LIVING THE GIMMICK by BOBBY MATHEWS + THE HARDEST WAY TO MAKE AN EASY LIVING by THE STREETS

BY TIM P. WALKER

The first book I covered in this blog series was Hector Acosta’s Hardway, a novella set against the backdrop of backyard wrestling. (Well, common area wrestling that is.) Reading it, the sense of community within the backyard leagues portrayed is pervasive. It’s all for one and one for all. That is not the case in Bobby Mathews’ Living the Gimmick (Shotgun Honey, 2022), a novel set in world of professional wrestling. In that world, it’s every man or woman for themselves. Lives, livelihoods, alliances, friendships—those are all lost, won, or pushed to a draw on a day by day and match by match basis. It's a calloused and desolate world full of debauchery and violence.

The novel tells the story of wrestler Ray “the Wild Child” Wilder through the eyes of his best friend and fellow wrestler Alex Donovan, who retired from the ring to run a bar in Birmingham, Alabama. Not long after these two reconnect, someone puts a bullet in Ray’s head, and Alex takes it upon himself to find the killer.

But Living the Gimmick doesn’t concern itself much with the mystery of who killed Ray. Rather, it seems to spend most of its pages wondering how exactly he lived as long as he did. Between chapters set backstage at an event taping, we’re given a tour of Ray’s life in the business, where he rose to fame in various promotional alliances as a designated bad guy—a heel. These chapters bounce between various events set mostly in the American south over the course of thirty years, and in them we’re treated to run-ins with dodgy promoters, ambitious competitors, fans who take the act too seriously, and the perils of trying to make the next match in another city hundreds of miles away, which are made all the more perilous when booze, drugs, and one night stands enter the picture.

Naturally, when I think of these aspects of the business of American professional wrestling, I think of the heavily British-accented hip hop of Birmingham, UK’s The Streets.

The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living (Locked On, 2006), the third album Mike Skinner released under his Streets moniker, is an album primarily about the business of being ascendant pop star Mike Skinner, and he doesn’t quite cast himself as the designated good guy—the face, if you will—either. In this album, the only thing he seems capable of destroying more than hotel rooms (“Hotel Expressionism”) and all kinds of relationships (“All Goes Out the Window,” “Fake Streets Hats”) is himself (“Pranging Out”). Meanwhile, we’re treated to his brand of celebrity gossip column drama, wherein he hooks up with another self-destructive British pop star whose fame eclipses his own (“When You Wasn’t Famous”—C’mon, this came out in the mid-aughts. You know who he’s talking about. Think English and notoriously averse to rehabilitation centers.) The title track sums up the state of his being: bobbing along like an old-fashioned whistled work song, Skinner lays out in detail the personal and financial pit he seems to be digging himself as he climbs the ladder of success. “If this keeps going so well, this is going to be the end of us.” Indeed.

Of course, being a self-destructive British celebrity means the targets on his back are the ones painted by the tabloid papers. As he points out in “Two Nations,” America has a distinctively American problem with their pop stars. “You build on stars and maniacs shoot them.” While it may be debatable who the real maniac is in Living the Gimmick, the novel itself is a distinctly American one about celebrity culture and all its toxicities.

As similar as Mike Skinner and Ray Wilder are, Living the Gimmick is as much Alex’s story as it is Ray’s, though the version of Skinner he most resembles is the one staring down his own existential despair. He doesn’t make fodder of it like Skinner does, or so much as acknowledge that it’s there, but the despair runs deep. As he spent his entire wrestling career as Ray’s sidekick both in the ring and out, his life is defined by his relationship to Ray, so much so that he comes off an empty shell without him. Throughout the novel, he fills that emptiness with senseless acts of destruction, such as when he unmoors Ray’s boat during a party or when he gets into violent scrapes with another wrestler while investigating Ray’s murder. Even the murder investigation seems to be something he pursues simply to fill the massive hole in his life.

As for the mystery of who killed Ray Wilder, the question doesn’t seem to be all that important. To be honest, I forgot the name of the killer the minute I turned the page on that particular chapter. I’m not sure it matters either. And by the way he sometimes plays them for laughs, the tribulations of Mike Skinner don’t seem to matter much in the end either. He closes The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living with backstage banter and the sound of a concert crowd. The show goes on as it must.