“What about Ankylosaurus and Stegosaurus, The Dinosaur Brothers!?” Lou twisted up his face, hooked his fingers and struck his best ferocious pose to go along with the name.

I shook my head, something wasn’t right. “The group name works, but the individual names are all wrong. Ankylosaurus sounds too much like “sore ankle”. I don’t want some fat guy going for my ankle in the middle of a match.”

We’d been at this for the better part of two days now, trying to think up names for the audition tape we were going to send in to Memphis Wrestling.

“We need something that’s not literal, isn’t a direct reference to something, but just sort of feels, you know,” I paused trying to come up with the best word, and ended up with, “scary.”

Lou scrunched his face up and looked around the room, grasping for anything. He settled on the bookshelf and his eyes went wide.

“Alice. Through the Looking Glass.” He muttered to himself, then jumped up and clapped his hands. “That’s it!”

“What’s it?.”

“You’ll be Brillig, and I’ll be Slithy! The Jabberwockies!”

He struck his pose again.

And this time it worked.

We had ourselves a name.

Memphis Note
Memphis Wrestling was a fixture on every local boy’s television set from the late 50s on through 90s. It was just like the wild stadium wrestling we see on cable now, save without the budget or consideration for racial demographics. But, fans were loyal to a rabid fault, which let Andy Kaufman pull off his great staged rivalry with local wrestling hero Jerry “The King” Lawler.

When you’re young, you think you’re immortal. And when something comes along, slaps you across the face and shows that you’re wrong, it affects you, deeply.

That’s what happened to me when I was sixteen. A friend killed himself trying to drive away from a house show after filling his arm full of heroin. I thought that my friends were smarter than that, better than that, so I blamed the drugs, then I blamed the people, the scene and everything but my friend’s own failings.

I embraced the straight-edgers, disavowed booze, yelled at anyone smoking, and violently confronted anyone I thought was high. There, on the fringe of society, the farthest point from my grief, I found a new home.

Out there on the edge, though, things distort. Eventually you forget why you’re there. Then one morning you wake up the thing you hate, putrescence filling your veins.

I got lucky, had friends that helped walk the long road back to being clean.

But, I can’t help but think all those black X’s I drew on my hands might as well have been drawn on my eyes. All those years I spent angry should’ve been spent trying to help.

Memphis Note
This one goes out to all of the kids I knew sleeping on bare mattresses in flop houses that always managed to talk their way into shows, never had enough money for rent, but always enough to stay high. Most of you didn’t get out without scars, some of you didn’t get out at all. This is for you, most of all.

You’ve never know asphalt until you’ve run over it on a raw summer’s day in naught but bare feet. The jagged edges of rock and glass tearing into your feet; the searing heat cauterizing the wounds closed.

The pain gives knowledge, and the knowledge understanding.

“‘Til you are as hard as what you touch you are not done!”

This is the refrain of our clan. The refrain of the modern, urban ninja.

No longer bound to an ancient culture, we are freed to spread a hidden power, for hire to those who can pay.

As a boy, newly brought into the fold, I was amazed by the brazen openness of our secret.

So obscene, so obscure must the fact of our existence be to those that drop money into those pro-offered buckets that they simply dismiss us as acrobatic children with a braggart’s swagger.

Now, as I watch the next generation acrobatically twist through the air on Beale, tourist dollars filling their buckets, I know that with but a word I could command those children to kill everyone within eyeshot and the Mississippi would be tinted red for days.

But thus is the power of the Beale Street King.

Memphis Note
Every day down on Beale Street, there’s a squad of the most acrobatic kids you’ve ever seen. They spend their days flipping and twisting through the air, over cobble stone and asphalt, carting around a bucket between acrobatics for whatever tips you can spare. Check them out, drop a dollar in their bucket…or else….