12-Pack Review: ECWA 05/04/02

BEER ONE: The East Coast Wrestling Association – which I never heard of till like seven years ago, but according to smart fan legend, Jim Kettner has been promoting matches since George Hackenschmidt was challenging all comers at carnivals. ECWA first popped into my consciousness when I was early on in my family stages, settling down to have a regular job and a decent house for my wife and impending kid, and I’d watch the Wrestling Power on the ol’ public access in Richmond, Virginia. Tim Noel always did a fine job with that show, and I taped the fuck out of it, and shit, he even held a copy of my zine up on his call-in show one week, which, a shitty zine like mine and public access, that’s two things that deserve each other. Early on in seeing ECWA, I was impressed, because it was indy, and at that point the World of wrestling hadn’t been flab-armed by internet geeks with show reports and tape reviews that fed the twisted, fragile souls of chant-happy crowds of comic book dorks. Indy wrestling was an alternative, and I don’t pretend to be a smart fan, though I’m probably smarter than most wrestling fans who poke around online, and back then I loved the indy shit on public access. I have never liked the WWF product, ever, as it is too glossy and high production, and for me, wrestling should be slightly dirty enough to make it seem real enough to justify wasting your goddamned Friday night at the Richmond Coliseum (back then) or your Saturday night at the Blackwell Community Center (now) to watch grown men fight, but not really fight. And WCW, back when the cruiserweight shit was in full bloom and there were seven star matches on WCW Saturday Night every week, well, back then I could give a shit about WCW. It was strictly cornball shit, and I’m not sitting there for two hours of NWO recaps just to see Mr. JL vs. Eddie Guerrero go four and a half minutes, in between Lee Marshall trying to get me to make collect phone calls against my better judgment. ECWA, on the strength of it’s Super 8 shows, grew into a major indy trendsetter, by yearly exploiting/displaying the talents of some unheard of dudes, plus guys on loan from the WWF developmental department, looking for some exposure and credibility before they become wrestling video game addicts or sky surfers or whatever the fuck those jack-ass writers think is the New Thang. And I dug a lot of ECWA over the years, and always vibe on the Super 8 and get the tape, but I can’t help but sort of detest the whole smart mark effect that ECWA, and even more so, Ring of Honor, are a part of. The smarts make the yearly mecca to Super 8 for mask trading and tape tossing festivities, and that’s all fine and dandy and to each his own, but I guess I’m on the outside looking in when I wonder where the fuck the danger is anymore? Where the fuck is the wrestling where somebody is actually getting booed? How the fuck can I hear that some crowd full of people who are full of themselves chant, out loud, “Who booked this! Who booked this!”, but I don’t hear about fans being genuinely hateful of a guy. Unless they don’t like his workrate. Motherfuck a workrate. Sabu needs to throw fire, not fake flash paper fire, but real gasoline soaked rag fire, into the eyes of your average smart crowd. I mean, sure, their moms will be mega-pissed when they have to go come get them all from the hospital, but maybe they’d shut the fuck up next time. I don’t want to hear polite applause at a goddamned wrestling match; go to a spelling bee if you want to do that shit. I mean, sure, if two dudes bust their ass and have a great match, I can dig on giving them a rousing ovation at the end, but one of them motherfuckers should utilize that moment where the crowd is weak to call us all a bunch of faggots, not to shake hands and hug the guy he had just been trying to murder for the last half hour. I don’t get it at all. But here I am, about to dip into an ECWA card, and see what entails. I’m sure there’ll be shitty indy nonsense, which ECWA is known for, and I’m sure there’ll be overhyped indy fanboy wet dream superstars, which they’re also known for. But I hope it’s good, and that’s all I hope for from any wrestling. Motivate me to care. Reckless Youth did it every time I saw him on Wrestling Power. Shit, even Cheetah Master got me fired up, mostly because of the screaming teenage girls in the audience. A wrestling show that doesn’t have screaming teenage girls and some old drunk guy trying to fight a heel at some point, that ain’t the type of wrestling show I care to see. This is billed as ECWA’s Night of Unusual Matches, and double awesome for the fact this is an RF Video tape, that I got from some dude with shaky handwriting that insinuates he’s either an alcoholic, a heavy video gamer, or he’s a closet homosexual. Indy wrestling shouldn’t have giant screens to recap shit; it doesn’t make them look more professional or well-produced, it takes longer for me to see a wrestling match. Get a public access show for this shit, and make the matches good enough that the fuckers sitting there to see LIVE PEOPLE WRESTLE will tune into channel 47 at 7:30 on a Tuesday night to see your program. Well, apparently according to the giant mini-tron, The Hat Guy, yeah, that guy from the ECW crowd, is gonna wrestle. That’s the smart fan epitomized right there, wearing a distinguishable fuckin’ thing at wrestling shows to get himself over, and now he’s gonna be in a fuckin’ ring. Fuck smart fans. I hope SARS hits Philly. Billy Bax is in the ring, and he’s heeling it up. The crowd sounds hot, though they’re chanting “BORING!” so they may just be hoping their chants will hurry up to get an Amazing Red vs. Dick Togo match started.

BEER TWO: Mike Kruel is Billy Bax’s opponent, and he’s called the Modern Day Warrior by the ring announcer, yet he comes out to “Kashmir” by Zeppelin instead of “Tom Sawyer” by Rush. I have re-entered the glamorous world of housepainting, so I can tell you what an error that was. Even the most liberal of housepainting crews listen to shitty classic rock radio on the jobsite; I can’t figure it out. THE BEST CLASSIC ROCK…AND TODAY’S NEW ROCK…every station, across the country says that. Clone radio. Clearchannel. Whatever happened to John Boy and Billy’s PBR wrestling thing? That shit was great, shitty wrestling and shitty beer, in one place. All indy wrestling should be sponsored by beer. Mike Kruel and Billy Bax are more than capable so far, but again, as with a lot of indy shit, I have a hard time believing two dudes that are so tiny are really all that bad ass. The immense money a guy can make in the NFL, or even in Arena League or Europe or CFL, has really ruined how many good big guys there are in wrestling. If chop blocks were still legal, we’d have all sorts of big lugs with bad knees who could come in and rule shit. But no, everybody’s gotta be a pussy about every goddamned thing on Earth and not let anything violent that’s not just special effects violence actually happen. No wonder kids are so fucked up; they can carjack the President and rape his wife on a video game, but if they point their finger like a gun while playing cops and robbers at school, they get suspended for a week, which of course leaves them at home to carjack the President more often. A self-perpetuating cycle. The stipulation on this here match is the winner gets a valet. Now, Mike Kruel has the more sexy body in need of a weak-willed large-breasted woman to rub her hands on his swollen pecs, but Billy Bax fits the mold of a Tully Blanchard little cocksucker with a woman role better. Kruel has submission thing going on, but Bax has yet to submit, even though a couple of times Kruel has clamped on something and made terrible faces and yelled about how he’s gonna break something, like a Big Lots version of Ken Shamrock. If you’re not gonna unplug your dinky ass jumbo screen, at least put on some nice rave hippie-dippy spiral indigo images. Kruel does a hurricanrana, and I’m of the belief that your rana doing legs should be around the rana receiver all the way to the mat, or else your just flopping over backwards while some dude flips himself over. There are slight differences that make moves look lethal instead of some hokey shit, and there’s a reason these guys are in the first match of an indy card. Billy Bax wins, holding the ropes, and will get a whore now. Well, they got some old lady out of the crowd to be his valet, and from the cheers, she must be an old school ECWA fan. I hope she doesn’t give birth to a hand. Hey, this is in Delaware, the Truck Stop State. That means everybody there is a tax evader and murders lot lizards. So we have an elimination match with Xero, Abunai, & Mozart Fontaine vs. Ryan Wing, Inferno, & Roughhouse Rivera. The second team has some homoerotic shit going on, and I fear that Inferno is the same Inferno that tormented me from my earliest ECWA viewing days on public access. He is the indy equivalent of Chris Chetti; that is to say, he is completely devoid of any charisma and manageably competent in the ring. So one dude who I think might be Inferno puts some fuzzy dice around his neck before doing fake battle with some other dude who I think might be Xero. I might have all these wrong, but fuck it. This masked dude has to be Abunai, because you don’t run around with some dope get-up like that and not have some fucked up name like Abunai. He also has a cross tattoo on his back, which suggests a Hispanic heritage. Or he’s goth. Wait, this dude has long hair and glittery trunks, so I bet he’s Xero, and that big, bald guy was Mozart Fontaine. The guy I assume is Inferno has his ass hanging out now, and he’s getting outsmarted by faces as his own partners elbowdrop in that old F.B.I. bit. Then Abunai gets pinned and eliminated. Nope, glitter trunks guy was Mozart Fontaine, because he just got eliminated and I heard that guy on the mic say his name. So that leaves Xero, the budget Bam Bam Bigelow, against all three homoerotic heels. Ryan Wing is crushed into non-contention. And then Inferno feels the mighty crush of Xero, leaving just the big man and Roughhouse Rivera, looking like Apolo Dantes’ younger cousin. You know, they should have a shitty wrestling book of the month club, because every time I turn around, some jackass has a book about wrestling. You know who should have a book about wrestling? Nobody. Enough crap’s been written about it in the last few years. Xero wins the match, and I’m sure he’s more than excited to finish early so he can get back to Roddy Piper’s book in the locker room. What the fuck? How much inside shit do you have to know about wrestling? Shoot interviews, books, internet reviewers full of shit over themselves…it’s ridiculous. IT’S FUCKIN’ WRESTLING! I guess it’s the whole religious fanaticism angle, and with any religion, you have to believe or you’re not correct, which in internet wrestling dork terms means you’re a stupid mark, or a rube, because every internet wrestling fan has read B. Brian Blair’s book and speak carney like an alcoholic midget from 1934 nowadays. And the workrate crowd is the scientific opposite of the general wrestling mark, thus the workrate crowd over-analyzes and has like 3000 tapes and two review sites and does a column for a website like 23 people read and takes himself so seriously that when one of those 23 people question his all-important opinion (it being important because it’s on the internet for the possibility of millions of people to see), they get dismissed with whatever form of wise-crack is appropriate for that particular reviewing smart mark wrestling nerd. My problem is this, I don’t like people telling me how to think, and most religious groups, including smart marks, tell everyone how to think, and it files down the ranks. A year ago, you couldn’t get people to give half a shit about an IWA Mid South match; and now, after a few well-placed props being doled out by wrestling nerds extraordinaire, there’s fuckin’ bus trips from NYC to an IWA event later this year.

BEER THREE: And on one hand, that’s great, you want good shit to be able to make a dime by being good shit. But on the other hand, there’s another instance of the old drunk who wants to fight the heels having his seat sold beforehand to some mark who’s apt to chant “Who Booked This! Who Booked This!” if American Dragon isn’t declared Supreme Overlord of Earth. And what’s really fuckin’ gay is I’m bitching about this shit; I don’t hang out with those fuckers. I’m a man of the people, not the 0s and 1s. I get drunk with dudes I meet at bus stations (that’s perfect for inserting some homosexual wisecrack, so insert it here, smart ass wrestling fan), I don’t bitch about how A.J. Styles should’ve gone over Sick Nick Mondo in the second round of the Indy Super-Cup Round Robin in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, last month. I could play Extreme Warfare Revenge for seven days straight, cross check my results with TNM7, and then make the fuckin’ characters on WWF Warzone and let the PS2 simulate the matches, but it ain’t gonna make it where I could sell a five dollar ticket to a pack of actual human beings who would also blow another five bucks on hot dogs and potato chips at the concession stand, now would it? Of course not. Smart fans are the biggest stupid fuckin’ marks of all. At least a fuckin’ mark, when confronted with it being fake, will just get quiet and try to change the subject, embarrassed at getting called on the fact he wasted time watching grown men in homoerotic outfits physically tussle with each other in pre-determined matches. The smart fan will go into some goddamned diatribe about the athletic prowess involved, or how great the stiff shit is. Your average Joe Blow bumming a cigarette at the gas station who remarks at your Four Horseman shirt could A) give a shit less about any sentence anybody has ever said on this planet involving the words “Misawa” and “Kobashi”, and B) could probably make Low-Ki look like a bitch. I don’t care how much karate that mother fucker knows. In all my life, I’ve seen plenty of fights, real fights, and never has karate played an integral role in somebody winning or losing. Never. Not once. And most kicking I’ve ever seen happen occurs after one dude has hit the floor and the other guy is still standing. And I don’t remember Miyagi teaching Daniel-san the ol’ boot to the gut, not even in Karate Kid Part III. Anyways, wrestling is a religion, and smart marks are a bizarre obsessive workrate fanatical cult that I can’t put my love into because they’re too goddamned oppressive about their commandments being met. If Low-Ki started throwing powder into people’s eyes, then kicking them one time right smart-like while they rubbed their eyes in pain, then he’d rule. But oh well, I digress, as usual. Quiet Storm is taking on Chris Devine, where the winner gets a highly profitable once a month gig in ECWA. Devine is a tiny, pudgy, rat bastard of a northeastern indy worker. I will be forced to root for Quiet Storm, who just missed a dropkick by half a foot. How can guys do corkscrew moonsaults but not actually put boots to face in a fuckin’ dropkick? Right here is where I’d be one of those jack-asses chanting “BORING! BORING!” if somebody else started it. Sure, they’ve got moves going on, but there’s no passion, and I’ve seen this a thousand times over. Give me something to motherfuckin’ care about. Devine tosses his pudgy ass off the ringpost in a plancha to the outside. Devine does a nice roll-up submission thingy, and he gets some polite applause, and I regret that the Sheik is dead. Devine is doing a lot of rollie pollie olie shit in there. I guess that means he’s great. Quiet Storm does a dropkick from the top that touches, then a tope to the outside. I’m more concerned with how he got that name. I hope it’s because he hung at the park where dudes all wash their cars on Sunday afternoons, listening to the oldies quiet storm show on the local urban contemporary station. That’s where I get my fix of “Belle” by Al Green. One time, I went riding after getting drunk with this punk rock chick with no hair, and we laid in a field and kissed and clutched, and we went back to her house and she showed me her shotgun under the bed, then I tried to mack, but she wasn’t having it, but we went to sleep naked so I assumed that meant morning love action; and when I woke up she was out the bed, but I heard Al Green playing real fuckin’ loud, and I went downstairs and she was hooking up some potatoes and some eggs and looked absolutely beautiful and I fell in love. I tried to get her to go camping with me after that, but it never happened, which is probably for the best, because never are things as great as that point where you fall in love, just because of some stupid shit. I’m glad that I allow my mind to be open enough to let those unexplainable emotions in. I’m also pretty glad I’m not you. Nothing against you, but I sort of dig on me.

BEER FOUR: Chris Devine yells out “STAR! CRADLE! DRIVER!” perhaps not realizing he’s like five foot four, and then he does his stupid move that looks like it’d be easy to crack somebody’s neck with, which I guess makes him great, again, according to The Smart Commandments. SMART COMMANDMENT #1: Little dudes are better than big dudes, unless they’re Japanese. SMART COMMANDMENT #2: Ring psychology is so fuckin’ important, yet dudes ought to hug each other afterwards, because that shit’s all gladiatorially honorable. Wait, no, gladiators killed each other. SMART COMMANDMENT #3: Snowflakes on match ratings equals good; snowflakes on TV screen while I watch your videotape equals bad, because if I’m gonna watch obscure, tiny, indy superstars kick each other in the face with no insurance coverage, I want it to be crystal clear. SMART COMMANDMENT #4: You send first, because I don’t know if you’re as smart as me. SMART COMMANDMENT #5: ahh never mind. You get the drift. I could make fun of that shit all night, but it doesn’t mean nothing if I don’t stab anybody I hear talking about Triple H who calls him “Trips” next time that shit happens in real life. Wait, that doesn’t happen in real life. In real life, I’m quiet about the pro wrestling, because if you tell people you like it they think Hulk Hogan and shit like that. Oddly enough, the average person has never even heard of Chris Benoit, much less puroresu. So when dealing with the average person, I find it beneficial to know about regular shit, so that we have something to talk about. “That Amy Wynn on Trading Spaces, man, wouldn’t you like to fuck the shit out of her? Paige? No way man, Amy Wynn is way hotter. Yeah, that Genevieve chick is hot, in an older chick who works at the library sort of way. But Amy Wynn is the best. Oh, she knows it; I mean, she’s building shit with miter boxes and shit, but she still wears shorts and tank tops. She knows what’s up.” Now, the ECWA jumbo screen has been overtaken by bad dance music and it’s retrospecting all the guys who’ve jumped from being ECWA stars to being WWF mid-carders. Wait, there’s an ECWA fan celebration in the ring from 1981, proving that they did exist back then. They must’ve really sucked for me not to even read about them in Ringside Superstars magazine when I was a kid. Backstage, Xavier talks on a phone, then gets his ass kicked. You do not need backstage angles when there’s like 100 people in your crowd, on a good night. The Japanese Pool Boy comes out, to Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, and he’s homoerotic and masked, and taking on Johnny Maxx. Why is every other fuckin’ wrestler in the northeast portraying a gay guy? I mean, I know it’s grown men barely clothes pretending to fight, but are that many wrestling fans really closeted gays? Japanese Pool Boy is great comedy fodder, which in the context of a one-on-one wrestling match, means he’s worth a fuck for about a minute and a half. By the way, this is a coal miner’s glove match, hearkening back to Wilmington, Delaware’s turn of the century coal mines that helped build the Truck Stop state into the glorious four-lane piece of shit that it is.

BEER FIVE: Pool Boy finally gets the glove, but then gets dropped on his head, so it’s on. Johnny Maxx wins with one coal miner’s glove, which I think came from the flea market, and he gets his arms raised, looking like seven thousand other non-descript longhaired indy wrestlers with long tights. We’ve got Tony Kozina in the ring, who doesn’t suck, and he’s going against A.J. Styles, who I try to hate as much as possible for being a little Wal-Mart engaged to marry his childhood sweetheart southern good kid who does no wrong, but damn it, Styles always tries and wins me over, that fucker. I hope he chokes to death on Taco Bell while listening to Kenny Chesney’s new CD in his pick-up. Their opponent is The Amazing Red, who is still small as fuck. Ahh…the unintelligible beginning of a three-way dance, leading to the impending spotfest. A.J. Styles could benefit from some travel time with Jake Roberts, or at least Bill Alphonso. Red does a dive and lands on his head, and Styles threatens a Styles Clash slamming of the child on the hard concrete ringside, but Kozina breaks it all up with a dope “Shit, I’m supposed to break this shit up” style dive through the ropes onto the other dudes. If I was Red, I wouldn’t watch Styles run by me, jump on the second rope, and then backflip on me. You see, that makes everybody look stupid, and the fan feel stupid, because it’s fake like the regular dudes they work with make fun of them about at lunchtime. Hulk Hogan foam fingers. Kozina does this nice thing where Red’s little ass is gonna do a hurricanrana, but Kozina turns it into a figure-four where Red is hanging and Kozina is leaning back over the ringpost. Styles does a Styles Clash with Red onto Kozina, and Red gets the win. What a fuckjob ending; I was just starting to enjoy the match, too. But that’s okay, because I’m immediately treated to Mr. Ooh La La, who is so French I bet he hates freedom. Mr. Ooh La La’s ring introductions, complete with the Rick Rude strip tease, but boggled with him stumbling through the roes, it’s good stuff. That’s right, Ooh La La, the ref made you stumble, kick his ass. The Hat Guy. The fuckin’ Hat Guy. A guy who sits in the crowd in a goofy hat and a Hawaiian shirt is having a match. To The Hat Guy’s credit, he looks a little like a drunk Dick Murdoch coming out for a match in Hawaii, and he’s accompanied by a bunch of old dudes in Hawaiian shirts as well. To his discredit, Jimmy Buffett is playing. There is nothing good about Jimmy Buffett. I like a lot of bad music, but there’s nothing good about Jimmy Buffett.

BEER SIX: I can dig on some Mr. Ooh La La because he’s very Playboy Buddy Rose-ish in his girthy overly confident bad guyness. He should ride around in a limo with escorts and do video taped promos that way, having a champagne jam and caviar daydreams. If it wasn’t for Ooh La La’s innate evilness, this match would be completely unwatchable. Why the fuck hasn’t Mr. Ooh La La been in a Super 8? I mean, that shithead Ace Darling was in like seven straight, but no Ooh La La? Fuck Jim Kettner and his prejudices. The Hat Guy is terrible, absolutely terrible. Again, SARS can’t hit Philadelphia indy wrestling crowds fast enough for my pleasure. Okay…let me barely explain the screwjob nonsense of the ending…Ooh La La roll-up, Fontaine distracts ref, old guys in Hawaiian shirts roll Hat Guy on top, ref chases off old guys, Fontaine turns and rolls Ooh La La on top, match ends. What the fuck? Some white guy who looks like a snapping turtle is explaining how he was the mastermind behind this all on the jumbo screen. Fuck explaining backstage; give me fireballs. Some dudes beat up Low-Ki now, but not until Low-Ki talks all deep-voiced, in pretendence he’s not a midget. PRINCE NANA!

BEER SEVEN: If Reckless Youth used to wear a shirt that said KING OF DELAWARE, then is Prince Nana heir to his throne? I’d take a hundred Prince Nana matches over seven smart indy fanboys’ wet dream superstar three-way iron man sixty minute overtime submission star matches anyday. The crowd is doing the Steve Austin “what? what?” think, and Nana is internationally frustrated. In Ghana, wrestling fans don’t all have columns on websites that 23 people read, and they don’t mock the combatants like this. I love when Nana disrobes, because he always makes me think of Yaphet Kotto. Nana is taking on Scoot Andrews, for the Truck Stop State Title. You can tell a true native African like Nana by their hair, because even if they cut their hair yesterday, it looks like a tiny little afro. My wife studies dance in Senegal, and sometimes we meet Senegalese people, and she can talk to them in Wolof, and it amazes me how I’ve been able to not only recognize native Africans now, but what part of the continent they’re from. When our daughter was a baby, we ran into these people from Ezibu Muntu or something or other from Richmond, an African dance troupe, and my wife was one of the only white people they let dance with them, but she couldn’t perform because they refused to let white people perform. Well, anyways, we are talking to these folks, and our baby cries, and the chick is like, “You should take her around more black people, so she doesn’t cry,” in broken English, and it pissed me off because my best friend at the time was a black guy who was always at the house, and I said, “Well, she usually cries around new faces, no matter what they identify themselves as.” I’m not one to believe in that reverse racism shit when it comes to jobs or colleges, because if a job or college doesn’t want you, forcing them to take you ain’t gonna make things right. But when a motherfucker tries to insinuate I’m not letting my fuckin’ baby around black people, then fuck them. I’ve known shithead white people and shithead black people, and good whiteys and good negroes, and the shitheads far outnumber the good folks. I hate where I live because there’s hardly any black people on my road; that shit makes me nervous. I don’t trust living around nothing but white people; they make you cut your lawn by community decree and won’t let you leave boats laying on the ground and don’t like your idea that old apple juice barrels make for good recycling bins and shit. I root for Nana because he represents everything the smart fan hates; I think he even got run off from Ring of Honor. Scoot has been, though I dno’t think he still is, the smart fan’s black man of choice. That goddamned copyright RF thing has been on the screen the whole time. SHIT! RF! TAZZPLEX316@YAHOO.COM IS RIPPING YOU OFF! Scoot Andrews’ hair is really weird; it sort of tufts up on both sides of his head like that eagle who looked like Richard Mulligan on the Muppets show. I always used to notice Richard Mulligan’s name because I wondered if he was related to Blackjack. By the same measure, I wonder if Prince Nana is related to Lil Kim’s vagina?

BEER EIGHT: I love the strap/chain match touching all four corners at once angle; it’s not done nearly enough nowadays. Scoot just hit three, then got reeled in by wrestling royalty. Then a ref bump and Scoot hits all four, but it’s not official. So Nana slaps on the figure-four, on the black Nature Boy; how ironic. And the ref comes to as Scoot passes out. NANA WINS! NANA WINS! And Nana’s streak of never losing a Ghanaian strap match continues. JUMBO TV SCREEN RECAP OF AMERICAN DRAGON VS. LOW-KI ECWA FEUD! So exciting. Low-Ki and Xavier are your tag champs coming in, which is the combo of smart mark jesus and smart mark judas, as they all hate Xavier because he’s not flashy or Japanese or Super 8ish or highspotness enough. So they defend against Stryker & Buck Wylde, who I don’t know. Also, The SAT, who are like a tag team Super Crazy, which is like the Headhunters are a tag team Abdullah the Butcher. You know how big Abby was, worldwide? That’s why the Headhunters get booked to this day. You know how big Super Crazy was worldwide? Yeah, not a lot, but some. That’s why the SAT is already passé. And also, they defend against the J-Team, who is J.R. Ryder and J.J. Johnston, two guys bound for the WWF because they suck and get bigger by the year due to the “nutritional supplements” they ingest, or inject. Low-Ki and Xavier come out, both with taped ribs, and I wonder why wrestling doesn’t get better doctors because wrestling doctors always tape ribs around the abdomen.

BEER NINE: This is a tables, ladders, and chairs match, which makes me wonder and remembrance, has Perry Saturn reunited with John Kronus yet? Probably not. Fuckin’ Saturn, bailing out on his boy like that. My favorite gig is where some dude will set up the ladder then start climbing up the wrong side, the weak side, because the other dude is supposed to go up the reinforced side. Those guys who do that in a match just don’t realize how many housepainters are wrestling fans. We see right through that crap. SCHOLASTIC APTITUDE TEST HIGHSPOT! Xavier sort of clocked the shit out of either Stryker or Buck Wylde with the ladder, in a really uncomfortable looking way.

BEER TEN: Xavier is on top of some shit, and throws one dude off, and then does an 840 degree supersault through some other guy on a piece of a plywood. It was bombastic. Of the dudes in the J-Team, I can’t tell them apart, but from their physiques I know they both love strip clubs and steroids, because they are cut, yet have beer bellies. It is the shape of a true superstar in this goddamned beezlebubbian industry. The S.A.T. win the belts and I got a 1300 on my SATs, and the one dude who scored just above me in my high school, he’s a professor at a midwestern college. The dude just below me, he’s a lawyer with some big firm in Richmond now. I bet neither of them have wrestling, or organic herb spirals in their yard, so that when they’re making some spaghetti sauce, they can go out and cut some fresh basil and sage and oregano for the shit, because they’re pussies. They were smart, or so they thought. Money, or the accolades of people you’ll never meet, or any of that keeping up with the Joneses shit, that shit don’t make you smart. But fuck it; I’m sure you think you know better than me. Especially since I only took one sip of this beer before the tape ended.

EPILOGUE: FIRST STAR OF THE TAPE: Mr. Ooh La La; that guy rules. Give me a modern day Buddy Rose over a modern day Denny Brown anyday. Did old school junior heavyweights suck more than today’s cruiserweights, other than Alabama juniors, or is shit just too spotty festive now? SECOND STAR OF THE TAPE: Prince Nana; as long as Prince Nana is wrestling, I’ll verbally support him. I know people hate him, but I also know people think the American military liberated Iraq, so people know what they’re told, and I can’t accept their anti-Nanaisms as gospel nerd truthfulness. THIRD STAR OF THE TAPE: Xavier; he’s not half as bad as fuckers make him out to be. I’ve always enjoyed Xavier. Sure, he’s not the gay sex cockfest that Am Drag vs. Low-Ki could be, but fuck it. Haha, get it? Buttfuck it. I love sex.

12-Pack Review: CWF 11/30/02

BEER ONE: If it weren’t for the snow, I would’ve drove my ass down to Roxboro, North Carolina tomorrow to see the Carolina Wrestling Federation in action, live. But with snow, the Pearson High School basketball tourney got moved to the weekend and ruined the CWF’s plans. Plus, I ditched my car the other night where both driver’s side wheels were off the ground and had to get a tow truck to come because the dude’s tractor from the top of the hill couldn’t do shit for me. Of course, three drunks, two of them looking like different uncles or aunt’s boyfriends of mine, showed up in an old-fashioned tow truck. Not a rollback like you usually see nowadays, but the Orville Bedo special, complete with that giant rubber contraption thing I never could quite figure out. They used a two cables attached to wenches to pull my ass out, which made me thankful, because I think new rollback tow trucks only have the one wench on them. It was nice to hear the bottom of my car scrape against asphalt and rock, and then know I had to dump my car in a church parking lot and catch a ride with my bro-in-law back to the crib. He’s a fuckin’ med student, and was in his hospital blues with a stethoscope around his neck, having just got off from working on fuckin’ brains. It was nice to drink a beer and slide through the snow with a man in his position. My bro-in-law, he’s a real egghead, but he’s a good egghead. We’ve done enough stupid shit together that I can respect him and he can trust me with his younger sister. Shit, the only time I’ve ever been out of America was in a boat with him to go across the St. Lawrence River to get cheap cases of beer in Canada to bring back to our vacation “cottage”/hut with sunlight visible through the siding on the New York side. We also drank and drive at night to Alexandria Bay, like an hour’s boatride away, and were lucky not to die. But that’s the thing about life, if you don’t risk it, it sucks. It’s like saving your money instead of spending it; you end up a stuck up white motherfucker in a too-tight shirt with a stuffy tie around your goddamned neck. Fuck all that nonsense. So let’s get ready to rumble…in this corner we got the fuck body snatcha. This is at the CWF Dojo in scenic Burlington, North Carolina, in a strip mall I’m sure. I would wager half my life that there’s a check-cashing joint within a quarter mile. There are two rows of chairs on the camera side, pure indy, and they call out a young guy, Brad Attitude, in a Jack Daniels t-shirt, with a bottom lip-piercing, and nonsense. They are calling out the young lions of Carolina indy sleaze, as also Kamikaze Kid and Brass Munkey and Stephen O’Hara come out as well. All four are part of the Rising Generation League tournament, going at each other in two contests tonight. The main event was gonna be a four-on-four elimination match, but Amber Holly was injured in Pennsylvania, and out comes that fucker in the Hawaiian shirt. This guy kills me. He’s like the fat kid who throws up in that stupid fireside story in Stand By Me all grown up. Brad Rainz is out in the dark for the first for-real match of the night, and he’s wearing a black wifebeater, psychologically suggesting double heelness. His opponent is The American Steel Ninja, who I’m sure drinks Steel Reserve fortified malt liquor and was trained in the Frank Dux school of ninjitsu. The small crowd is sometimes awesome, as you can hear some smartass say, “Did it hurt?” and the wrestler will answer him. Rainz smacks Ninja, then does some Karate Kid mockery shit, getting a laugh out the crowd. This is like a keg party without the keg, and the ring squeaks, and it reminds me, to an extent, of the OMEGA days when the Hardys and Shane Helms and Shannon Moore and Serial Thrillaz and all these guys you never knew of were doing their thang. Except CWF ain’t afraid to have some heavyweights in there, too. The CWF has three flags hanging from the wall – an American one, a North Carolina flag, and I don’t know what the third one is, and I can only hope the CWF has it’s own battle flag. Being it’s North Carolina, shouldn’t there also be a Confederate flag, and maybe even a #3 Dale Earnhardt flag. It might make them have to put a third row of chairs in the Dojo if they did that. Man, it would be great to be in Roxboro tomorrow. My uncle used to take me when he couldn’t get anybody older to tag along to the drag races, and we’d take the Mason Racing Vega stationwagon down there on a Saturday afternoon, and there would be, on a good weekend, maybe thirty cars, and on a great weekend, like fifty or sixty, and some local boy would always win. I remember one time, my uncle won the race, the computer print-out they give the drivers at the end actually proved it, and he went in a huff to the track owner to complain while I loaded the car back on the trailer, and he came back and said, “We won.” I asked why we didn’t do anything about it, and my uncle laughed and said, “It ain’t nobody but you and me here, and you’re 13. Plus, your daddy would kick my ass if I got your ass kicked in North Carolina.” Ahh, Uncle Ricky, I still miss you, you crazy fucker. The only family member I have with a racecar doing a burnout on his tombstone. American Steel Ninja wins with some kick move. Next up is a tag match with Kenny James, the volunteer firefighter, and his partner Xsiris, a masked man in the team of mismatched men, vs. Hangtime, a black dude in a basketball gear, and one half of the Southside Playas, J-Money. It seems natural to me that Hangtime, being a basketball guy, should have a serious feud with those volleyball players from the last CWF tape I watched, who I later found out to be the unmasked Black Skull of OMEGA fame, along with Cham Pain, who has obviously lost his fuckin’ mind.

BEER TWO: This is a casual match, as everybody seems to be in sneakers. Actually, J-Money has wrestling boots on, and of course, Xsiris has a mask on, I’m sure a Highspots special. Hangtime looks as if he’s straight from a pick-up game at UNC-Greensboro, putting on elbow and knee pads on his way to the Dojo. THIS IS THE SQUEAKIEST RING I’VE EVER HEARD! It’s sort of enthralling, like the first time you saw Georgia Championship Wrestling on TBS and they had that extra tinny sound to their ring, unlike most wrestling you’d ever seen. Xsiris does a kick at a fan, then a springing senton onto Hangtime. The CWF should think about doing one of those one-night tourneys, featuring their guys and a few outside names, of light heavyweights, because there’s some decent dudes down in Cackylacky right about now. Of course, that’s God’s Country; Flair’s Country; and motherfuckers love some wrestling. There are wrestling churches. I saw one, in some town, run by the Italian Stallion in a strip mall, and even the half-crippled fat black dude in a Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirt with cross-eyes because a battery blew up in his face wasn’t down with it. God wrestling could be great if they had somebody really research the context of religion, as opposed to just having wrestling matches in a parking lot, then offering to testify for folks. You preach to the converted that way. If you had some evil Sam Hayne character throw fireballs and still get pinned by George South’s old ass, with the spirit of Jesus in him more visible than ten Hulk-ups combined, then you might convert some pagan delinquents into your collection plate. I don’t mind this match anytime Kenny James is not in it. He is just too volunteer firefighter for me to get into. James and Xsiris win the match via some chicanery, of course. Goddamn, bastards. That Kenny James is one overweight, pasty, heel motherfucker. Okay, Tomk of the Death Valley Driver Video Review is all about this Brass Munkey cat, and he’s up next. Tomk is one weird motherfucker and seems in tune with what I’d enjoy, even though he’s only met me in real life once, and on a night I ended up drunk and getting in a fight with some chump at a warehouse party who was wearing one of those ‘70s style thrift store brown leather jackets. Tomk sent me like 12 hours of Sid & Marty Krofft nonsense, and I think I owe him big-time, and there’s actually a couple of tapes here with his name on them, if only I had the proper combination of motivation and money. It seems I always have one, but not the other. Stephen O’Hara has this odd little Alfalfa sprout on the front of his hair, in MTV punk rocker style. Munkey has a giant unfilled tattoo of a cross on his chest, suggesting he ain’t nowhere close to the type of Christian my grandma would approve of. Munkey was not afraid to deliver the shittiest of stiff kicks to the back of O’Hara, completely more violent than anything yet. Munkey goes to the top, and some old drunk yells, “Come on Munkey, get funky!” Munkey is pretty good, and has that young redneck mustache that suggest the mad smoking of blunts in Ford Escorts in IGA parking lots. IGA what, IGA who.

BEER THREE: Man, Brass Munkey is not afraid to be wickedly vicious with a kick or clothesline or slap. He misses with the frogsplash, obviously because it goes against his monkey nature. INDY DOUBLE CLOTHESLINE STALWART! And the ref counts. He hits the Munkey Wings, aka Christopher Daniels’ thing, for the win. And the combatants hug. You know why? Because this is an indy tournament of cruiserweights and nobody knows any better. I will cheer the day somebody ruins the fuckin’ honor of an indy tourney by smashing the trophy over somebody else. Brad Attitude vs. The Kamikaze Kid is next up, yo. The Kamikaze Kid, visually, is very Willow the Wispish. Size-wise, he’s very Shannon Moore-ish. Which makes him the bump-master early on, as he’s a munchkin, and has to use wizardry and thinking skills to outmaneuver the bigger Attitude. You know, Brad Attitude could be Ric Flair Jr. in the ring, and I’d have trouble with it because that’s a stupid fuckin’ name. At least be Tad Attitude and act like a rich kid. Or Chad Attitude and act like a rich kid, just not so rich as Tad. But Brad Attitude? Man, that’s tough to swallow. The thing I love about a guy like The Kamikaze Kid, just like with the old OMEGA masked guys, is I can only hope they are like 15, and wear a mask to conceal the illegality of their actual professional wrestling. Laws are stupid. I remember reading at Indy Insiders how Kamikaze was just in a mask vs. mask match with somebody, probably Xsiris, and I can only hope both of them are under-age, but one of them just turned over-age and legal, and thus lost a mask match, to show their face, and accumulate rat notches on their travel bags. Attitude teases throwing the Kid into the crowd, but instead throws him out the side of the ring against the brick wall, in a wicked bump. I will drink in honor of that shit.

BEER FOUR: The ref does a super-slow count until Kamikaze shows signs of actual functional life. As he appears on the apron, the girls in the crowd scream, because North Carolina girls have been raised to appreciate the wrasslin’. Kamikaze is out, and Attitude picks him up for a Razor’s Edge type thing, and the Kid doesn’t come to until he’s about to get planted. Then he busts a double-pump frogsplash, barely getting an extended second pump out. That’s great and all, but I’d still put it behind the over-exaggerated single-pump splash of Art Barr and Eddy Guerrero. However, to the Kamikaze Kid’s credit, I’d put the double-pump ahead of the seven thousand single-pump ones most motherfuckers do. Corey Edsel comes out as the CWF champ, and he’s fuckin’ good, and big. He won a certificate, an actual certificate. That rocks. Not a trophy, but a certificate, as best singles wrestler of the year. And he talks on the mic about how great the fans are, and how it couldn’t happen without them and thanks for supporting the show. It’s beautiful, and perfect. This is indy, with a British and Canadian flag on the wall as well. Ahh, all these certificates are the Independent Insiders awards. That’s a great website for keeping up with Carolina indy wrasslin’, but I can’t remember the addy. Do a google search for “indy insiders” and “Carolina” and you’ll be there, fool. You know, now that hippies have been inundated with hip hop culture and started wearing baggie homemade patchwork corduroys, wrestlers are the only sub-culture left that still wears fanny packs. I loved going to a show and seeing a show somewhere and having the hip hop and hippie cultures combine in a hot, young, dirty hippie chick, with sagging baggy pants, like a hip hopper, and no underwear, like a hippie, showing her ass in a way that my uncle telling me to “stop showing your ass” would never understand, were he to be resurrected from beneath his tombstone with the burn-out.

BEER FIVE: Hey, it’s Otto Schwanz in the ring, the bestest wrestler in North Carolina who should be on your TV screen had the people in charge of putting wrestling on your TV screen cared about wrestling. His opponent is Corey Edsel, who is better than you’d ever expect from looking at him. My dear reader, imagine a guy who’s like PN News brother, but can actually wrestle a match instead of kicking a wack-ass pre-written “freestyle”. Otto Schwanz is the best over-seller in the business, and were wrestling the way it was, he’d be making a fat paycheck as a glorified jobber in Atlanta every Saturday night. Otto is the King of Over-Emphasis, which would make my last statement even more true. Schwanz is controlling the match, with Corey getting little bursts of comeback here and there. Schwanz keeps hitting the figure-four, which harkens back to the Carolina wrestling roots of future Governor Ric Flair. Of course, in true modern urban Dusty fashion, Edsel reverses it. Edsel is one of the better big men I’ve seen in recent years, but he should lose some weight, because he’s faster than his weight suggests and he can’t keep kicking ass like he does with his girth. Then again, the motherfucker lives in North Carolina, home of Hardee’s peach milkshakes, and he’s doing shit I ain’t doing at half his weight, so fuck me. I’m just saying, go far, big man, go far. Edsel wins with a powerbomb pin on Otto.

BEER SIX: This has been a pretty shitty review, and I’m not even drinking heavily enough to sleep through the night, and there seems to be only one match left, so fuck, I don’t know what to tell you. I might just mail it in. It’s not like more than nine people read these fuckin’ things anyways. And the more I write this dumb shit, the more chance I stand of some wrestlers deciding I’m a little too fuckin’ smart for my own good and kicking my ass in a parking lot somewhere or another. I mean, I can hold my own, I’m six foot one, 230 lbs. But I’ve also had my ass kicked enough times in my life to know, that no matter how good you can hold your own, sometimes you will get your ass knocked the fuck out, and when it’s like four on one, you better just look to break one nose for face value before you get super destructed. I haven’t had my ass kicked, shit, I haven’t even been in a fight since my kid was born, like four years ago. There are times, when you mostly bottle your emotions like I do, being a cockshit Southern man and all, that violence cleanses. You might beat some other dude’s ass, or he might beat your’s, but the winning and losing is not so much the point as the violence that cleanses the pain of everyday existence, the shitty jobs and cheatin’ women and overdue electric bill and suspended license. That’s why oftentimes dudes who you see fighting in some run-down backroads pub will be buying each other beers half an hour later – they’ve bonded in that experience, and publicly no less. I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying; I just hope this last match has some of that senseless soul-cleansing violence that the wrestling is supposed to give me. I don’t mean blood and guts with light tubes sticking out your ears violence; just some wholesome down home fisticuffs to the forehead grudge match hatred. This jank is a Survivor Series Elimination Match, handicap style, with Mikael Yamaha, The Gemini Kid, and William L. Cross, the commissioner of CWF, facing off against Slick Ric Converse, NiteStic Eddie Brown (who rules), Kurt Solo, and that goddamned Hawaiian shirt stoner manager Brad Stutts. GeeStar is part of the evil entourage, and I dogged her out as a fat chick in the last CWF review, and I heard through the grapevine she was pissed, because I judged her physically and not by how good a wrestler she was. I’m not one to go back on shit, but I’m hitched to a pretty feminist ol’ lady, who does makes empowering herbal tonics and all for herself, inapplicable to men, and has studied under serious femi-naturalist kooks like Susun Weed, and on top of that, I have a four-year-old daughter, and we’re very conscious about raising her with enough self-esteem that hopefully we can immunize her from falling for the date-rape, bullshit, you-suck-my-cock-but-I-ain’t-eating-no-cooch frat thug crowd that seems to grow in number every year. Shit, my daughter was wearing a shirt with GODDESS across her belly when she was 2. So I hate to be considered some asshole misogynist. However, that being said, America is a fucked up place, run by the aforementioned shitty frat thug men who have gotten older. And women are judged by looks first and foremost. Look at fuckin’ wrestling itself. Vince McMahon may be convinced some indy chick is the greatest wrestler this side of The Dynamite Kid, but he’s gonna make her get a tit job before she’ll appear on WWE TV once. It’s gotta suck, especially when you’re doing this for love. Well hell, same goes for the men, because if you don’t have the “Look” that Vince wants, you’re shit out of luck. Unless you take “nutritional supplements”. Look at The Hardy Boyz in their OMEGA days, and look at them now. Shit, if somebody put together a yearbook of WWE Superstars, before their stardom, during their stardom, and after they were squeezed of every dime of merchandise and catch-phrase value they could be squeezed of and tossed aside, you’d have mad motherfuckers calling for the head of Vince McMahon. I mean, shit, the dude allowed his own daughter to get breast enhancement surgery. He may not have asked her to do it, but he certainly ain’t afraid to show what he paid for on his TV shows, now is he? And that sucks, way more than me judging by looks. I mean, I’m some dude sitting here, like any dude, always thinking about sex. I don’t add any violence to it; I don’t add any weird control issues to it; nothing. I am down for mutually beneficial getting’ it on, and that’s it. So I say to you GeeStar, wherever you are, my bad. But by me hearing what you’re saying and being sympathetic, that means I don’t fit in the power structure of America in general, and wrestling in particular. Look at ECW. Look at the WWE. Shit, TNA’s biggest female participation is girls dancing in cages. When my daughter gets to be a teenager, I am gonna be shooting off the front porch nightly, just to scare motherfuckers away. Men suck, and I know this, because I am a man. Okay, okay, enough diatribe…back to the wrestling.

BEER SEVEN: The Gemini Kid is absolutely fuckin’ awesome because he’s an indy wrestler in North Carolina wearing a 1000% Guapo t-shirt. Stutts is doing a great fatboy Jim Cornette not-quite-comfortable in the ring schtick before the match with the ref checking him. Of course, the ref finds foreign objects. My favorite all-time pre-match nonsense was Thunderfoot who would let the ref check his left boot, then spin around and lean on the ropes to let him check the left boot again, leaving the dreaded loaded boot unscathed. The ref keeps pulling gimmicks out of Stutts’ apparel. Cross and Stutts start out and Stutts does some serious stalling, like only a childhood fan of Tully Blanchard could do, then he tags out to Eddie Brown. Yamaha tags in as well. Eddie Brown’s facial expressions are fuckin’ great. Not many even fuckin’ attempt to do facial shit in the ring, but look how much it’s helped guys like Steven Regal. Blah blah blah. You know, it’s easy to overlook the fact there’s a kid wrestling in dirtbike gear, but when you think about it, that’s fuckin’ perfect. North Carolina wild kid dirtbike indy wrestler. I grew up with like nineteen dudes who could’ve been Mikael Yamaha. For as small and pure babyface as he is, I gotta give Yamaha love because he might be the only guy in the ring that knows what Team Hessian is. And I bet he had a Jeremy McGrath poster on his bedroom door when he was 12. We’ve got Kurt Solo in the ring now against The Gemini Kid, and they look far from your average Monday night wrestler, but they’re great. It’s so odd that styles will place a thing, because you wouldn’t see this assortment of motherfuckers in a Jersey ring or Texas or Indiana. This is pure Southern shit right here. The heels are doing rapid-fire tagging and beating-upon of Gemini, and all these guys sell pretty good. Usually that’s what makes an indy show so indy, is the inability to pretend to have actually been hurt by twelve minutes of punishment before you jump up and do a corkscrew plancha through three tables off of a girder in the ceiling. Gemini is beaten down and they tag in Stutts for the pin attempt, but he only gets two, and then ducks out in true heel manager coward fashion. New style and old style ring-gear displayed, as Kurt Solo, in some swank-ass trunks, shiny and evil looking even in their white with touches of blackness, beats on The Gemini Kid, who has black trunks with GEMINI in big plain letters down the side, and wrestling boots with a simple black star on them. Gemini pins and eliminates Kurt Solo, and then Eddie Brown comes in to advance the carnage. Three on three now. Great heel suckerage going on there, as Stutts gets caught in the ring after another two-count on Gemini, he stalls and does the whole time-out bit, then when the crowd gets hot for the tag to the commissioner to come in and give Stutts his, Stutts suckers him into the corner where he tags out and then the commissioner, strong by coward manager standards but weak by actual wrestler standards, is forced to get smacked around by Eddie Brown and Ric Converse for a while. He Crosses Up though, and gets the hot tag to Yamaha.

BEER EIGHT: Eddie Brown gets behind a beaten Gemini, holds his arms up and pumps them, chanting “Ge-muh-nye” in pseudo-redneck twang, and then drops him on his head. And he does one of those great, lengthy upright suplexes of his as well. A sudden small package by Gemini eliminates Eddie Brown, though. It’s now three one two, with Slick Ric Converse, the CWF champion, being the last protector of that cock-sucking, stoner, Playstation 2 time-wasting, Gen-X coward manager, Brad Stutts. The crowd, only two rows deep, is fuckin’ loud by this point. There are no more of those completely silent moments I mentioned earlier. Converse is working on a plethora of weird ways to drop Yamaha on his head, until Yamaha rolls him up in a reversal for the pinfall, leaving coward manager all alone against all three of the other dudes. Stutts, of course, tries to split, but Yamaha and Gemini trap him ringside, do the duck in a row getting punched, and throw him in the ring for the vengeful wrath of Commissioner William Cross. Stutts attempts to repent for his wayward activities of the past, but Cross ain’t having it, and he pins the dude after a DDT. The good guys win the main event and everybody can go home happy. I hope they don’t get tricked into one of those stupid six-dollar burgers at Hardee’s though. That shit’s a rip-off and a half. Sort of like me calling this a 12-Pack Tape Review and only drinking seven and a half beers on it.

EPILOGUE: FIRST STAR OF THE TAPE: Nite-Stic Eddie Brown. The motherfucker is money, and the fact that guys like Brown never even get considered for an opportunity in those bullshit over-hyped northeast smart mark indies is the reason I don’t like those bullshit over-hyped smart mark indies. A bunch of sheep, worshipping CZW. SECOND STAR OF THE TAPE: Brass Munkey. The motherfucker probably ain’t old enough to buy beer yet, though I’m sure he does, and he’s fuckin’ bad ass. Plus, he misspells monkey, which means he’s down, knowwhatumsayin. THIRD STAR OF THE TAPE: The Gemini Kid. Really, I could’ve picked anybody – Kurt Solo or Corey Edsel or Otto Schwanz or The Kamikaze Kid, but I pick Gemini because motherfucker has simple iron-on looking letter spelling GEMINI on his pants, and a Los Guapo t-shirt. You can’t beat that. I’ve gotta ride down to Cackylacky one weekend, see if Boomer is still alive, and catch these fuckers live. And though it’s family oriented wrestling, you know there’s a good bar not too far away, one with some AC/DC on the jukebox, because it’s motherfuckin’ North Carolina daddy.

12-Pack Review: XPW 08/31/02

BEER ONE: Xtreme Pro Wrestling, the wrasslin’ that everybody loves to hate, and understandably so. Rob Black is not a decent guy – he’s a high end pornographer, and brings those glossy, sleazy production values to the World of wrestling, which I’m sure was an easy transition. I mean, I’m with you – fuck Rob Black. But how can people run around masturbating all over their Smackdown-laden fantasy booking for Wrestlemania XV4B, and then condemn XPW. Rob Black and Vince McMahon are very much alike, very much. One’s just an admitted pornographer, and the other’s a supposed genius businessman. Both take people with low self-esteem, drop them into a social shark tank of surgical body manipulations, drug abuse, and Bacchanalian sexual dysfunction deemed self-exploration. Both leave those they exploit of all worth on the side of life’s shitty pop culture road, half-broke monetarily and completely broke psychically, lusting for the limelight they’re no longer in. Both repackage wrestlers so that they can own the gimmick, and both stress production values that put a layer of shine on whatever shit they might be throwing at the wall, giving it a little more stick for all us fuckin’ fickle dumbasses out here waiting to watch something, anything, to take our minds off…well, our minds. Tits? Black and McMahon got ‘em for you, as real as the Grandma pictured on any frozen food entrée with Grandma as part of the title. Violence against women and homosexuals? Affirmative on both ends, and always ready to toss out more. Yet everybody, as of late, has loved all over the WWE Smackdown brand because of the worker’s, and most people wouldn’t piss up XPW’s ass if its guts were on fire. I’m not here to defend Rob Black; he’s a slimy fucker. He, in all likelihood, had a dude’s finger lopped off because said dude was boning Black’s former porn whore pussy on the side. He did some webcam where he was gonna feed a baby PCP, then eat it on a big sandwich while his buddies took bonghits, playing Meshuggah real loud. And he’s a modern-day pornographer, abusing women who probably grew up abused already. Don’t get me wrong; I love to get fuckin’ buck naked and hit the sugar walls with as many women as I could. But call me old-fashioned, or a sensitive type, or whatever, but if there’s two, or even three of us there, I want us all to enjoy ourselves. This modern-day pornography of having seventeen dudes fuck one chick in the ass so she screams is kind of weird. First a bunch of guys standing around stroking themselves, waiting for their turn is kinda weird. I wouldn’t stand around with five other guys, all of us naked, and masturbating. So why would I want to stand there with five other guys while one guy does the only chick in the mansion we rented for the day? And the money shot…that is the stupidest degrading shit ever. Ooh, that’s so awesome, he just blasted his sperm all over her face. What’s the message we’re sending here? That the chick shouldn’t have ever made us cum, because we’re just gonna shoot it in her face like an execution style murder? I don’t fuckin’ get it. Even the silicone titties that half of you are brainwashed into thinking are sexy…they take the sensitivity out of it for the women. I mean, that’s a major erogenous zone, and they destroy it to make their tits bigger to be attractive to guys who want to blast them in the face with sticky sperm. What the fuck? Are we that fucked up? And sure, Rob Black has made that his business, but don’t think Vince McMahon wouldn’t do the same. He’s required women to get breast implants to get contracts, even allowing and probably paying for his own daughter to get a tit job. I have a daughter, and if she ever suggested she might want a tit job, I’d probably beat the fuckin’ shit out of her. Of course, I don’t have to worry about that, because we instill our daughter with self-esteem, which will do more to keep her out of that sick cycle of psychological whoring most of us are stuck in half the time anyways. Guys like Rob Black and Vince McMahon prey on that shit, no different than a twisted white guy driving around truck stops in Delaware in his stationwagon looking for hookers to kill. You see, when some chick is a whore in a porn movie, we say, “Well, she made that decision. She put herself into that lifestyle.” Same thing as the predatory killer, hookers are the dregs of the Earth, and no one cares, not until like 34 of them are murdered over a five year span, then some fat cop who jacks off to child porn finally decides to do something with all my goddamned tax dollars he’s wasting, and they start looking for the Truckstop Hooker Murderer or whatever clever name CNN gives the guy. Black and McMahon don’t murder bodies though, they murder souls, and we don’t care. It’s entertainment. Those people are adults, they can choose not to do it. Man, fuck you and fuck them. Profits over people. The profit of the product is more important the people involved. The more you can squeeze out of other humans at as little monetary cost as you can get away, the better a business man you are. Shit, Vince McMahon is in the Forbes 500 now, isn’t he? He had his stupid XFL football on a major television network every week. He is powerful as fuckin’ shit. And all through the exploitation of human souls – the Jake the Snakes doing crack in British hotel rooms, the Dynamite Kids and Drozzes in wheelchairs, the dead-at-a-young age Rikishis and Davey Boys and Rick Rudes and so on. Now, the wrestling industry at large is probably guilty of that, rather than McMahon specifically, but he is the most successful wrestling promoter ever in all the history of the stars and planets, so I gotta think he ain’t afraid to turn a motherfucker out like Don the Magic Juan. That being said, the XPW has seemed pretty stupid, what with Rob Black’s desire to be ECW, going back to when XPW showed up at that one pay-per-view like some alternative rock fraternity jocks, trying to cause a ruckus, and the stereotypical frat fight that ensued. The only thing missing was a pizza joint that had $1 green bottle beers on Tuesday nights being across the road. Well, it seemed for a while everybody wanted to be the new ECW, and everybody was running the ECW Arena. This show I’m about to dig into, Hostile Takeover, is the first show XPW ran at the infamous and over-glorified ECW Arena. Motherfuckers act like the Arena magically makes the wrestling better. You know what? Madison Square Garden is probably the most famous basketball arena the World over, yet the Knicks have usually sucked the last couple years. It’s not the building, it’s the wrestling. And that’s what led me to get XPW involved in this tournament of independents. Let’s see, Rob Black sucks a lot. But Damian & Halloween, Chris Hamrick, Juventud Guerrera, Vic Grimes? That’s good shit. I’m down with all that. If I could go to a fuckin’ indy show that got me half as hyped as that line-up does maybe once in a year, I’d be a happy drunk. And the tape starts with the wrestler I hate the most in all the World – Shane Douglas. The mutants chant “Welcome Back! Welcome Back!” because indy wrestling crowds want more than ever to seem smart and respectful yet edgy and get themselves over as a whole. Fuck the crowd. Lizzy Borden is with Shane, and I think that’s the slut whore who Rob Black is married too, and she’s not the Lizzy Borden who sang “Give ‘em the Axe”, or better yet “Terror Rising”, so fuck her. Shane is like I always remember him, cutting a self-glorifying promo while clutching a title belt he probably pulls Hogan-like backstage shenanigans to keep, all with a cast on his body. Shane is eternally injured in one way or another. Maybe that’s so when he’s finally retired he can blame the continuous shitty matches he had on injury, from 1994 all the way till the end.

BEER TWO: Terry Funk is in the ring cutting a promo, and he’s just not his old self, being cool and crazy. It’s kind of pathetic now, ever since his last run in WCW. I don’t know, maybe he gave up the Coors Light. Funk is talking about “f’nXPW” and “rinsing out your dirty underwear” and all sorts of nonsense that I guess would sound like a great cut-down if I was dressing out for phys ed in the locker room in seventh grade, but being a grown human being who has fought other grown human beings over things as dumb as not calling the rail on sinking the eight ball, well, this seems contrived and idiotic. Good wrestling gets you hyped and makes you stomp your feet. Bad wrestling, which the World is goddamned chock full of nowadays, is like all the guys on the high school football team who couldn’t get college football gigs doing a live improv theater performance with an outline/script put together by some closet homosexual with either money or believable promises of money. Funk’s knee was attacked from behind, and I hope somewhere tonight in this World, Shane Douglas has a Magnum T.A.-like car accident. Lizzy Borden, with her fake tits, leads Shane down the aisle, with his fake talent. I am fake excited. Now, this is what I’m talking about. It’s Psichosis, Tijuana’s millionaire, vs. Super Crazy, bedecked in an IWA Puerto Rico t-shirt. The thing about the former WCW Mexican cruisers who now do the indy thing sometimes, is they don’t seem to give a shit about wrestling in front of non-brown people, only doing it for La Raza, like Frost. They start with the armdrag and missed dropkicks nobody can outdo the other ending in a face-off, center-ring. Standard indy fair that’s been overdone in recent years, but we’ll see where they go with it. Nicho does what Nicho does best, even off a shoulderblock from a running the ropes bit, and that’s flip sideways and land on his head. Nicho will bump like a man with a gym bag full of painkillers and an 18-year-old white girl in his hotel room awaiting. Crazy is the controlling factor right now as Nicho keeps it technical, and Crazy stalks for a baseball slide and a dive, which Nicho pushes him into the guardrail with. You knew the heelish tactics would be necessary to turn the tide. Now Nicho is dropkicking Crazy around the ring. Back in the ring, Crazy is not afraid to nail dastardly dropkicks all about Nicho’s head, who is not afraid to take them. Crazy hits his standard Asai moonsault. Crazy does his ten-punch in the corner thing where the crowd counts in Spanish, and the shitty commentator says, “simulcast in espanol”. Not often to I miss Joel Gertner, in fact, this was probably the first time ever. Nicho turns a top-rope superplex by Crazy into a facebuster, then hits a legdrop from the other top-rope for the pin. Sort of a fast finish, and seemingly odd as Nicho took a beating and then pumped up suddenly for the win, like a face would do, when he was the heel of the match. I hate shit like that; this whole cult of personality no good guys and bad guys shit is stupid. What if movies started pulling that crap, and it was an action flick with like seven guys just all trying to kill the fuck out of each other and you couldn’t really get behind any of them morally, so you just went by how cool their t-shirts were? Man, this is gonna be good – it’s The Sandman vs. Pogo the Clown. Pogo is a guilty pleasure of mine, because he’s a fairly agile fat guy, doing a John Wayne Gacy gimmick. He should wear pointed boots like The Iron Sheik though, to really put over the clown thing, yet hearken back to the history of wrestling. One of the first great things I thunk of when I read about XPW doing a talent deal with IWA Mid South was seeing things like Pogo the Clown vs. Corporal Robinson at the King of the Death Match tourney this year.

BEER THREE: The Sandman seems to be getting some of the beer gut that WCW liposuctioned off of him back, finally. And Pogo stands over The Sandman and drinks a beer, which is blasphemy, I guess. Pogo looks like he could outdrink Jim Fullington, and The Sandman is doing hi same old pulling himself up and falling down thing. God, don’t these fuckers ever try anything different? Shit, The Sandman and Shane Douglas and Sabu and the whole gang should just do an ECW-reunion barnstorming tour and do this same shit they always do and make as much money off of Polaroids with Francine as they can off small-town hicks in the midwest. Sandman’s wife, looking very much like the first frame of a milfhunter movie, comes to his rescue, after Pogo leaves. Aw, she pours beer in his mouth to revive him. That’s so fuckin’ clever. Let’s add Mr. and Mrs. The Sandman to the Magnum T.A. car wreck wishes. The New Black Panthers are in the ring now, Malcolm XL and Smokey Carmichaels, and they’re great as foul-mouthed not-quite-as-funny Ron Killings, who I think used to be involved with them. “So fuck all the bullshit, and bring out some motherfuckin’ Mexicans.” Holy shit, Halloween talks in English, and he talks in cholo drawl about kicking ass, and goddammit, if we did a Top 25 Tag Teams in the World every month on my fuckin’ website, then Halloween & Damian would be my number one pick for the last year and a half. Compton is really a wrestling hotbed when you think about it, as most gangster black tag teams for the last ten years have come from there, as well as the Public Enemy. I’m not sure who’s running the wrestling school down there, but he’s obviously not a very technical fellow, and I can’t see Ernie “The Cat” Ladd’s Republican ass endorsing such promo-cutting styles, but hey, if it puts fat white asses in the seat, who can complain? Halloween and Damian decked out in customized overalls and ominous facepaint is fuckin’ wicked. The only thing that could make them better is if King Diamond was their manager, or if they came out to something off The Ultra-Violence. Even Halloween in reddish-orange, and Damian in black, adds to the evil. And they’re the faces. Evil heroes, proof that Slayer has had an influence on the World. Wow, Malcolm XL doesn’t suck, hitting a backflip over the top rope to the outside on Damian. This is for the XPW tag team titles. Halloween makes it lucha rules and runs in to chop Carmichael into the ring. They trade smacks, then Halloween lets Smokey run into him a few times, and then he just clotheslines the fuck out of him. Outside the ring, Damian has dropped the straps of his overalls, and I expect a fistdrop soon. Carmichael hits a flippy-dippy thing to the outside on Halloween, giving both Panthers a chance to show high-flying moves. Then Mexico’s Most Wanted heads down the aisle, out of there like a five thousand dollar love seat. Once dragged back to the ring, they take over, and Halloween hits El Chairo Con Huevos on him, which is a clever name for a clever move. I’d describe it for you, but that would be really fuckin’ gay of me. You see, these are 12-pack reviews because when shit like that happens, instead of me being a fuckin’ mark and trying to think up some clever line to replace where Joey Styles would say “oh my god”, I just drink beer. Damian does a nice pin break-up, and Malcolm XL is a couple seconds late on the follow-up maneuver. Shit, the Panthers hit simultaneous highspots; they’re not bad at all.

BEER FOUR: Damian has to be a King Diamond fan, as his facepaint is very much like the King’s drippy paint years, where he went beyond his standard style to the weird black-and-white zubaz thing. I gotta think this is because Halloween is fuckin’ crazy, because you gotta think they apply each other’s facepaint so it doesn’t take so long. I can hear Abigail cranking up now, and two muscular insane Mexicans in a shitty locker room in a bingo hall painting each other up for a couple hundred drunks. Halloween’s paint can’t take too long, I mean it’s fuckin’ orange with black eyes. So once “The Family Ghost” gets to going, Halloween is getting serious about the evil of Damian’s facial stylings. By the time they get to the title track, Halloween’s wrapping it up, and they sit there vibing and self-psyching themselves for fuckin’ Godliness through the entire seven minutes of madness of “Black Horsemen”, and they are primed. And I’m sure they have to time this shit. You can’t get that primed, and then sit around for an hour waiting for your match. I couldn’t make my face look that fuckin’ Godly Evil and just walk around casually, like nothing is up. It’d be like LSD, and every time I passed a mirror, it’d fill me with a rush of uncontrollable emotions that I couldn’t stop so I’d just have to ride to wherever it, my sub-conscious, wanted to take me. Mental note to self: GET HIGH AS FUCK TOMORROW AFTERNOON AND SIT IN THE BACKYARD IN THE SNOW LISTENING TO KING DIAMOND. Wait, you have a kid now. Okay, revised mental note to self: GET HIGH AS FUCK TOMORROW NIGHT AFTER THE KID GOES TO BED AND SIT IN THE BACKYARD IN THE SNOW LISTENING TO KING DIAMOND. I should probably burn some things as well. Fire is good; it keeps us in touch with our feral roots. As does sex. As does violence. Damian hits the Mexican Guillotine for a two-count, as Carmichael breaks up the pin. Guys are getting fucked up in this match, and the partner is always there to run in and break up the potential pinfall, like a good tag match should have. Thus, you are telling the crowd that since it’s a tag match, two men have to be beat down, so as to not break-up a pinfall. And as I say that, Halloween powerbombs Carmichael on XL, then they hit Montezuma’s Revenge, one of those clever team-style moves, for the win. Those guys rule, and King Diamond rules, and Mexico rules for having kids to this day into getting fucked up on inhalants and listening to metal. I haven’t done enough inhalants in my life to the point where I have noticeable neurological damage and shared an apartment with two other guys and we had no furniture outside of milk crates and construction site materials and you had to light cigarettes outside, just to be safe, but I’ve done enough to know the joys of killing a mass of brain cells so fast, everything takes on a rhythmic industrial hum and you sort of swim through life for a few minutes. It’s a lot of fun. I never listened to King Diamond on inhalants, but I can tell you Thin Lizzy is fuckin’ great on them. Early Ween, of course, was made for inhalant abuse. The Butthole Surfers, though more of a trippy band, aren’t bad on inhalants, especially that weird double live tape thing with the alien on the cover. Oh fuck, Pussy Galore is the best for inhalants. And acid. The Exile on Main Street cover record is the most absolutely brilliant thing on Earth, of course, because I listened to it like three times in a row one day on five hits of acid while living the dorm-life in Richmond, Virginia. Later, me and my roommate were still tripping, laying there in our beds, and there was a fire alarm, and we couldn’t figure it out, we thought the stereo speakers were doing it. He was looking at them, I was freaking out, saying “Cut them off, man, shit”. People were banging on our door, and we assumed it was because our speakers had turned into a giant alarm clock, waking up the World at four o’clock on a Sunday morning. We stabbed the woofer of one of the speakers with a screwdriver before we finally answered the door and our RA told us we had to go outside and shit. We wandered till we met up with some friends, and nobody had any liquor, so we just stood there in the cold, watching the lights on the cop cars and fire trucks. Ahh, it’s Angel the Hardcore Homo vs. Supreme for the Death Match title. Supreme seems more gay to me than Angel. An effeminate latino is gay, but a good haircutter, and the type of guy who knew chicks to fix you up with since he was friends with them, but not enough to not set them up for a good dicking. Those type of gay guys are the best. Supreme is that fat, white, creepy dark homosexual, upset over the years of closeted homosexuality, and very much into the Anal Birth of Bert type stuff, that he scares the fuck out of me, just because they exist. There’s barbed wire in two corners, and this is a battle of the dark, sado fat white guy fag, and the skinny, peppy, happy-go-lucky humourous fag. These guys are shitty hardcore, and Mad Man Pondo would rape them both, all with that goofy smile on his face. They keep teasing the barbed wire, in new and more closer ways, but nobody has tasted the barbs yet. Well holy fuck, Supreme takes a hurricanrana outside the ring, face first onto some light tubes. That is fuckin’ crazy; then I remember he’s a sadomasochistic fag, and it seems more pathetic than crazy.

BEER FIVE: Angel pulls at him but Supreme tugs away and rolls over, I’m sure to taste the sweet blade. Angel botches a flip and lands on the barbed wire and light bulbs; I can’t tell if it was a work or an accident. Supreme does a shitty Scott Hall release slam over his head and over the top rope onto a table of barbed wire, with Angel barely missing. Then more violence with the bed of barbed wire, and Angel’s pajama bottoms keep coming off. Suplex of Angel onto a bed of light bulbs, and then Supreme carves the hardcore homo’s head with a bulb. The announcer says, “these hardcore fans don’t even wanna look, avoiding the carnage.” Yeah, whatever. You could set Angel on fire and rape his burning body, and they’d chant “X-P-dub! X-P-dub!” Supreme sucks so fuckin’ much. Finally, Angel is allowed to get some violent offense, and his face is bloody and I’m sure he’s pissed at Supreme’s shittiness, so he basically just starts busting tubes over his face, which is great. I am so behind Angel at this point, just because he has some style and Supreme sucks. They go in the women’s bathroom, and Supreme washes the blood off Angel’s face in a toilet. Supreme’s fat ass is able to climb a ladder up to one of the Viking Hall balconies, and Angel follows him. Let’s see, a fat white guy and a skinny Latino…I bet I know who takes the bump. Well, fuckin’ fuck, there’s two tables of barbed wire below the balcony and Angel gets thrown off into it. Of course, the fat faggot gets the pin, and the proud outed homosexual has to do the job, not only by taking the loss but by taking all the gimmick-selling bumps for Supreme’s Chinese buffet-addicted ass. Next up is Chris Chetti, who has always been boring, vs. Juventud Guerrera. The great thing about Juvi is he’s either gonna be motivated and have a great match, or he’s gonna be wasted and be hilarious on the mic like some guy you bullshitted with at a party over by the cooler full of purple passion one time. Were I a booker, I’d have a rule for Juvi. I’d check his eyes real good, and you know what to look for when you’ve been there, Visine removes the red but not the truth, and regardless of the outcome, I’d book fifteen minutes for Juvi. If he seems relatively straight and able to walk without bumping into shit and not asking for a ginger ale when he’s already got one in his hand half-full already, it’s a fifteen minute match. If he’s staggering around and laughing that laugh that only the fucked-up can laugh, where you realize the Sandman’s wife’s wrestling name was Peaches and you look at her chest and you laugh real slow and guttural like Ronnie Dobbs crossed with Vader, well, then it’s twelve minutes of Juvi on the mic, talking whatever shit comes to his twisted little well-traveled Mexican mind, with a three-minute screwjob of a match tacked onto the end.

BEER SIX: You know, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Juventud is a Mexican who was working for an American company when he was arrested in Australia, buck naked, assaulting a police officer. That is fuckin’ special. You realize how comfortable you have to feel to be naked in a hotel, even in a strange city, much less a foreign country? Drugs don’t just make you feel that way, not even good drugs. You have to be in a certain state of mind to start with. Most drug partakers set certain boundaries for themselves before they take drugs each time, except the too-far-gone types like heroin and crack, where your pre-set boundaries are as useless as God on a Friday night. But the rest of us drug users, well, we pre-establish boundaries before we cut ourselves loose, so that we know we’ll only go as far as we want to go. You know, if you’re feeling especially fucked up and about to split a quarter of shrooms and share a bottle of Crown Royal, you tell yourself, “Okay, I’m not leaving the house. Except, to maybe chill in the back yard. But that’s it.” And you try to follow that. When you are a Mexican, with a high-paying job, in Australia, and you are able to take E, and have the boundaries so far-flung that you end up naked in the lobby fighting women cops, well goddamn, that’s amazing to me. Those are the best types to hook up with at Greyhound stations during long lay-overs when you’ve got seven hours to kill in places like Little Rock, Arkansas. “Hey man, you drink?” “Yeah.” “Want some vodka?” “Sure.” “I’ve got a half a fifth over in the woods over there across the street.” And you look worried, because your boundaries aren’t as far-flung as his. So he says, “Tell you what, meet me in that parking lot over there behind that bread truck. I’m gonna go get my bottle of vodka.” And you do. And his first question behind the bread truck is, “You don’t have any weed, do you?” God, humanity is great when we don’t deny our animalistic tendencies too much. That’s the problem with the money shot cum blast – it’s not animalistic, it’s a white man Republican power trip for broke folks. Animalistic is hitting the sugar walls raw and never pulling out. NEVER! What feels better than coming inside a woman? Not much that I’ve found; no drugs or alcohol or wrestling or anything. XPW is kind enough to subtitle Juvi’s commentaries. The crowd does the Steve Austin “what?” thing that was all the rage back then when folks wore onions on their belt, and Juvi plays it off well, going “Fuck You”, then “Fuck You”, then “Fuck You Again”, then “Fuck You Twice”, “You don’t get tired?”, and “So Suck My Dick”. Man oh man, Juvi’s the fuckin’ greatest. He goes all four sides of the ring yelling “FUCK YOU!”

BEER SEVEN: “You want some of this? You want some juicy juicy juicy juice?” Man, if I were a money mark, I can tell you that Steve Corino and Juventud Guerrera would be at the top of my program, with a motherfuckin’ bullet. Chris Chetti comes in. It’s nice to see Chetti stick with the wrestling after losing out on Tough Enough 2. You’d figure most of those kids would’ve just quit. Once the match starts, Juvi hits a nice vicious elbow to the face, and goddamn Chetti’s getting a beer belly. Couldn’t they have booked a Juvi/John Kronus match? That’d be much better. Juventud has the evil-happy-go-lucky eyes of a man who’s great to party with, but you never bring your girl around, or let him know where you live at. Some of my best friends have been guys like that. This match is clipped the fuck up. Juvi pours the juice from the blender he brings in on top of Chetti, and Chetti shakes. I have never, in all my life, ever shaken from liquid. One time, I was all fucked up at this party, and these rednecks said, “You like Beam?” And I said, “Yeah.” And they said, “Come take a shot.” And I went out and they handed me a pint, and you gotta understand where I grew up the schools remained segregated five years after Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education. And there’s rednecks with money who went to the white school, and there rednecks with no money who ended being the 15% of white kids once the schools were “desegregated”. Well, these rednecks were from the rich redneck school, and often times they didn’t like us public school kids, which at that time was probably fifty-fifty percentage wise, coming to their parties and fucking the girls. Well, I went out to take a shot, and they handed me a Jim Beam traveler, and it looked clear to me, but I was fucked up, so I swigged it. It was fucking rubbing alcohol. I was ready to throw up immediately, but wanted to fight first, but luckily my boy Jubb followed me out, seeing the scene develop and knowing a drunk Raven led off by three guys was likely to end in bad news of one sort or another and he came and threw the bottle down and yelled at the dudes and led me back to the general population of the party. I was real fucked up, but this chick Heather took care of me. Being the lovable drunk is great, because even though me and Heather didn’t hook up that night, just because I was so funny and charismatic, even in that complete state of disarray, I was able to hook up with her many times in the following years. Legend weighs heavy in the minds of the sugar walls, and even more so with memories of you being helpless. Juvi hits a Juvidriver, and Chetti sits up for two seconds with a weird look on his face, I guess in some clever selling way, but falls out, and he gets pinned, and he reminds me of Lance Storm at the stage when Storm was first in ECW. This is pitiful in two ways; first off, Chetti has been wrestling for a while and should be better, and secondly, Storm has been mid-card great at best in his career, never top-shelf status. Juvi goes to fuck up Chetti some more, and Julio Dinero comes out, but falls victim to the eye poke. One of my favorite moments as a wrestling fan is being at the lone NWA Virginia show at a bar in Harrisonburg, and being half-drunk, and having Julio Dinero come out to confront me, I don’t know why, and me telling him, “Good job, Mr. Corino” and pissing him off. God, there’s tape of that whole fuckin’ scene somewhere, but nobody will give it to me. Well, since it’s the ECW Arena, we have to have a 3-way Dance. It’s Altar Boy Luke vs. Little Guido vs. Vic Grimes. Grimes and Guido and a shitty Chris Daniels wannabe – this could be good or terrible. Altar Boy hits a nice swan dive on Grimes ringside, but he’s half the guy’s size, so it’s hard to believe. And then a springboard corkscrew plancha on both guys by Altar Boy. It’s great and all, but Altar Boy’s a mini. I’d have put him in a match with Angel, and put Supreme against Grimes. But I’m sure Supreme has a big ego and is Rob Black’s friend because he hooks him up with girls who live under bridges for cheap porn starlets or some shit, so Supreme couldn’t do the job to Grimes, and Grimes wouldn’t job to a fat S&M fag, so we end up with this match, when Guido should’ve been in a 3-way with Super Crazy and Nicho instead.

BEER EIGHT: This would be so much better if Larry Rivera were talking through my videotape-playing machine. The greatest thing is I have a Terry Funk vs. Shane Douglas match still left, FROM 2002! It could only be better if somebody dollied out Bruiser Brody’s body with a rotating chain screwed into his arm. Or The Sheik’s body getting tossed into the ring and somebody blowing fire through a hole in his hand. Guido keeps breaking up the pinfalls Grimes makes on Luke after vicious maneuverings. Luke taps out after some serious body-bending by both Grimes and Guido, which leaves just the two former ECW dudes. Grimes is very sudden and violent, and Guido is continuous and methodical, this is not a very good match-up of styles. But Guido is playing well so far. It’s really fuckin’ gay of me to notice, but John Finnegan is a superior referee. You can see him anticipate things, much like a great worker would, and he moves out of or into the way as necessary. Guido starts the David vs. Goliath mode by hitting a series of weird submission things on Grimes. Grimes hits the win with a Styles Clash thing. Grimes is very much Ian Rotten-like in his ability to get busted up like a blood-letting freak, yet able to tweak it with some actual wrestling. “Little Guido…he’s knows those pizza cutters very well…but in a different fashion.” God, that’s terrible commentating. The XPW TV title is on the line, with Chris Hamrick, in his gay red pleather outfit, challenging for the title against some fuckin’ manager and a hooker and the champion, Kaos. The only person without their hair dyed blonde is the referee. This is a ladder match, and Hamrick hits a loud superkick on Kaos’ manager, G.Q. Money. XPW seems a lot like a group of sadomasochistic gay men, interspersed with some actual wrestlers mostly from Mexico, and some hookers “retiring” from porn, plus a couple of washed-up ECW World champions. But the main focus is the sadomasochistic friends of the owner. Hamrick hits a springboard moonsault to the ringside area on Kaos, who’s holding the ladder. I would be all about Hamrick if he didn’t wear such queer clothing in the ring. Okay, Kaos is in the tree of woe, holding a chair against his forearm, and Hamrick sets a ladder up against the chair, and then climbs the top rope and dropkicks the ladder, which hits the chair, which hits Kaos, and it’s like watching that Oriental chick play billiards, which is fancy talk for shooting pool, on ESPN2, and it’s too much, so fuck it. Motherfuck it. Ladder matches are overrated. Now, we’ve got an “industrial-sized ladder”. Kaos misses a really aesthetically beautiful moonsault from two-thirds of the way up the ladder. Kaos is not too bad, either, kind of a cross between Lenny Lane and Lodi. I expected the XPW-exclusive wrestlers to all suck, but they have not. Chris Hamrick has short hair, dyed blonde, and is wearing shiny red pants. He ain’t from no Bristol, Tennessee, I’ve been at. Turned out, psychologically. I’ll say this for XPW – they have nice fiberglass Werner ladders for their match, four of them so far. Not the cheap metal ones you used to see in Sabu & Van Dam vs. The Eliminators matches that made ladder matches so great. I hate that scream that this Kriss Kloss dude does, or whatever his name is. Kaos wins the match, but falls off the ladder holding the title belt like they always teach you in Ladder Match 101. Danny Doring enters the ring to break up post-match nonsense, and the crowd cheers on violence against Veronica Kaine. So Doring piledrives her, complete with panty shot. Danny Doring talks on the mic for a minute or two, and he’s a bigger fag than I’d ever imagined. The sad thing about pro wrestling is the guys like Doring who start to believe their own promos and think they’re something other than some guy. Speaking of which, time for Shane Douglas. Shane, as a heel, dogs the other Philly promotions and puts over XPW. Funk cuts the promo short by coming to the ring and does the absolute worst chair throwing into the ring that I’ve ever seen. My grandfather has a bad leg and two rebuilt hips, and he could throw a chair into the ring better than Funk just did. I wish I could make all memories of Terry Funk disappear after he won the ECW title on their first PPV, and his legacy was frozen in that. Imagine Michael Jordan playing for another ten years, and not only playing, but forcing himself into a starting role, and bricking free throws against the front of the rim. That’s Terry Funk in 2002. Imagine Mario Lemieux playing for another seven years, at the end, sucking wind halfway through a shift on the ice, and barely able to skate past a defender, much less get a shot on goal. That’s Terry Funk in 2002. Imagine Emmitt Smith refusing to retire and smasing his shitty body along behind a patchwork offensive line without the benefit of the prescription and street drugs of the early ‘90s Cowboy offensive lines. That’s Terry Funk AND Emmitt Smith in 2002. Put Terry Funk and Emmitt Smith in that Magnum T.A. car wreck too, but make Terry the drunk driver who’s loose body goes with the vehicle rolls and comes out with one cut over his left eye. I don’t want to hurt the Funker, because he is the Funker, after all. They’re selling some serious Funk injury to the arm, and I can’t believe it because Funk keeps holding his arm up to show the crowd, in true Funker fashion.

BEER NINE: Finnegan stops the match, and puts a towel on Funk’s arm. But his arm is not hurt enough to not piledrive Lizzy Borden, and then tear off her panties. He’s such a babyface. Shane runs, and Terry Funk sucks up those few cheap cheers that feed his pathetic soul. I drank two sips of that beer, which feeds my pathetic soul.

EPILOGUE: FIRST STAR OF THE TAPE: Put ‘em together and whaddya got? Halloween and Damian 666. It’s hard to take one over the other, which is what a tag team should be about. God Bless the both of them for wrestling, and God Bless seeing them in a quality match to re-inspire me to watch lucha this weekend, though it will probably be a repeat, and it won’t have Fuerza Guerrera. SECOND STAR OF THE TAPE: Juventud Guerrera, by talking alone. If he could’ve somehow done a backstage scene where he date-raped Danny Doring’s stripper fiancé, it might’ve been better, but hey, when you’re a wrestling fan, you take what you’re dealt. THIRD STAR OF THE TAPE: Angel the Hardcore Homo. He’s not bad, and he’s an amusing, lovable homosexual. Were the territorial system still alive, I’m sure he’d be a great Junior Heavyweight member of the House of Humperdink.

12-Pack Review: NWA WS 11/02/02

BEER ONE: The first time I ever remember reading the term “NWA Wildside”, I didn’t know what to think. Wasn’t that the TV show with Terry Funk in it? Where was Wildside? Most wrestling promotions have geographical indicators in their names, but not with Wildside. It sounded like a great place for the Western States Heritage title to be resurrected. Eventually, because the Internet knows all motherfucker, that Wildside was in Georgia. And everybody says it’s good. Well, you probably know the history, you’re a fuckin’ wrestling nerd if you’re reading this anyways. You know the whole WCW developmental thing, and about Mamaluke and Styles and Air Paris and all that crap. I don’t need to tell you anything, Mr. Online Wrestling Fan. Well, this dude Jacey North used to wrestle in Virginia, and now he wrestles down there. The thing with Jacey is, he’s good in the ring and all, I’ve seen some good Jacey vs. Preston Quinn matches, probably the best indy matches I’ve seen in Virginia, outside of Rolling Thunder of course. Well, I always remember Jacey for one reason. J.T. Smith briefly was in the area and operated a wrestling school, the Virginia Wrestling Federation Academy, out of a dingy warehouse with a rut-filled parking lot in scenic Ashland, Virginia, where there is nothing, especially hope for the future. Anyways, me and my boy Matt the Firefighter got up and rode out to see a VWF show in the warehouse one time, and we drank plenty of Budweisers on the way, and sitting at the convenience store down the road on a Saturday night, watching the high school girls and guy talk and flirt, all of which probably love that Kenny Chesney motherfucker right about now, and it was beautiful perfection. We get to the show, and it’s very indy. Parts of it decent, and parts of it terrible. Bubba Knuckles was there, and he’s dead now I think. He got busted open with a chair on accident and was pretty bloody. But Jacey had one of the better matches that night, a tag match I think, and I seem to remember Hot Property also being in it and impressing me with his enthusiasm. Anyways, Jacey got the botched heel cheating clubbering with a cane for the finish, and he got clocked right smart. Later that night, I remember him walking right by me and Matt the Firefighter, holding a cold can of Lipton Iced Tea on his bruised bald head that he got out of the cooler the concession lady had set up in the corner. To me, that has always symbolized Indy Wrestling, the cold iced tea can held to the bruised head. Shit, I bet Jacey even had to pony up two quarters for it, to cover costs. Anyways, Jacey North sent me this Fright Night 2002 tape, and since it’s called Fright Night, I expect some scary shit to go down. Real scary shit. This was some tag tournament deal. I also have Old Milwaukee. Me and Old Milwaukee are always some tag tournament deal. Ahh, the wonderful comforting font of a Smart Mark video. Night 2 starts with The Backseat Boyz from Combat Zone talking shit about the NCW Arena. Trent Acid is annoying, which I guess is great since he’s a heel. Ref says, “Guys, you’re up in 10 minutes.” They are in street clothes, and the guy who’s not Trent Acid says, “We’ve got a massage in 10 minutes.” Dragon Dan Wilson is your ring announcer. Claudia the Claw is your referee, and she’s a chick. Rick & Chris Michaels are your first tag team for this match. They have the black and neon green clothes that The Confederate Mack endorses so much, as long as it’s not D-X related. Their opponents are Dory Funk Jr. & Adam Windsor. Dory is older than fuck and wearing a thrift store baseball hat. This is my first watching of “The Royal Stud” Adam Windsor, and he’s more solidly built than I had expected. Dory and Rick Michaels start it out. Dory has quick tags to Adam Windsor, who looks like he’d be a great partner to Adrian Street more so than Dory Funk Jr. You know, Dory might be old as fuck, but for a guy his age to be running around the ring, just running the ropes and doing headlock takeovers and shit, that’s pretty impressive. He should put his legs in the sun before he wrestles again though. And old guys should not wear blue biker shorts, I don’t give a fuck who they are. Rick Michaels apparently will also wrestle in a barbed wire match later tonight. Your ref looks like Janet from Three’s Company. Apparently it is an unwritten rule in professional wrestling that if you are British, you have to have either a crown on your trunks to symbolize your allegiance to the Queen, which makes you a natural heel in the republic of America, or you have to have a Union Jack, which makes you a babyface, because we don’t think of evil Queens and Kings trying to tax us anymore, we think of Def Leppard videos from our youth. Either there is no mic for the crowd or they are completely silent. Dory Funk Jr. looked old to me twenty years ago when he was losing the Mid-Atlantic title to Mike Rotunda, who spelled his name with an A back then because he was a big Herbie Hancock fan, and any Herbie Hancock fan worth his weight in jazz fusion vinyl knows that “Rock It” is crap compared to the Fat Albert Rotunda LP. Evil black men come in and break up the match, ruining the tournament format. Onyx enters the ring as well, and all sorts of angles are furthered, and the match is called a double DQ, letting Dory keep his face. Janet from Three’s Company emphatically explains to Dory and Windsor why she disqualified both teams. Rick Michaels takes the stick and starts talking about how he’s gonna carve up Rainman in the barbed wire match. The Backseat Boyz come out to the Midnight Express song, and I hate them. I really really hate them. Trent Acid and Johnny Kashmere hit the ring, and Kashmere takes the microphone. I think if ECW was still around, these guys would be embroiled in a bitterly boring opening match pay-per-view feud with Joey Mathews & Christian York right about now. And Danny Doring & Roadkill would always come out and make it a 3-Way Dance. God, ECW sure did get predictable. Ahh, evil is always good, and here comes Gabriel & Azrael, the Lost Boyz. Marilyn Manson fans indy wrestling in spot-tastic ways in the deep south is good post-modern culture.

BEER TWO: Gabriel and Acid start this party out. No tag out to Kashmere. Heel stalling antics, with another tag before even a lock-up. Boy band gimmicks suck, especially when they are heavily soaked in homosexual antics. Homosexuality is not funny; it is a serious good time when you feel the pang. And we all do. Don’t like. You know you’ve jacked off reading that story in Penthouse Forum about the old college buddy giving the guy a back rub after a physically taxing tennis match, that ends up in mutual masturbation and then a 69. I know you Mr. Online Wrestling Fan, better than you know yourself. That little Dream Sequence thing the Backseat Boyz do is pretty nifty. And then Johnny Kashmere takes a nice little face bump to the wood floor. Reverse rana by Acid on Gabriel with Gabe’s head landing on Acid’s back very awkwardly, making them lucky they didn’t die. Then Azrael puts Acid on the top rope in a tree-of-woe style position, then neckbreaks him. Lost Boyz set up chairs ringside and get ready to do a double suplex on Acid, but as they lift him, Kashmere dives in and causes all sorts of mayhem and chair rumblings. The Backseat Boyz do their big move and win and that is that. All those guys are good enough, but it’s like a lot of the indy shit I see, I just can’t get up for it. Brandon P & Jay Freeze, aka Future Shock, come out next. Their opponents are Scottie Wrenn & Tank, neither of which look like socially adjusted individuals. This is why wrestling is good. It gives a guy like Tank a place to be popular and have crowds cheer for him. Without the pro wrestling, a guy like Tank would be murdering teenage girls or some shit. Future Shock is from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and appropriately enough they have tarheel blue on. For big freakish guys, Tank and Wrenn work a nice double camel clutch/boston crab thing on Future Shock. Thus far, it’s a squash, so the small heels will have to eyerake their way to momentum here soon. Yep, a low blow and they take over on Tank. I like the aesthetics of Wildside teams having color-coordinated outfits, but they’re not exactly alike, like Chong’s explanation of what their band needed as outfits in Up In Smoke, the same, but different.

BEER THREE: Dragon Dan Wilson uses the word “chicanery”, which means I drink, as that’s my favorite word to work into everyday conversation. Tank is getting beat down, and it’s weird Southern tag role reversal as the heels are small and fast, while the faces are big monsters. Tank gets a nutsack grab, but then gets eyeraked back into submissive positions, teasing a hot tag for the crowd. There’s the big punch by the face and double fall-down. He is positioned for the diving tag, but no, Future Shock takes over again. Tank executes a chokebreaker, which is a chokeslam into a backbreaker across the knee, and is my new favorite move. Wrenn gets the hot tag, and hits a powerslam but the ref has his back turned. Brandon P comes in with a chair and cold clocks Wrenn, puts Freeze over him, and ref returns to action. Tank does that casahajamay thing Taz used to use on Brandon P outside the ring. Freeze goes for a tornado DDT on Wrenn, but he turns it into a tilt-a-whirl slam for the pin. I vote Tank the one indy wrestler Most Likely To Have Entered A Toughman Competition. Holy shit, the behemoth Iceberg is from “Places Man Fears To Tread”. That’s the best hometown since Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Iceberg is a very short 600 pounds, so short in fact, that his airbrushed name stops at the “r” on the leg of his pants. Stone Mountain is the opponent, another big man, Wildside’s Big Show. Iceberg tells the fans to move, and he throws Stone Mountain over the rail, or tries, and reversal and HOLY FUCK, Iceberg’s big ass goes over the rail. Now he’s getting rubbed into cage, and Stone Mountain has the worst wrestling outfit I’ve seen in my life – black pleather singlet with a silver mountain on it. Not a nice one either, just a crude mountain shaped thing on his belly. Iceberg’s button-down shirt with the sleeves cut-off and bloodstains on the back is much more pleasing. Iceberg is also bleeding, ever so minutely. Stone Mountain goes for a big choke, and the ref gets bumped. Goddamn all these ref bumps. Iceberg gets a low blow in, then gets a vegetable peeler from his C.E.O./manager Jeff G. Bailey. Stone Mountain has an icepick and stabs Iceberg in the head, and he’s got a good nasty bloody forehead that would make Rod Price proud. The ref disqualifies Stone Mountain, and all sorts of wrestlers come out to break them up. The old fashioned locker room pull apart. Iceberg has leaked blood all over all types of shit. He glares ringside, in his torn up shirt, bloody bald pate, and bad tattoos, looking like a well-fed and less-jailed G.G. Allin.

BEER FOUR: For some reason, in this 12-pack of Old Milwaukee in my studio, which is always cold, there’s a Budweiser. I haven’t bought Budweiser in years. It must be magic, or forgotten drunkenness, but nonetheless, I drink a toast to the Magic of Independent Shit, whatever it may be. We all have passions, and we want to do them for others to enjoy, and there’s a fine line where we start to try and make money off those passions, thus compromising them for mass appeal. That middle ground, where you’ve developed some but haven’t started to be pimped out/exploited/made it big just yet, that’s the perfect spot to be in. You know how NFL guys get busted for videotaping themselves having sex with drugged-out vixens? I bet Arena Football guys get away with that shit all the time because they’re not under the microscope. Scott Cage comes out to wrestle, and he slaps hands with the front row, which barely get up out their seats, meaning he’s a good guy, this I know. The other dude is Baldor Alexius Darkanius or some shit, or B.A.D. for short. His valet is a muscled up, fake-tittied chick named Taylor Made. That name screams The Anal Adventures of Max Hardcore Volume 14. Cage throws some really terrible punches. B.A.D. is cursed with an outward belly button. My boss sucks and gave us a shitty bonus, and this dude in the warehouse John, he doesn’t give a shit really, one of those great goofy oblivious guys it’s good to know. Well, two weeks after a shitty Christmas bonus that was accompanied with a letter saying “I’ve done what I can to not lay off people, so sorry this bonus is smaller than I’d like,” in other words, attempting to make us grateful for not losing our jobs instead of giving us workers the cut of his fat pie we deserve, well two weeks later, holmes takes a day to go to Maryland to buy an Audi. He comes in the next day, and we see the car and are like, “What the fuck?” So me and John are fucking off in the break room and the bossman comes through. John says, “So you got an Audi, hunh?” And the bossman turns, glowing with material superiority, which he thinks makes him enviable, “Yeah, I did.” John says, “I got an innie.” I stifle immense laughter into a chuckle. My bossman is not getting it and responds, “Yeah, it was a great deal. I got it in Maryland.” John answers, “I got mine from my mom.” At that point, I had to leave. You see, I’m trained to not upset my shitty boss, or else our company wouldn’t be as productive and I wouldn’t be as broke. We’re also not supposed to talk about what we make to each other. B.A.D. wins pretty quickly there, and I look at the Taylor Made chick again and get really creeped out about the whole muscle worship sub-culture that exists out there. Right now, some dude is paying money to have some roided out chick choke him with her thighs.

BEER FIVE: A security guard put his hand on Taylor Made so B.A.D. beats him down. Backstage interview now with bloody title holding Iceberg. His manager Jeff G. Bailey talks like a redneck salesman in a print shop, wearing the same five-year-old tie styles you’d see. I bet Jeff G. Bailey knows the best seafood buffets in all of Georgia, and I bet he can pitch some quarters in the locker room. “600 pounds of unharnessed malignance…” That’s quality promo-ing. Stone Mountain says something about “tasting blood and getting the victim’s DNA in his body” and things about hating Iceberg down to the bone marrow in his body. Onyx is cock fuckin’ diesel, and he’s teaming with Tony Mamaluke, who we all know is not afraid to break his own face for our enjoyment. Onyx is busy dancing in front of a cute white girl in the front row. God Bless the South. Mark & Jay Briscoe are the opponents, and they are still young and still great and full of potential, but the few years they’ve been in wrestling has left their eyes much darker and disturbed than they started. Mamaluke and Briscoe do some amateur no-one-can-get-the-advantage shit. The Briscoes are pretty tall, and with the proper “nutrition” could be humongous in the money-laden soulless sports entertainment branch of the pro wrestling. Onyx is wearing black boots that go pretty high on his calf, plus some big black kneepads, which makes it look like he’s wearing stockings. Mark with a dive, then Jay. The Briscoes are like everything the Harris twins could’ve been. Tony Mamaluke follows up with a swanton on the other three. Dave Prazak says “sea of humanity” for the second time on this tape, and I’m of the firm belief that you shouldn’t repeat terms like that on a tape. Once a tape. Just like a good MC wouldn’t use the same odd word twice in a rhyme, or you don’t repeat certain terms in a speech, he shouldn’t have done it. Or change it. Think of Joey Styles and how he inflected “oh my god” differently to change it up. Then again, don’t. That shit was stupid.

BEER SIX: Mark and Jay do a tag hand to foot, and watching this makes me realize a subtle thing I love about Southern wrestling, compared to the northern indys, probably subconsciously going back to the Civil War’s results. Southern indys, or at least Wildside, have a darker environment, with shadows and “chicanery”. Northern indys are always too bright. Maybe it’s just me growing up on Mid Atlantic with the regular show and the Worldwide show, where the crowd was in the dark and the ring was lit up like Pops on a Thursday night (you see, Thursday was payday). Onyx is good and all, but he seems sort of out-of-place with the Briscoes and Mamaluke. Jay Briscoe does not shave his underarm completely, which means he’s not ready to be a major league pro wrestler. Do regular people shave their underarms? I mean, shit, I have a hillbilly beard and dreadlocks, so shaving my underarm I’ve never thought about my whole life. I guess regular people, with their “work” haircuts and shit, and chicks who shave their legs and underarms and trim their cooch because they’re afraid to go against the paternalistic media’s desire to make pre-teen girls the ultimate sex symbol (mostly hairless and smooth), they might shave their underarms even as guys. The bell rings and the time limit has expired. What the fuck, was it a 10 minute time limit? No, says the announcer as I type that, a 15-minute one. That couldn’t’ve been fifteen minutes. John Phoenix comes out with Jeff G. Bailey, meaning he’s all evil. The curtains to Wildside are a glittery red Christmas tree wrapper, which is fine by me. Jason Cross looks like a Tough Enough candidate. He has a cross on his ass, which is not very Christian-like of him. I don’t know either of these guys, so I’m uninterested at the beginning. I’m more concerned with excitement at going to the Chinese buffet tomorrow and filling up on steamed dim sum or some shit. Too many wrestlers wear shirts in the ring. Phoenix wins my affection with a crazy springboard moonsault to the outside. Then he tries and barely hits a 450 splash to the wooden floor from the top rope.

BEER SEVEN: The great/bad thing about that is, as the announcer said, “he came within a centimeter of landing on Jason Cross’ face, with his boots.” It was very high risk and very drink-worthy. These two, who I’ve never heard of, are fuckin’ great. I am sold, and drunk. They do counters galore from an in-the-ring off-the-ropes position all the way up the aisle till Phoenix nails a spinkick. Holy shit, John Phoenix is fuckin’ awesome. Why haven’t I heard of this guy? Oh yeah, wrestling nerds are reactionary faggots, that’s right. Cross hits a corkscrew bodypress, and makes himself more drink-worthy by risking brain damage for 125 people’s enjoyment. Cross hits a running shooting star, which is not nearly as impressive as you’d expect from the name, for a two-count. Bailey uses a roll of coins on Cross, and then Phoenix hits a 450 splash for the win. Bailey uses a roll of pennies, in true heel manager fashion, not even trying to get quarters. We have the finals to the tag thing now, with Tony Stradlin & Todd Sexton, aka TNT, hitting the ring first. Midnight Express music starts up, bringing out those shithead Jersey fucks the Backseat Boyz. Trent Acid seems to believe his own hype, but I guess lots of blowjobs from rats can do that to you. Scottie Wrenn looks like the bassist for every nu-metal rap group out there. Future Shock nails Tank & Wrenn with chairs. They do a knee-mangling angle with Scottie Wrenn.

BEER EIGHT: Tank is gone with the Wrenn injury for now. Stradlin & Sexton are pretty good, but really small. I always remember reading an Apter mag back in the day about Kendall Windham, and the story had Blackjack Mulligan making him eat a second helping of flapjacks as they called them, to bulk Kendall up. At that point, Kendall had already won the Florida title, but he had to be bigger for the wrestling professionally. A promoter’s dick doesn’t get as hard for a skinny kid as it does a muscular kid, just like fratboys like fake tits. What I’m saying is TNT could use some second helpings. Two complete teams have a decent match, while Tank bleeds ringside, which leads me to believe he’ll win this thing. Johnny Kashmere looks like the type of guy who has really shitty taste in rap music. Backseats hit their Tea Gimmick on Sexton, but Stradlin (I think) does a roll-up on Acid for the win. Tank comes in the ring, though, refusing to lose like that Chuck D lyric. Scottie Wrenn comes out with bandages on his shiny pants. Of course, the heelish skinny dudes start to work on said bandage, and Wrenn is selling like an air conditioner at Christmas. CHOKEBREAKER! But only for two. Tank and Wrenn win while I don’t pay attention. So this is a barbed wire main event. “The Soul Assassin” Rainman vs. “The Original Chosen One” Rick Michaels. Very religious. No rules, no DQ, no countout. The ref comes out with safety goggles on, plus cooking mitts, which is a good sign. FUCK THE MICHAELS KIDS! RAINMAN COMES OUT TO “COME CLEAN”. “Gotta freaky freaky freaky freaky flow, control the mic like Fidel Castro.” Me and my boy Boogie Brown had a song called “Mic Control” where we cut up that “control the mic like Fidel Castro” line. Rainman is beating up fans and talking shit and this is a barbed wire match and he is my new favorite wrestler ever. Michaels brings a tiny torch to the ring and is dressed like the anti-Raven of ECW, with a white t-shirt without sleeves instead of standard black. Michaels runs back because he forgot his barbed wire baseball bat. This is one of those deals where they wrap the barbed wire around the ropes, Puerto Rico style, but they’ve only got the wire on two sides of the ring. Ah, they’ve got spiderweb shit on the other two sides on the ground. They have teased barbed wire to the forehead a few times so far, and I await the blood. Don’t promise me shit you don’t deliver, but I know this is just the proper build-up.

BEER NINE: Hey, it’s the first-ever barbed wire match in Wildside. That way, when I die, I can tell my grandkids, “I watched the first barbed wire match in NWA Wildside history.” They won’t care, but it will be fun to say dumb shit like that anyways. Rick Michaels leaves the ring to get his baseball bat. The Rainman is wearing a crimson mask, as Gordon Foley would say. He was great back in Continental. Now, Michaels gets the bloody treatment. “I am literally speechless” is the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever heard. No, not really. I’m drunk, and sorry you have to deal with more of this. I should quit doing these things; it’s painful for me and painful for you. Rick Michaels bloodies up the Rainman right good, then drags him around ringside, just like a white man. The ref is covered in blood, but luckily, he wore safety goggles and a oven mitts. The ref stops the count at two, feigning fatigue. Rainman gets a camel clutch, with the proper face-dogging of the barbed wire baseball bat worked in. Yep, they’re bloody. Barbed wire plywood brought center ring by Rick Michaels, and I’m sure ugliness will ensue. It sucks that I’m desensitized to this shit, and I want somebody to get decapitated or arm sawed the fuck off or some shit. Michaels hits some combo thing that’s his thing obviously, across the barbed wire, and he gets the pinfall victoire. Of course, post-match, in the locker room, Iceberg with Jeff G. Bailey beats down Rick Michaels, who lays there gasping, very Blair Witch-like at the end. Two-thirds of a beer left.

EPILOGUE: FIRST STAR OF THE TAPE: John Phoenix, easily. Before-hand, I never heard of the guy. And seeing him first, I thought, “Who is this white guy dressed like Tajiri in ECW’s Tajiri & Whipwreck days?” But he ruled it, and is the motherfuckin’ man. SECOND STAR OF THE TAPE: The Briscoe brothers. I don’t know how to tell them apart, but they’re both fuckin’ bad ass. Quality wrestlers who are not physical midgets and only like, what, fifteen? I hope they get to wrestle quality shit for a long time and don’t get turned out by this sick sordid perverse industry. THIRD STAR OF THE TAPE: Iceberg. He’s a big, fat fucker, but he’s entertaining. And he’s homicidal.