---

Red Ripper

By Gordon Grice

---

Listen, I could still stretch half you pups if I felt like it. Sit down and learn something about the business. Did I ever tell you about the Red Ripper? I got a special reason for telling about him, because he’s come back to settle up with me. I never cared who he was under the hood, not until the night they went after him with a Polaroid. He was a good traveling buddy, and kind of a mentor, so what did I care? Wish to God I’d never got curious.

Some of the young guys thought Rip had a stick up his ass because he took his gimmick so serious. He never took that hood off, not even in the locker room. So one night they decided to pull a swerve on him. Rip had just gone broadway with Dory, and he comes back to the locker room and peels off everything but the hood. He’s standing there naked. Gray hair bristled on those round shoulders of his, and his balls hung halfway to his knees. What, you didn’t know that happens when you get old? Now you got something to look forward to.

Anyway, I saw one of the guys signal to another one, so I knew a swerve was up. Rip gets in the shower and one of the guys pounces into the next stall with a camera and the other guy gives him a leg up. The first guy leans over Rip’s stall and snaps a picture. I saw the flash and heard the bulb crack—they used to crack, boys, back in those days. One of the other old guys looked up and grunted a little, kind of annoyed about the flash, but he didn’t say anything. After a second, we heard Rip cussing in that grizzly-bear voice of his. The young guys ran for it like little kids. Rip comes out of the shower lacing his mask, soaped-up and cussing, and the mask is loose and flopping around, which made it look like his head was swollen up half again its normal size. Those two boys grabbed their gear and hightailed it.

Nobody laughed at Rip. Nobody needled him. People just stared at him a minute, and he stood there dripping, and then he turned around and went back into the shower. After a minute he came out with his mask laced up tight and got dressed and motioned for me to get a move on.

In the car that night he was quiet for about twenty miles, and then he asked me if I wanted to shoot jackrabbits. So we shot jackrabbits when they jumped into the headlights, but I felt odd seeing him wield his twenty-two that night. Keep in mind he even traveled with that hood on, so there I am speeding through the night looking at this dark red patch where his head’s supposed to be, and just an ice-blue eye floating along and a hairy, muscular arm laying along the window holding a twenty-two.

Next time I saw Mr. Flashbulb was two towns on. Mr. Flashbulb was booked with somebody else, but at the last minute he found out he had to wrestle Rip instead. That was easy enough to read. Rip had pulled strings with the office to switch things up so he could get some payback on the kid. He’d take him in there and stretch him. If the kid was smart, he’d do his best against Rip, and then not complain afterward.

Mr. Flashbulb goes to the ring, and Rip went out second because he was the bigger name. Sure enough, Rip starts riding the kid around the ring, stretching him. The marks can’t really tell. Hell, to them, every match is a shoot. But to us in the back, it was easy to see what was going on. I was standing in the entry way with Steinborn, and he just grunted, sort of disapproving. After a minute or two, I noticed Mr. Flashbulb wasn’t putting up any kind of a fight, just letting Rip do what he wanted. Exactly the wrong way to handle it, because then all the other boys will think you’re easy and you won’t get any respect. It wasn’t a question of winning; it was a question of going down fighting. Rip had him chicken-winged on the mat and Flashbulb just laid there looking scared. Rip cranked on it a little, which I can assure you hurts like hell, but Flashbulb just laid there. Finally Rip slapped him on the head, and I could see Rip talking to him, telling him to put up a fight. After that the kid did some stuff, but it was pretty weak, and Rip had no trouble taking over whenever he felt like it. Finally the fans started to get restless, and Rip just took the guy down hard and clamped on the sugar. The ref was in there asking for the bell right away.

Rip didn’t let loose. I could see the ref arguing with Rip, which was part of the show, but also not, if you see what I mean. The kid’s head is pushed forward like his neck’s broken. Finally Rip lets the kid go and he lies there unconscious on the mat. When Rip walked by us on his way back to the shower, Steinborn said, in that gentle raspy way he had, “Just a kid, Rip.” Rip walked right by him.

That kid was broken. He never lipped off to anybody else, and pretty soon the others caught on that he’d lost his nerve and they started to push him around, and the kid had a rough time of it for the rest of his stay in the territory. After that he went to Louisiana and didn’t do so well. Drank a lot, I guess. One night between towns he slipped off the road and went end over end and landed on his wheels. The next one to happen along was McGuirk, and of course he recognized the car and got out to help. When he shined his flashlight in, he could see Flashbulb wasn’t all there. Pretty soon a bunch of the boys were stopped along the road with their headlights shining into the bar ditch, and they were all beating the reeds looking for his head and his left arm. McGuirk thought he saw the arm, but when he grabbed it, it hissed and gaped its cottony mouth at him.

Finally the state troopers told them to stop looking, they’d start again when it was light. Ended up the arm was wedged under the front seat, but the discovery of the head was the real main event. It was laying on the floorboards, cut in neat halves by the wreckage, and the brain glistening on it like oysters on the half-shell.

Don’t be snorting at me, boys. I’m just telling you what the troopers told us. The picture? Yeah, that had come up a few weeks after the shoot, when some other guy was needling Mr. Flashbulb, because by now everybody gave him a hard time. And the guy says, “Hey, whatever happened to your picture of Rip?”

Flashbulb looks at him like he’d just proposed marriage or something. He looked at him so long I thought he was going to start something. But then he said, “That picture didn’t turn out.” And he got up and fiddled with his gear for a minute and then he looked around real nervous. Rip wasn’t in the room. And then Flashbulb said again, “That picture didn’t turn out,” which was a weird thing to say because by now everybody had gone on to something else. Then Flashbulb grabs his bag and leaves.

---

“I heard he never takes it off because he’s scarred up,” Sarpolis said over a bar table maybe a week later.

“Do tell,” said the Turk, and passed his mug to the barkeeper for a refill.

“Story goes that him and Bustamante were going round the horn with gimmick matches,” Sarpolis went on, sucking his cigar between sentences. “They’d done regular matches, fence matches, Texas death, everything you could think of, and they were still drawing, so they wanted to keep topping it, keep topping it.” The cigar pulsed as he drew on it. “Finally, Rip comes up with the inferno match. There’s a torch posted in the corner, and you win by sticking the other guy’s face in it.”

“How the hell do you work that?” Mr. Leg-Up asked. I call him Leg-Up because he was the guy that gave Flashbulb the leg up to take the Polaroid. He was half-drunk and surly.

“In and out of the fire quick, and then sell it like a son of a bitch,” Sarpolis says.

“Sounds stupid,” says Leg-Up.

“I’d go out with my hair wet,” Fargo says. “Less chance of catching it on fire.”

“It was stupid, as it turns out,” Sarpolis said. “Bustamante got a little too excited about sticking Rip’s face into the torch. Rip’s hood caught fire and kind of melted onto him. He’s scarred for life.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “He was already wearing a hood when this happened?”

“Yeah, he was the Black Phantom. After the fire he changed to a red hood and started calling himself the Red Ripper.”

“But what was he before he was the Black Phantom?” I said, because the topic had started out being why he always wore a hood.

“You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown,” the Turk said to Sarpolis.

“You mean it didn’t happen?” Leg-Up asked.

“Sure, it happened,” the Turk said. “But he’d been doing hoods for years by then. That angle was just to switch him to a different hood.”

“You’re so smart, tell us who he is without the hood,” Sarpolis said.

“I ain’t that smart,” the Turk said.

An hour or so later some had left and some were playing pool, but the Turk and me were still at the table and we’d switched to sipping vodka. Turk said it helped his busted tooth. I was trying to have a good time but drizzle was slapping against the window and there wasn’t a female in sight and the bar smelled like a wet dog.

“Of course you know the Angel of Death story,” Turk said. It came out of the blue. I told him I didn’t know the Angel of Death story.

“That was what Rip called himself before he started wearing hoods. Angel of Death. One night in Amarillo he accidentally drops a knee on Lancelot’s gut and Lance finishes the match, but then he goes to the back and throws up blood. He died on the way to the hospital. Ruptured spleen or something. They put it in the papers and everything: ‘Man Dies after Wrestling Angel of Death.’ Rip’s been hiding his face ever since.”

“Is that a shoot?” I said.

“If it ain’t, it ought to be,” said the Turk.

---

“Lancelot? Sure, I know him,” Romero said a couple nights later in the Love’s Country Store where we were gathering up all the cold cuts for a blow-out. Rip had stayed in the car and made me go in. Said half the time the clerks would go for their gun if they saw a guy in a hood walk in.

“He still around?” I said, acting as dumb as I could. Yeah, I know, not much of a challenge.

“Retired. Runs horses up in Minnesota. Some special kind of a horse, Morgans or Bordens or something.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“Naw. I seen him last summer when we worked a couple dates for Verne.” Romero grabbed two loaves of bread and piled them on top of my double armload of baloney.

“Maybe he was just hurt or something. I heard something bad happened to him in the ring.”

“Everybody gets hurt, kid. Your time’s coming.”

We knew the clerk; he liked to kid us. “Gents,” he said, “you’ve took my entire stock of baloney.”

---

“A fire it most certainly was not,” Sailor said, unlacing his boots. “It was acid.”

“How the hell would you know?” said Swede. “You probably weren’t even born.”

“I most certainly was not,” Sailor agreed, wrenching his right boot off with a flourish. “But my daddy was. The fan poured acid on them from the upper gallery. Splashed my daddy’s arm and he had the mark for the rest of his life. Like a puppy dog ran through red mud and then walked on his arm.”

“And Rip?” Swede said.

“Worse than that.”

“What, two puppies?” the Turk said, and everybody laughed.

“You certainly must have seen him without the hood, kid,” Sailor said to me.

“No,” I admitted.

“Not in a motel room or something?”

“Never.”

“He’s certainly an uppity prick, kayfabing in front of his traveling buddies. You ought to swipe his hood sometime. Teach the bastard a lesson.”

That idea had already stuck sideways in my mind. Like running your face into a flame. You know it’s a bad idea, but something stupid in you wants to know how bad.

---

“I didn’t do nothing to Mr. Flashbulb but stretch him,” Rip said in the car that very night. I hadn’t asked.

After a while he spoke up again. That grizzly-bear voice of his just rumbled up out of the dark.
“Did you know you sweat different, depending on what you feel?”

“I guess not.”

“Like if you’re scared, you smell different than if you’re just working hard.”

“Sure, that makes sense,” I said. “Or if you’re drunk, that smells different.”

“Exactly, kid. If I get mad I sweat different.”

“I never noticed.”

“You ain’t seen me mad, not right up close. My mad smell is different than the next man’s. Mr. Flashbulb got to smell it up close. It does something to a man’s mind. Or maybe it just gives him bad luck.”

I couldn’t tell how much of that was a joke.

“Of course I didn’t have anything to do with how he ended up. I just put him on a bad road.”

---

Now I’m going to tell you something I never told anyone. It’s been forty-five, fifty years, and things are finally coming back around to bite me, so I’m gonna tell.

One night we were barreling down Highway 87, and the wind was blowing through my hair and I was feeling good, probably because we both, Rip and me, had a Coors Light open and the radio was playing George Jones. Then I saw a red shadow run along the side of Rip’s hood and slip off the back. Of course it was the lights from a cop car. Rip slowed down and the Smokey Bear got closer and the whole inside of the car was full of blue light and then red light and back again. Rip just sat there with the engine throbbing—missing a little, I noticed—and the lights gleamed off his hood, but his eyes were in shadow. We’d had a few laughs over the months when somebody passed us close enough to get a glimpse of his face, and usually they’d do a double-take. But now I was feeling nervous, because this was a Smokey. I was afraid he’d make Rip take his mask off. I don’t know why that upset me. Hell, I was curious to see what he looked like, just like all the marks were. To tell you the truth, I’d actually given some thought to swiping his mask, or goading Leg-Up into doing it, just so we could find something out. But just now, on a dark road with nobody much around, I liked the idea of seeing his face a whole lot less.

The highway patrolman comes up to Rip’s window. He’s a big guy, kind of bony and big-hipped, and I sized him up and thought he might be tough to handle if it came to that. Not that it needed to come to that. I pushed my Coors can down into the space between the seat and the door.

A flashlight beam poked into the car. First it outlined Rip’s head, so I could see him as a silhouette; then it blinded me.

“Step out of the car, Sir,” said the Smokey.

I heard Rip open the door. The light pulled back and I could see again.

“What the Sam Hill kind of a get-up is that?” the Smokey said.

“I’m a wrestler,” Rip said, calm.

“You’re going to have to take that off, Mister. How do I know you ain’t somebody from a wanted poster?”

“Mind if we do it in your car? I’d hate for a passing motorist to get a glimpse. Hurts my trade, you know.”

“How in hell would they know it was you?” Smokey sneered.

“They would if they saw who I’m riding with,” Rip purred. “My partner there is kind of famous, especially among the ladies.” In my dreams, maybe. Anyway Smokey let Rip go to his cruiser. Smokey followed him at a distance, his hand on his hip right next to his holster.

In the rearview I couldn’t see much of the cruiser itself, just the top light showing red and then blue, and below it through the windshield, shadows that I wouldn’t even have been able to call human if I didn’t already know, the trooper taller than Rip and with his Smokey Bear hat bobbing as he talked, Rip thick as a boulder beside him, his hands moving around behind his head. He must be working at the laces of his hood.

A truck came over the hill and I had to look away because its lights stabbed right into my eyes. It was a few seconds before I could see anything in the Smokey’s car again. Then I caught a motion that must have been Rip nodding his head forward. The hood fell into his hands. I felt embarrassed for him. It was like that thing in the Bible where Noah’s son sees him naked and it’s a sin. But I couldn’t actually see him. He was just a lump of shadow.

The Smokey saw him, though. He suddenly thrashed around, like he was having a seizure. What the hell? I thought Rip had done something to him, but they really weren’t that close. The Smokey opened his door and stumbled out onto the road. He fell on his hands and knees. Rip was putting the hood back on. I was afraid somebody would come by and see us. I can’t say why; I hadn’t done anything wrong, and maybe Rip hadn’t either.

The Smokey got to his feet. He stood there in the middle of the highway. Headlights came bobbing over the hill ahead. Didn’t he have a lick of sense? Rip got out of the cruiser and adjusted his mask. Smokey glared at him, put his hand on his weapon, and then began, slowly, to pull it out of its holster. I saw him plain. It was the headlights of a Semi that lit him up.

What the hell was he doing? I put my hand on the door handle, but I was way too slow. The truck passed. The Smokey was gone.

Our driver’s side door opened. Rip folded himself painfully into the seat. He put the car in gear.

“Did you see that?” I screamed. “I think that truck hit him.”

“I hope you saw it too.”

I heard the Semi hit its Jake brakes. It sat idling for a minute. Then I saw its tail lights moving away. Maybe the driver would find a turn-around and come back. Maybe not. I sat still.

“Funny thing,” Rip said, easing us back onto the highway. “I wasn’t even speeding.”

In the rear view I saw the colors receding, the red, the blue, the red.

---

“I ought to swipe his mask,” Leg-Up said, drunk, which had got to be his usual. “That’ll teach the bastard not to show his face.” He slammed a locker shut. It bounced back open. He slammed it harder. He was pissed about how snug Rip had worked him in Colorado Springs the night before. This was basically his first taste of what Flashbulb had got, and he didn’t like it. But somehow he’d rambled on about it until he ended up bitching about the mask again. Of course all this bitching happened while Rip was out having his match.

Leg-Up was saying pretty much what Sailor had said to me a couple weeks before. No doubt Sailor had said it a lot of times. And here it was coming out the hind end of the suggestion machine. I wanted him to stop talking about it. I saw red lights and blue lights and more red lights every time I shut my eyes. Also, I kept feeling like I ought to unmask Rip myself. No way I was going to do it, except now I hadn’t slept well and who knows what I was going to do.

I hadn’t said a word about it, not to anyone, not even when the boys gossiped about the death of Officer Jim Oakes and said he hadn’t been too bad for a Smokey.

It seemed like I ought to say something to Leg-Up. Shut him up. Warn him.

I just sat on the bench. It was the Turk who spoke up.

“Talk’s talk, kid, but you don’t mess with a man’s gear.”

“Certainly not until you’ve tried easier ways,” said Sailor. He stood there in his tidy-whities running a travel iron over a pair of pants he’d folded on the massage table.

“What easier ways?” Leg-Up said.

“Guy drives a car, right? Probably has a license. Probably keeps it in his bag. You want to see his face, it’s on his license.”

“You don’t reach into a man’s bag, Sailor,” said the Turk. “You know that.”

“Certainly, I know that,” Sailor said. “But does this dumb kid? I guess not.” He added that last part because Leg-Up was already unzipping Rip’s bag. Stuff spilled out—a couple bloody hankies, a leather case with a syringe sticking out of it, a straight razor. An extra hood, which who knew he even had one, crumpled and crusty. Maybe that’s where the smell came from.

“Something has certainly died in there,” Sailor said. He slipped on the pants he’d pressed and started cramming his things into his own bag.

“Quit while you’re ahead, Leg-Up,” I warned. I was half-ass protecting my friend’s gear, but also, I remembered lights—the red, the blue, the red.

“What is this shit?” Leg-Up said, ignoring me. He was peering into the bag.

“Ain’t a goddamned thing in that bag belongs to you,” growled Rip. There he stood under the hanging bulb, the hair sticking out of his shoulders like a sweaty halo, his mask like a smudged old thumbprint in blood.

“Shit,” Sailor whispered on his way out the door. The iron, too hot to pack, he just left behind.

“The rest of you clear out, too,” Rip said. He sounded calm, which I knew was the worst way for him to sound. They all went. The Turk didn’t even take his bag.

“Might be best if I stay, Rip,” I said. “Keep things from getting out of hand.” I sounded calm, which was maybe the best piece of work I did in my whole career.

Leg-Up was on his knees scooping things back into the bag. “Look, Rip,” he said. “I already had a few drinks. I shouldn’t drink before I work. It makes me do dumb things.”

“Maybe you should stay, kid,” Rip said—to me, not to Leg-Up. Leg-Up he ignored, like he was already dead. “I can see those questions trying to boil up out of you. Makes me wonder why you didn’t protect my bag. Makes me think you’re too far gone in curiosity.”

I looked him right in his icy blues. My gut was churning.

“See, I’ve always drunk too much, even when I was little,” Leg-Up said. He set the bag on the bench, gentled it into place.

“At least turn your back, kid,” Rip said to me. “I’ll give you that much.”

This is where I should have stopped him, but a picture of the Smokey Bear poked into my head at that moment. The way I had remembered it, I didn’t see what happened to that Smokey, but now a blurry movie popped up in my head like I actually did see it but couldn’t quite remember. I turned my back.

“You don’t have to take it off, Rip!” Leg-Up said. “I’ll be good!”

The sound I heard next must have been the hood coming off. Have you boys ever listened to a hunter shucking the hide off a deer? It never occurred to me before that his mask wasn’t made of cloth. Maybe it was part of him. I was terrified to look, and yet I felt my feet twitching to turn. I hesitated for maybe a second, because another picture of the Smokey came flitting across my mind like a bat. I knew I really had seen him face that Semi and take a little dance step right into its path and go flapping away like laundry caught in the wind. And I knew that wasn’t as bad as what I would see if I finished turning around to look at Rip. And then I turned anyway and thank God, thank God, he was already putting the hood back on, and all I caught was a glimpse of those puppy tracks Sailor had talked about, bubbling up and stretching like purple maggots about to bust out. And then the hood was back in place and his hands were behind his head lacing it.

Leg-Up was still on his knees. I could see he’d pissed himself. Something was wrong with his right eye. He’d had a stroke, they found out later. Rip says to me, “Anything else you want to see, kid?” There wasn’t. “Find some other ride to the next town. Don’t let me see you again, you nosy bastard.”

---

I thought I’d have to catch on somewhere else, but it was Rip who left the territory. Pretty soon he turned up in the Maritimes working a hooded gimmick—Blue Thunder, something like that. Lots more hooded gimmicks turned up over the years, and sometimes I found out who they were and sometimes not. I tried like hell not to get booked in the same territory as the ones I didn’t know, just in case.

Yes, I did see him again. I was coming to that. I’ve seen him half a dozen times, starting last month in Lubbock. I was looking out over the house and there he was in the third row. At least, a big guy with them icy-blue eyes was. The people didn’t seem to notice him even though he had his old mask on.

Since then he turns up everywhere. I caught him loitering outside the heel locker room in Hereford, masked, staring at me like I owed him money. In Tucumcari, while I was gassing up at the Love’s, I spotted him perched on the awning like a gargoyle. Yes, I know I’ve had my bell wrung a couple hundred times over the years. Say I’m losing it if you like. Which doesn’t explain how the custodian at the Civic Center caught somebody in the shower last week after the building was supposed to be closed and said she wouldn’t go back to work until they stopped letting guys with swollen heads in there.

Sure, I know why he’s picking on me. It took a long time, but what’s a few years to him? It’s because he liked me. He thought I was the one guy who wouldn’t stick his nose in. And somehow I guess I did.

---

Host Commentary

The map is not the territory, coined by scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski is the first thing that springs to mind here because ‘territory’ has a different connotation in professional wrestling. In the US this is less apparent than it was, thanks to the McMahon family’s sociopathy, but in most of the rest of the world Professional Wrestling is divided into territories. Territories are exactly as they sound, areas companies work, with the inevitable occasional crossover and frequent talent shifts.

The map here is simple. The Red Ripper is a heel with a mask gimmick, a big guy who moves slow and doesn’t stop. One part Mean Mark Calaway, one part Kendo Nagasaki and with both boots in the not quite mystical not quite human grey area all three men have used throughout their careers. They have and I’m being diplomatic here, taken very different paths through that territory and Calaway’s choices are not ones I agree with.

The map is not the territory. That phrase has two meanings here, now that I think about it. The good and evil (and lets not forget tweeners) of professional wrestling has endured for so long because it’s elemental storytelling. Opera with Enzugiri. But dig under the surface and you find an industry only just dragging itself out of the mud of corruption and abuse. New guys had to ‘pay their dues’ until they were told different and if one of the most respected men in the locker room didn’t like you there was nothing you could do about any punishment he handed out until someone more respected than him stepped in. Look up the work Lance Storm did dealing with John Layfield’s aging frat boy bullying bullshit nonsense. Look up, for all his faults, the fact Calaway had to step in when a younger wrestler was told to get changed in the corridor because he’d looked at Chris Benoit funny. Look, if you can, at the legions of female wrestlers who’ve dealt with abuse and exploitation from everyone from their bosses on down to their colleagues. It’s not the fun kind of dark territory it’s the map this industry has navigated for too long without ever looking it in the eyes, without ever looking under the mask.

Grice hits two lines here which are, for me, perfect and speak to his awareness of the darkest elements of this often wonderful often terrible industry and the larger points beyond that:

 

‘Just a kid, Rip.’

 

Is the first. Look at the tolerance there, look at the exhaustion. Look at how many times what Rip does has been done before and look at how little there is that can be done about it. This is minimum participation society, where bullies and monsters maul with impunity because they know how to run the ropes of impropriety. I hate how much resonance that has in 2026.

The other is this:

‘Everybody gets hurt, kid. Your time is coming.’

Fuck.

That.

That sentiment is ‘why should I fight for pay equality?’, ‘why should other people’s student loans get forgiven?’, ‘why should I care about your rights?’ wrapped up in scar tissue, human growth hormone and shitty tattoos. That’s cowardice and anger dragged into a fist that’s a claw looking for something to gouge. It’s pulling the ladder up behind you. It’s ‘tradition’. It’s people saying with a straight face that noted horror authors’ fascist sympathies don’t matter because ‘everyone knew.’

It’s apathy. It’s, to borrow a line from Cody Rhodes who, for a while, knew better

Old men, talking

Young men, DYING.

Except it’s never just men and as long as ‘Your time is coming’ is a threat squeaked from the lips of cowards who’ve given up, it’ll just keep happening. TCruelty is currency and the only thing you can buy with it is more cruelty. Rip the mask off.

Bloody knuckled, hard edged, haunting. Thanks to all.