Finishing Moves

In his story from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 43, “Fixation,” Evan McGarvey boards a long flight with a group of professional wrestlers.

By Evan McGarveyDecember 23, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Fiction

This story is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 43: Fixation. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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WEEKS BEFORE THE PLANE, when I accidentally walked into Old Mann Winter’s personal locker room and saw how bad the burns were on his hands, I thought I was going to be fired. He never took the gloves off, not in the ring, not around the other wrestlers. Never. He’s dead now, so I feel okay sharing this: the burns were awful, his fingers were stiff and mottled red, and his hands, my god, the flesh looked like wads of wet paper running from his knuckles up to his elbow. I didn’t blink, didn’t pull a face, just apologized and got out of there.

I had seen one of the holy mysteries. You know, not counting the girl wrestlers, we had four women in the whole company—two seamstresses, the ring announcer, and me—and it would have been easy for them to get rid of me. I knew where I stood in the wrestling business. I was told when I got in that it didn’t matter that I had been the only woman working a camera at WFAA, I was still going to be around men who cut themselves and dropped each other on their heads.

Winter sees me backstage a few days after and tells me:

“You’re on the Japan trip.”

I didn’t know then if it was a thank you for not saying anything or a shut up about what you saw, but I knew that I would never see Japan without the company. So I already felt beholden to Winter, like a child might to a distant uncle. I know now that his sternness was inseparable from his generosity. Standards and secrets, that’s wrestling.

The whole company flew over in a charter 747. The coach cabin was like business class with huge seats and more room and had a bar in it. Never seen anything like it. Whoever thought that putting wrestlers in a plane with a bar for 12 hours was okay might be the dumbest person in history.

We worked the shows in Japan. I couldn’t believe how silent the crowds were. Respectful, like they were watching opera or something. After a good sequence, like when Chief Apia threw Winter off the top rope, the crowd would stand and clap. Then they’d sit and watch in reverence, quiet again. The lighting was all different too: I saw so deep into the crowd, faces, people wiping their glasses, the shape of front teeth. You could hear a cough in the eighth row.

I thought that I had been given this gift, and I started taking shots of the crowd for myself that I’d have the guys edit and slam onto a VHS for me to keep. Princess Fumiko was the women’s champ, and for her the crowds would pop, I thought. They, her people, would ripple with sound. And they did. They stood and clapped like it was a graduation, and even behind all Fumiko’s paint—she had made her gimmick a bit more demonic in ’97, green glitter around her mouth, pancake white around her eyes—you could see her trying not to smile, not to break.

The fight started over the ocean on the flight back to the US. The boys were half asleep or were wasted or pilled out. The first round of drinking on the plane had been terrible: Longview & Lubbock, the tag team, grabbed bottles of scotch for themselves and the two stewardesses raised their hands up in protest and walked to the galley. After a while, a few of the office people come back to the coach section and this corporate exec gives a speech about professionalism and travel. The guy dares to say “like any other businessman flying international for work.” Someone whips an open beer can at him, beer arcing out of the can and splashing a half dozen people. The people who got wet are up and pissed.

Old Mann Winter was close to the front of the cabin. He could have sat way up in first class with the bosses and the other main event guys, but he’s the locker room leader. He needs to be in the right zone. He needs to be seen. Winter turns back and glares at the wrestlers who got splashed. Everybody complies. For a moment, I think the world will be calmed. Winter’s hands are in the gray leather gloves he wore when he traveled. He’s got them at his sides. The wrestlers who got streaked with beer sit down.

But Norma Lee Rooks stays standing.

Norma was one of the first girl wrestlers in the TV era. Her nose had been broken a few times, and her teeth were new: big white veneers like shields on top of whatever the years had whittled down. Norma had real forearms and a few fingers broken. Nothing past her wrists laid straight, no different from a few of the guys. In the ’70s, she put out a cigar on her own arm to show a promoter she was for real, then covered the scar with a tattoo of a mermaid. Every time one of the new girls got a tattoo, she’d make a whole stink and say they needed to pay her a royalty: “I did that. I invented that. Girl, you owe me.” And she would really make it tough, haunting the new girl backstage in Fresno or Sacramento until she gave Norma Lee a few hundred bucks. Which worked. Until Norma came asking for more the next time that she saw you a few weeks down the line.

Fumiko wasn’t sitting close to Norma Lee on the plane. Fumiko still acted new, and stuck close to the two Japanese male wrestlers we had at the time. They were sitting a few rows ahead of me. As Norma started running down every young wrestler to the corporate guy, I saw in real time that she knew she could not cuss the office out the way she wanted. Her face slowed down. She’d be fired. But her anger kept her, for that night at least, from becoming another broken-down, busted-up old wrestler.

“You’re all punks. Flying on a jet. Meals paid for. Bar in here like its fuckin’ Caesars Palace. And you think you’re a draw, you think people are buying tickets to see you. And then wasting the fucking beer to whip it at somebody from the office …”

She spins and sees Fumiko. Eyes narrowing, some electricity coming back to her cheeks and jaw, Norma Lee starts cutting into her, starting with the insults she’d always throw at a new-to-her girl wrestler:

“Not pretty enough to not be tough and not tough enough to not be pretty and only has the belt to keep her people happy while we were over there, and I’ll tell you that a lot of the fathers of American men on this flight wouldn’t appreciate having a …”

I don’t think I need to share the slide into common ugliness. I learned how swiftly Norma Lee’s list-making of grievances careened into skin and language. It struck me then as abnormal, but at my age, I understand that it’s a matter of convenience for many.

Fumiko, bless her, she doesn’t know what Norma Lee is going on about. She’s chatting with the two other Japanese wrestlers that we had with the company at the time, cruiserweights who occasionally tagged together.

Old Mann Winter stands up again. Hell, everyone in the cabin turns back to look at Fumiko. Norma’s sewage continues without pause at the front of the cabin. Winter is staring holes through her, waiting for her promo against the world and the Japanese to finish.

Finally, Fumiko catches on, looks at Norma for a moment, then gets back to chatting with the Japanese guys. They laugh and Fumiko hits one of the guys on the arm. Norma sees it.

Winter calls out something in Japanese. A few guys had worked Japan like Winter had, doing the evil American foreigner gimmick like a cowboy or an Olympic bully in a tracksuit. Winter says the phrase again, this time looking at Fumiko, and she looks back at him and nods.

I’m sitting there, trying to be cool, but already I’m imagining how I would shoot this. If you operate a camera, you know how a falcon or hawk would feel when they are about to dive off the branch. You become an instrument for something bigger than yourself. My first boss at WFAA told it to me: moments. But I hate that, hated it then and hate it now. Moments. That’s someone spilling juice and you shoot that and you call it a story about a family or even a story about a morning. No, you only got juice dripping off a countertop. The audience deserves more than that. In wrestling, that would mean getting only the finishing sequence and the pin. Wouldn’t that
be awful?

Winter walks down the aisle, stops and greets the Japanese crew, says something else to Fumiko. Then Winter walks up to me. He was one of the top guys and the oldest of the top guys: he had power. He also had beautiful, open eyes like a fawn’s. His breath was clear—he only drank with a few guys and in tucked-away bars only he knew about—and of course he’s tall and with those long arms, but he’s looking at me like a peer, a colleague, which of course I am, and he says:

“Can you get a camera ready?”

“They are packed away. They are all underneath,” I said.

“Anything closer?” he said.

I thought of my territory, what I was responsible for, what I had in my carry-on, what the other camera people on that trip had with them.

“I think another camera guy might have a little DV camcorder with him in his bag,” I said, pointing back at the guy.

“DV?” Winter said.

“Sorry, yeah, digital video,” I said.

“Does it make a tape?”

“Not really. You don’t load a VHS into the camera and record directly onto that”

“But could you make a tape? Eventually?”

“Eventually I could, but I’d need to go into the studio at the office.”

Winter gestured with his chin toward the guy with the camera, nodded to me, and went back to his seat. The guy with the camera slept like the dead. I feel bad for not remembering his name, and I wish I could sit here and run through everyone I worked with then, but I do remember his face: trim mustache, big ears, and the kind of ski-jump nose I was taught was beautiful. He had the camera right at his feet in his backpack. I took it.

Norma Lee’s husband Billy Rooks had been dead for years. Shot in a truck stop near Springfield, Missouri. Everyone hated him on account of how he and Norma trained new wrestlers. Billy taught people how to make out a check, then put you up in a literal barn, then nothing, then he’d beat the piss out of you for weeks before you learned that wrestling was work. He and Norma were worse on the girls who wanted to wrestle. A few girls, after they got injured, Norma and Billy would give them drugs for the pain, keep feeding them the junk after, and get them hooked. There were a few girls who wanted to get into the business and went to see Billy and Norma and then were dead two years later, needles in their arms, dying alone and higher than the telephone wires.

I could not sleep. In the middle of the night, someone sang “Tennessee Whiskey” on the intercom and someone threw another beer can and this time it hit Norma Lee square on the back of her head. She explodes, yelling: “I know it was you, I know it was you!” She’s storming into the dark, tripping over someone’s leg, and now more people are up and Fumiko is up because she never fell asleep and has been steadily drinking beer with her people. Norma Lee barks at Fumiko to “stand up and fight face to face, which is more than I can say about your people … ”

And Fumiko lays into her like a tide. She takes the edge of her hand and chops it across Norma’s chest, knocking her back. Like a slap but with the blade of the hand. And Fumiko hits Norma again. And again and again until the people who are awake are counting the chops. I can hear Fumiko call her “old pig” and Norma won’t let herself drop to a knee because it would kill the last threads of her reputation. Norma tries to grab Fumiko’s hair but Fumiko kept it short—a lot of the Japanese girls did, they thought women pulling each other’s hair in matches was demeaning to them as athletes.

I’ve framed it perfectly. I got right in the aisle and shot them from below, real superhero angles. I hold the midrange because I want each of Fumiko’s chops, the backswing and the slap and Norma’s flail. I know why I got this job. I know why
I do this.

Finally, Norma Lee cries out, and looks like she’s trying to say something to Fumiko, leaning forward, not begging but trying to explain something. Norma Lee’s face isn’t warm. Her brow is knit, her lips thinning as she’s drawing her face back. I zoom in a little.

Fumiko reads her face, looks back at Winter. Fumiko smiles at Winter, gestures to Norma and then chops Norma even faster.

Later I learned that Fumiko’s hero when she was young was Lady Blaze. Blaze—a motorcycle stuntwoman gimmick—had worked with Norma a decade ago and Norma treated her like an animal, took liberties in the ring. Billy threw out her gear in the locker room while Norma was beating her in the ring. After the show, Lady Blaze ate in a Waffle House, still dirty, wearing spare clothes from another girl, makeup still on, trying to hide her face and protect her gimmick. That’s the image that every girl in Fumiko’s era had in their brain.

The pilot comes on the loudspeaker, says they are going to call the FAA, the FBI, whomever, and boys in blue will be waiting with cuffs if we don’t stop this instant. That slows the chaos. But when Winter put his hands on Norma’s and on Fumiko’s shoulders, that was what really ended it.

I didn’t stop rolling. I could see Norma Lee smiling a little after, like the fight had become a match. In that way, Norma Lee was fine losing. She had made a career of it. Fumiko lifted Norma Lee under her arms, dragged her back to her seat, and set her down with a hand across Norma’s chest, like she was trying to stop something that had been spinning. I kept rolling, capturing guys settling back down, Longview & Lubbock going to the galley where they had locked up the liquor. Fumiko stood in the aisle for a bit, catching her breath. I stayed on her as she leaned on the bulkhead, breathing deep, smiling, a little blood on her hand. Then I cut and closed the camera.

Everyone started to split up once the plane landed. It’s always the same: one crew starting the L.A. to Vegas to Phoenix loop, while another—the jobbers, the guys on the fringes—works a few months for a Mexican promotion. The lights were coming on. Fumiko and the Japanese guys sat and waited for everyone else to file out, whether for self-protection or so that everyone could see them sitting unbothered. Norma Lee was ushered off, sunglasses on like a rich widow would. I never saw her again. She had spoken with me once months before the plane, told me she couldn’t believe that girls were working the cameras now but what did she know, she didn’t understand anything about the business anymore. I felt nothing when I heard that she died.

I was one of the last people on the plane. I was looking for the other camera guy whose camera I lifted, and Winter approached me. His eyes were even softer than they were when he asked me to shoot the fight. He held his hands out to me. This time, they were in different suede gloves up to the forearms and with fringe, like a lady’s.

“Thank you,” he said with his hands out.

Then he took the camcorder from me and held it like an egg.

“How much are these?” he asked.

“Not cheap. But they are coming down. Give it a year and they’ll be 400.”

Winter bent the screen off and tried to rip apart the solid core of the camera, crushing what he could, looking for some kind of tape or disk or some proof. He slammed it against the bulkhead. He stomped it into the aisle. The plane was nearly empty. When he finished, he tucked the offering of metal and plastic under his arm and left.

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Featured image: Oscar Bluemner. Snow and Glow, 1935. Purchased with the Katharine Ordway and Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Funds, Yale University Art Gallery (1937.2323). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed November 19, 2024. Image has been cropped.