1.
I am disdainful of fewer things since my wife and I
separated. Professional wrestling, self-help books.
While we were married, and for most of my adult life
before then, I was either indifferent to or (more
often) scornful of many of the manifestations of
popular culture.
Like
most people I dismissed professional wrestling
because I realized it was fake. It became unworthy of
further attention. A couple of my uncles have been
fans at one time or another. The redneck one used to
quickly gloss over any comment on the fakeness of
it—"Why do they have to stamp one foot in
order to kick with the other?"—and then
discourse on the athleticism of the wrestlers. This
was indisputable of course: the spectacle of a
300-pound muscle-bound man doing back flips would
instantly silence the most persistent of doubters.
The question of the fakeness, however, would never be
addressed.
Another
uncle, with whom I still keep in touch, had an
attitude toward professional wrestling which was
closer to what mine became. He liked the bickering
that goes on, the ploys by managers and tag-team
members to get referees to turn their backs, the
theater of the whole thing.
2.
I was also quite the supercilious snob regarding
self-help books. A couple of months after separating,
however, I bought two about the break-up of
relationships.
One
was a true self-help book in all the negative
connotations of the term. The title was catchy and
contrived, flippant and superficially creative: Loveshock.
And the subtitle, to specify that this wasn't a book
about the misfortune of static electricity during
sexual intercourse: How
to Recover from a Broken Heart and Love Again.
The co-authors are pictured on the jacket. Dr.
Stephen Gullo has an open-faced but shallowly sincere
look about him. Connie Church looks as though she's
survived many of these shocks. Her jaw is angular and
distinct, perhaps from months of loss of appetite,
whereas Dr. Gullo's face is tending toward
chubbiness, no doubt the unfortunate result of a
cushy counseling practice.
The
other book is more a popular psychological treatise
than a self-help book. The author is Diane Vaughan
and the title is Uncoupling:
How Relationships Come Apart. I found some of the
passages in this book positively poetic, though I
suspect now that my agitated mind was probably
reacting more to familiarity of content rather than
to poetry of expression.
I
read Loveshock
during the blackest of nights. Supper was pasta and
potato chips and Diet Coke. The TV was on, engaging
my mind in something easy and undemanding. I read,
skimmed and skipped. Hated the book really, but
needed something to break me out.
I
read Uncoupling
in the relative ease of my new apartment. I had lost
weight (like Connie) and I pampered the body with hot
bubble-gum-scented bubble baths. The pores opened,
the bubbles popped, and I read about loss and the
possibility of reconciliation.
3.
It had happened both suddenly and in the most gradual
manner possible. One Friday night she suggested that
we should separate, and the next morning she took the
dog and a few necessities and drove to meet her
father for breakfast. I waved good-bye to her in the
most ridiculous of circumstances: on the verandah as
she got into the car, the dog excited about the
early-morning activity, me wearing only a pair of
silly green-and-white striped shorts that hung on me
like dumpy underwear. She drove off. It had been a
long night during which I had slept fitfully. I
closed the door and went back to bed.
4.
Most people's disillusionment with professional
wrestling, as with marriage, is a simple result of
expecting it to be something it isn't. They think
that wrestling is a sport and so are disappointed
when it does not display the hallmarks of other
sports: skill, genuine competition, victory based on
merit. The truth is, of course, that wrestling is not
a sport at all but rather an elaborate soap opera.
The wrestlers can no more be accused of bad
sportsmanship than a doctor on General
Hospital can be taken to task for lack of
surgical knowledge.
The
thing about wrestling which appealed to me was the
exaggerated simplicity of the whole thing: there were
no bad guys whose skill you had to concede, there
were no good guys with character flaws. These facts
were very attractive to a mind which was still
reeling in confused emotion: rejected, erratic,
lonely, and always contriving the most irrational and
unlikely means of reconciliation.
5.
The Loveshock
writers made me angry sometimes. I remember that
their advice to the heartbroken for avoiding futile
attempts at reconciliation was to pin notes on the
phone such as: STOP! DON'T CALL! It struck me as the
ultimate in bathos, relegating the coping with
extreme emotional trauma to the level of the
techniques used by dieters to discourage them from
opening the fridge door: DO YOU NEED THOSE CALORIES?
or A MOMENT ON THE LIPS, A LIFETIME ON THE HIPS.
6.
I went through her dresser drawer a few days after
she left. My heart was literally wrenched at each
item I picked up. The drawer was her: cluttered,
simple, sentimental. I was (and remain) a paragon of
minimalist order. A friend of mine whom I have known
since kindergarten—the stereotypical messy
male—often discusses the relative merits of
neatness with me, and proudly informs everyone that I
am in a class by myself.
In
her unburdened departure my wife had left the
contents of her top dresser drawer behind. I read a
note I had jotted to her months before thanking her
for some small kindness. She had saved it, whereas I
used to read letters from my poor mother and then
tear them up and flush them down the toilet.
7.
Ravishing Rick Rude became my favorite wrestler. His
schtick was comfortingly predictable, the same
scenario repeated with only the bit players changed.
His performance involved spectators and commentators,
the actual wrestling being merely incidental. He
would make an excessively grand entrance wearing a
floor-length cape which temporarily covered a
magnificently sculpted body. The body would be
revealed and Rude would mock the unmuscular wimps in
the audience, who he imagined were shrinking at the
sight of a "real man". A commentator would
point out how vain Rude was.
The
major appeal was to the women though. "Lovely
ladies" Rude called them. He would always win
his fight (no Tysonesque upsets in this sport) and he
would always invite a young woman to the ring
afterwards to participate in the Rude Awakening: a
kiss which would make her swoon and fall to the
floor. Rude, buttocks and biceps flexing, would then
dance over her. A commentator would point out how
disgusting this was.
8.
It happened gradually, too, the result of some
inexorable force of which I was simultaneously keenly
aware and completely ignorant. In the last few months
I was making an unconscious effort to be
self-sufficient and self-contained. I spurned the
trivial and the fundamental. Reduced my sexual
pleasure to solitary late-night explorations on the
couch when I was supposed to be reading. Became
irritable at advice on a badly tucked-in shirt tail.
I
had gained about fifty pounds, and imagined myself
even more unattractive and unapproachable than I
actually was, a kind of huge round object which it is
technically impossible to scale. I made half-hearted
attempts at diets and exercise regimens, but always
ended up wallowing in the lean-to sunroom off the
back yard. Furious at something, fuming.
9.
I watched Rick Rude add to his routine one night, a
variation on the immutable. A woman was called to the
ring for the kiss but was refused by Rude because he
didn't consider her attractive enough. The word
"dog" may have been used, I can't remember.
Can't remember either what the commentators said,
whether they considered Rude to have reached a new
level of disgust and tastelessness and general
insensitivity.
I
pitied the woman, of course, but could not help
admiring the skill with which Rude was delineating
his caricature. Vain rude hunk. He was complete and
whole and could be summed up in three words. I,
however, was a recently revived zombie, still
wandering about dazed with my arms outstretched in
front of me like a character from a bad horror movie.
I
imagine now that a wrestling match between Rude and
me would have been quite interesting. Ravishing Rick
Rude vs The Zombie. Rude as brash as ever with that
beautiful physique and those Lycra tights with the
woman's face at the crotch. Me tubby and depressive,
vulnerable, wearing a loose-fitting shirt and pants
with pleats that strained with the load.
10.
I subjected Uncoupling
to a textual scrutiny that only the most organically
composed of fictional works could endure. I read
about the possibility of reconciliation at the
various stages of separation. Or I analyzed the tone
or even the adverbs on each of the pages mentioned at
"Reconciliation" in the index, trying in
vain to discover if this separation was just a
temporary silliness. I discovered few answers, and
eventually stopped looking altogether.
11.
I wrote down what I knew about professional wrestling
and had it published in a newspaper. A curious thing
happened some time after: I could no longer bear to
watch it on TV. The predictability of the whole thing
now provided more boredom than solace. The redneck
audience, cheering as if it made a difference,
provoked no smile. Even Rick Rude failed to excite.
I
consciously adopted an affectation among friends.
When they asked me why I didn't watch it anymore, I
replied: "I know too much about it".
12.
I met my ex-wife by chance one Saturday at a mall. I
was charging upstairs and she was at the top. I
looked up, noticing that a dark blue coat had
replaced her former affection for pastels. She
blushed.
"Sorry,
I didn't mean to startle you," she said.
"Oh,
hi, how are you?" I said automatically.
We
mounted the next flight of stairs together, she
chattering nervously about the mundane, me
tight-lipped and barely civil.
I
reached the top of the stairs without volunteering a
word. She swallowed a farewell, pursed her lips and
turned left after I turned right, heart pounding,
gait even more exaggerated, eyes fixed straight
ahead.
13.
I shelved the books, filed away my article, and
started to understand professional football.