Break it off: nocturne in wrestling

PAUL GALLICO

It isn't like the old days, in wrestling.

Behind the populated rows at the wrestling matches in the steel and concrete arena of Madison Square Garden now lie barren reaches of empty seats. There are many faces in the mezzanine and the side balcony and the center arena, spectators in spotty clumps, but the vaster reaches of the two semicircles at the end that reach from the floor to the rafters are deserted. The spectators are quieter, chew more gum, sit in the boxes with their hands in their laps and their legs crossed and look resigned. The wrestlers still wrestle, still sigh and grunt and groan. Some of the zest and some of the fine theatre seems to have gone out of it. Perhaps the play has been running too long.

One night, not long ago, in the big muscle shop I seemed to be watching the familiar scene with more detachment than usual. Faces in the audience seemed more distinct, voices and cries sounded clearly like lines spoken in the quiet of a playhouse. I wrote down the things that happened and the things that I saw. . . .

Browning and his opponent whom I shall playfully call the Stooge (it was not Kurt Gabriel) came swinging down the center aisle and into the brighter circle of light shed by the powerful searchlight batteries beneath the steel rafters. No one seemed to be particularly pleased to see them. There was still a murmur of laughter around the audience, left over from the previous bout featuring an enormous and obese party by the name of Man Mountain Dean (an expoliceman from Miami), who, for the sake of publicity, had grown a beard that made him look like a malignant Falstaff. The Man Mountain had been deftly kicked in the groin by his opponent and had lain on the canvas, squirming and opening and closing his little mouth like a blowfish. There were only five or six thousand people scattered in an arena that was scaled to hold twenty thousand, and they rocked with merriment. When the Man Mountain was swept from the premises there was a little grumbling. A lot of the customers wanted to see him kicked again. Some of them had been paring their finger-nails or leaning over and talking to their neighbors when it happened. There is really nothing quite so funny as to see a big fat man kicked anywhere, and fall down.

In the new bout, Browning wore a fairly clean bathrobe, but the Stooge wore one that made a young thing with wide eyes in the second row squirm a little. Her young man explained, quickly—.."It's a lucky bathrobe," he said. The two wrestlers were unattended. Boxers are always accompanied by an incredible entourage consisting of male nurses, chirurgeons, first and second vice presidents, confidantes, valets and bottle holders, but wrestlers are either deemed fit to look after themselves, or else nobody will have anything to do with them in public. I never saw any wrestler with a second, except Jim Londos, and at that, Ed White, his manager, never got into the ring with him, but roosted back of his corner and looked exactly like the old women who sat by the guillotine in old Paris and knitted while the heads tumbled into the baskets.

Browning and the Stooge climbed up the steps into opposite corners of the ring and shuffled their feet in the rosin. Browning's face was curiously chubby and immature, but he had a chest like an oak cask and his legs were thick and strong and developed beyond all proportion. He was the recognized wrestling champion in New York State, and a far cry from the magnificent, theatrical Londos. The Stooge had a bullet head with short cropped hair, a lip that had been torn and had healed into a perpetual sneer. He had tiny eyes, an unshapely body with thick fur on his chest and arms. The Stooge met with immediate disfavor from the ladies in the audience. A nightclub blonde with a powder-pale face, in the front row said to her escort—"Oooh, I don't like him. I hope he loses." The escort knew all about wrestling. He said—"You ain't supposed to, Baby.. That's the Menace."

A voice from the darkness yelled— "Give him the airplane scissors, Jim," and there was a laugh. Browning turned his head in the direction of the voice and grinned and blinked his eyes and shed his bathrobe. The airplane scissors was his specialty. He would encircle an opponent in the coils of his tremendous legs and then whirl about on his shoulder blades, spinning his victim aloft, until theoretically he became sufficiently ill and so afflicted with impending mal-de-mer that he permitted his shoulders to be flattened to the mat. There wasn't a soul in that house that did not know that that was exactly how the match would eventually end.

There was a fat man in the third row on the aisle, with very stiff reddish hair, a pince-nez and an extraordinarily tiny mouth. His overcoat was over his knees and covered with peanut shells. He shelled peanuts interminably and opened his small mouth just enough to admit a peanut. Joe Humphries, old and shrunken since his recent illness, but still wearing the same sized clothing he used to wear (which hung loosely on him) introduced the two wrestlers. Gunboat Smith, a big man with a bony face which wore a look of perpetual indignation, and hair that stood up straight on his head, was the referee. A little man in a Tuxedo and a black slouch hat known as Jake (Hassen) Pfeifer scuttled nimbly around one side of the ring carrying a black ebony cane. A newspaperman said to another—"What the hell is Jake Pfeffer up to?" The bell rang and the two wrestlers advanced toward one another, their arms dangling below their knees like great apes.

Thereupon, the most curious peace fell over the assemblage as though, after the rush and bustle of the arrival of the newcomers, the shuffling of feet in the corners and the introductions, the wrestling came as a welcome sedative to the nerves. The audience settled back with something of a sigh into more comfortable positions. The sports writers opened their newspapers or magazines and began to study them. The Stooge who had his arms locked behind Browning's head suddenly twisted and clapped a wristlock onto Browning's right arm. The fat man with the red hair who was shelling peanuts now opened his mouth a little wider to let some words out. He said, in a rather flat voice and with not a great deal of emphasis—"Break it off." He then reduced the size of his mouth to a lower case "o" and popped a peanut into it.

The Stooge lost his wristlock, and hauled off and slapped Browning's face with his open hand. "Gunner" Smith, the referee, waved a stiff, bony finger at him in admonition, shook his head, waved it again and looked too hurt for words. His expression seemed to say: "That you should do a thing like that before my very eyes. . . ."

The Night-Club Blonde yelped—"Stop that!" and then, to her escort—"Did you see what he did?"

The escort replied—"He's supposed to do that. He's gotta do that to get the crowd sore. Now Browning will do something to him. It's an ack."

Two young kids in the fifth row—a nicelooking girl, and a dark-haired boy—kissed one another.

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Browning flopped the Stooge with a headlock, then switched quickly and secured a Japanese arm-lock by wrapping one leg around his own arm and trapping the Stooge's left arm. The fingers gradually began to turn white. The Night-Club Blonde said—"Oooh, looka his hand. Ain't that awful."

"He makes it do that himself," said her escort. "He cuts off his own circulation. It's part of the ack."

The Stooge abandoned pulling his own hair, looked about him with his little piggy eyes which were half full of mischief and half of malice. Then with his free hand he grabbed Browning's hair and yanked. Browning turned a look of great sorrow on the referee who immediately waved the bony finger. The fat man said "Break . . ." and then corrected himself but dropped his peanut—"Pull it out." The Gunner registered intense indignation, waved his finger again and then slapped the Stooge across the mouth. The Stooge uttered a great groan and fell hack and began to beat his own brow with the flat of his hand.

Jack Curley, the promoter, a stout man with an enormous head with thick lips and kind eyes who looked as though he might be more at home in a Capuchin frock, wandered around the ring smiling benignly at his friends. The Stooge suddenly broke the hold and leaped up, then felled Browning with a "flying mare," and then another and another, Browning's massive body banging to the floor with great crashes.

A newspaperman leaned over backwards and said something to Curley who cupped his ear to hear better, then smiled, clapped the man on the back and waddled on down the aisle in the direction of the dressing room without ever once looking at the ring or what was taking place inside of it.

A reporter looked up from a copy of the Ballade oj Reading Gaol and said—"Routine 4B." His neighbor glanced up at the clock pinned to the mezzanine and said—"It's five minutes early tonight. They left out 4A."

The people in the audience looked on stolidly and from the balcony there floated down the loud, long, nasty note of a raspberry which drew a laugh. As the Stooge came in to seize him again, Browning lowered his head and butted him in the stomach. The Stooge immediately clutched his head with both hands and sank to the canvas where he writhed and thrashed. A nondescript man holding his hat and overcoat got up from somewhere along the ninth or tenth row and said loudly to his neighbor—"Now's the time. Jim ought to get him. He's got him now."

The neighbor produced a cigar, bit off the end of it and spat it out, said "Too early. Not time yet," lit the cigar and lapsed into silence, turning his hack on the man.

Browning, with a compassionate smile on his face waited for the Stooge to get up and then knocked him down again. This time the Stooge got up and began to beat Browning about the head, pull his ears and kick his shins in a violently malevolent flurry. The crowd perked up a little and looked; and, under cover of the excitement, the two kids kissed again and then the girl took a handkerchief out of her pocketbook and wiped the lipstick from the hoy's lips as he tried to draw his head hack so that she couldn't remove it.

The Gunner, registering some thirty degrees of dudgeon hauled the Stooge off Browning and slapped him again and the Stooge looked as though he were going to cry. Then Browning dumped him, scrambled onto his back and grabbed his foot and began to twist it.

"Mmmmm," said the man with the peanuts, "Break it off."

The Night-Club Blonde said "Looka, can he do that?"

Her escort said—"It don't hurt him. It's part of the ack."

A vendor sailed up the aisle peddling hot dogs. A man in the front row said to his friend—"Look, there's Harry. . . . No, no, over there. . . .

No . . . see the dame with the fur . . ." The two got up and went over and visited with Harry for a while, as the Stooge beat the canvas with his hands and bellowed. The man with the peanuts finally got some color into his voice and said with considerable impatience as though it was his last warning—"Ah, break it off."

Half an hour later, the Stooge staged another terrific flurry. He banged Browning to the canvas, threw him over his shoulder, spun him across the ring by his head, pounced upon him, picked him up and threw him down again.

The reporter who was reading Wilde looked up once, then closed the volume and slipped it into his pocket, saying "That's it," and reached for his typewriter. His neighbor, already unlimbering his, said "Uhuh."

The reporter slipped a sheet of paper in the roller and without looking up at the ring began to write. . . . "Jim Browning's boa-constrictor legs claimed another victim at Madison Square Garden last night where the champion successfully defended his title. After (he left the space blank for the time) of wrestling Browning suddenly coiled his legs around his opponent and whirled him into the air and spun him around in his famous 'Airplane Scissors,' and pinned his shoulders to the mat. Just before the end, it looked for a moment as though the champion might he dethroned, but . . ."

The reporter stopped and looked up. Browning had his legs coiled around the Stooge and was spinning him around. The crowd cheered faintly and some of them got up and began to hunch themselves into their wraps. The Night-Club Blonde had a mink coat and smelled heavily of Shalimar. They brushed by the reporter who was writing again, and her escort said, leaning over his shoulder -—"Put a piece in the paper, the whole thing is an ack."

Joe Humphries held Browning's hand aloft.