Why Can’t We Have More Stories Like It?

Drunken review of who knows what the hell.

I like supporting other writers.

When it’s all just writing to you — some of it good, some ok, and occasionally a flash of gold in the pan — you can drop your silly hustle for a second and just bask in the glory of something truly liberating and beautiful.

I want to say “check out this guy”, but I won’t. I’ll spare him the unwanted attention.

It’s not really about him, to be honest, and he might not even like what I have to say. It’s about this beautifully flawed rare gleam of a story, about wrestling of all foolishness.

After reading it I found myself thinking exactly what you’re thinking right now. Well, what makes it so great? What even is great? And ay, there’s the rub. Only gold is gold.

As with all inimitables (viz. Hemingway), there can be any number of imitators but few with the alchemy to succeed. If any. And who’d want to outsomeone anyone anyway? Who’d want to read that more than once?

So then, accepting that perfectly simulating someone’s output is either impossible or pointless, should I even try to work out this latest Medium writer to stop me cold in my tracks? Answers at the end.

Let me begin by describing him. Maybe then the task of describing his work wouldn’t seem so difficult, pointless and intrusive. Just call it a review tinged with a bit of fanboyeurism. There’s your point.

[Here my notes get a little garbled, the author possibly being drunk.]

Something something such is his enigma (or completely out-of-fucks lack of it) that he’s at once manly [WTF] and brimming with heart [better]. “A reluctant liberal” might be a good angle. Or wholly above it, maybe. You imagine a true woman raised him good and true on some essential strip of land, or that he had a bunch of sisters, perhaps. A healthy family life anyways.

I don’t care that it is unevenly (and in places poorly) written, it is that singular. You feel like maybe you’ve encountered the actual real deal somehow. An intelligent or empathetic lumberjack with ahdeers an oapinions and the mahnd to make it ’bout neither. But it really does labour under poor organisation and an intransigent or unwitting refusal (a very American enigma) to let go of at least some of the actors of this farce, wrestling, and so he gets all tangled up in complex exegesis as a result and yet, somehow, still gets to the heart of it. [Yup, drunk AF]

Genius? Don’t be ridiculous. Just a seriously hypnotic lover of wrestling with a cracking knack for telling about it. Without telling. Not inventive, just belly-deep mid-stream in that crystal Americana that flowed and flowered in the mid-twentieth century confluence of new and reimagined industries (idk, bull-rearing, journalism, music, advertising). But a solid, untamed talent that could lead, or might once have led, to something great.

It just killed me.

It’s the wrestling story Lester Bangs might have written but didn’t, knowing he couldn’t. To have done it he’d have had to imagine it, and to imagine it, been it. Well, fuck. Maybe Lester found another story that needed telling instead.

It’s also about homophobia — likewise not really the point of this article, but very much of that story.

Let’s enter dangerous territory: Should the writer have got so wound up about LGBTQIA+ wrestlers being depicted as villains in WWE ‘matches’ under the leadership of Vince McMahon?

And the answer is, of course he should have moaned about it. He did it in the best way possible — completely incidentally, in all guileless sincerity and without any suggestion that this is his identity or alliance. A man after any writer’s heart.

We now know, or otherwise should be told right away, that childhood runs deep and we are still deeply troubled and scarred survivors, only barely, of our socialisation. There are no adults in the foxhole of ritualised shaming and belittling that passes for adulting in a literal roomful of figurative English public school bullies. Of course he should have fucking said something.

I also like his tone. How I like his tone!

Sober language, perfectly weighted. Neither hysterical nor afraid to call a thing out. Not a “very” or a “vile” in sight. Cadences cut in stone. All perfectly within reach of any native speaker or foreigner with an ear to hear the tongue so decreed.

No matter that the subject matter, wrestling ‘entertainment’, is actually fucking boring to anyone over the age of, say, a late-blooming nine-year-old. I get that sport runs deep in the blood of certain hyper-histrionic types, but goddamn.

I don’t care that he talks so intelligently about the grace and athleticism of plumper bodies, or so fairly about the polished public speaking of both villain and hero role-players in the embarrassing homophobic display he describes, or with such integrity about the shameful heat from the public directed at the caricatured, co-opted gay wrestler, and the equally unfairly opposite lionisation of the macho hero, who jeered right along at the inevitable loser. None of that tells us what we’re dealing with here.

What I’d like to think is that he loved wrestling and hated seeing it destroyed by Vince McMahon, who I assume is a prat without the need of further evidence. And that’s as much as he knew. I don’t think he thought about writing, or how to write, or considered, even for a moment, that it was good, what he was doing. He almost certainly didn’t equate love with writing, but having read him I want to make that connection. I see love for his sport, and I see knowledge. And that is all it needs to be.

I will end here with the naked disappointment of your not being able to see for yourself, unless you really want to know (in which case, dm me).

[I left that last parenthesis in to add embarrassment to my naked shame at having lost my notes. I simply cannot, for the life of me, remember the author’s name or find the story again.]

So what have we learned? If you’re going to write, love.

Know something.

Give a lot.

Take nothing.

Be right. Try, anyway. Hard enough to be sure. But never too sure.

That’s all I’ve got.

[Except this: any wrestling fans who know about the story I’m talking about? Please and thank you.]