Wrestle Maniacs by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Honey Badger Press
Published: 2017-12-01T08:00:00+00:00

It started in Lloyd Berman’s office on the sixth floor at the Franklin Park Hotel. Berman had been sitting behind his desk, smoking his cheroot while Bam-Bam Abruzzi waited on the wrestling promoter’s plush carpet.

Berman finally spoke. “You can’t swerve the Combine in the big cities.” The rotund old man hitched his suspenders and pointed his limp dick of a cigar toward the slats of the Venetian blinds over his window, as if those Italian thugs were waiting downstairs to break Bam-Bam’s jaw for him. Maybe they were

“I couldn’t take a dive,” Bam-Bam said, and held his arms up in protest as if he were pleading with a priest. He should have known better than to try to explain something like pride to this money-grubbing toad. Bam Bam didn’t take any soft touches in the ring. He worked his record to 20-0 the hard way, beating journeymen and ham-and-eggers in VFW halls and armories, putting the okeydokey on fellow fringe contenders and crushing the dreams of up-and-comers with his own Susie Q of a right hand.

Then, one night after a first round KO win in the Olympia, he’d been in the shower when he saw two sets of shoes appear beneath the stall. All four shoes were Italian and with fawn-colored winged spats. He continued washing himself down and listened.

“Next month against Fordham…” He knew the man speaking to him worked for Blinky Palermo. He recognized the raspy quality of vocal cords cut wrong by an Ellis Island croaker. “You’re going to dive in the third. After that, you’ll get your shot.”

Bam-Bam had killed the showerhead, let the water bead over the hard musculature of his back. “And if I don’t dive?”

There was a pause, a tubercular cough. “Then you-know-who will be offended, and maybe a little scared.”

“Scared?” Bam-Bam laughed at the idea that Palermo would be scared of a top-ten contender. He could have the mayor bumped off with a slight nod of the head.

“Yeah,” the tough said. “Scared you might say something. So me and Gaetano got instructions to take the box cutters to your throat, reach in and up, and pull your tongue out from inside your neck.”

The other goon spoke up. “Tongues is longer than you think.” His basso voice echoed through the locker room. “I can turn yours into a bowtie for you.”

Bam-Bam’s options at that point were to do something that would make it impossible for him to look in the mirror ever again, or to buck the Combine and lose his tongue. He surprised everyone, himself included, when he cited a sprained back to the local wannabe Winchell and Runyon ragtag squad, and then went to see Lloyd Berman about making the transition from slugger to grappler. Primo Carnera had done it, and it had worked out well enough for the Ambling Alp, hadn’t it?

Hadn’t it?

He was still asking himself that question when Berman barged into the dressing room where Abruzzi waited on a massage table, playing with the ties of his loaner “Opponent” robe that the house at this venue had given him.

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