That's Me on Top Helpless!

My birthday is never a good day anyway. It usually comes on me like a bad lab report (Gemini creeps into the western sky, charts under his arms, delivers the news, "Pssst...you've still got it...the drugs are no use...life is the big dose") and last June I turned 31 in L.A. and proved I could get lower than that. I couldn't have done it in any other city nor without the help of another frayed mind, and I would have let go of my anxiety over it long ago except that there is a professional-quality photographic record of the whole dirty business.

That's Rowland's contribution, a friend of mine, a photographer, wizard of visual delights, a man who walks around with entirely too much ginseng in his system and who crashed into my birthday funk like this: "I'm calling from the pay phone at the Academy of Nude Wrestling on Santa Monica Boulevard so I have only three minutes to tell you that I have uncovered prehistoric thrills here my brother and you will love it. They got a woman...leopardskin tights...big scary woman...eyes that are looking for food...hardly talks at all...snorts kind of--"

"It's my birthday, Rowl, leave me alone," I told him.

"...And for twenty dollars they'll turn her naked body loose on you for half an hour and I can shoot it with the motor Nikon and we can bury the negs where they'll find them after the quake because I'm telling you this thing is goddamn anthropological."

"You and I don't eat the same roots, Rowl."

"Gimme that bullshit...call yourself an athlete of experience...I need, you now. The sheriff's vice cops have been here once this morning and the reptile queen is talking about going home.... It's too sleazy to last...it's too beautiful."

"No. I'm thirty-one, I want to be a grownup," I said and he laughed the way whores do when you offer them small money and I told him I'd show up.

On the way there, north up U. S. 405, I used all the tricks I know to get out of my worried head and into my easily pleased body. It worked and pretty soon my dumpy little car felt like a flower in the rapids and everything that wasn't funny (eight acres of bumper to bumper, Chevies around Long Beach) was beautiful (the Goodyear blimp moored around Hawthorne).

I had the car as full of AM rock 'n' roll as I could get it and somewhere around Redondo a voice started playing in my head, telling me a dirty joke I once knew. So at 70 miles an hour, louder than Killing Me Softly. .., a Texan bursts into an Alaskan bar yelling that he's pissed and ashamed to be from the second-largest state in the Union and that he will take any initiation the natives say to become a genuine sourdough. The locals snicker, they laugh. They tell him that he has to drink a quart of whiskey, wrestle a Kodiak bear and fuck a woman, in sequence, in one night. The Texan chugalugs the booze and careens out into the arctic dark. Couple of hours later he staggers back in, clothes ripped to shreds, his back scratched and torn, one ear partly hanging off, he's limping, but the fire is still in his eyes and he plants both feet, sways, and then shouts, "All right you bastards where's this woman you want me to wrestle?"

I listened to that three or four times and by the time I floated down the off ramp onto La Cienega, I loved it as I had when I was a child. I loved everything: I had the rhythm of the city, the rhythm of the times and I hit every green light for three miles, past massage parlors (wonderful), sweaty little bookstores, a billboard shampoo ad: "Get 'Head" (nothing is too bizarre), sweaty little moviehouses (fantastic), seven-and-eight-year-old hitchhikers (far out), and I had the windows down and the radio up and an ad for Deep Throat came on, then Lou Reed started singing about boys' becoming girls ("Take a walk on the wild side") and when I couldn't get enough, I started singing myself.... "All right, Los Angeles.... Hey hey, L.A.... I got your number.... I'm thirty-one, Los Angeles...now where's this goddamn woman you want me to wrestle?"

I met Rowlie on the sidewalk in front of the academy. He had on a couple of cameras and a bag full of lenses and he was excited because he said he'd found a film designed especially for sleazy light. He called it whorehouse Verichrome. The sign on the window behind him said:Wrestle a live nude model.

"I already shot it," he said. "I love it: horny enough to get them in off the street, specific enough to discourage the necrophiliacs."

"It'll be the late Seventies before you can wrestle a dead nude model," I told him. "Even in L.A."

"What kinda shape you in?" he asked me.

"I feel like I've unplugged my basic goodness and left the motor functions intact," I said. "I think I'm ready."

We walked out of the sunlight into a room too dark for anything but the growing of fungus or the selling of flesh: heavy drapes, red, a couple of cheap space-age swivel chairs, a half-dozen full ashtrays and a couple of half-empty Cokes floating with cigarette butts that had no place else to go. There was an empty desk with a little ring-for-service bell on it and there were back-room noises: pounding, small cries, some laughing.

Rowlie hit the bell and before it stopped ringing, a head poked around the doorjamb: dark hair, greasy as the Fifties, "Be right there, you guys," a face that had seen the top end of its career emceeing dance contests, "We're busier than shit today," a manner that had run a we-supply-the-camera-you-shoot-split-beaver photo studio before this, "Be right back," a smile that could have wilted ivy.

He was gone, then back, putting on a Hawaiian shirt, saying hi again. His name was Jess and one of the heavy loves of his life was named Suzy. He had both names tattooed on the big muscle of his right arm. "You guys are gonna have to wait, I'm sorry, there are two writers, a photographer and a vice cop back there right now and I don't got any girls left." Then he smiled again.

"Oh, Rowland," I said. "Press day at the snake pit. You give a hard test," but he didn't hear me, because he was asking where the lizard woman was and Jess told us she'd gone home. Just tired, he said, she was very popular, but he promised that he had two bronze beasts for us and although I didn't know what he meant right then, a minute later a big, hard-looking black woman in a bra and panties walked out of the back trailing three men behind her: two writers and a photographer. I was looking at their faces for signs of just how slimy it was going to get, but they just kept smiling and walking, fraternal smiles...hi...hi...see you at the big fires...ha...and then they were gone.

I asked and Jess explained to us about the vice cops. "Can't touch us," he said. "They been back three times now and it's really pissing them off. See, the law says that if the girl takes her own things off, you can bust her. But if the customer does it, or if they accidentally fall off, you're cool. The fuzz keep sending these undercover guys in here to wrestle, it's funny, man, they think they're undercover, but I been on this street long enough to know 'em all."

A derelict wandered in the door, stood blinking his eyes against the dark for a minute and then said, "Well...what about it?"

The black woman--who had introduced herself to us as Gloria--gave him a speech she'd memorized. "Well, sir," she said, "the girls here are all taking a course in feminine wrestling. Thass a gentle kind of rasslin' where nobody gets hurt and nobody wins. You the customer are considered her sparring partner and it costs twenty dollars per half hour...."

When she got to the part about the money, he stood wavering for a second, then said, "That's too rich for my blood," and then stumbled out the door. He looked like a man who knew exactly what his blood was worth and I wish now I'd followed him out into the sunshine.

A guy in a sports coat, low brows, fireplug shoulders came out of the back adjusting his tie, not looking at anybody, and he walked through and out. Jess mouthed the word vice but didn't say it and pointed at the guy as he went through. Then Tina came out: almost as big as Gloria, also in bra and panties, with a sour look on her face.

"How'd it go?" Jess asked.

"Sheeeeeeeeyit," she said, "he was strong. I couldn't throw him for nothin'. And right up at the end, I said, 'Yo time's up,' and he say, 'No it ain't,' and then blam, he throw me over, then blam again...he's mean."

Just after the cop got out the door, a young guy in a Ban-Lon sport shirt had come in and now he was asking for Cynthia, whom he'd wrestled before, he said, and who was his favorite.

"Oh," said Gloria. "All...she's working in the other room now." The kid just stood there looking at her, the way Rowlie and I were looking at her. Jess was looking at her, too, angry.

"How do I get there?" the kid asked.

"You can't," Gloria told him. "It's a--"

"There ain't no other room," said Jess. "Cynthia's gone." He made it sound as if candles were being lit for her somewhere and the kid left. Then I asked Jess about the other room and whatever he mumbled was hard to hear, but the spirit of it was, "I'm just the piano player."

Then he gave me a release to sign that said if I was killed or paralyzed that was that, and then he led us all to booth number one, the deluxe chamber, it turned out. There were a couple of double mattresses jammed against each other and covered with burlap, and four highway markers, stolen, spray-painted, strung with droopy clothesline, trying to look like ringposts. And there were things about our stall that were trying to make it look like a classroom: There were three right-handed desks at the end of the room opposite the mat and all over the walls there were big-time, university-style anatomy charts. One of the duotone posters showed the main veins and arteries, another outlined the muscular system, another the skeletal system and my favorite, the biggest, named the differences between the male and female structures: silhouettes of him and her, skull larger in male (it said near the top), male shoulders broader and less sloped. Female thorax narrower, male torso shorter, female pelvis wider, male arm longer, oblique slant in femur more pronounced in female, male legs longer. I was studying the chart, looking for a cheap way to win, maybe, when Jess told me to strip to my Jockey shorts. Gloria had already taken off her bra and was smiling "Are you ready?" and Rowlie was in a yoga squat in the corner looking like a lotus with several cameras hidden in it, peeping at Gloria's large heavy breasts and the rest of her muscular body.

"I don't have any Jockey shorts," I told Jess.

"Boxers are OK."

"Well, I don't have any boxers either. I don't wear shorts."

He looked at me as if I were a pervert. "I got a pair of cutoffs in my car," I told him.

"Better get 'em," he said and I did.

When I got back, there was someone new in the room. "Willie," Jess told me. He was a black man in a dashiki, probably six and a half feet tall, probably 250 pounds, a sumo stomach and a half-crooked "Whass happenin', baby?" smile.

I shook his hand and told him, "Not much, just getting ready to wrestle that lady over there," and I pointed to Gloria.

"Thass cool," he said, "thass cool. Thass my lady." Then he grabbed her from halfway across the room and pulled her to the stool he was sitting on, and while I put on my trunks and Rowlie pretended to check his lenses, Willie played with Gloria's nipples as if they were dice. She squealed and protested and slapped at his hand, but he really wanted to do it and so he did. Jess was getting a kick out of it, but I could tell it was spooking Rowl and I was having horrible flashes that maybe Willie was going to want to (concluded on page 235)That's Me on top(continued from page 162) go around the room and play with everybody's nipples.

Gloria broke free and headed for the mat. "Come on," she said. "Less go."

"Do like I taught ya, now," said Willie.

Gloria got down on all fours (a standard collegiate-wrestling start position) and told me to get next to her, one arm around her waist, one hand holding her left wrist. My arm touched her breast as I was taking hold and a voice in my head told me, "That's Willie's, don't ever touch it," and then another voice said, "No, it's not Willie's, it's Gloria's, and you're a reporter on assignment, wrestling a woman, it's your birthday, relax." Then the first voice said again, "No, you're wrong. It's Willie's."

Jess yelled go and all the feminine wrestling bullshit went out the window with Gloria's first move: She tried to trap my arm with a quick and nearly professional roll-over that wanted to pin and injure me in the first few seconds. Willie yelled and Rowlie fired off a salvo, but I let go, which left me still in the start position with Gloria on her back, under me, smiling up like the lamb she'd never been, making her eyes go soft and her voice go gentle. "That don't count," she said, "you let go."

"I'm sorry," I told her and as soon as I said it, I knew why spies and smugglers use women in the tight spots, one on one in cheap hotel rooms and at border crossings. Gloria: 150-odd pounds of sin who'd studied charts and tricks, who wasn't going to leave that room till she pinned me, who was getting 20 bucks a half hour to maul L.A.'s horniest vice cops and kinkiest street trade, working her way up to the "other room"...Gloria. And I knew that every man she climbed onto that mat with was finally brutal Willie to her and that given a nail file and a little darker room, she'd just as soon cut out my eyes and eat them as do any feminine wrestling and still in that moment, with her on the bottom and me on the top, I felt like a heel.

I should have forfeited right there, because that was the subtle moment of her victory, but Jess yelled go again (the subtle moments were getting by Jess) and Gloria was on me like burden on a donkey.

I was cool for a while, small defensive moves, but Gloria was strong and big and she started killing me. I got a little desperate and threw a headlock out the woman, rolled her over my hip, and her goddamn wig, which looked and felt real to me, came off and she hit a highway marker and the wall. The building shook. Rowlie started to boo. I turned to ask him to please give me some slack and was only to "give me" when Gloria jumped on my head.

I was on my knees, bent double, face smashed into the mat and she had the beginnings of a hammer lock on my right arm. Willie was saying little street things like "Get his fingers...kneel on his calf...choke him..."and then there was an arm around my throat. I didn't want to be choked, so I raised up and flopped the two of us over. I landed with all my weight on Gloria's stomach and thorax and torso and on Willie's breasts. It knocked the air out of her, but Willie yelled, "Don't let go," and she didn't. I was slippery with the archetypal sweat of a man losing and I was trying to use that to slip free and I think I might have made it if she hadn't thrown a neat and painful scissors around my legs. Rowlie was laughing and clicking, Willie was slapping his knee and Gloria worked the right-side hammer lock into a hall nelson, and when I reached over and back with my left arm to undo it, she turned it into a full nelson and then it was all over except for the official birthday portrait that Rowlie was now standing for.

"Turn his head a little this way," he asked Gloria and she did it.

I couldn't see Jess, but his laughter was over the line into manic stuff. Willie was clapping and Rowlie's camera sounded like Kerouac's typewriter. I made one frantic try to get loose, but it didn't work, and then I just lay there belly up, pinned, trying to believe that the universe was unfolding the way it should whether I knew it or not, and then finally feeling like just another journalist in the downhill paint of the 20th Century who knows that the heavy stuff is going on in the other room while he's pinned by forces sleazier than he has drugs or meditations for, wondering if this is it, if he could possibly have been born to star in an old dirty joke, at 31, on Santa Monica Boulevard, in Los Angeles.

That was the bottom moment. After that, nothing much bothered me (Willie ordering mural-sized prints, Jess giggling...Tina saying she wished I was the fuzz...), it was all easy.

When we were on the street again, Rowland told me to think of it as the kind of experience that keeps a great man humble. I told him that if I'd wanted to be humbled, I would have wrestled a Buick or something, then I asked him to burn the film. He said no, and the only reason I mention any of this is that I don't want those particular photographs to fall into the hands of either my friends or my enemies without a true and complete explanation hooked right to them.