Page 6 of A Long Con

I might be dealing a-PVP to high school kids on spring break, but deep inside The Samoan Slammer was a heart of gold. I just never showed it to anyone. Why would I, after being treated like a circus animal for so many years? I worked year-round playing my persona night and day. I didn’t even have the time to get married, and here I was, thirty-five, a former first-string choice, a face champ who commanded a crowd. I was picking myself up by the jockstrap, making the best of things, and other corny things my dad might’ve said, if I still talked to him.

I was going to reach out to Twinkletoes to see if the Bent Zealots could launder my income. That was one of the things they did best, with their business fronts like Anson’s bail bonds office, the weed dispensary Herbal Legends, and Bond’s off-track betting business. There was even allegedly a new member who was an exorcist. I wondered how lucrative that was.

Twinkletoes was a WrestleMania fan. I’d met him after a match in Phoenix when he’d come through the fog machine fog and introduced himself. Of course I was in full Samoan Slammer regalia, my face painted in a vaguely tribal way. I have a full sleeve of ancient kakau artwork, interlocking lines and geometric patterns that snake around my pec, ending in a swirl at my nipple. I’d been told the shapes represent protection of my family heritage and personal identification, my status as a warrior.

“The family that I live for only breathes the air that smells of combat!” I growled at Twinkletoes.

He wasn’t affected. He was a weedy, weak-looking young man, perhaps afflicted with muscular dystrophy or another muscle-wasting disease. He just chuckled at my shouts.

“That’s cool,” he said, watery-eyed as though stoned. “Hey, I’m a member of a motorcycle club in Lake Havasu City. You ever fight there?”

I made claws with my hands. “Dig your fingers into my organs. Stretch into my tendons, bury your anchors in my bones. The power of The Samoan Slammer will always prevail!”

Twinkletoes chuckled. “Awesome. Hey, here’s the business card of one of my brothers, Anson Dineyazzie. I know, it’s a bail bonds office, not that you’ll ever need that, but use him as a contact. I don’t have a card ‘cause I’m a jack of all trades. Just get ahold of Anson and tell him Twinkletoes sent you. We can walk you through the ropes, show you an amazing time, brother.”

“Brah,” I agreed, looking at the card. “Should I jump off the tallest building in the world?”

“Cool,” Twinkletoes giggled.

So that was how I came to know the club. I did wind up having a bout in Lake Havasu City, so I looked up Anson for a change of pace. They turned out to be a mostly gay club aside from Twinkletoes and a few other Navajo kids. That was OK. I didn’t mind. They had women called “sweetbutts” clinging all over them, fag hags of a sort, and of course I was the apple of their eye. Then I had my traumatic brain injury, dropped fifty feet onto the ring when my cable snapped. Luckily, they were showing highlights of my career on pay-per-view when it happened, but people in the audience thought it was scripted and roared to their feet. The Samoan Slammer was known for acrobatic stunts. Then the announcer told them it was unscripted. Or so I heard later.

My chin and neck hit the top rope and I bounced several times. My skull cracked on a turnbuckle, one of those padded pieces of metal holding the corner ropes together. I should’ve really been dead. Instead, I could never wrestle again and had to gulp handfuls of opiates. With no medical insurance, I had to find a new career. I tried bodyguarding for other wrestlers or underworld types for a while, but my new personality didn’t fit in with their lifestyle. I was too bold and brave for them, taking unnecessary chances or drawing attention with my antics.

I found another new life with the Bent Zealots, an inventive and crafty band of brothers. In many ways, I hated being half-Hawaiian because my father was a Kanaka Maoli, and I hated him. My mother was German, lending me big round eyes and I’d been told an erotic nose, so I studied German on Duolingo with a vengeance. Das ist dein Problem, I often told people. That is your problem. My life had been ruined by a chance accident, and I could not stop breathing and bleeding the wrestling business. I felt I was never truly out of it, especially when I picked up snakes without fear or reasoned with muggers with no concern for my safety, or theirs. This new brain injury made me more The Samoan Slammer than ever.

I greeted everyone on Lock and Turk’s front lawn. “Brah, brah. Hey, Hobie.” I bro-hugged a roly-poly brother, a limp-wristed guy married to a lawyer who had adopted a young girl. I asked Lock Singer, one of the owners of the house, “Seen Twinkletoes around?”

“Yeah, we tasked him with cleaning up,” said Lock. Twinkletoes was still their roommate after Lock’s husband Turk had founded the club a couple years earlier. So of course they made him clean up, even though he was fully patched.

Out back, I helped Twinkletoes stack up a bunch of abandoned paper plates and plastic forks. A couple other guys were manning the grill. Paper party lanterns were strung from the eaves and back fence. “Listen, I’m going to need some money washed, brah. Which business do you think is the best?”

Instead of answering, Twinkletoes asked, “You still plying that flakka bullshit? I saw a guy walking on his butt the other day on that shit.”

Dr. Thymus Moog raised a red cup and said, “A girl came into the ER seizing.”

And Merwin Bigwater quipped while handing me a couple dirty plates, “I saw a guy running down the street naked. He was trying to get hit by a car so the people chasing him would stop. But there was no one chasing him.”

I shrugged. Those people weren’t my concern. “Some people take too much product, or just don’t have the constitution for it. It’s very lucrative. You guys should set me up with some more subcontractors.”

“No thanks,” said Merwin. “And Herbal Legends won’t clean for you, either. We have enough dodgy laws to abide by.”

Anson Dineyazzie wandered on by. He was the fierce outlaw who owned the Los Toros Hermanos bail bonds business in partnership with Lock Singer. Anson did all the out-of-town stuff, the bounty hunting, so Lock could stick closer to home. “We can’t clean that at our place, either. We deal too closely with pigs.”

That made sense, but I was getting desperate. If you couldn’t go into business with a weed dispensary or a human bounty agency, who else would help you out? I was going to have a hard time explaining where I was getting tens of thousands of coin unless I entered into an agreement with someone. I was just a former wrestler, a shadow of my old self living in a one-bedroom apartment over a biker bar. If I suddenly upgraded to a house and a Harley V-Rod, it would put me in the crosshairs of banks or the feds.

Twinkletoes and I hefted our plate piles into a trash can. “I’m sorry, Royal,” said Twinkletoes. “We’re maxed out finding ways to wash our own shit. We had a massive shipment of AKs two weeks ago. Haven just agreed to add it to his NASCAR income, pay taxes on it, like he’d participated in the Baja 1000.”

I was pretty tight with Haven. We both had sensational, daring, and dangerous careers with national sporting federations. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask him.

“Yeah, brah, I get you,” I said. “It was a lolo idea of mine.”

Twinkletoes shrugged. “Not really. We do it all the time. We’re just maxed now.”

“I can do it.” Before I could open my mouth, another Bent Zealot strode by. It was Harte Saxonburg, and I struggled to remember what he did for a living.

Twinkletoes seemed skeptical of the redhead, too. “Harte? Seriously? You own a rock shop.”

Harte frowned. “What’s wrong with a rock shop, Twink? You act like it’s a vacuum cleaner repair shop. We have some rare minerals.” He was a huge, powerful man with ginger hair, like a giant among Lilliputians. His black leather “cut” brought to mind the vest of a Germanic goliath, and he even wore pointy-toed cowboy boots.