Mott the Hoople and the Game of Life
yeah yeah yeah yeah
Andy Kaufman in the wrestling match
yeah yeah yeah yeah…
So Andy, did ya hear about this one?
Tell me, are you locked in the punch?
Andy, are you goofing on Elvis? “Hey Baby”,
are you losing touch?
If you believed, they put a man on the moon...
—R.E.M., “Man on the Moon”
Monday night was wrestling night. Me and Dan went every week. We were high school kids, in the early eighties in Memphis, Tennessee. We wore black leather jackets and Sex Pistols T-shirts, and we went to wrestling to piss off the rednecks. We booed and jeered at the good guys, the heroes. We cheered on the villains, who were managed back then by Jimmy “Mouth of the South” Hart.
One Monday night after Dan brought me home, the telephone rang. I looked at the clock; it was 11:17. A man said, Camille? I said, yes, this is she. Camille, he said, this is Jimmy Hart calling.
I recognized his voice and still I said, really? I sounded like an idiot and Jimmy Hart laughed. Yes really, he said. I called to say thanks for the sweet note you sent me.
Earlier in the evening, Dan and I sent Jimmy Hart a note that said we were part of the Jimmy Hart Fan Club. Actually, it said that I was the President, and Dan was Vice President, and now here I was, eleven-something at night, a school night, no less, my mom looking at me and tapping her foot.
Jimmy Hart also managed a rising young star on the wrestling circuit named Andy Kaufman, whom, I assume, needs no introduction. Kaufman was there for virtually the same reason we were, you could say, but Andy took it up to a whole new level.
Billing himself as the world’s only inter-gender wrestling champ, he challenged women to wrestling matches. He went on TV, and gave us all lessons on how to use soap. He quickly became the most hated man in town, and Dan and I watched and loved every minute.
I read a story recently about a Scottish scientist, Professor Andrew Sweetman, who believes he has discovered “dark oxygen” being produced more than 13, 000 feet below the ocean’s surface. That is something, in and of itself, but equally amazing was the fact that eight or nine years had to pass before Sweetman understood what his own scientific inquiry had told him.
On three separate voyages to a Pacific Ocean area known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, sensor readings indicated oxygen was being made on the seabed floor, where no light penetrates. Sweetman told his students to send the sensors back to the manufacturer for testing, “since obviously, they’re just giving us gibberish.”
The tests came back every single time saying the sensors were calibrated and working perfectly, according to Sweetman, and he said this went on for almost nine years.
There was one Monday night when I was at home, sick with the flu, and Dan went to wrestling all by himself. When it was over, as he was walking back to his car, he was stopped by three guys in Lynard Skynard T-shirts who beat the holy crap out of him.
After that, to his credit, Dan still went to wrestling. He and I were there when Jerry “the King” Lawler gave Andy the pile-driver that left Kaufman in a neck brace, in public, at least.
While professional wrestling may not be real, for the crowd that willfully assembled each week, its heroes were, and its villains, as well. To this day in Memphis, feelings about Andy Kaufman run deep, and the waters are murky where all that’s concerned. There are those who believe a lingering effect of Lawler’s pile-driver had something to do with Kaufman’s death at the tender age of thirty-five.
That’s nonsense, of course, and anyone who believes it probably thinks the moon landing was staged. Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer. But then again, Professor Sweetman was convinced his equipment was faulty for almost nine years, until finally it occurred to him to challenge some basic and long-held beliefs.
When Jimmy Hart called, I never mentioned I was only sixteen. That Dan was my boyfriend, and only seventeen. And there was no fan club, not that we ran, at least. I have no idea now what I might’ve said. But I know in that moment, I truly believed there was a fan club. That Dan and I ran it. That I was the Prez and he was the Veep.
Kaufman, I've heard, wanted to be remembered as something besides the lovable Latka of “Taxi” fame. So he tore all that down. He threw it away. Me and Dan went to wrestling to piss people off. But we went together. When Kaufman went down to the depths where it’s cold, unlike me and Dan, Andy went there alone.
Professor Sweetman believes now that minerals, like manganese, are able to produce oxygen without photosynthesis, a way no one ever believed it could be. I think Andy Kaufman was a bit that way too. Made his own air, and was his own light. A man on a moon. At the bottom of a sea.