“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.

It had been two months since they’d moved his mother into the assisted living home, and this was the first chance they’d gotten to work on clearing out her house.

He was having a hard time sorting through his mother’s things, so she suggested that they try something a little easier, less emotional, like the attic.

They worked opposite sides of the cramped space, her husband digging through a wall of boxes while she sorted a mound of seasonal decorations.

“Oh, wow.” She heard him say, shoulder deep into a cardboard box. “I didn’t know she kept any of this stuff.”

He popped out of the box holding a broad leather belt with over-sized, spray-painted medals stitched onto it.

“A wrestling belt?” She arched an eyebrow at him.

“Yeah, mom made it for me. I used to watch wrestling every Saturday. I was obsessed. I mean, it was stupid, but it was great. I’d jump around the house for hours afterwords.” A slight smile of remembrance danced across his face. “She broke me of that pretty quick, though.”

“Really? How’d she do that?”

“Threatened to make me take ballet lessons.”

She laughed. “I knew I liked your mother.”

Memphis Note
Most major cities had some kind of local wrestling, but few, if any, held a candle to what was going on in Memphis. Memphis wrestling first helped to break down segregation, then it helped to push the city back to the national stage after the death of Elvis. It wasn’t so much that there were more wrestling fans in Memphis, it was just that our fans were better than those anywhere else.

Roscoe stomped back into the dressing tent, growling and holding a blood-stained towel against his forehead.

“Freakin’ amateurs don’t know how to fake a hit.” He roared, booting a bucket across the tent.

“And here all this time, I thought you were paid to take a few knocks.” Chided the carnival dwarf, rolling up an onion paper cigarette.

“Like to see you go a round in the ring…” The wrestler grumbled.

“Shit, kid, you’re two hundred pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal. People look at you and they’ve got expectations.” The dwarf twisted up his smoke, pulled out a match, struck it off the wrestler’s boot and began puffing away contentedly. “They look at me and they’re surprised that I can dress myself.

“You mean that?”

“Yeah, the think cause my arms are all stubby I’ll come out whinin’ like a brat for some one to pull up my drawers.”

“No, about the steel and sex appeal.”

“Why not? Just look at you. Nature smiled down on you as much as she took a dump on me.” The cigarette finished, the dwarf stopped it out into the dirt floor. “Play to your strengths. You got enough of ‘em.”

Memphis Note
Sputnik Monroe got his start in wrestling by playing the villain in matches put on by traveling carnivals. He wasn’t called Sputnik back then, though. He was Roscoe Brumbaugh first, then Rocky Monore. But, no matter his name, he was still twisted steel and sex appeal, with a heavenly body women loved and men feared. Or, at least that’s how he described himself.

It is Monday night outside the Ellis Auditorium, and the lines of folks waiting to get in wrap around the building. There are two lines, one for the whites and another for us coloreds. When the doors kick open, the whites go streaming in. Our line moves a bit, then stops.

I’m near the front, with my big brother and dad. The man at the door is saying our section is full.

From inside, a giant with a puffy, mean face and a shock of white hair down the middle of his head appears. He gives us a nod, pulls out a money clip and slips the doorman a few crisp bills. The doorman starts waving us in.

As we pass him, I can’t help but ask, “Why’d you do that?”

He grimaces down at me.

“Shit, son. I get thrown in that ring nearly every night of the week. And every mornin’ I wake up with bruises darker than you are. Skin don’t mean nothin’. Payin’ folks is payin’ folks.

“Now get in there. Don’t want to miss Bell Time. Me and Billy Wicks are gonna put on one hell of a show.”

And they sure as hell did.

Memphis Note:
The man with the white hair in this story is Sputnik Monroe, a Memphis wrestler from the 60s. He single-handedly desegregated wrestling audiences in Memphis. At first he would bribe the doorman to let more blacks in than their section could hold, then once the management caught on to that, he refused to go on unless black patrons could sit anywhere they pleased. He was such a big draw, the management had no choice but to agree.