Grappling With The Wrestling World, The Epilogue

I genuinely thought my professional wrestling career was dead and buried with its ashes scattered, tombstone etched, funeral long over. But in the summer of 2005, while I was still half-assing “work” at LeisureLink, a little spark flared back to life. Out of nowhere, I got a message on AOL Instant Messenger, yes, AIM, the digital equivalent of sending smoke signals, from a Los Angeles wrestling promoter whose name I’ve long forgotten. That’s not shade; my alcohol-addled manic brain just genuinely deleted him to make room for more important memories, like the entire discography of Front 242.
You have to understand: by then, I had pretty much nuked my standing in SoCal wrestling. I’d screwed over PCW after skipping out on a show and skipping into a new life, gotten into my final message board war, and gotten myself rightfully banned from the forums on SoCalUncensored.com. Banished. Excommunicated. Digitally executed. So when a promoter actually reached out to me, I half wondered if it was a prank.
But he insisted: he ran a new promotion called Hybrid Pro Wrestling, and he wanted me to appear on his shows. He said there was a wrestler named Xtreme Loco who needed heel heat, which is what you try to accomplish by getting the audience to boo a villain, because his promos were about as effective as a broken Speak & Spell covered in Cheeto dust. I was cautious because once you walk out on a company in wrestling, you’re not just blackballed… you’re blackholed. I let my ego and untreated mental illness take the wheel, and naturally, I said yes.

The Return That Nobody Asked For

My first appearance that summer was an in-ring segment titled “The Aaron Proctor Show.” Who came up with that name? Me. Obviously.
The promoter was planning a DVD release, so he had an actual camera crew and a commentary team. I’ll never forget hearing XPW alumni announcer Kris Kloss excitedly calling my entrance like I was a returning legend instead of the community theater villain I actually was.
The segment was a half-work, half-shoot (read: half real, half fake) explanation of why I left PCW and why I was suddenly back, allegedly managing champions. I ran down Brawlin’ Bo Cooper in a scripted promo until he stormed the ring and dropped me with a Death Valley Driver. It was cool because the crowd always loved seeing me get beat up. This was meant to set up the next show, where I’d manage Xtreme Loco in his feud with Cooper.
But the crowd reaction?
Oh, they booed, but not the good kind.
Not the “You’re such a dastardly villain!” boo.
More like the: “Oh great, this clown is back,” boo.
And the boys in the back? Most of them treated me like I had the plague and an IRS audit all at once. A few were friendly, but most remembered what I’d done at PCW and wanted nothing to do with me.
Wrestling has traditions. Some are good, some absolute garbage, but one of the most sacred is you don’t walk out on a show. It makes you unreliable. It puts people at risk. And I had done exactly that.
Which always made me wonder: Why the hell did this promoter want me on his shows at all? Did he lose a bet? Was this a dare? A social experiment? We’ll never know.

The Second Act Nobody Needed

I came back the next month, this time calling out Bo Cooper again while accompanied by a punk rock valet with a pink Mohawk the promoter named Roxy, who had the personality of a Hot Topic store mannequin who’d come to life. I think he wanted me to head up some villainous stable of misfits, which piqued the interest of the rebel in me.
Bo came out to kill me again, but this time Xtreme Loco hit the ring and brained him with a steel chair. Beautiful. Classical. Shakespearean, even.
This set up my planned third appearance, which would end up being my final wrestling appearance ever.
Because someone, no idea who, but I have theories, got into the promoter’s ear. Suddenly, Roxy was managing someone else, and the promoter invited me to the show but said he “didn’t have a spot for me.” Classic wrestling speak for: “Hey kid, creative’s got nothing for you.”
The match went on without me: an ambulance match between Loco and Cooper which was pretty high-concept for an indy fed. Meanwhile, I was backstage, awkwardly wandering around like the ghost of a wrestler who died of embarrassment.
I talked to John Webber, aka The Stepfather from this saga’s second entry, for what’d be the last time ever save for a Facebook argument we’d have about 8 years later when I was in conservative cosplay mode. Of course, like all the other shit I’ve pulled, I regret breaking that friendship, too. 
I sat in a corner quietly until the show ended. Then I went home and drank a whole bottle of Scotch straight, no mixer, trying to swallow the truth: My wrestling career was over. For real this time. And I’d done it to myself.

The Backyard Epilogue

There was one little footnote to my days in pro wrestling. Everything ended up coming full circle. During my 2006/2007 Pasadena mayoral campaign (because my life is a series of genre shifts) a twentysomething backyard promoter emailed me through my campaign website. He’d heard about my wrestling background and asked if I could referee his main event at a backyard wrestling show over on Los Robles.
Backyard wrestling. Despised by the pros. Participating in it was the same reason we never booked The Young Bucks. During a mayoral campaign. Sure. Why the fuck not? Who did I have left to piss off? Maybe I’d win the coveted Unhinged Teen Vote.
So there I was, in full goth regalia, standing on blue gym mats in some kid’s front yard, with garden hoses tied up as makeshift ropes attached to trees. I refereed a match between two completely untrained, dangerously enthusiastic kids who used barbed wire, light tubes, and thumbtacks like they were filming a low-budget remake of ECW’s infamous Mass Transit incident. Look it up. During the match, I tried to channel my inner Charles Robinson, but with more eyeliner and existential dread.
Maybe twenty people were there. Maybe they voted for me. Probably not.
I never told a soul about that show until years later. But that was the real end. Back where I started: the backyard.

The Part Where I Grow Up… Sort Of

These days, I’m just a fan and I’m finally okay with that. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of wrestling history, and when I’m not watching Tully Blanchard, my favorite wrestler ever, absolutely cook someone on the mic, or binging Mid-South, WCW, ECW, or Attitude Era WWE, I’m usually converting my wife into a wrestling nerd, one current storyline at a time. My favorite wrestlers these days are probably Gunther and Rhea Ripley but Ethan Page and Trick Williams sure have bright futures ahead of them.
I’ll never fall out of love with wrestling. And I’m glad the backstage culture, from what I hear, is more accepting, less toxic. People always ask me if I’d ever try to go behind the curtain again, maybe take the good parts of my wrestling resume to some small indy promoter as a weekend hobby. I tell those people that I’m 44 years old and I had a wild reputation of physical participation in the quasi-sport. If I took a bump now, I’d end up in the hospital or the morgue.
I keep in touch with a few of the wrestlers, managers, ring announcers, refs, and fans I’ve met along the way. Reminiscing about old times with Benjamin Tomas can be quite therapeutic at times. Sharing an old story with TARO or Disco Machine still makes me feel like I was one of the “boys”, that I belonged to a family for a short while. I lost contact with a bunch of people, sadly. If you’re out there, Scott Abeyta or Thunderbird or any others who I’ve not named, hit me up. I’d love to hear how you’re doing.
Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d gotten control of my drinking sooner, gone to therapy, gotten medicated, stopped blowing stuff up for sport. Maybe this blog would be written by a WWE superstar. Maybe not.
But I like this version of me. And I like being a fan. The story’s still good, it just didn’t go the way 24-year-old me imagined. Speaking of stories, I have a ton of those. An old, comforting memory of a car ride to a show in Fresno or a backstage blooper at the South Anaheim Marketplace pops into my head all the time and I get to relive it over again.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Grappling With The Wrestling World, Part 6

It was the summer of 2004 for PCW, and the sun was setting on our attendance numbers. We’d done all we could with the venues we had, so in one of our many grand ideas fueled by stubborn optimism, we decided to move our shows to the Fraternal Order of Eagles hall in Altadena, California. It sounded poetic, “Eagles” hosting wrestling like my favorite football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, or famous KROQ DJ, The Swedish Eagle. It was like fate was giving us one last shot, at least for me. We thought a change of scenery might breathe new life into our fan base: families looking for a cheap night out, kids mesmerized by bodyslams and dropkicks, lapsed fans nostalgic for the old days, maybe even curious newcomers who’d never seen independent wrestling before.

It didn’t work.

Despite the new venue and our hopes, we were still getting the same faces (loyal but few) and we weren’t putting on the kind of shows that drew the attention of the increasingly hard-to-please internet fans. They had a new obsession: Pro Wrestling Guerrilla. PWG was the new king of California indie wrestling, the West Coast’s answer to Ring of Honor. Founded by six wrestlers who actually knew how to book and draw, PWG could afford to fly in top-tier talent from across North America. They had energy, attitude, and money. We had… a banner, a ring, and misplaced confidence.

Not that we were ever trying to compete with them, at least not out loud. But it stung. We couldn’t even run on the same weekends as PWG without being crushed attendance-wise, so we often settled for Friday shows that maybe, if the moon aligned just right, drew seventy-five people. Seventy-five if we were lucky, fifty if the Dodgers were playing.

Still, there were bright spots. One of the funnier stories came from a random night when NWA legend “Ragin’ Bull” Manny Fernandez showed up at one of our shows. We didn’t even know he was there until after he paid for a ticket like a regular fan. Mace and I just stared at each other: “Manny Fernandez is here? Why the hell did we charge him to get in?” Pete’s brother, who was working the door that night, wasn’t a wrestling fan and had no idea who Manny was. When we found out, we announced his presence at intermission. Manny stood up, gave a wave, and got a respectful cheer from the crowd. Looking back, it was surreal to be performing in front of one of the toughest men to ever lace up boots.

But that was one of the few highs during a period of slow decline. The Philly Connection storyline was fizzling out. We couldn’t afford the fly-ins anymore, and guys like Messiah were increasingly unhappy with how things were going. So, I pivoted. I reinvented myself as the babyface commissioner, the nice guy, the crowd’s friend, and started a “feud” with Mike Vega. It kicked off during our Halloween show, where I dressed as one of the Spartan Cheerleaders from Saturday Night Live. Mike hit me with a spike piledriver right in the middle of the ring. The crowd loved it. My neck, not so much.

Outside of wrestling, though, my attention was slipping. The clubs, the nightlife, and my goth friends were far more fun than dealing with wrestlers and the constant message board wars. I was tired of the online fighting, though, to be fair, a lot of it started because of me. I had no filter and way too much time on my hands. The internet trolls hit back hard, taking shots at my appearance, my sexuality, my personality. It wore me down. I was either well-liked, despised, or tolerated… rarely in between. I got along great with the lower and midcard guys, but most of the main eventers big-leagued me. My heart wasn’t in it anymore.

So, I shifted gears again. I joined a goth band called Venus Virus as their keyboardist. I wasn’t good at keyboards (not really) but somehow, I was better at that than at the wrestling game. And just like that, I made one of my trademark impulsive moves: I walked out of a PCW show at intermission one night in the fall of 2004 and never looked back. Mace and Pete called me several times afterward, but I ghosted them. I was angry, burned out, and full of self-righteous pride. In hindsight, I should’ve handled it better, but at the time, I didn’t care.

For the next two decades, I didn’t talk to those guys. I was devastated earlier this year when I learned from Ben Tomas that Foob had recently passed away. Although Foob’s wrestling style didn’t go over well with the internet smart marks, he knew a lot about wrestling and passed it on to younger people getting into the business. Foob always tried to entertain the kids as best as he could, too. I always teased Foob about his wrestling style and his unwillingness to never turn bad guy or “heel” and I kind of regret all of that.

So wrestling was in the rear view. I convinced myself I was destined for something bigger like a band that would blow up in the L.A. goth/industrial scene. I even snagged a temp job with Yahoo for a while, but that didn’t last. They found out I’d dropped out of high school and never earned my GED. (That came later because I didn’t get it until I was 33.) Another self-sabotaged chapter.

Still, there was one genuinely fun story from that time. PWG needed to borrow a sound system for a show, and Pete volunteered ours. I tagged along and suddenly found myself backstage, surrounded by indie wrestling legends and future WWE Superstars: the Briscoe Brothers, Christopher Daniels, AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, El Generico, Kevin Steen, and Adam Pearce. Daniels even seemed impressed that I knew his entrance music. For one fleeting night, I felt like I belonged. I felt like I was part of the big leagues. A few fans even recognized me from PCW and said hello. It felt good, but deep down, I knew the truth. I didn’t belong there. I’d never make it to TNA or WWE. I wasn’t a wrestler, a decent booker, or a promotional visionary. I was just a guy chasing attention, chasing fame, chasing validation.

When the band fizzled out (surprise, surprise!) it was partly because I got romantically involved with the lead singer. That ended as dramatically as you’d expect. Of course I was impulsive, emotionally chaotic, and completely unmoored and she was sick of my shit. I was a ticking time bomb wandering Pasadena, haunting L.A.’s goth clubs, high on my own delusions, pretending I didn’t care about anything. Wrestling had failed, the band had failed, and I was left wondering what the hell came next.

A sensible person might’ve said, “Time to get a stable job, maybe plan a future.” Me? I thought, hell, maybe I’ll run for mayor of Pasadena or something.

But before that ridiculous idea took shape, there was LeisureLink: the best job I ever had, until it became one of the biggest meltdowns of my professional life. As you’ve read in the previous entry, I fucked that up royally.

Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’07

I jumped into campaigning for mayor of Pasadena the same way I used to cut promos back in my independent wrestling days. I was not just full of hubris. I was having a full-on manic episode. I was also completely full of myself (and alcohol) and I figured people would love that about me. I believed that posting YouTube videos and MySpace memes and throwing names at the current mayor and all the other city council candidates would take me somewhere big. 

I said the Mayor was a 170 year old man. I made up nicknames for City Council people and candidates like “Stone Cold” Margaret McAustin, Sid “Vicious” Tyler, and “Sexy” Steve Haderlein. Who could have guessed that those same selfish tactics would one day put a man inside the White House for two non-consecutive terms?? That man just happens to have a pro wrestling background and happens to be a WWE Hall of Famer. Like I always tell my close, personal friend (shout out to “Mean” Gene Okerlund) and the managing editor at Pasadena Now, André Coleman, over and over again: Trump stole my whole gimmick but he left out the quixotic parts and the altruistic elements that I had attached to it. Some of those altruistic elements — like free buses and rent control — worked for other candidates of the future, however, like Zohran Mamdani.

There were no real debates between Mayor Bill Bogaard and me at all. That simply was not the Pasadena Way of doing things. Instead we had “candidate forum” after candidate forum after candidate forum. Those events were basically just panels set up for questions and answers with short opening speeches and closing speeches all held in a town hall format that everyone followed. We visited every single hot spot where people engaged with local politics showed up. That meant about a million different senior citizens centers with names that I cannot remember right now no matter how hard I try. Still, that did not mean those forums lacked any comedic moments at all. Especially when confused seniors started wondering out loud why some guy wearing eyeliner was standing there mocking the Crown City in front of everybody.

I remember one specific interaction with a voter like it happened yesterday morning. Bogaard and I sat on a panel alongside candidates running for the Pasadena school board. That group included the late, great, affable Bill Bibbiani. He might have been grizzled in appearance but he had a heart of gold. He was a man totally obsessed with motorcycles and going against the grain. Let’s say a hypothetical Measure A was on the ballot. He’d be against it while everyone else championed it. I thought to myself that he was pretty cool for going his own way and standing out. He and his wife lived down the street from me and always called themselves my Pasadena parents because they looked out for me and checked in on me. 

Anyway, there was this sweet, kind lady in her seventies sitting in a wheelchair all the way in the very back row of one of those senior citizens centers. When the time came for people to ask questions, she did not even bother to raise her hand or anything. She just started yelling out “Mayor Bogaard! Mayor Bogaard! When you win the election, what are you going to do about all the crime in Northwest Pasadena?”

That was a formidable question without a doubt and showed how much people in Pasadena care about the entire community, even about neighborhoods other than their own. But I could not help myself and I started laughing quietly to myself right there during the forum while sitting on the stage. “WHEN you win…” I kept thinking over and over in my head. That was the exact moment I knew my entire campaign was dead in the water and had no chance. This happened long before any surge of young people began caring about elections across the country. It was way before the AOCs of the world came along and energized young voters to maybe think about supporting more radical candidates or more fringe liberal candidates. I ended up as nothing more than an afterthought and a total joke to everyone. After Bogaard trounced me and took 89 percent of the vote, I still did not realize for about two whole decades later that maybe if I had taken things a little more seriously and stopped running a publicity stunt just to make myself famous, I could have cracked 15 percent or maybe even 20 percent of the vote.

That is the thing I find so hilarious: even now. People back then, and a lot of people, saw right through my facade without any trouble. I swear the 1,472 votes I received were mostly protest votes. I would get tons of voters coming up to me and asking if I was serious about this or if I was just doing it all for attention. I would always answer them with the former option even though deep down inside I was really just seeking acceptance and attention that I never received from my parents when I was younger or really anybody else growing up. I am not saying my goth aesthetic is the culprit or was the culprit back then, that’s me being myself. I am saying my motives were the real problem.

Still, that whole “WHEN you win” thing struck a deep chord inside me. On one hand, and a heavy hand it is, it’s fucking hilarious. I still regale people with that exact story to this very day whenever I get the chance. I even heard later that one of my old bosses, the guy I used to call The Bulldozer when I worked at LeisureLink, actually saw my face on the front page of the Pasadena Star-News. This is the same Bulldozer who fired me in 2005 after I threatened to beat him up, so yeah, small world. He later told a coworker he’d sat down to breakfast, seen me and my campaign staring back at him from the paper, and almost choked on his cereal. For one ridiculous, glorious second it felt like vindication: the kid the Bulldozer once dismissed was suddenly newsprint famous.

On the other hand, it reminds me of this one time my dad ran into my eighth grade art teacher, Miss Fenstermacher from Chichester Middle School, at the bank one afternoon. She saw him standing there and said “aren’t you Aaron Proctor’s father? I am his art teacher.” My dad responded right away with “Art teacher?! Aaron can’t draw!” Not that I could draw or anything like that but it was still mean and hurtful. So mean that when she told me about that interaction later she almost had tears in her eyes while recounting every word.

So while my campaign for mayor of Pasadena actually had a real platform and some altruistic intentions behind it, all it was was a big “look at me” statement to everyone around… not to mention the actions of an unhinged, undiagnosed bipolar basket case.

“Look at me, Dad! I am the new Mayor of Pasadena.” I just wanted someone to impress and someone to accept me through all of my horrible faults. It didn’t work in my pro wrestling career so maybe, I thought, it would work in the political arena. There was not a chance in hell winning the election was ever happening but I took a chance anyway and for a few solid months in 2006 and 2007, I became a local legend in my own mind and around town.

Grappling With The Wrestling World, Part 5

[Some names have been changed.]

2003 was, without a doubt, the high-water mark of my professional wrestling career and simultaneously, one of the lowest, most emotionally frayed years of my personal life. It was the kind of year that leaves scars, tattoos your psyche, and yet fills your chest with a sense of nostalgic fire when you look back on it. Everything felt big, loud, fast, and burning and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, even the fuckups.

I had a halfway decent job at the time. I was a customer service rep at a call center for GlaciPure, a water delivery company that sounded like a rejected 1980s sci-fi beverage brand. My heart was never in it. My real passion, my real oxygen, was the chaos of professional wrestling. Specifically, Pacific Championship Wrestling, or PCW, the indie SoCal promotion I was helping promote. I was also getting neck-deep in the online wrestling world. I was getting too addicted to message boards, gossip threads, burner usernames, the whole seedy digital underbelly of the scene.

At one point, I got into a drunken flame war with a rival promoter, not realizing, or not caring, that he was affiliated with a Northern California outfit run by none other than Roland Fucking Alexander, the carnivore behind APW and the infamous “King of Sleaze” in “Beyond the Mat”. One day, bored and cocky at GlaciPure, I poked around in the customer accounts and, lo and behold, there was Roland’s name. Past due. I gleefully posted about it on SoCalUncensored’s message board like it was a win in some cosmic wrestling war. Juvenile? Sure. Satisfying? Extremely.

Karma came swinging. I skipped a day of work to film a local cable access promo for PCW on a wonderfully bizarre show called “The Netherworld VideoZine”. Hours later, I got the call that I was fired. Honestly? I was pissed. But deep down, I knew it was my own fault. I had this delusion of invincibility, this messianic arrogance that wrestling had somehow given me. I thought I was untouchable. Turns out I was very, very touchable.

My girlfriend had had enough by this point. One day she just packed up and left, moved into a new place without me. So there I was: single, jobless, and living in a shoebox studio apartment in Pasadena. Granted, it was a nice shoebox. It had charm, and I made it work. But I was alone with nothing but my eyeliner, my over-inflated ego, what seemed like unlimited alcohol, and my obsessive love of wrestling.

Eventually, I landed a job at Nexava Analytics, a market research firm with a vibe that screamed “Reagan-era startup that forgot to die.” Fun fact: Gwen Stefani’s dad, Dennis, worked there, but I think Gwen sucks so I didn’t care. I did data entry on one of those ancient CRT monitors that felt like it weighed more than my car. We processed feedback from focus groups about candy bars, TV ads, movie trailers, the kind of stuff that could rot your brain if you thought about it too long. I made a few fast friends there, but predictably, I’d get fired from that job too. That’s a story for another day. Just know it involved mischief, sarcasm, and me being me.

But the wrestling? The wrestling was alive. PCW was trucking along, and my world expanded beyond the SoCal scene. I’d struck up a friendship with our ring announcer, the affable Scott Abeyta, and his wild-eyed, unpredictable buddy Thunderbird. Now Thunderbird was a character. He was a journeyman wrestler with a gravel-voiced charisma, a man who had been slated to debut in XPW under the “Doomhammer” gimmick before that gloriously depraved promotion went up in flames. When he wasn’t in the ring, he had a habit of working gimmicks that toed the line of brilliance and madness. Around this time, he was doing a “prisoner” shtick which included wrestling in a bright orange jumpsuit, complete with handcuffs, shouting that he was on the lam from some fictional penitentiary. The referee would pat him down LAPD-style before his matches. It was nuts. It was perfect.

Scott, Thunderbird, and I became our own little nomadic tribe, hitting the road together for Central California shows. Bakersfield, Modesto, Fresno, Stockton, Sacramento, we ran Highway 99 like we owned it. The drives were long and dusty, the kind of stretches where the air smelled like hay and cow shit and you passed more fruit stands than gas stations. But those car rides? They were the stuff of legend.

We’d blast 80s mix CDs I had burned which had everything from Front 242 and Depeche Mode to Gary Numan and Berlin. Mean Gene’s Burgers was our unofficial roadside headquarters. One time, just outside Merced, Thunderbird convinced us to stop at a run-down swap meet where he tried to trade a replica wrestling belt for a used VCR and a bootleg DVD of “The Pest”. Another time, on a fog-soaked drive back from Stockton, we got pulled over by CHP because Thunderbird had duct-taped “PRISONER TRANSPORT” signs to the side of Scott’s car “for realism.” The cop let us go after Thunderbird cut a promo in character. I swear, he almost got us booked at the officer’s kid’s birthday party.

We started calling ourselves “CenCal Censored,” a parody of the SoCalUncensored crew. We even had a little clique hand gesture which was a bent-fingered “C” we’d flash backstage like our own warped version of The Kliq. Wrestlers, valets, managers… we were like a misfit mafia of dreamers in suits and spandex.

I managed some absolute characters on that circuit. “Ridiculous” Mike Rayne, who lived up to his name and then some, and “Angry” Andrew Wright, whose commitment to kayfabe was so intense that when I asked why he was angry, he barked, “Because I’m ANGRYYYY!” with his veins bulging, eyes wild. He once headbutted a locker just to prove it.

One night in Bakersfield, I was managing Rayne in a no-DQ match against a high-flying technician named Dante. I was doing my usual schtick of interfering, shouting, clowning around until Dante had had enough and hit me with a spike Michinoku Driver right onto the mat. I rolled out to the arena floor, safe as houses. The referee, Aaron Hernandez, leaned in and whispered, “Are you okay?” But I was laid out in front of two wide-eyed kids who were watching every breath I took, so I groaned, “No, I’m not okay.” Big mistake. Hernandez freaked out. After the match, I dragged myself down the ramp, sold the injury like a champ and then popped up backstage like it was nothing. Hernandez screamed, “Are you shitting me? I thought you broke your neck!” I just shrugged. The locker room gave me a small ovation, but the promoter pulled me aside and told me to never do that again. I was trying to preserve what they call “kayfabe” in the wrestling business but apparently I overachieved.

Back in SoCal, I was telling Pete, Mace, and Foob Dogg about the talent up north. Guys they’d never seen. I pitched booking a few of them. We made it happen but the turnout was a bust. Eighty people. Tops. No money to pay the guys who drove five hours south. Mace said, “You have to tell them we can’t pay them.” I said, “Why me?” And he said, “Because you’re the one who vouched for them.” Man, the looks on their faces when I told them all they were getting was pizza and a handshake: it killed me. I never asked them to work for us again after that. The guilt just hung around my neck like an anvil.

But damn, those shows, those trips, they were electric. I felt more alive on a dusty highway than I ever did behind a desk. I was “The Noticeable One,” a character named after the Missing Persons song, drenched in eyeliner and sarcasm. I got real heat up in places like Merced and Modesto, good heat, not the “go away” kind I’d get in L.A. I felt like I belonged in Central California. They embraced the absurd. They respected hustle. I seriously considered just relocating and starting over as a full-time wrestling degenerate.

But I didn’t. I stayed loyal to SoCal, to PCW, to Pete and Mace and Foob. Even though I knew my run was winding down. As 2003 turned into 2004, I could feel the walls closing in. My personal life was still a mess, my employment record was a trail of smoldering wreckage, and I was too proud to ask for help. Wrestling had been the one constant but even that, I could feel, was about to slip through my fingers.

Still, I’ll always remember 2003 as the year I lived. Like a fireworks display in a dark sky, very loud, very bright, extremely chaotic, and over too soon.

Grappling With The Wrestling World, Part 4

[Some names have been changed.]

The January 2003 PCW show went off without a hitch, on paper, at least. In the tag team title match, The Backseat Boyz dethroned Blaze Vandal and Max Mercury of the so-called “Excellence Foundation.” It was a spectacle of glorious cheating. I got to choke Mercury on the ropes when the ref had his head up his ass, then lured him out of the ring so the Backseats could secure the win by whatever underhanded method they favored that day. Even after a smug heel promo aligning themselves with me, the crowd popped for them like it was a homecoming. The Backseats weren’t just over, they were indie wrestling royalty.

That night, The Philly Connection was born and ran roughshod over the rest of the card. Messiah won the PCW Championship in the main event, and we closed the show standing tall with our stable triumphant, arms raised, a perfect visual to slap on a VHS cover. We even produced commentary in post and hawked VHS tapes and DVDs at the gimmick tables and online. A handful of fans actually bought them. Not a windfall, but it gave us something tangible, something real.

But of course, the internet is the internet. You can’t please the message board mongrels on SoCalUncensored.com. The undercard didn’t scratch their itch for high spots and workrate: they wanted Super Dragon, not storylines. And to make matters worse, I didn’t “gel” with the smart mark illuminati. Led by keyboard warriors, some who would later have their own run as a promoter, they mocked my lifestyle, threw around homophobic slurs like punctuation, and made it clear that a guy like me didn’t belong in their wrestling bubble. This wasn’t heat. This wasn’t an angle. It was open rejection. They hated me for existing in their space.

Behind the curtain, though, things were different. I was mostly well-liked by the wrestlers or at least tolerated. I’d become tight with Pete, Mace, and Foob, enough that I was treated like one of the boys. I even struck up genuine friendships with guys like Ben Tomas, who wore more hats than a circus monkey… referee, ring announcer, photographer. Ben tried to guide me through the minefield of online backlash, but I wouldn’t hear it. I was too drunk on hubris and just plain drunk most of the time.

Someone once said the only time they ever saw me without a cigarette in one hand and a stiff drink in the other was when I was asleep, and even then they weren’t sure. My solution to criticism wasn’t grace or maturity. No, I went full scorched-earth. I hit the message boards with venom, tossing insults at faceless trolls who (spoiler alert) had way more time and venom than I did. I’d get cyber-jumped after every post. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t cathartic. It was stupid. Even Mace and the others told me to knock it off because it was making PCW look bad. But I didn’t care. I was in the business. These dweebs were just noise.

Spring and summer 2003 came, and the Philly Connection storyline limped along. The Backseats only managed one title defense, against Preston Scott and Matrix aka Damage Inc., before dropping the belts. At least I got to hit a triple superkick with the Boyz, which remains one of the coolest moments of my life. But PCW’s financials were an open wound. Drawing 200 people was a good day. More often we were lucky to hit 75. Eventually we moved operations to the Anaheim Marketplace, a flea market venue where a lucha promoter let us use his ring for free if we booked a few of his guys.

And then we got a call from two brothers who’d been training themselves in Rancho Cucamonga. Called themselves The Young Bucks. Mace told them, flat out, “We don’t book backyarders.” Legendary fuck-up, that. Wonder if it still keeps him up at night. It would haunt me.

During that period I was mostly involved in the Mace vs. Mike Vega feud. Vega was a talented Canadian gimmick guy who was really from Whittier but running a Bret Hart homage, right down to his red-and-white singlet and a fleur-de-lis tattoo. I interfered in their matches like a good manager should, but I screwed up a Philly Connection beatdown once and legitimately busted Vega’s mouth open with a mistimed clothesline. He was gracious about it. Too gracious, probably.

Mace, Pete, and Foob wanted me deeper in the fold. Promoting, designing flyers, scouting talent. They also wanted me to become the show’s heel commissioner replacing the uninspired babyface Vance Hartman. Our brilliant storyline solution? Me vs. Hartman in a weapons match. I hadn’t taken a real bump since Maverick’s school and hadn’t “wrestled” since my backyard days. We told fans to bring weapons, and they delivered: keyboards, vinyl records, someone suggested a refrigerator “so we could wrestle in it and not be seen.” Real riot, that one.

I entered wearing Adam Ant face paint, a Mace T-shirt, black tights, and purple kneepads. The match was an absolute disaster. I broke records over Vance’s head like a maniac. He crushed my throat on the guardrail. I got thrown into the post and bruised my shoulder so badly it stayed purple for a few months. Mace ran in to help me win. A botchfest from bell to bell. Vance, disillusioned and facing personal struggles, vanished from wrestling after that.

Now I was the heel commissioner. I relished it. Backstage, my responsibilities grew. We needed a new venue, and I found it: The Eagles Hall in Altadena. Gorgeous layout, better access for LA fans, could fit 300 if we pushed it. Around this time, I started financially backing PCW, too. That meant more drinking, more smoking, and even less time for the goth-industrial clubs I once haunted. My girlfriend was increasingly fed up, understandably. I was neglecting my job at GlaciPure, a water delivery company, because I was too busy chasing dreams in black attire and eyeliner. When people would ask what I did for a living, I’d tell them I was a pro wrestling promoter, not a customer service representative. My girlfriend would roll her eyes but she saw I was having fun even though I was losing most of her support for the venture.

There was no shortage of drama. Other promoters took issue with me like with my flamboyant presentation, my mouth, my reputation. I’d attend other shows for free because, well, that’s how it worked once you were “in.” One night I almost got into a fight with another promoter. We were both plastered and puffed up with alpha nonsense. That was me: ego first, consequences later.

By the end of 2003, PCW had found its home in Altadena. The Philly Connection angle was unraveling, as most of the actual Philly guys were gone. Nick Berk was a highlight… he brought in the Blue Meanie and Jasmine St. Claire to hang out backstage. Meanie was generous and professional. We begged him to dance for the fans, but he politely declined, not wanting to steal thunder from the locals.

And still, somehow, I didn’t see the fire I was building with my own hands. I just knew it was getting hot. I wish I’d recognized how much damage my arrogance and unchecked behavior were doing. I wish the fans hadn’t been so cruel. But truth be told, I gave them reasons. I didn’t help my case. I’d log onto the message boards looking for feedback, only to find “f—-t” plastered everywhere like graffiti. Maybe I didn’t belong in wrestling. Maybe I was too thin-skinned for that world. Maybe the demons were always going to win.

But man, it was one hell of a ride that was almost over before it even started.

Grappling With The Wrestling World, Part 3

[Some names of people and organizations have been changed]

There were exactly three weeks left until the next Pacific Championship Wrestling (PCW) show in January of 2003. It was scheduled to go down in a sectioned-off corner of Frank & Son’s Collectibles Show, a sprawling nerd bazaar in City of Industry, California. Think a flea market mashed together with a comic con, but instead of cosplay meetups and trading cards, we were setting the stage for body slams, blood feuds, and broken egos.

And I had a serious challenge on my hands.

I’d already been running my mouth to Pete, Mace, and Foob, the trio who ran PCW, that I had connections to some of the most buzz-worthy independent wrestlers back East. I told them I could put together a stable, a unit of East Coast killers that would not only turn heads but elevate the entire card. It wasn’t just hype. I truly believed I could pull it off. The only problem? I hadn’t actually lined anyone up yet.

But I had an ace in the hole: Derek Soren. Derek was an up-and-comer on the Philly wrestling scene who would go on to achieve some pretty cool things. By night, Derek was a DJ on Breeze 104.5. That was Philly’s go-to station for smooth soul and quiet storm classics. He had ties to everyone that mattered in our circles, and more importantly, he owed me a favor. I called him and said, “I need talent: real names. Guys who can work, who the smart fans will recognize, and who won’t embarrass me or themselves.”

What I got back almost knocked me out of my chair.

Trent Acid and Johnny Kashmere. The Backseat Boyz. Arguably the most electric tag team on the independent circuit at the time. They were fast, fearless, and impossibly charismatic. Cult heroes in Combat Zone Wrestling, staples in Ring of Honor, and darlings of every message board that mattered. These weren’t just guys trying to break in, they were already stars in their own right.

I pitched them to Pete and the crew, and within a few days, they were officially booked. Not only were they coming in, but I was going to manage them. And not only was I managing them, we were booked to win the tag team titles that very night.

Suddenly, my pipe dream had grown teeth.

But two wrestlers don’t make a stable. We wanted a full-scale invasion. So we gave it a name: The Philly Connection. I suggested the name after eating a cheesesteak at a restaurant with the same moniker in Monrovia. That’s when Mace (who, to his credit, had a knack for booking with nuance) suggested we mix in SoCal guys who had also done time on the East Coast, especially in CZW. That way the Philly brand would feel legitimate, not just imported.

First up was Messiah. A lightning rod of controversy and charisma. Messiah had a persona that felt biblical and blasphemous all at once. He wrestled like a man haunted by demons, the kind who looked like he enjoyed the pain almost as much as he dished it out. He had history with CZW, XPW, and a reputation that made people whisper before they cheered. Booking him added an edge to our faction, a sense of danger that you couldn’t fake.

Then there was B-Boy. He was the contrast and the grounded technician, the streetwise brawler who didn’t need flash because he had fire. Every match he was in looked like a fight, because to him, that’s exactly what it was. His style was crisp, intense, and brutally effective. He was respected on both coasts, and the fans knew he was the real deal. No gimmicks, no posturing and just lots of impact.

We also added Lil Cholo, which, honestly, started as an inside joke. The name felt so hyper-local, so distinctly SoCal, that putting him in a Philly-themed stable felt absurd. But Cholo had presence, and he could work with anyone. He brought a kind of laid-back menace that made him a wildcard in the group.

And finally, Mace himself joined the stable with a clever twist. His new gimmick was that he had “sold out” to the East Coast. He leaned into it hard, mocking the SoCal fans for their loyalty while adopting our Philly bravado like it was tattooed on his chest. It was meta, it was timely, and it made the whole thing feel a little more self-aware which always plays well with the jaded fans in California.

Bringing the Backseats out West wasn’t cheap. We had to drop a few thousand dollars to cover their flights, hotels, and other travel expenses. But from the moment they walked into the venue, it was clear we made the right call. Total pros. Johnny Kashmere was calm and focused, already visualizing the match before the ring was even set up. And Trent Acid (RIP) was magnetic. He carried himself like a rock star, but he treated everyone like family. He didn’t just tolerate me as a manager, he encouraged me, gave me tips on timing, ring presence, how to work the ref, how to position myself during tag spots. He understood the psychology of the whole act and helped make me better at mine.

The chemistry we had was instant. We weren’t just running an angle. We were building a movement. The Philly Connection had a mission: to walk into PCW and take it over from the inside, not with brute force, but with swagger, work rate, and calculated disruption.

But there was one looming question that hung over us like a smog-filled California sky: would the fans buy it?

These were Southern California diehards. Jaded, fiercely loyal, obsessed with message board lore and notoriously hard to impress. They’d seen everything. They had seen deathmatches, lucha hybrids, shoot-style throwdowns. Were they going to accept an East Coast invasion, led by a loudmouthed manager in eyeliner and a bunch of Philly imports?

We didn’t know. But we were about to find out.

And one way or another, it was going to be unforgettable.

Grappling With The Wrestling World, Part 2

In the tail end of 2002, just over a year after I uprooted my life and landed in Southern California, I found myself bitten—hard—by the wrestling bug once more. The mainstream wrestling landscape was a total train wreck. WWE had acquired WCW and rolled out that god-awful “Invasion” storyline, which might go down as one of the most boneheaded creative catastrophes in wrestling history. ECW was already buried, six feet deep, its wild heartbeat silenced. And yet, I still loved this insane, glorious business. I needed to find something real again. Something raw.

Around that time, I’d restarted trading VHS tapes—this time gritty bootlegs of Ring of Honor events, Japanese puroresu, the sort of thing that reeked of passion and sweat, not the sterile nonsense Vince was shoveling out. I scoured the internet for any indie shows I could find within bus or girlfriend-driving distance, since I didn’t have a damn car.

Then, one night in Monrovia, fate stepped in. I was walking out of a movie theater when I spotted a beat-up pickup truck parked out front. On its bumper was a black and white sticker that simply read: “Support Indy Wrestling.” Underneath it? A URL: SoCalUncensored.com. I raced home and punched in the address like it was a cheat code to a hidden world.

It was a goldmine. Dozens of indie shows happening all over SoCal—especially down in Orange County. I started bugging my girlfriend to drive me to every single one of them. Then something caught my eye and practically screamed at me: PCW (Pacific Championship Wrestling) was looking for a ring announcer.

Now, I had kinda been a ring announcer before—back in the ICW days, when I wasn’t working a match, I’d get on the mic and belt out introductions through a battered little PA with all the gusto of a pro. I figured this was my shot to finally claw my way out of the backyards and into something legit. I shot off an email, exaggerated a few things (okay, lied), claimed I had done ring announcing for Maverick’s AAW, and dropped that I had “East Coast connections” in case they ever wanted to fly in some Philly talent—post-ECW, the scene out there was blazing hot.

A day or two later, I got a reply from Pete Villano, one of the three guys running PCW. He said their next show, titled Revelations, was going down that November at the Knights of Columbus in Buena Park. If I could get there, the ring announcing gig was mine. No pay, but free soft drinks and pizza.

Done.

I treated it like I was making my Madison Square Garden debut. My girlfriend, annoyed but resigned, agreed to drive. It was a cold, windy night and the show wasn’t even inside—it was held in the damn parking lot under a sagging tarp. That tarp flapped in the wind like a haunted circus tent.

Pete introduced me to his partners—Dave “Mace” Geck and Robert “Foob Dogg” Tenorio, the latter two doubling as wrestlers. I rolled in wearing eyeliner, a Missing Persons tee under a black blazer covered in New Wave pins. They were… taken aback. I don’t think they expected their new “Philly ring announcer” to look like he just wandered out of a Depeche Mode video.

Then the twist: they already had a ring announcer. I wouldn’t be introducing anyone in the ring—I’d be doing live color commentary. Right there, right next to the crowd.

Live commentary at indie shows is usually a goddamn disaster, and I knew it. But I was there, the wind was howling, my girlfriend was freezing, and it was hard to say no. They told me I’d be using my real name and that I was spearheading a “Philly invasion” of PCW. I thought, what the actual fuck? I hadn’t arranged for a single wrestler to come out from Philly. No logistics, no storyline, no plan.

But the show went on.

The crowd? Ice cold. They booed me, not because I was doing some excellent heel schtick, but because they genuinely didn’t care and wanted me to shut the hell up. It didn’t help that I was wearing makeup in 2002 Orange County—cue the slurs and sideways glares. And the other ring announcer and I sat there calling matches while the fans heckled us nonstop.

There were some solid matches on the card—Lil Cholo, who’d go on to bigger things, showed out. Big Bear Calhoun did his lumbering monster routine. The Stepfather, a well-educated guy playing a gimmick from “Swinehide, Kentucky” who moonlighted in sitcoms and commercials, stomped around in his ridiculous mustard-stained A-shirt and bathrobe. Scorpio Sky wore a rooster mask, acted the part, and called himself The Chicken Boy. There was even a farewell match for a guy named Lucky, who was leaving SoCal for Texas or Japan or maybe just giving up—no one was really sure.

And speaking of The Stepfather—man, what a character. When I first met him backstage, I asked the obvious question: “Why do they call you The Stepfather?”

Without missing a beat, he smirked and barked, “’Cause I’m your daddy now!” I nearly pissed myself laughing. He delivered it like he’d said it a thousand times. Maybe he had. Maybe he said it in a Tide commercial once, who knows.

The main event featured The Messiah—freshly exiled from XPW—and Christopher Daniels and the crowd was electric for that. Finally, names they recognized. Sensing the moment, my commentary partner and I made the smartest decision we’d made all night: we shut the fuck up.

After the show, my girlfriend begged me to pack it in and head home. But I wandered to the back, drawn like a moth. Pete told me the live commentary was, yeah, not the best call—but he liked me. Liked the “gimmick.” I told him, flatly, it wasn’t a gimmick. It was just who I was. They all looked at me like I had tentacles.

And then came the twist.

They invited me back. Next show was in January 2003, in the City of Industry. But this time, I wouldn’t be on commentary. I’d be managing. Full-on Philly invasion storyline. They wanted to fly in talent from the East Coast.

How were we going to pull that off?

I had no idea.

Not one.

But I knew I was in.

Grappling With The Wrestling World, Part 1

[Some names have been changed]

If I’m going to start telling my wrestling stories—and trust me, there are quite a few—then I suppose I should commence at the beginning. Not the sanitized version, not the version you’d give in a media interview or puff piece. I’m talking about the raw, jagged-edged truth of how a lanky, eyeliner-wearing, goth-obsessed kid from just outside Philly found himself navigating the unpredictable world of professional wrestling, all while torn between two identities. Two callings. Two versions of myself that never quite fit in the same room.

It all began in the late ’90s, during a time when pro wrestling was reaching a fever pitch. The so-called Monday Night Wars between Vince McMahon’s WWF and Ted Turner’s WCW were dominating televisions and adolescent imaginations across the country. But in Philadelphia—gritty, blood-soaked, gloriously unrefined Philly—something more rebellious was happening. Something that felt like punk rock with piledrivers. Something underground.

Extreme Championship Wrestling—ECW—was the bastard child of wrestling. Spearheaded by Paul Heyman, it was raw, violent, and absolutely magnetic. Chairs flew, tables exploded, and crimson masks were as common as wristlocks. It didn’t just break the rules; it rewrote the rulebook in its own blood.

To a teenager like me, ECW wasn’t just a wrestling promotion—it was a philosophy, a countercultural battle cry. Inspired by its renegade ethos, a wave of youth-led promotions began popping up around the country. They called it backyard wrestling—an act so frowned upon by the industry at large that it may as well have been a felony. No training. No licenses. No insurance. Hell, sometimes no fucking ring. Just kids in suburban hellscapes turning trampolines and picnic tables into makeshift squared circles and turning pain into art.

At Chichester High School, a small cadre of wrestling fanatics who all happened to share 7th period lunch together and I started our own backyard federation at Lex Holloway’s sprawling estate. We called it Insane Championship Wrestling—ICW for short. A tribute, sure, to ECW, but also our own chaotic brand of adolescent madness. My brother Adam and I were deep in the thick of it. We weren’t just pretending to be wrestlers—we were wrestlers, at least in our minds.

While my brother took on the pretty self explanatory name of “Hardcore” Adam Proctor, I wrestled under the moniker The Toreador Vampire, an aesthetic fusion of my two obsessions: professional wrestling and Vampire: The Masquerade, the tabletop RPG that occupied my other social circle. Pale skin, frilly sleeves, blood capsules in my mouth. My entrance music was Gary Numan’s “The Angel Wars,” and I would hiss at the crowd before launching into a match full of clotheslines, snap suplexes, and the occasional unprotected chair shot. We were reckless, theatrical, and completely alive.

We built stories, feuds, and stables. I once went to war with part of a stable called “The Entourage”: “Toxic Tommy Vexx,” a kid who built his character around a nihilistic aesthetic and came to the ring with actual barbed wire wrapped around his forearms. Another major feud was with “Bishop Steele,” a hulking religious zealot who carried a bible and smacked me in the head with it—literally and figuratively—in a legendary backyard match dubbed “The Rapture.” I lost in dramatic fashion after being powerbombed through a card table lined with Christmas lights. The lights didn’t cut me, luckily, but – yes, it hurt. And yes, I bled.

Of all the blood-slicked, sun-drenched spectacles we ever staged in the unholy proving grounds of Lex’s backyard, one match remains forever burned into the reel of my memories. It was the beginning of the fall of ’98—high heat, high stakes, and the kind of teenage ambition that only thrives in suburbia when MTV, ECW, and too much Surge collide. That day, I was set to square off against a bizarre enigma of a wrestler who went by the name “Cosmic Ray.”

Cosmic Ray was an actual walking contradiction. He wore tie-dye everything—shirt, pants, headband, even his mismatched socks. His entrance music was Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride,” and he made his grand entrances by pedaling a rusty red tricycle to the ring, a peace sign flag waving behind him like some deranged herald of flower power doom. His promo style was part Timothy Leary, part Macho Man Randy Savage. Everyone thought it was a joke—until the match started.

Our “ring” was a fever dream of backyard ingenuity: old gym mats and torn bedsheets laid out like sacred parchment, hemmed in by wooden posts we’d driven into the lawn with Lex’s dad’s sledgehammer. The “ropes” were lengths of tightened garden hose, looped and tied with the illusion of tension. The turnbuckles? Folded towels duct-taped in place. It was barely functional, definitely unsafe, and we treated it like Madison Square Garden.

Cosmic Ray had one rule that afternoon: “Brother, you gotta slam me into the stars.” Which, in his vocabulary, meant dumping him directly onto a bed of thumbtacks he had meticulously arranged into a peace symbol mid-match. He said it was symbolic. I said it was insane.

The match began with his signature tricycle entrance—bell-bottoms flaring, hair flying, hands throwing up peace signs like confetti. I stood in the ring, stoic as ever in my Toreador Vampire garb—flowing black sleeves, pale makeup, and the ever-present scowl of a goth kid who’d listened to too much Switchblade Symphony the night before.

He offered me flowers. I hit him with a cookie sheet.

We wrestled—or something close to it—for several minutes. Chair shots, rubber hose rebounds, and a few amateur chain wrestling sequences that would’ve made even a greenhorn cringe. But then he pulled out the infamous black velvet pouch and dumped thumbtacks into a peace sign in the middle of the mat. “Do it,” he said with glassy, enthusiastic eyes. “Send me back to the cosmos.”

I hoisted him up, spun him like I was invoking some dark art, and dropped him—spine-first—into the thumbtacks. His back erupted in a constellation of silver dots. He let out a howl so loud even Lex’s neighbors peeked through their curtains.

But it didn’t end there.

As if touched by some divine hippie madness, Cosmic Ray rolled from the mat and ran barefoot into the woods behind the backyard. I gave chase. We continued our “brawl” down the brushy hill and into the creek that ran behind Lex’s fence. There, standing ankle-deep in muddy water, we traded wild swings. He tried to dunk me under; I gave him a suplex into the shallows. Our war cries mixed with the hum of cicadas and the distant sound of suburban lawnmowers. We looked like two escapees from a haunted Coachella.

Lex, ever the director, filmed it all on his camcorder—shaky zooms, bad focus, audio crackling with adolescent commentary. We dubbed the tape that night and passed copies around school when we came back on Monday. The reaction was pure chaos. Kids cheered. Jocks actually respected us for once. Even a few teachers—Mr. Devlin from English class, and that science teacher who used to quote “Stone Cold” Steve Austin—asked for copies. We were legends for a month, maybe two.

Cosmic Ray never wrestled again after that match. Said he needed to “re-align his chakras” and “contemplate the metaphysical implications of violence.” I respected that.

But for me, that match was something deeper. A performance. A rite of passage. The first time I felt that strange fusion of violence and theater, character and chaos. I was starting to understand that pro wrestling was an art form—just like the music I worshipped, the clubs I haunted, the eyeliner I wore like armor.

Still, even back then, I felt torn. On one hand, I was this blood-soaked creature of the mat, writing myth in mud and thumbtacks. On the other, I was slipping into downtown Philly in velvet and PVC, dancing beneath strobes to Depeche Mode and Faith and the Muse.

I couldn’t balance the two. Not yet.

So after I dropped out senior year and a few years later, when the chance came to leave Pennsylvania behind and head west, I did it without hesitation. I thought I’d left wrestling behind. I thought I could bury that life and become someone new in the California sun.

But wrestling never leaves you. That was only the beginning.

Meanwhile, like I said, we were all the rage at Chi High: Did you hear what happened in Lex’s backyard last weekend? Did The Vampire really DDT that guy onto a lawnmower? Once, at our peak, 150 people crowded around Lex’s yard for what we dubbed “ICW: Beyond Insanity.” It was so loud, the Upper Chichester police had to come and shut our show down. For a brief, shining moment, we were gods in South Eastern Pennsylvania suburbia.

But it wasn’t long before we caught the attention of some real wrestlers—men who’d laced up boots in actual rings and collected pay envelopes in hot, smoky VFW halls. Chief among them was Maverick, an imposing, no-nonsense veteran of the East Coast indies who ran a small-time promotion called All American Wrestling—AAW. Somehow he’d seen a VHS tape of one of our backyard shows and, rather than scoff, he came to one of our shows with a few other wrestlers, namely Norm The Barfly, to scout.

Maverick was a brick of a man—barrel-chested, perpetually chewing gum, eyes like steel traps. He was everything I wasn’t: traditional, disciplined, anti-flash. He dressed like a cowboy when he came to the ring and would have probably rode a horse as part of his entrance if he had ever made it to the big leagues. But he saw something in me. Maybe it was the 6’3 frame even though I was skinny as fuck. Maybe it was the audacity of showing up in corpse paint to a match. Whatever it was, he offered to train a handful of us. Only two of us made it past the first few sessions. Both of them had pretty decent careers on the independent wrestling circuit and they even showed up, separately, in one-off segments on WWE television years later.

“Mav” didn’t pull punches—figuratively or literally. Training with Maverick meant waking up sore, bruised, and rethinking every bad habit you’d ever learned from watching television wrestling. He taught me how to “bump”—how to fall convincingly and safely, how to sell pain, how to protect myself and others. He drilled me in match psychology, the delicate art of pacing a fight to build tension and payoff. I learned how to call spots, how to work the crowd without saying a word, how to coordinate backstage with referees and opponents so the illusion of chaos could be orchestrated with precision.

But Maverick didn’t see me as a future in-ring technician. He told me, flat out, “Kid, you’re not athletic enough and too weird to be a wrestler. But you’d make a hell of a manager.”

At first, I was insulted. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Managers in wrestling are part con man, part hype man, part lightning rod. Besides, I was the guy always picked last in gym class, if I wasn’t sitting out entirely. I did have the gift of gab, the flair for theatrics, the look of a villain pulled straight from Anne Rice’s nightmares. I began studying the greats—Jim Cornette, Bobby Heenan, Sensational Sherri. I saw how they elevated matches, incited crowds, and amplified their wrestlers. Maverick taught me to be a presence, even when I wasn’t the one taking the bumps.

I never appeared on one of Maverick’s shows. But what I learned from him laid the groundwork for what was to come. A foundation I’d carry with me when I left Pennsylvania for California.

And yet, as I was being pulled deeper into wrestling, something else was tugging at me—something equally seductive. The pounding basslines and strobe-lit euphoria of Philly’s goth and industrial clubs. I was falling in love with dancing until dawn to Covenant, VNV Nation, and And One. The smell of clove cigarettes and the beats of clashing bodies on a sticky dance floor was becoming as intoxicating to me as the roar of a wrestling crowd.

I tried to live in both worlds, but my peers weren’t having it. The wrestling guys didn’t understand the eyeliner, the PVC pants, the fact that I knew every word to “Wind Of The North”. Wrestling people would later accuse me of “living the gimmick”, a big no-no. And the club kids? They didn’t care about wristlocks or booking finishes.

I couldn’t reconcile the two. Not yet.

So I walked away from the “ring” on Jennifer Drive. I chose clubbing over kayfabe. I traded choke slams for strobe lights and bleeding foreheads for bleeding hearts on the dance floor.

But, like I said, the ring never really left me.

This is just the first part of the story—the prologue, if you will. The curtain hasn’t even risen on what would happen when I moved to California and found myself pulled back into the world of professional wrestling in ways I never could have predicted.

More on that soon.

Bodyslams Before Breakfast

I was five years old, almost six, in 1987 when the wrestling bug bit me—hard. It all started in a living room in Delco, on a scratchy old TV that still had wood paneling on the sides and required a firm smack sometimes to clear the static. That spring, WrestleMania III had just happened. I didn’t see it live, of course—we didn’t have cable, and Pay-Per-View was a luxury I thought only rich kids had. But the buzz was impossible to miss. Hulk Hogan body slammed André the Giant in front of a sea of humanity at the Pontiac Silverdome, and even though I didn’t witness it as it happened, the aftershocks reached me.

I don’t remember the exact moment I first laid eyes on wrestling, but I do remember the feeling. It was Saturday morning, right after my usual cartoon block. It became a permanent part of my weekend. I would finish watching Muppet Babies or maybe Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and then—BAM!—the intro music kicked in, and suddenly, I was transported into this wild world of color, fury, and charisma.

There was a different electricity to wrestling. The announcers shouted like it was the end of the world, the wrestlers moved like giants and superheroes, and the crowd’s roars hit me like a wall of fire. From that moment on, I was hooked.

Back then, my wrestling diet consisted of whatever syndicated scraps I could scrounge up. WWF Superstars, Wrestling Challenge, NWA/WCW Worldwide, and Global Championship Wrestling were my weekly lifelines. I’d catch matches on random UHF channels that faded in and out depending on the weather or the position of the rabbit ears. I’d sometimes watch through static, eyes glued to the screen like I was decoding a transmission from another planet.

The bigger storylines found their way to me by way of Pro Wrestling Illustrated and its sister mags—The Wrestler, Inside Wrestling, Wrestling Superstars. The “Apter Mags”. My mom would buy them for me and my siblings from the newsstand after church on Sundays. She didn’t have to do that, but she knew how much we loved it. Those magazines were more than just entertainment—they were sacred texts.

That’s how I learned about feuds in other territories, champions I’d never seen in motion, and angles that blurred the lines between real and scripted long before I even understood there were lines. Those magazines made legends out of men I had never even seen wrestle live. I read about Jerry Lawler in Memphis, The Von Erichs in Texas, and Bruiser Brody’s wildness in Japan. I even remember seeing a picture of “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes and his amateur wrestling savant eleven-teen son, Cody. Who knew what kind of foreshadowing that would be?

One of the coolest parts was the pen pal section in the backpages. I ended up corresponding with a kid in Connecticut named Bobby Blanchard—no relation to my favorite wrestler of all time Tully Blanchard, although we both agreed Tully was criminally underrated. We’d write letters back and forth, talking about our favorite matches, arguing over who had the better finisher, and comparing which issues we had in our collections. For a kid without the internet, it was a lifeline—an early glimpse into how wrestling built a community before hashtags and message boards.

What really grabbed my heart were the wars playing out on my limited TV channels.

WWF had the pageantry, the larger-than-life personalities: Hulk Hogan flexing and preaching about vitamins and prayers; “Macho Man” Randy Savage dripping in glitter and madness; The Ultimate Warrior sprinting to the ring like he was possessed. And who could forget Earthquake, the walking natural disaster who crushed Hulkamania in front of kids and parents with that devastating splash? I still remember the sinking feeling when he jumped on Hogan’s chest on The Brother Love Show. It felt personal.

On the other side, the NWA, later WCW, was grittier. The fights seemed more real, the emotions rawer. It was Ric Flair, slick and arrogant, with the Four Horsemen flanking him like made men. Sting, the painted surfer warrior, was everything I wanted to be: intense, fearless, and cool. Their feud over the NWA World Heavyweight Title in 1988 and 1990 was like something out of a comic book come to life. Flair, with his robes and his insults, was the perfect villain. Sting, with his screams and explosive energy, was the ultimate good guy. I still remember watching Clash of the Champions I on tape years later, seeing a young Sting go to a 45-minute draw with the Nature Boy—it was like watching David stand toe-to-toe with Goliath and refuse to fall.

We didn’t get cable until the mid-90s, so the Monday Night Wars came late for me. While my classmates argued over whether RAW or Nitro was better, I was still trying to make sense of old taped-over VHS collections, reading secondhand results from PWI, and piecing together storylines from scattered episodes. When we did finally get cable, it felt like stepping through the forbidden curtain. Suddenly I had everything—RAW, Nitro, Thunder and SmackDown, and later ECW on TNN.

But it was those early years, before the red and black rebellion of the Attitude Era, that made me fall in love with wrestling in the first place. It was the spectacle of Hogan vs. Earthquake, the unrelenting drama of Flair vs. Sting, the dark charisma of Jake “The Snake” Roberts, the brutality of Demolition, the athleticism of The Rockers, and the eerie allure of The Undertaker’s debut. It was the pageantry and violence coexisting in perfect, chaotic harmony.

Wrestling wasn’t just a show. It was a feeling. A weird, wonderful blend of sport, theater, mythology, and soap opera. And for a wide-eyed kid in the late ’80s without cable, every suplex, every promo, every magazine centerfold was a window into a bigger world.

I didn’t just watch wrestling—I believed in it.

And if I’m being honest… part of me still does.