Cosmo (6 page)

‘If you're good,' I say, steering an ant away from a sandy hill, ‘we'll have a match tonight. You can be The Ultimate Warrior. I'll be The Undertaker. We'll set up the ring in your bedroom with the mats. It'll be like WrestleMania. Mom and Keith won't care 'cause they'll be in the backyard. We can do a whole match.'

Eddy closes his eyes and smiles. ‘WARRI-OR!' he screams, fists in the air. And just as he lets loose, two boys about his age walk past on the sidewalk, turning to stare with big, stupid grins, catcalls and insults poised on their lips. But I stand up and stare at them like The Undertaker, hands wrapped around our shitty iron railing.

‘Say something,' I say, staring with the 'Taker's dead eyes. ‘Say one fucking word.'

They keep walking. They're obviously the smarter type of neighbourhood kid: a real rarity. But by minding their own business, they've managed to avoid a bloodbath. There've been so many I sometimes lose count: shitty, rainy afternoons when I'd find a huddle of smiling children circling Eddy on the playground. How I'd find Eddy on his muddied ass, his mouth full of black dirt and half-chewed worms. The Halloween of 1989 when kids locked Eddy in a storage closet at our school, surrounded by the mannequins from the drama department, their smooth faces concealed by horrible Mummy and Werewolf masks. How I sat on the other side of the door waiting for the teacher's key while Eddy wept. You should have seen his eyes when he got out.

Thing is, Eddy's likely to run up and give a big, caring hug to anyone who's just dunked his head into a toilet or made him drink piss. Even the smallest act of kindness can instantly turn a heel into a face, a villain into a hero. Just like the wrestlers he loves who're constantly switching sides – one day mortal enemies, the next best friends. I'm not so eager to let go, forgive. ‘Don't be such a jobber,' I keep telling him while walking him home from school. Looking after Eddy is like working hundreds of tag-team matches held in countless house shows across the city, with your partner not even aware of the fight.

I can't stand the heat any longer. I tell Eddy it's time to clean the house. I get
The Wrestling Album
blaring on the living room tape player, drowning out the pathetic squeals coming from upstairs. Eddy dries while I wash, holds the dustpan while I sweep, collects his toys and crayons and colouring books and puts them in his room. I work up a shiny sweat, scrubbing counters and vacuuming the den, sucking all the bread crumbs, dog hairs, staples and clumps of calcified snot from underneath the couch. The sun cuts across the sky while we work, pushing the air outside into a level of heat that's killer.

‘Land of a Thousand Dances' shakes the thin walls of the house. Eddy leaps onto the freshly vacuumed sofa, holding my old T-ball trophy for a microphone, and belts out the first verse. I hear his squeaky whine trying to keep pace with Mean Gene Okerlund, ‘Rowdy' Roddy Piper and all the other wrestlers McMahon forced into recording this brutal cover. I join him during the long, ridiculous chorus, chanting out the repetitive stream of
na
's and strumming on the vacuum shaft like it's an electric guitar. Uncle Keith reappears, his hands clamped over his ears. His sunburnt chest looks like a giant hickey. I resist the urge to give him a knife-edge chop right across his sagging bitch-tits. He's got a stupid, exhausted look on his face, and mumbles something to me about taking a nap, barely audible over the grating roar of the vacuum and the cassette player, and then plods up the stairs to pass out. This means he hasn't finished cleaning the backyard. This means Mom is going to be royally pissed. But for now, Eddy and I have some fun. I rush into the kitchen, open the freezer and stick my head inside. The cold air is delicious. I grab four grape freezies and a pair of scissors, head back into the living room. Calmed, Eddy and I suck and chew on the thin packages of sugary ice, our chests slowing down. We sit side by side, the evening and its consequences still a million miles away, as the last words from ‘Land of a Thousand Dances' shake the floor beneath our feet.

 

Mom comes home from work smelling like metallic coffee grounds and burnt toast. She's in her typical flurry of post-shift exasperation, complaining about the pervert customers who ask about her menstrual cycles or turn-ons. Before she's even thrown her keys onto the kitchen counter, she asks me if the chores are finished, if the list was followed. Judging from her narrow-eyed gaze across the living room, her survey of the kitchen and her slow, satisfied nod, I figure Eddy and me are off the hook. Then she asks about Keith, who's still upstairs, asleep, even though
The Wrestling Album
is still blaring.

‘King Shit's all tuckered out,' I say, then realize it's high time to run down to the convenience store to buy some pop and chips, and take our time doing so, because shit is going to
soar
.

By the time we're back, Keith has managed some sort of miracle: Mom, somehow, seems okay. We find them unfolding lawn chairs in the backyard, hauling up coolers and bags of crushed ice from the basement. They have case upon case of Coors Light and Canadian and tons of pop for mix. They both seem excited, or drunk.

‘This is gonna be a real shaker,' Keith says, unfolding a plastic chair and sweating through a
CHCH
News T-shirt from '89. Mom laughs. She's rosy and clean from the shower, still wearing a bunched towel on her head. Seeing her like this is always a supreme relief; whenever she's happy the walls seem to radiate calm, as if the plaster and brick of the house were somehow hard-wired to her fluctuating moods. Despite all of Vince McMahon's insistence that wrestlers like Hogan or ‘Macho Man' Randy Savage are
the
 most electrifying superstars of our day and age, none of them can come close to matching Mom for her intimidation, microphone skills and thunderous, static-charged aura.

I barely have time to shower or change clothes before the backyard party gets going. The guests arrive earlier than I figured, filing through the door or staggering around the side of the house. Jim and Danielle O'Brien, with their strange talk of star signs and crystals and alien energies, Jim's wild paintings of the ‘elder beings' he wants to show Mom. Swingers, acid-poppers, hippy-dippies – plain creepy, with glazed looks in their eyes and frizzy hair. Keith's old garage buddies Don and Pat and Mike, with their rank smell of gasoline and butts, their dirty fingernails and high-pitched hoots, lugging two-fours and already carving up Keith over his gut (not that I mind – they remind Eddy of The Bushwhackers, give him a laugh). Mom's hyperactive friends Gail and Tyler, women who chain-smoke cigarettes and go to bingo and talk about things like the lottery and the weather and how they can't handle standing in lines. And of course Aunt Deb and Uncle Frank, drunk and high respectively, but thankfully without their brood. What a tag team: Uncle Frank sitting stoned in his dank basement, lost in the Nintendo Mushroom Kingdom, only peeling himself off his moist couch to work another night shift or to spark a J from his crappy marijuana crops. Aunt Deb bellowing from her backyard, bursting out of her blue bathing suit, letting her kids know that they're in deep shit. With
six
kids, no less, all of whom have teased or tortured Eddy and aroused my wrath. But that's the way she goes – we've known them so long, they're sort of like family.

With the dog's whining drowned out by the guests, Eddy and I get called into the backyard to say our hellos. Uncle Frank asks me if I have a boyfriend while his eyes go up and down my body. Don and Pat get Eddy to chug a can of Sprite, despite my glances at Mom. By the time it's nine o'clock, there's gotta be twenty, thirty people in the backyard, friends of friends, old boyfriends and girlfriends and married people, and everybody's drinking and hollering; the noise becomes a bass hum through the walls of the house. ‘It's like the Royal Rumble,' I say to Eddy, jabbing him, making him stutter and laugh, spitting Sprite. And Keith gets his stereo blasting Night Ranger and Journey and Rush: the worst bands in the world.

After most of the guests arrive and the party is in full throttle, Eddy plunks himself down outside the door to the spare bedroom with a bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips, singing lullabies to a door-scratching Gorilla. I'm relaxing on my own bed, flipping through
Rolling Stone
, an article on Guns N' Roses I've been meaning to read. So far, so fucking amazing; Slash is the sexiest monster I've ever seen, and so much hotter than the New Kids' ‘Step by Step' nonsense that the girls get wide-ons over – it's not even a contest. It's almost peaceful: the door closed, a tall glass of ice water on my night table,
Appetite for Destruction
in the tape player. I close my eyes for a second, begin to drift to the sounds of ‘My Michelle.'

The door flies open. Eddy's standing there with the Cheez Whiz jar in his hand.

‘Holy shit, what do you
want
?' I ask him, groggily.

He walks over and puts the jar on my bed. It's jammed with spiders, squirming over each other, one mass of legs and fangs and swollen abdomens.

‘Get it away!' I yell, curling up.

‘There's fifteen spiders,' he says, taking it back. ‘One bit me. You said –'

‘Fuck, I know what I said. Just give me some peace and quiet.' But Eddy's got that look on his face – I can tell that he's been waiting, biding his time. That he's bored out of his skull.

‘What do you wanna do?' I ask him, defeated, closing my magazine.

‘You said we'd have a
match
.'

I stand. ‘Okay then,' I say, sighing. I roll over and hit
PAUSE
on the cassette player. ‘Let's have a match. But this is going to be
the
match – the match to end all matches.'

Eddy starts getting excited, hopping from one foot to the other like a cartoon character. I start issuing commands. There's a lot of stuff to do before we're ready to rumble.

Eddy and I fold all the sheets on his bed and put them in his closet. We do the same with mine. Then we drag my mattress out of my room, across the hall and into his. It takes longer than you'd think, involves lots of sweating and cursing and Eddy almost crying on more than one occasion. We push the two bare mattresses against each other in the middle of his room. Even when they're flush, they take up almost all the floor space, so we push Eddy's trunk and baskets and other crap into the hallway. Meanwhile, we can hear Gorilla getting revved up, like he can sense there's gonna be some real crazy shit going down. I turn to Eddy and nod.

‘Get changed, superstar,' I say.

Eddy runs to his closet and starts rummaging through his stuff, humming the
Saturday Night's Main Event
theme music. I walk back to my room and start changing into a black button-down blouse and a pair of tights. I go down the hall to Mom's room and find her old leather gloves, a bright and brassy shade of violet. Then I find Keith's ridiculous Stetson hat and one of his grey striped ties. Using Mom's mirror, I tuck in the blouse, tie up the tie and don the hat. It's the closest approximation to The Undertaker that I can manage without applying white face paint or drawing dark circles under my eyes. For a moment, I stand and pose, rolling my eyes back into my head.

When I'm back in Eddy's room, he's already in his Warrior getup. He wears his red Speedo and red knee-high socks. He's tied multicoloured wrapping-paper ribbons around his elbows, in the crooks of his arms. And he's tried to apply the Warrior's distinctive face paint – obviously using red and blue ballpoint pens, and ending up with something that makes me want to howl with laughter and beat him senseless at the same time.

‘You idiot,' I say. ‘Don't use Bic pens on your face. They won't come off.'

Eddy growls and charges me, head down, butting into my stomach. It hurts; the little shit almost knocks the wind out of me. I push him back down onto the bed.

‘You
bitch
!' I say, before leaping on him. From there, we start laying into each other, but this is no ordinary match – I don't give him any quarter. Eddy gets a thorough beating: ddts, clotheslines, backbreakers, spinebusters, armbars – the works. At first it seems as though he's died and gone to heaven, squealing and giggling. I guess he assumes it's okay if he hits me with force behind it; the kid doesn't know his own strength. So I retaliate, hurting him, smacking him in the crotch a couple times before smearing his face against the mattress, pulling him up for air just before it seems he'll burst into tears. I grab him around the neck, squeezing hard, about to perform The Undertaker's signature chokeslam. He starts kicking my shins, spitting, punching me in the gut; he's desperate, terrified. But gravity and height win out, and I lift him off his feet and send him crashing down onto the mat. Then I cross his arms over his chest, sit on his stomach and count
one, two, three
, as Gorilla screams through the wall.

‘How do you like that, huh?' I ask him, expecting him to flee the room sobbing. But after a few seconds Eddy sits up, looking as though he were just asked to do some advanced math problem. ‘Holy
crap
,' he says, smiling big. And then he's on his feet, flushed, the ink smeared and sweaty on his cheeks. He rubs his hands together like he's warming himself over my body, like I'm some sort of crackling fire.

‘Again,' he says. ‘Rematch.'