Oh Hell Yeah, I Wrestled Living The Gimmick

Oh hell yeah, I wrestled living the gimmick. I thought I would take a change of pace and challenge myself to read something I wouldn’t otherwise have read, so I picked from a list of books at decided on Living The Gimmick by Bobby Mathews. Oh hell yeah, I did.  Many might be surprised by this but hey, I like to read A LOT and as many know everything gets a fair go with me. This is a fucked up wrestling novel about a fucked up wrestling industry ran by fucked up people in wrestling.  As a soap opera fan (All My Children fangirl) that was fine by me. Sometimes you need a little bit of that Erica Kane kayfabe wrestling drama in your life on Friday to get you to Monday. I also used to watch wrestling when I was a kid, well back in the 80s before WWE was a thing so I my curiosity was peaked quite a bit. I jumped in blind – I knew from talk it was about wrestling but I didn’t bother reading the synopsis being lazy as hell.

Living The Gimmick is the very careful Jessica Fletcher mystery pantomiming Columbo living the detective gimmick.  Some of that is good and some of that is a what the fuck moment in a can. It’s good on the merits that Murder She Wrote type Colombo stories can be entertaining (at least until those hellish last seasons) but bad in the sense the overall novel is too careful explaining itself.  A bit more on that in a minute.  I want to talk abut this cover first.  I’m real hard on butt fucking ugly ass covers, and I’m pleased to report this cover ain’t ugly. The cover does it justice, and in a great fucking way.  The cover is slick.  I breathe a sigh of relief seeing it wasn’t butt fucking ugly and mislead the direction of the novel like a lot of these new books tend to do trying to be all Penguin Random Schuster. I dig the vintage vibe reminiscent of old wrestling promos from back in the day. It’s simplistic, gets the point across, it’s interesting, and leaves a lot to the imagination on what’s inside the pages.  Five fucking stars for that Bobby.

Now I know I said earlier that this is about wrestling and it is, but let me clarify this for the folks that ain’t familiar with wrestling. This book is about the old school wrestling motif. That might be a complete turn off to a lot of folks that didn’t grow up in the age of WCW, GLOW, and WWF, when the wrestlers themselves lived under the code of kayfabe (which is the wrestling version of Omerta the Italian Mafia lives by) and the general public had no fucking idea that the matches were scripted fake entertainment. The 70s and 80s kids should love the setting, if for no other reason having a flashback to the golden era of wrestling before it became a corporatized slut selling its ass to the highest bidder.  Bobby has researched and captured the vibe of that era masterfully in the novel, to which he should be commended.

Okay, now let’s get on with what you’ve come here to read, the review.

At the opening we start off running with two washed up, has been, all but forgotten former wrestlers named Ray and Alex strolling down a drug and alcohol riddled memory lane at Alex’s bar. In their prime at the top of the wrestling exploitation heap they got into all kinds of shit and blew all kinds of money.  Behind the scenes Alex was a cuck boy for Ray, the Randy Savage larger than life asshole superstar that kept loyal yes men around him like Alex to save his ass from all the bitches, blow, and booze all of them did too much of and caused problems where there didn’t need to be any. In the present Alex is an old ass man two steps from diapers, just trying to make a good living out of trouble with his bar and far the fuck away from the wrestling world that he misses but is years behind him because of age and the partying he indulged in during his heyday catching up to him. Ray is a drugged out, alcohol laced entertainer living shit paycheck to shit paycheck in a business that has used him up and thrown him to the wolves. Then BOOM…Ray walks out the bar to his death. An unknown assailant blows his brains and his eye out all over Alex. That, I have to admit, is one hell of a way to end a first chapter of a novel.

Cue the Jessica Fletcher mystery pantomiming Columbo living the gimmick thing starting from there.

Now Alex is in shock, he’s mad, he’s confused, and he’s just out in the world with his memories of his great friendship with Ray, and hell bent for leather on a witch hunt to find who took out his friend and left pieces of him in his hair. All of the even numbered chapters are flashbacks that give us “clues” to the backstory of Alex and Ray’s relationship, the backstory of their wrestling careers and the industry that made them, and the beefs real and imagined that brought everyone’s lives from the old days crashing into each other over Ray’s death while Alex does his worst Cagney and Lacy impression ruling out suspects from the wrestling world that has forgotten him. Most of these stories are insightful, littered around the nostalgia of the real classic age of wrestling, but they can become to explanatory like a history lesson spoon feeding the audience into this intricate wrestling lore that is a bore. I’d prefer a prelude or an epilogue that ran down all of that instead of Alex having to incorporate it in his flashbacks.

Now as Alex stumbles and bumbles like a bad Magnum P.I. hunting for the killer he starts getting irrefutable evidence that his old buddy Ray was an incredible piece of shit and that during their friendship he was his unknowing enabler. Of course he’s dick hurt over this but for his own sanity to prove his career and subsequent sacrifice of life wasn’t in vain he keeps at it until he finds the killer. Now I’m not going to say who the killer was, read the fucking book if you want to know that, but I will say I did not expect it and was a bit disappointed in who it was because there were so many other great characters it could have been the one it wound up being didn’t leave me satisfied. After everything comes out in the wash and all loose ends are tied the fuck up Ray is just empty and trying to accept his age and his life behind him and in front of him.

Bobby was on to something with this Living The Gimmick thing. It was quite the ambitious project, as every throwback story irrefutably is. I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to because it was just too fucking careful for my taste. I wanted the dirt, the grime, the meat and potatoes that really rings it home that this world ain’t no joke and that it eats its own.  The flashbacks should have been more explicit, more direct to really convince me Ray was a piece of shit (not that it was hard not to think that of the guy with his behavior, but I really wanted the “Wild Child” experience). As grimy as 90% of the characters are in the book I wanted less of an PG rated afterschool special cautionary tale of the do’s and don’ts in wrestling and more of a NC-17 riddled murder, mayhem, assault story it’s supposed to be. The wrestling world since its inception has been a dark, grimy, nasty, dirty place littered with addictions and a lot of murdered people, either by their own hand or others. Give us readers that type of reality leaking on every page. These people are fucked up and fucked up shit keeps happening either voluntary or involuntary to them, and I want to voyueristically enjoy their fucked up lives falling apart as they are sucked into sins.  Fuck the trigger warning crowd, fuck the easily offended – if you’re going to throw us into the sleazy world of old school wrestling I want the sleaze.

If you’re a wrestling fan it’s worth the read for the nostalgia. Just don’t expect the grease and sleaze that would make HBO blush.