Well, you must be asking yourself, what does all this mean for me? Where does all this leave me? Well frankly, and I say it right out because I don’t like to see you break your heart, it means that there’s no place for you in the strong man game! Face it now, Boswell, I tell you like a father.
However, I have been thinking that there’s one area left that I haven’t mentioned and that’s wrestling. A lot of the boys go into that and make good money and a famous name and it’s not a bad life. I know what you’re going to say, that wrestling is fixed. Well it is and it isn’t. What I mean is that there are clean wrestlers and even those that are fake have to demonstrate a mastery of the different holds and etc. And don’t think it doesn’t hurt when you get slammed around like that! Of course you know how to fall but plenty of bones are still broken. So don’t kid yourself about that! After all, they’re really wrestling. Only the winner is fixed. And what does an artist care about that, right? It’s the form of the thing. The same as in weightlifting or anything else.
Now I don’t know whether this sounds like good advice to you or not. Maybe like most young men you would prefer to beat your head against the wall than learn from an older person’s experience, but I think you’re more sensible than that and so I took the liberty after you left me of writing to an old friend of mine who actually used to manage me at one time, maybe you heard of him — Mr. Frank Alconi — about you who now handles wrestlers and promotes matches in Jersey City. He wrote back saying that he is always looking for big strong boys like yourself for the ring world and that if you are interested he will forward train fare, coach of course. His address is Frank Alconi, 9 Water Street, Jersey City in New Jersey.
Do as you please, but I think this is the best thing. Whatever happens good luck to you. I sign as I used to in the old days when it meant something.
Yours in Force,
Felix Sandusky
P.S. Where are the poses you promised? I want to see that neck.
I wrote Frank Alconi for the money, and he sent it, and I went to Jersey City and became a wrestler.
I became a wrestler, I suppose, because, resolutions or no resolutions, it is an integral part of my character to take advice from the great. A reflex action. Go with the experts, I always say. There’s no father-figure crap about it. My father is dead.
I never sent Sandusky a picture. He had to be made to understand that it was my neck and I did not intend to do any better by it than I did by myself. There would be no silk shirts around it; I would not flatter it with ties. I wrote Sandusky once thanking him for his interest because that is good sportsmanship. Otherwise, when I was in St. Louis I sent him passes to the matches and that was the end of it. If he was so in love with my neck he might want to be around when it was strangled.
Frank Alconi put me to work at once. I was already strong, of course, and Alconi said I was a natural and anybody Felix had faith in by Jesus he had faith in too. But for a long time I didn’t know what I was doing. I went wearily up and down the East Coast between Jersey City and Raleigh, North Carolina, precariously ambulatory, describing my sensations to myself in a kind of hospital shorthand — restive, critical, grave. Indeed, my memories of those first weeks are chiefly memories of liniment. My body was like some great northern forest, one part of which was always on fire. The other wrestlers kept telling me what a good sport I was and visited me at the rubbing table afterwards. Beating me up made them feel young again. They seemed to like to feel my muscles. I can remember more than once, lying on the rubbing table near unconsciousness and death in the unheated basement of a civic auditorium, looking up into the loveless smiles of ancient apes, having them stare down at me lost in wonder, and then, tracing their prehensile fingers over the bumps and hollows of my flesh, pointing with inverted pride at their own tough and lumpy bodies, which looked, from the angle at which I saw them, like great hairy mounds of red meat. Then these fellows would shrug, pull on their pin-striped businessmen’s suits, snap their Wall Street Journals smartly under their armpits, and go off with a wave to lose themselves among the traveling salesmen in the hotel lobby. In those days druggists went blind mixing special liniments to keep me alive.
When I got back to Jersey City I told Alconi I would have to have more training.
He grinned. “Tough. Felix said you was tough.” I rubbed my neck sentimentally. “Rough, huh? Trip’s been rough?” “A cob, Mr. Alconi.”
“Sure. It’s the gym does it. All the time developing yourself against instruments, against metal, when what you need’s contact with human beings. Where’s the fight in a bar bell?”
“That must be it.”
“Sure,” Alconi said. “You need the old smash.” He ground his fist against his palm. “The old kaboom. The old grrr-rr-agh.” He pulled some air down out of the sky, cradled it in the crook of his right elbow, and strangled it. “The old splat cratch.” He kneed an invisible back. “The old fffapp!” He grabbed handfuls of invisible hair and gouged invisible holes in invisible eye sockets.
“With all due respect, Mr. Alconi, that’s not what I need,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been getting. What I need is to learn to protect myself against that.”
“Sure,” he said. “I understand, kid. Only I’m not your trainer, you realize. As your manager I get thirty- four per cent of your purses. As your trainer I’d be entitled to another”—he considered my bruises—“fifteen per cent.”
“Sure,” I said.
“That would still leave you with fifty-one per cent of yourself. You’d be in command.”
“Chairman of the Board, as it were,” I said.
“Yeah,” Alconi laughed. “That’s right, Chairman of the Board.”
I slept on it. The next day I went up to Alconi again. “Who’d pay expenses?” I asked. I had been paying my own.
Alconi frowned. “What the hell,” he said, “we’ll take the railroad expenses off the top, the gross. We’ll split.”
“Okay,” I said.
We signed a new contract and I went back to my hotel and renewed auld lang syne with a pharmacist I had been keeping.
In the morning Alconi called me over to his office in the gym. “Boswell,” he said, “Jimmy, you lucked out. I got a class of ladies starting Monday and I’m registering you.”
“Ladies!”
“Girls. Female wrestlers.”
“You want me to train with girls,” I said.
“Jimmy,” he said, winking evilly, “it’s better than bar bells.”
“Sure.”
“The coming thing,” he said expansively. “Lady wrestlers. The wave of the future, Jimmy. I can foresee the time when they’ll be girl tag teams, girl midgets, interracial girl wrestling, mixed matches with men.”
“Interracial mixed matches with men,” I said.
“Let’s go slow, Jimmy,” he said.
At first I was shy. After all, it’s an odd feeling to see the world strapped across the thick, broad shoulders of some nubile young lady, an extraordinary concept to be struggling for air nuzzled against the breast of some matronly female giant. But I got used to it, and soon began even to enjoy myself. This was frequently and embarrassingly apparent even to the young ladies. Ultimately, for everyone’s protection, Alconi’s male instructor had to put me on a private crash program. It wasn’t the same.