I met him on Ben Franklin Parkway, at the beginning of the alphabetized row of flags belonging to every country in the world. The only flag not alphabetically placed was Israel, which was on the pole closest to city hall, even before Afghanistan and Albania.
Ali and I started out at Reading Terminal and ate brisket at an Amish kiosk. With drinks in hand we sat on the steps of city hall and watched the workers on the scaffolding around the building as they wiped away hundreds of years of grime.
Philadelphia, Ali Ansari said, was America’s pretty but rebellious daughter. She subjected herself to piercings and ugly makeup and tattered clothing and abstained from showering, as if there was authenticity to be found in shirking the established norms. Philly was shy inside, he said. She didn’t want people looking at her; but the shyness came from wisdom. Philly understood that when you reveal yourself, the world starts expecting you to maintain yourself. Beauty is a slavery. But now Philly was washing up. Getting her hair done. Adding highlights. It was out of character. He said she would regret her decision.
“Maybe the city will attract more people. More diversity?”
“Multiculturalism? It’s a recipe for estrangement. Everyone performing their pantomime. You just realize how different we are from one another.”
The sun hit us on the face, energizing us to move. Ali suggested a trip to Northern Liberties. He wanted to show me something weird. We took the subway under the Galleria and the jewelry shops, under Independence Hall, all the way to the riverfront, until we emerged near the Ben Franklin Bridge. The river was pepper gray. It gave the sun no surfaces to twinkle in.
We stayed on this side of the river, looking out toward Camden. I had only been to Camden once, when Marie-Anne and I had gone to do a little circumambulation of Walt Whitman’s grave. The lone man in history who had become one with America.
We soon arrived at a refurbished warehouse. I was expecting some kind of hipster convocation. What I saw instead was a roped wrestling ring surrounded by two levels of seating. There were a few stout men of Irish descent taking their seats, beers in hand, holding the fight card, placing wagers.
“The Extreme Wrestling Association of Philadelphia,” Ali Ansari said, and nudged and pushed me toward the front row. The smell of turpentine mixed with sawdust and talcum; it had an intensity that brought the warehouse to life. The steel and stone and aching bone that had been used up in its past. The night shift, with minimal light, sedate faces hammering out metal parts and metal gizmos with which America armored itself and strode forth into the inhospitable world, manifesting a destiny outward after having mastered its interior.
We waited half an hour for the seats to fill up. Most of the audience members were factory stiffs and other longtime residents from Northeast Philadelphia. The show, meanwhile, had all the ingredients of the kind of wrestling popularized by the WWF, WWE, and Vince McMahon. But there was a twist — it was much more violent. The wrestlers bled more, threw themselves from higher ladders, and tossed each other into the bleachers in order to inflict pain that would be deemed more and more believable.
We had come to see the main event, which featured a massive, bearded wrestler named Marty Martel. He had a cross tattooed on his stomach. He entered the arena to Norwegian death metal music and carried a great broadsword in his hand that he handed off to his manager, a smaller guy wearing a crown and robes; his name was Charlie Main.
Marty Martel was a face. Once he was in the ring he gave a long speech about kicking out all the immigrants who were stealing good American jobs. This earned him a lot of laughter and support. In the middle of his speech he was interrupted by the heel, a masked Mexican wrestler named Gonzo, who lambasted Marty for denying his family an opportunity to pursue the American dream. The crowd booed Gonzo and cheered for Marty. They were egged on by Charlie Main, who walked around the arena swinging the broadsword and saying gibberish in mock Spanish. I found myself rooting for the heel, though in the face of Marty Martel’s large following I didn’t cheer out loud. Ali Ansari wasn’t so shy. He stood and rooted for Gonzo, screaming at him to “choke the fucking cracker.” It shocked me that no one else in the audience seemed to find Martel’s commentary offensive.
After a number of super kicks and iron claws the fight turned in Gonzo’s favor; he made Martel submit with a mean camel clutch. But the apparent victory was thwarted when Charlie Main jumped into the ring and distracted the referee by complaining that Gonzo was an illegal immigrant and didn’t have the work authorization to be in the ring in the first place. The referee tried to tell Charlie Main that such bureaucratic things didn’t matter in the ring, which was a place of honor, a place of equality. But as the two men had their dramatic discussion, thoroughly engrossed in each other, Martel was able to slither out of the camel clutch and pinned Gonzo with a suplex. As the reversal took place, Charlie Main excitedly directed the referee’s attention back to the action and within seconds the referee was on the floor, counting Gonzo out. Not wanting to give the judges a chance to review the end of the fight, Marty Martel and Charlie Main ran out of the ring and toward the tunnel.
The masked Mexican wrestler, now all alone in the ring, with only Ali Ansari’s support in the audience, was left stomping mad, clutching his hair, beating his chest. On his way out of the ring he took hold of the announcer’s microphone and vowed that he would exact justice against the entire association, going so far as to challenge the referee to a match. That fight was scheduled for next Wednesday. The crowd roared their approval and booed Gonzo out of the arena.
There were more fights scheduled for the evening, but Ali Ansari said he had seen all he had come for and we headed back to Center City, for beer and mussels at Monk’s.
“I had no idea these things were so political,” I said.
“Wrestling represents the American narrative like nothing else. Any issue there is, it can address. Liberal versus conservative. Antiwar versus prowar. Man versus woman. Rich versus poor. Wrestling’s got it all.”
“All this time I thought it was just a bunch of fake pummeling.”
“The fighting is fake,” Ali Ansari said, “but that’s not why people go there. People go for the story. It’s social drama.”
“I take it Gonzo is a friend of yours and we came to support him?”
“I don’t know Gonzo. I came for Marty Martel. Whose real name is Martin Mirandella.”
It turned out that Martin Mirandella had once been a wrestler in the WWE, where he’d played a heel called Hasan Hussain. He had been managed by the same guy who now played Charlie Main. Back then Charlie was called Rasheed Shaheed, though originally he was an Irish kid from Maryland. Their story in the WWE was that they were a pair of Arab cousins from Dearborn, Michigan, who were fed up with the way the United States treated its Muslim minorities, and wanted nothing more than to expose the manner in which they were denied their fair shot at the title.
“Basically it wouldn’t matter who they beat,” Ali Ansari explained. “The association would always find a way to deny them the title shot. This only caused Hasan to fight harder and beat more guys. After each fight he demanded a title shot and every time the association, playing the part of the racist, or the oppressive white man controlling the glass ceiling, turned him down. People loved it. Hasan became one of the best heels in years. But the more wrestlers he beat the more the other wrestlers turned against him. At one rumble that I remember, all nine of the other wrestlers stopped fighting each other when he entered the ring and ganged up to beat him up.”