In 1998, when a professional wrestler named Jim Janos, a.k.a. Jesse (The Body) Ventura, was elected governor of Minnesota with 37 percent of the vote in a three-way race, I put away other diversions and sat down and wrote Me: The Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente Story, which came out three months after his election, which is rather sudden in the world of publishing. The book suffered from the sheer improbability of a wrestler who wore pink boas in the ring being elected governor of a righteous Midwestern state, but then so did Mr. Ventura, and he quietly left office after one term and went on cable TV and disappeared.
My tour of duty in Nam as a U.S. Navy Walrus ended on New Year’s Day 1970. I was tempted to stay, but by then the war was lost, so I didn’t bother to re-up.
One night when we pulled patrol duty along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a Walrus named Walt Unruh told me all about his home along the Iditarod Trail in Alaska and how you could take off in your float plane from Anchorage and in twenty minutes land on a sky-blue wilderness lake with no living soul within thirty miles and toss your lure in the water and catch a king salmon.
“The north is man’s country,” he said. “Up there, you can urinate your name in the snow nine months out of the year. Nobody cares if you bathe or not or whether you eat with your fingers or lean to one side in your chair and let her rip. And cold weather, you know, is a proven aphrodisiac. Northern men can go all night where southern guys peter out in fifteen minutes.”
Sitting in a tree in Vietnam, I thought Alaska sounded wonderful. After two years of jungle life, frozen tundras seemed like a piece of cake.
I flew Da Nang to Los Angeles first-class courtesy of the CO whose butt I’d saved from court-martial when I told the higher-ups that he was leading the unit in battle on a particular day he had chosen to spend at the beach at Qui Nhon with a honey named Dixie Dexter.
With about five grand in back pay and an airline pass to anywhere in the U.S., I landed in Fairbanks on January 5. Thirty-seven below zero and the airport wind sock stuck straight out, pointing east. Snowbanks as big as New Hampshire. I rented a back room in a mobile home on the edge of town, an old trailer surrounded by junked cars and oil barrels, with a satellite dish out back and a BEWARE OF OWNER sign in front. He was a guy named White Blaze who resided in the front room and earned his living with a deck of cards. He had been a thoracic surgeon in Memphis and got addicted to muscle relaxants, which did him no good in surgery but helped his poker playing enormously. After he had perfected his game (losing a wife and two houses in the process), he emigrated north, to where money flowed freely, where the sun rose at eleven and set at one and there was little else to do with money except risk it in manly games of chance.
Everybody I met in Fairbanks was someone who’d screwed up big-time in the Lower Forty-eight. Gratuitous screwups. They’d fooled around with a sister-in-law or got hooked on cough medicines, maybe embezzled from the March of Dimes or swiped the Hopi tapestry from the Unitarian church (and then tried to sell it to the Methodists) or attempted to shoplift a garden tractor or phoned in bomb threats to group homes for paraplegics. Having thus hit bottom and become social pariahs, they hitchhiked to Fairbanks to remake their lives as short-order cooks and reside in a trailer in a climate where, for half the year, you don’t need a freezer.
My five grand leaked away in about a month, half of it spent on a used Rambler that wouldn’t ramble, and I was forced to hike into town and find work. I went to the courthouse and took a civil service exam and got a job in the post office, sorting parcel post.
But Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente is not happy in a confined space performing tasks assigned to him by small-minded people. The art of clerical sorting does not engage my mind: the cogs simply do not mesh. I stuck to my post until lunch hour and then looked around at the cubicle, the helpful lists and charts taped to the wall, the pigeonholes, the tape and scissors and ruler and paper clips, and I said goodbye to it as a bear would say goodbye to a leg trap and went out to lunch and stayed there.
In Mom’s Café I ordered a hamburger, very rare, with a raw onion, mustard, a glass of gin, and a raw egg yolk in a china cup. Next to me sat a hatchet-faced guy whose narrow head supported a toupee that looked like a raccoon crushed under a semi, all eighteen wheels. He had glazed it with gel and it glittered like cat turds in the moonlight. He wore a livid green plaid sportcoat made of petrochemicals and a yellowish shirt and blue-blob tie and brown slacks with a lived-in look. He was the unhealthiest-looking human being I had ever laid eyes on, very sallow and liverish, all splotches and rheum and exploded capillaries, a stub of a cigarette smoldering on his lower lip, a fresh one on its way. He lit it and cast his bulbous eyes on me and said, “The name’s Felix. I.W.W. International World Wrestling. You look like a warrior to me. Glad to meetcha.” Then he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a roll of cash big enough to choke a caribou and peeled off fifteen hundreds and handed them over. “That’s for fifteen minutes of your time.”
So I sat and listened.
“It’s a new pro wrestling circuit, the I.W.W. We’ve got a terrific show here. Eight guys. You fight the same guy every day, you get to know each other’s moves, it’s like ballet. Good money. Winter is great. No sun for three months, and the towns are full of construction guys and oil workers, their pockets full of dough, going stir crazy, desperate for entertainment, and these are not theatergoers here. The night shift gets off at seven in the morning and by seven forty-five they’re pretty well oiled and that’s when we put on our first show. We’ll pack a hangar, a warehouse, with a thousand men, all of them betting like mad—I’ll handle your side action for you—and when we’ve milked that cow, we go up the road to the next venue and do it again at four and come back to the first place for the midnight show. You go out and perform and I handle all the monkey business. How does four hundred a day sound?”
It sounded good to me. It sounded fantastic. I packed my stuff and Felix’s bus picked me up at noon. An old Eskimo guy named Iron Eyes was at the wheel and Felix was camped in the seat behind him, wrapping bundles of tens and twenties and plopping them in an open suitcase. It was almost full. Behind him, sprawled across the seats, leaning every which way, buried under quilts and bear skins, were eight men fast asleep, mouths agape, each one snoring in a different tempo and key, each one quietly emitting his own brand of gas. One man, with a dirty blond beard, wore a horned helmet and a black mask. The floor was littered with pistachio shells and empty beer cans and pizza crusts. The aroma was pretty stiff and a guy would think twice about lighting a match: between the alcohol and the methane, the bus had enough fuel to achieve low orbit.
Felix nodded toward the helmeted man. “That’s Svend. He’s the foreman. Soon as he wakes up, he’ll work you into the show.”
I flopped down in back and a crusty old dude in the seat opposite opened one bloodshot eye and said, “You wouldn’t be interested in purchasing a crossbow and a broadsword and a Satan cape, would you? Sell you the whole kit and caboodle and toss in my Mongolian goatskin boots free, all for five hundred bucks. What do you say?”
I said it sounded good but what would I use them for?
“I’ll toss in a wooden altar, six candles, a hex medallion, and a vial of powdered elk antler,” he said.
He reached over and shook my hand. “I’m the Duke of Dubuque and this sad sack next to me is the Dauphin Louie de Louie.” He nodded toward a figure wrapped in a horse blanket, dead to the world, snoring like a Piper Cub on takeoff. The Duke leaned toward me, confidentially. “We are only temporarily in the wrestling line while we get our real-estate licenses. Came to Alaska last spring with a theater troupe. Did Beckett and Shepard and all the newer playwrights. Taught acting, stage movement, public speaking, deconstruction if there was a call for it. But alas, Alaska is no fit home for the artistic temperament. The conceptual way of thinking is not welcome in the North, my boy. These are engineers, not savants. And so we were forced to join this gang of cretins and thugs and common ruffians.”
He lowered his voice. “I blush to say it, but the Dauphin and I wrestle in the altogether. Au naturel, in other words. It’s been a big hit and a boon to our social lives, but it’s time to move on.”
He leaned closer. “I sense that you possess a noble spirit, sir, and that I can confide in you.” He glanced at the Dauphin to make sure he was truly asleep. “I am the illegitimate son of Nelson D. Rockefeller,” he whispered. “A love child by an actress who shall remain nameless. Shoveled into an orphanage and deprived of my heritage so as not to compromise my father’s presidential hopes. A Rockefeller by birth, entitled to a country estate and a fourteen-room apartment on Sutton Place, but instead—this.” And he gestured limply toward the detritus in the bus aisle and dabbed at his eyes. “A life of squalor in the frozen north among rug-chewing goons.”
I said, “You seem a little old to be the son of Nelson Rockefeller.” The moment I said it, I could see I had struck a nerve.
The Duke looked away, stung, and said quietly, “I knew I shouldn’t have put my trust in you. You’re like all the others. Forgive me for imparting that information. And now excuse me. I must rest.”
I tried to apologize but he waved it off. “It’s nothing. A man’s story is his own and he should keep it to himself. Silly of me to forget. Have a good life, sir.” And then the bus turned at the Fairbanks International Airport sign and stopped in front of the terminal and the Duke shook his partner’s shoulder. “Daylight in the swamps, your highness. Up and at ’em,” he growled, and he hauled down a duffel bag from the overhead and shouldered it and marched off the bus, the Dauphin slinking behind. Felix gave them each a manila envelope and shook hands and into the terminal they went. Felix patted the seat next to him. I sat down.
“Big Boy, I have come to a decision. The show needs a fairy, and, son, you’re the one who can do it for us. Hear me out. Your name will be the Flower Child, and you’ll come out and mince around with daffodils twined about your brow and a peace sign painted on your scalp and you’ll blow kisses to the crowd and talk about the importance of preserving the environment and not doing anything to negatively impact the caribou herds.”
“Please. No. I am a Navy veteran,” I begged him. “People will shun me in the street, nobody will sit next to me in bars, even hookers will look at me with moral disfavor.”
“Exactly. And we’ll double the gate, kid. We need that extra attraction. We got all the heroes we can stand, what we need is somebody the crowd can hate. There’s nothing that brings joy to so many people like giving them the chance to despise you.”
“I’d rather kill myself with a dull knife.”
“Please. For the guys’ sake. For the sake of the pure art of wrestling.”
“What would my Walrus buddies think if they saw me? You can’t make me do it, Felix.”
He sighed. “This is a privilege, kid, what I’m offering you. Any idiot can be a hero. It takes ability to play a heel. Did you ever hear of acting? You think actors would rather play George Washington or Count Dracula? How about I pay you four hundred a match plus a percentage of the gate to maintain your interest?”
He was a persuasive guy, Felix. He appealed to my vanity. He made me feel like Lon Chaney, Jr. And that night I walked into the Tanana High School gymnasium with daffodils on my head and wearing beads and sandals and an R. Crumb T-shirt as Felix screamed, “At two hundred and thirty-eight pounds, in the tie-dye trunks, a man who wishes to dedicate this next match to his friends Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda—from Berkeley, California, the Flower Child!” and a thousand oil workers booed from the depths of their beer-soaked hearts.
I danced up the steps to the ring and posed for the crowd and grabbed the microphone and asked everyone to join me in singing “Give Peace a Chance” and someone yelled, “Give me a chance to get a piece of you, fruitcake!” and I ranted about love and brotherhood and about how the exploitation of our precious oil resources was interfering with the breeding patterns of the great snowy owl and that for the sake of our children we should place a moratorium on drilling until we learned how to lessen its impact on these owls and also on the extremely rare snow spider and the Arctic moth—I yik-yakked until everyone was standing and screeching and shaking their fists at me and frothing at the mouth, and my gosh, what a thrill it was to have that audience in the palm of my hand—to stand in the ring and throw a pose and feel the anger flow my way—and then Yukon Bob came trotting down the aisle to thunderous acclaim, a figure of manly rectitude preceded by his booming belly, and he grinned a purposeful grin and heaved his great carcass into the ring and bared his chest and flexed his breasts and did a couple knee bends and we dove into a clinch and circled and I proceeded to whale away on him for a while, getting him in an illegal nostril hold, rubbing his eyes along the top rope, giving him an instep stomp, a nipple pinch, playing my dirty tricks as the referee, Iron Eyes, looked on solemnly, until Bob was dizzy with pain and then came the heinous Hangman maneuver—hurling him into the ropes so his head caught between them and he flipped over and hung by his neck and I kicked him a few times in the groin—Oh my! The pain! The exquisite suffering!—and then came the Backbreaker and then somehow Bob struggled free of my grasp. He shook his noble head. His nostrils flared. His outrage was awakened. He popped me one on the jaw and I fell and convulsed for a while and the crowd was in ecstasy. He whaled away on me and I popped my blood cartridges and the audience ate from our hands, it was exactly what a thousand sex-starved pipe fitters sky-high on boilermakers wanted to see at twilight on a Wednesday in January, blood smeared on the canvas, and the Flower Child in a dazed stupor, poleaxed by Yukon Bob’s Flying Augur, and the victor modestly acknowledging the cheers and the vile environmentalist, bloody and dejected, hustled away by security guys warding off the drunks trying to kick me in the gonads, and then Bob and me had a beer, showered, climbed on the bus, and Felix said that the gate was twice what he’d estimated and Yukon and Mike and Dave and Felix continued their bridge game as we rolled on toward Koyukuk.
I had earned fifteen hundred bucks that first day, what with the percentage of the gate. I counted it six times. My gosh, it was like a license to steal. To ride around on a bus and sleep and three times a day go and work hard for fifteen minutes—who couldn’t handle that?
• • •
The I.W.W. routine was a snap compared to Vietnam. We wrestled three bouts a day, six days a week, and ate four meals a day. The chow was good if you like meat. On Monday, our day off, we chowed down on unabridged T-bone steaks washed down with a snootful of hooch strong enough to take the chrome off a Cadillac. We continued drinking at a nightclub where ugly women dance on your table and you stuff twenties in their garter belts and they remove their underwear. We stayed until midnight and awoke at 5 a.m. with headaches you could split kindling with and crawled out of bed and resumed the suffering.
We wrestled in hangars, warehouses, the holds of ships, we wrestled in mud or coated with oil, and sometimes we wrestled in a ring with a few thousand live mackerel flopping around, just for the added interest. The alpha wrestler was Svend the Yellow-Toothed, a Nordic warrior with shoulder-length snowy blond hair and a caribou-skin cape with the head and teeth intact, and there was Ahmad Jihad in Bedouin robes, and Oberkapitan Werner Wehnnadd with his black boots and jodhpurs and gleaming monocle, and Ivan the Terrible in his fur cap and red sickle-and-hammer cape. There were various heroes, Yukon Bob and Matanuska Mike and Dawson Dave. And there was me, the Flower Child.
Svend had the best rant of anybody. He’d grab the microphone away from Felix, the ring announcer, and yell that he had never, never in his career, ever set foot in the ring with such heinous trash as this—pointing at his opponent, whoever it was—and he cried out, “I put it to you, the fans: What shall I do with this bucket of pus, this pisspot, this maggot, this abomination?”
And the crowd roared, “KILL HIM!”
And then he asked the fans on the other side of the arena, and they felt that homicide was the only fair solution, too.
Svend climbed up onto the turnbuckle and screamed, “I will thrash him, lash him, paste him, waste him, batter and lambaste him, and force the contemptuous blackguard to crawl across the ring and lick the sweat off my socks!”
This suited the crowd just fine.
Sometimes his opponent was Ivan, the perfidious Russian, and sometimes it was Prince Harry Belial, and sometimes it was me.
“Behold this degenerate molester of women!” he screeched, pointing at me one night when I was taking a night off from the Flower Child and wrestling under the name Richard Speck. “Tonight, my friends, this putrid pervert gets the punishment he deserves!” And the crowd roared, like high surf hitting a cliff, and Svend hurled himself at me and we locked arms and he said, “Stomp and chin kick,” and I stomped on his foot, and he fell down, writhing, and I took a run at him and kicked him about two inches east of his chin, and he clutched at his face and toppled over and lay, legs twitching, and I dove on him for the pin and he said, “Fourteen, double T, seventy-eight, sixteen,” and I jumped up and climbed onto the turnbuckle and jumped, my feet landing a couple inches south of his testicles, and he flopped over and writhed around on his belly as if he’d been reamed with a hot poker, and I got him in a toe twist, and that caused him no end of agony—of course the audience by now was foaming and raging freely, standing on their chairs, trying to hurl beer at me—and then I smacked him in the small of his back, and he screamed and banged his forehead on the canvas and his legs twitched, and then I got him in the Stretcher hold, and he was in hellish agony, but not so much that he couldn’t tell me what came next—“Forty-four, nineteen, thirty-six, ten, and down double,” he said, and then he managed to wriggle out of the Stretcher, bonk me on the forehead, run and carom off the ropes and do a flying mule and knock me down, do a pile driver, get me in a half nelson, and pin me, and leap up, arms raised, for the adulation of the mob, as I slithered under the ropes and into the protective custody of the ushers and limped back to the dressing room.
And afterward Svend and I would have a beer and he gave me pointers on how to improve my performance, how to roar better and harangue the crowd and work on my rant, using a thesaurus to piece together new expressions, like “malodorous moron” and “nefarious nincompoop” and “perfidious pipsqueak.”
He explained how to receive his flying mule and flop throat-first against the top rope and hang there by my chin, tongue out, eyes crossed, to be hauled off and put in a toehold and pinned. He taught me to get the right kind of trunks, with strong elastic waistbands so they stretch tight over your butt and don’t bunch up in your crack. And a nut cup that can stand up to a steel-toed boot or a folding chair. He taught me breathology and escapology and how, if you need to pee real bad during a bout, you have your opponent lift you up and do the Helicopter and the pee doesn’t land in the ring.
I enjoyed being the Flower Child because I was good at it. I added a pink boa to the act and let my hair grow out long and dyed it blond and took to wearing long dangly earrings. The sight of earrings on a man in Alaska made a crowd go bananas. I loved being the bad boy.
One night as I slept, someone filled up my bed with butterscotch pudding. I said nothing. The next night someone took the lightbulb out of the socket in my bathroom and put Saran Wrap over the toilet so when I peed, it all ran down on my shoes. The next day there was a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice by my bed when I awoke. My suspicions should have been aroused, but I am a Minnesotan, a trusting soul. The juice was doctored, as it turned out, with a mysterious homeopathic powder that gave me the worst case of hemorrhoids in the Arctic, a set of butt grapes that made bowel movements not the pure pleasure they should have been. It got so I couldn’t sit down. I had a foam doughnut sewn into the seat of my trunks, which got me the nickname Balloon Butt. And one night someone spooned a soy supplement onto my corn flakes that resulted in a rock-hard stool. It was like passing an axe. I fainted in the can.
That was the night the Flower Child lost it. I truly went ballistic.
I was the last event, fighting Yukon Bob, and I hurt like blazes. I grabbed the mike and I bent over and pointed to the relevant spot and told the crowd to pucker up. I was out of my mind with pain. I told the crowd to stick their hands in their pants and see if they could find their manhood. I said I was proud to be an atheist and Communist and that I could beat anybody in the place with one hand. And then Bob came waltzing in and I tore him apart—he kept yelling in my ear, “Cut it out, man! Slow down! What’s got into you?” and I kept whopping him in the chops, and the crowd went berserk and stormed the ring, waving two-by-fours and ball-peen hammers. Iron Eyes tore off his referee shirt and dove for safety, and Yukon Bob followed him, and I was all alone, surrounded by six thousand berserk oil riggers who were feeling no pain whatsoever.
I climbed up on the turnbuckle and held my arms up for silence and said, “Whoever wants to die first, step forward. I’ll kill ten of you before you so much as scratch me, and probably by that time the cops will be here. And when I’m on trial for mass murder, I am going to plead diminished mental capacity on account of hemorrhoids, and believe me, in my case it’s the truth. I am no flower child. I am a mad dog veteran of the U.S. Navy Walruses, a walking time bomb, and I want to die and take you with me!”
And two guys stepped forward with pistols drawn and knives in their teeth. The crowd shrank back.
“Walrus,” they said. “Bark.”
I barked the Walrus code for “brother.”
They said, “You were kidding about the Communist stuff, right?” I barked in the affirmative.
They barked back, “Three Walruses together can rule any mob.”
And we moved toward the now-silent crowd and they melted away in front of us. We charged up the aisle and into the locker room and I pulled on my clothes while they guarded the bus against tire slashers and I ran to climb aboard and we three gave each other the Walrus neck lock and the secret woof and the snuffle of brotherhood. And then I walked to the back of the bus and addressed my colleagues.
“I have taken enough crap from you idiots,” I said in a low cold voice. “It is enough to endure the bus rides, the darkness and cold, the drunken mobs, the lice-ridden hotels, the vile foods and condiments. I will not tolerate your perfidious schemes and evil powders. Whoever is responsible, prepare to die. I know six ways to kill a man with my bare hands and I am working on a seventh. Stand up like a man and take your punishment or else be exposed as the coward that you are.”
Felix stood up and smiled. “You were beautiful tonight, babes. All you needed was a little motivation. We cleared almost a hundred grand. You earned fifty grand in side bets. It was worth the pain.”
I pointed at him. “Et tu, Felix?”
He nodded.
“I will get you for this,” I said but with less conviction. Fifty grand. I’d never earned that much in one night.