhere in the building. I winced at the crude command, whirling around to find Tarzan had directed his threat to the corpulent woman seeking his head. She was quick with a reply. "Screw you, you jackoff!" she screamed, punctuating her order with two raised middle fingers.
Following fast on the heels of Tarzan's blast, her message said she wasn't shutting anything. The audience facing Tarzan appeared stunned by the big hole outburst, each member possibly thinking the massive wrestler had spoken to them personally. As a result, with the small armory fairly quiet, it seemed a certainty that people a block away heard Tarzan when he retorted, "I would jackoff for the rest of my life before I'd touch a fat cow like you!" boomed the irate wrestler.
Quivering with rage as he delivered this crushing message, Tarzan glared at the woman with fire in his eyes. I wondered if it was something personal between them, or if he was just really turned off by overweight women. The gross ringsider quickly brought me out of my reverie. Also easily heard, her reply signaled that she was anything but crushed. "With your equipment, you needledick," she brayed, "how could you even find it?" The spectators erupted, the men with guffaws and horselaughs, and the women with high-pitched shrieks and squeals. The front row of ringside seats was situated about eight feet from the ring, leaving Tarzan only a short distance to go as, face flushed scarlet, he stepped through the ropes to confront his slanderer. With a concerned look on his face, the referee moved in and blocked Tarzan's exit from the ring.
"Looky here, Tarzan," said Jerry, in a scolding voice. "If yer mother's gonna talk dirty like that, yer gonna have to quit bringing her to the matches." Turning his back to the fans on that side of the ring, Tarzan quickly covered his mouth to conceal the grin I saw there. I had no way to hide my reaction, and pent-up nervous tension, triggered by Jerry's outrageous remark, produced a bark of laughter that threatened to become uncontrollable. My opponent instantly squashed the threat. In a voice that sounded like he was gargling ball bearings, he said, "What the fuck you laughin' at, asshole?"
Tarzan glared at me with the same ferocious expression he'd worn when the match began, while Jerry showed his disapproval with raised eyebrows atop a look of stem rectitude. It was amazing how quickly un-amused I became under their dual scrutiny. Tarzan forgot about the emasculating woman at ringside. Backing to center ring, he raised two big fists while informing me my options were limited. "You can run, dickhead," he rumbled, "but you can't hide!"
I turned to Jerry for an explanation. "What the hell is his problem?" I asked, unable to keep the nervousness out of my voice. Jerry replied with the look and tone of a man reluctantly talking to the village idiot. "Well, it's pretty simple," he drawled. "If Tarzan goes out there and smacks that fat woman, she'll sue his ass off. You now," he continued, "he can stomp the shit out of you all night long, without it costing him a dime."
He smiled patiently after dropping this logical bombshell and, even with Tarzan waiting to use me as his whipping boy, the thought that I was going to like Jerry popped into my head. He had a twinkle of good humor in his faded blue eyes, with laugh lines in the right places on his craggy face. Though one of my dressing room morale mashers, he was light-years friendlier than his fellow put-down artists.
"Tear that jackoff's head off and shit down his filthy neck!" croaked the chunky cheerleader at ringside.
I saw the problem of how to deal with Tarzan wasn't going to go away, removing any choice other than to go out to center ring and face him. I didn't set any speed records getting there, but didn't have far to go and soon reached striking distance. Having thus far shown no sign of being a time-waster, my huge foe remained true to form by immediately cranking back his leg-sized right arm to launch a roundhouse punch.
It was instantly clear his fist, if allowed to travel a full one hundred and eighty degrees unobstructed, would crash violently into the intended target, represented unwillingly by my head. There actually was enough time to reflect on the physical aspects of the offensive move, with plenty left over to consider the proper defense.
In the end, swayed by Hollywood and a misguided notion of what the good guy in the match should do, I felt my only choice was to block the punch. Images of movie heroes doing the same thing flickered through my head as I waited until the very last instant to swiftly fling up my left arm. Just as quickly, I pulled it back down, with the bones involved possibly rearranged into three or four new sections from the meeting with Tarzan's thick forearm.
A strangled squawk, extremely non-heroic as movie script or any other kind of non-bird communication, burst from me as numbness spread from impact point to shoulder and fingertips. I knew Tarzan would now be infuriated and, with me partially disabled, that this would be an excellent time for him to launch an offensive. Needing some recovery time, I had to hope he was feeling some of the angst I felt. He was.
"Goddamn, son-of-a filthy, rotten, whore mongering, bitch!" whooped Tarzan. "No good, ignorant, shit for brains, mindless motherfucker!"
Luckily for me, Tarzan was of a defensive mind when in pain and I didn't come under attack. Even so, as he vacated any claim to being the strong and silent type, he loudly proved me correct about the infuriated part. With the width of the ring between us, we must have looked like movable bookends, both of us clutching one arm while doing that age-old dance, the hurting one-step.
"Tear off his ugly head now, while he's hurt!" shrieked the obese woman. Though Big Bertha got high marks for persistence, she needed to review her notes concerning originality.
Jerry walked over to me with an indignant look on his face. "Jayzus H. Keerist!" he said. "Did them amateur folks teach you that ignorant damn move?"
Indignation seemed the proper tone to use while going on with the conversation. "Maybe you think I should have blocked it with my head?" I hotly replied. Jerry speed-shifted into ridicule. "Hey dumbass!" he said, in an insulted tone. "Didn't you ever hear of ducking a punch? The man give you enough time to duck that one, you could have took anap first!" Rebuked by the crusty veteran, I turned to Tarzan, who had an eerie look to him. Over the worst of his pain, he no longer danced or rubbed his arm. He merely stood across the ring looking at me with a seething intensity that held all of his former hostility, but also a new element.
I hoped I was seeing caution at work. If Tarzan thought pain for me also meant pain for him, as in our most recent clash of arms; he might be easier to deal with. A classic example of this strategy is the guy with black eyes, broken nose and missing teeth, who won the fight by using his face to break the other guy's fist.
Jerry finished his examination of my wounded arm and diagnosed only minor damage. "There ain't a damn thing wrong with you!" he said. "I been hurt worse picking my nose, fer God's sake!" Having given medical clearance to go on, he promoted an attempt for improved skill levels by sadly shaking his grizzled head before saying, "This is about the most fucked-up abortion of a horseshit match I've seen in thirty-some years in the business!"
These tender mercies received, I returned to the firing line to find Tarzan gone. Removed to the far ring apron, he was trying to become better acquainted with one of the spectators. "Hey! You! Buzzard-neck!" he gargled, sneering at the object of his attention. "Is that yer wife yer hanging on to, or did they let you bring a baboon in with you?"
Tarzan was on the opposite side of the ring from Big Bertha, but she noticed his chatty mood and hurriedly waddled over to pick up where they'd left off. As she jiggled around the corner post nearest him, Tarzan spotted her imminent arrival. Recoiling, he hawked deeply and took aim before launching an impressive amount of semi-liquid material at the charging woman.
At first, his missile array looked as if it would fall short and miss her entirely. Having a moving target saved it. Big Bertha's speed and weight combined to produce too much forward momentum. Unable to put on the brakes, she trundled right onto ground zero and took a direct hit.
Jerry studied my opponent with an analyzing eye. "Look at ol' Tarzan over there," he said, sounding peeved. "You got him acting like a man with one thumb in his mouth and the other in his ass, waiting for somebody to yell 'switch!'"
All I had seen Tarzan act was mad, so I asked, "Jerry, what the hell are you talking about?"
Laying a gnarled finger alongside his nose, he issued judgment. "I think you got him scared," he said, seeming quite serious.
It was my turn to scoff. "Oh, yeah! Right! Why didn't I think of that?" I said. "I could see the guy had a yellow streak the first time I laid eyes on him!"
Jerry's face again grew somber. "Smart-ass don't sit well on hardly nobody, boy," he said with a frown. "If you're serious about getting in the business, you might want to remember that. Tarzan ain't all that worried about you trying to mess him up," he went on in a wry tone, "but yer green, nervous and clumsy, and them three put together can get a man hurt!"
If I understood Jerry right, Tarzan's hesitation to come to grips was not going to create awestruck terror of me in the profession. My talent didn't scare him; it was my lack of ability that had him worried. While he thought there was a good chance I was going to injure him, he felt it was going to be more by accident than by any design on my part.
I felt a little insulted, but also relieved. "Tell him I'll just wrestle him," I said, "and try not to hurt him, if he'll do the same." Jerry adopted the look of a man discovering a dozen squirming maggots in his half-eaten salad. "What a waste!" he said. "All them years in school just to become a college-educated idiot. I got a tree stump in my back yard smarter than you!"
Disgusted analysis given, Jerry used his hand as a handkerchief, loudly honking into it before wiping the spent ammunition on the bottom of his raised boot. An education about education was being forced on me. A college graduate, I stood here looking at a man who seemed to have gone no further in academia than eighth grade. As I was clearly student to his professor, I realized it was the classroom one was in that assigned rank. "Hey man, clue me in," I asked. "What did I say?"
Jerry was still concerned with my wasted tuition fees. "If brains was made out of dynamite," he said, sounding very sure of his thesis, "you wouldn't have enough to blow yer nose!" Softening, he apparently felt sympathy for a rookie's ignorance. "He ain't tried to hurt you yet, has he, boy?" he asked patiently, as if talking to a small child. "The business ain't about hurtin' people!"
What Jerry meant wasn't clear, but I had to agree with what he said. Though Tarzan looked and felt like he could, even if I used my fighting skills, put some hurt on me, the only pain I'd suffered in the match had been of my own doing.
"Well, we done screwed around long enough," Jerry sighed, going on in a snappy tone. "Let's get cracking!"
We turned toward Tarzan and found him still on the apron, deep into a strange dialogue with Big Bertha. She used a wide range of obscene terms to passionately describe his looks and family tree. He validated her earlier opinion about his sexual habits by moving a huge fist back and forth in front of his crotch, pantomiming an act, usually not performed in front of a live audience, that was said to grow hair on one's palms.
"Calm yerself down, lover boy. The honeymoon's over," Jerry said with a grin. "Say goodbye to your sweetie and get back to work." As he maneuvered Tarzan back into the ring, Jerry kept a cautious eye on the frothing Bertha. Almost raving, she looked mad enough to lunge under the bottom rope and bite the nearest ankle.
While it was the same violent-acting and vicious-looking Tarzan waiting to resume hostilities, I grew more excited than nervous as Jerry's advice sank in. Difficult as it was to trust someone as menacing as my opponent, I saw him in a new context. Along with his savage attitude, he showed rare speed and agility for such a big man. If I could block out his berserker image and focus on him solely as an athlete, I might be able to get through the match and learn something as well. Since it was vital that I do both, I decided to relax a little and see what happened.
Tarzan moved forward to apply simple arm bars and hammer locks. Allowing me to struggle out of them, he moved into holds harder to escape. By using his position as a hint toward reversing a hold and leaving only one avenue open to do so, the mountainous wrestler forced a lesson in counter-wrestling on me. He made it a tough contest, using up much of the stamina I had brought into the match, but he didn't make a liar out of Jerry by assaulting me.
He did stun me with two hammering forearm smashes across the chest. Both smacked into me with a loud thud, knocking the breath out of me and hurtling me backward into the ropes. More intimidating than painful, their effect soon wore off. While I was learning to trust Tarzan, I piled up minor injuries from another source, the wrestling ring.
About eighteen feet aside, with ropes at knee, hip, and chest level, it was soon revealed as a booby trap. When Tarzan escaped from another of my gained-without-a-clue holds by simply picking me up and slamming me, I got the two-for-one special. Not enough padding on top of, or give beneath, the hard ring boards, bruised me from shoulder to hip and I had patches of skin scraped off both elbows from contact with the rough canvas mat cover.
Tarzan paced the moves and countermoves to spark the fan's excitement. He drew cheers for me, after periods of suspenseful sparring, by the simple move of backing away. Shaking his head in frustration, he frowned at me, giving the impression I had stymied his plans. Since all I had done was wait for him to do something and then react to his move, it surprised me to have the fans respond to his non-moves as if I'd done something dazzling.
The audience reaction to my foe's thwarted purpose was strange. Only Tarzan knew what he was planning, any schemes he might be hatching could only be guessed at and speculated upon by the fans. It seemed they automatically assumed any design even thought about by Tarzan was a sinister, dastardly one, and his obvious regret at not being able to carry them out drew intense dislike for him. In effect, every time my foe stood around looking frustrated, the fans saluted me and reviled him.
"Rip off his arm and beat in his stinking head with it!" croaked a voice clogged with fury. Big Bertha fanatically savored the return to action, keeping up a steady demand for me to do something negative to Tarzan's head. Maybe she had figured out I wasn't going to try to remove even a molecule's worth and was hoping I would be more agreeable to merely pounding on it. She was out of luck there too.
"Let go before I bite yer nuts off!" growled Tarzan, sounding like he was gargling broken glass this time. The lesson seemed to be over. Moments before, clasped in Tarzan's powerful bear hug, I tried to loosen his grip by grabbing a handful of hair. Now, my mind and body shrank from the painful image drawn by his threat, and I reacted as if I'd just discovered his head was on fire.
Without bothering to release the bear hug and put me down, he shifted his hands and effortlessly pressed me over his head. Admiration for his strength tried to take the top spot in my thoughts, but was roughly shouldered aside by what it was going to feel like being slammed to the canvas from ten feet up.
It looked like I was going to have to wait to find out. Instead of slamming me, Tarzan lurched around the ring, easily holding me high over head. His huge left arm supported my upper body and I mustered all the offense I could come up with by snatching it in a death grip. As he continued to circle the ring, I wondered if he just couldn't make up his mind what to do with me.
He chose to seek direct audience participation in the decision and leaned against the ropes on one side of the ring. Addressing the awed fans with his usual volume, he asked their opinion of my performance to this point. "What do you think of this piece of shit now?" he bellowed, not sounding all that impressed with me. Under the intense scrutiny of the puzzled fans, many of them looking like they thought it was a trick question, I tried to put on the same impassive face I wore at the Olympics when I went out to wrestle the Russian. That guy was scary too, but I didn't want him to know I thought so.
"You like this Olympic jackoff?" angrily roared my foe. "You can have him!" Maybe Tarzan decided a panicky look on my face would better suit him, because that's what he got when he threatened to throw me headfirst into the audience. By all logical standards, the upcoming twenty-foot flight and crash landing should have been the only thing I had on my mind.
Uneasily lobbying for equal billing was the paranoid suspicion Tarzan might use me as a means to crush the unending torrent of abuse being hurled at him. Grossly sprawled across several seats, directly in my flight path, was the toxic Big Bertha! Like a ruptured sewer line, she spewed vile curses, obscene gestures and wave after wave of malice.
Given the choice of being dropped into her lap or taking a beating from Tarzan, I was leaning toward the beating. While she looked large and soft enough to absorb the impact of a small airplane, her raging antics gave me the impression that landing in her embrace would feel like being hurled into a threshing machine.
I noticed energetic movement and saw that many of the other spectators eligible to be squashed were turning down the chance to meet me face to face. As another sign of the regard held for my foe's power, fans as far back as the tenth row of seats frantically waved their arms and shook their heads in chicken-hearted haste to turn down his offer to fly me in for a visit.
"I dare ya to throw him over here!" yelled a distant voice. Followed by several other voices, their owners also well away from any possible crash site, this one urged Tarzan to make good his threat. They carried the same tone as those morbid observers urging suicidal leapers to "go ahead and jump."
Evidently preferring uncrushed safety to loyalty requiring a hospital stay, enough of the fans disowned me to reassure Tarzan that any post-match popularity polls were not already settled. Much to my relief, he contented himself with merely another lurch around the ring, possibly using me to condition himself for more strenuous future clashes. Lap two was just ending when Jerry made a suggestion. "Damn, Tarzan! Why don't you drop the boy?" he said peevishly. "Yer giving me a sore neck!"
With my sole choice as next move being forced obedience to the law of gravity, it was hard for me to sympathize with Jerry's growing cervical distress. However, not unlike root canal work, this first press slam would be better once ended, making me grateful when Tarzan agreed to the proposal.
Moving to center ring, he dropped the arm supporting my upper body, waited until I was head down and turning, then stepped out from underneath. Governed by the laws of physics, the plunge downward was painless. The flat on my back impact, ruled more by the law of the sudden stop, left me breathless.
While lying there doing fish out of water impressions, I wondered when Tarzan would grow tired of all this and end the match. The answer was given when he reached down, wrapped a big hand around my weakly flapping wrist, hauled me to my feet and, in the same motion, onto his shoulders.
As he began to rotate, moving counter-clockwise at a rapidly growing speed, I felt the lion's share of my bodily fluids trying to move into the inadequate space provided by far flung hands and feet. I tried to think of some way to counter or escape the move, but his Airplane Spin quickly rendered me too dizzy to come up with anything.
Tarzan unceremoniously dumped me off his shoulders, securing a position for me flat on the mat. Blearily watching the overhead lights spin, I lay there waiting for the finishing touches to this fantastic affair. I didn't care about losing; this was not to be a career for me. A performance good enough to earn me future matches had been all I hoped for when this match began, and I felt I had accomplished that goal.
When five seconds passed, with Tarzan nowhere to be seen, I took a dizzy peek around the ring. Locating him in the final stages of a staggering reel, I watched as he lost his balance and stumbled off toward a distant corner. Picking up speed at an incredible rate, he crashed headfirst into the turnbuckle, the collision moving the entire ring several inches.
It also arrested Tarzan's forward motion, bouncing him, staggering now in reverse, back toward my helpless position. Though earlier fears of being crushed resurfaced, my head was still spinning, making it hard to get a relocation message to my body. With rising alarm, I watched Tarzan fill the horizon with looming disaster. He shuffled to a halt, swaying unsteadily back and forth, from my angle looking much like an early toppled giant redwood. I was mustering up all the energy I had left to try and roll away from him, when he fell. He hurtled down, blocking out the light with his huge body, landing with a crashing impact that raised me two inches off the canvas and a cloud of dust even higher.
Lying scant inches away, appearing to be comatose, Tarzan had somehow reached my level of competition. The openings created by this new situation grew clearer when Jerry got down on one knee alongside me and made an observation. "Don't he look peaceful laying there?" he asked tenderly, going on to add, "Why don't you jump on top of him, while you got the chance?"
The way I was feeling, the ring could have burst into flames and not produced a jump from me guaranteed to clear a toothpick. Even so, all I had to do was roll over and flop an arm across Tarzan while Jerry counted him down. At the three count, the ring bell clanked, launching a wave of victorious pleasure across the small armory.
As the noise from the crowd became deafening, Jerry quickly man-handled me to my feet. Steadying me with one hand, he raised my arm in victory with the other and made another suggestion. "Ol' Tarzan there likely don't want to see your pretty face around here when he wakes up." Jerry turned me to face my exit route and went on, "Why don't you make like a cow patty and hit the trail?"
Feeling steady enough to follow his very sound advice, I wobbled toward the corner that pointed back to my dressing room.
"I'll give you a hundred bucks if you kick his head in!" hissed a familiar voice. A passing glance at Tarzan's pal, the obese Big Bertha, showed her nearing total lunacy. Trying to worm her way under the bottom rope to attack the fallen wrestler, she had a wad of bills clutched in one grimy hand. Her offer could have been raised ten times and remained of no interest.
Tarzan showed increased signs of life and I was provided with all the incentive I needed. Discretion took a starring role and moved me quickly out of the ring, valor making only a cameo appearance with a hastily contrived, mock-heroic expression replacing the addled look on my face as I cravenly escaped from my first victory.