Pullers copyright © 1998 by Tom Graves. Pullers, Second Edition copyright © 2019 by Tom Graves. Originally published in 1998 by Hastings House, Norwalk, CT. Pullers, Second Edition published in 2019 by Devault Graves Books. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form, except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission of the publishers.
Print book ISBN: 0-8038-9424-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-942531-33-3
Fiction
Pullers
Aesop’s Fables with Colin Hay (audiobook)
Nonfiction
Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of
Blues Legend Robert Johnson
*winner of the Keeping the Blues Alive Award
Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, &
Other Charmers & Dreamers
Graceland Too Revisited
(photography with Darrin Devault)
White Boy: A Memoir
Arm wrestling is a real sport, a sport where men of almost inhuman strength routinely risk breaking one another’s arms for the glory of winning and prize money that barely covers expenses. The pros, those who participate in organized tournaments, refer to these matches as “pulls” and to each other as “pullers.” Generally speaking, pullers shun the barroom matches we have all seen in movies—unless, of course, they happen to run short on cash.
Unlike the most well-known literary depiction of arm wrestling—in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, where two characters arm wrestle to a standstill that lasts for days— a long pull in a tournament might last ten seconds. Two or three seconds would be the norm. It’s fast, it’s furious, and if something goes wrong, somebody gets hurt.
Pulling, like any sport, is a world unto itself. What I have attempted in this novel is to present that world. It will be up to the pullers themselves to tell me whether I have succeeded.
—Tom Graves
“Wild is a category of its own. ”
—Larry Brown
Cockroaches. Nice American cockroaches. Periplaneta americana. The size about, oh, as long as the first two joints of your little finger. A whole boiling swarm of them.
Like everyone else, Carroll Thurston had hated cockroaches his whole life. Which was the whole point. They made his skin crawl every time he caught sight of one.
But not now.
He’d learned to love them. And it wasn’t easy to love a cockroach. But now he did, every goddamn one of ’em. He’d had to. Otherwise he couldn’t do what it was he did.
These weren’t just any cockroaches. They were mail-order cockroaches. Grown and bred in a sterile laboratory by people wearing white lab coats. Of course he could have gone to any run-down part of Memphis—any one of Memphis’s housing projects would do—and gotten all he needed for free. But the fact was you never knew where homegrown roaches had been. No telling what kind of germs and all they carried.
No, Carroll Thurston wanted clean roaches, roaches with a pedigree. Roaches a man could trust.
Carroll kept his roaches in a ten-gallon aquarium filled with shreds of corrugated cardboard. Because cockroaches are the Houdinis of the insect kingdom, he took the extra precaution of placing a heavy Plexiglas lid on top.
He’d learned an awful lot about roaches in the last year. For example, they were basically unchanged despite millions of years of evolution. They could also survive a nuclear war better than just about any other living organism. And people just hated the shit out of them. Would rather die than touch one.
Carroll had read that a fear of cockroaches was a learned behavior. Kids over the age of four picked up the fear from their parents and peers. Researchers had gone so far as to put fake roaches in the drinking glasses of kids under four years old. They had no problem at all drinking their water with a roach staring up at them from the bottom of the glass. The dread came later.
Smiling to himself at how grown men would run at the sight of a cockroach, Carroll Thurston tilted the lid off the aquarium, reached in, and grabbed a seething fistful of roaches. Without a grunt or a grimace he quickly stuffed the whole squirming mass into his mouth and crunched down hard three, four, five times.
“Hmmm, kind of like popcorn shrimp,” he thought to himself as he washed it all down with a big slug of Diet Coke.
Near rock-bottom of those annual lists that rate cities according to their desirability (or lack thereof) is the sleepy town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, an old railroad and paper mill community that still seems stuck in the belly of the Great Depression. The city’s most famous resident had been Martha Mitchell, the loudmouthed wife of Watergate alumnus and former Attorney General John Mitchell. Elvis Presley, natives are quick to tell you, performed at the Pine Bluff Coliseum once during his tours in the seventies.
Other than a few stoplights and strip malls, the town hadn’t taken on a lot of luster since the World War—the first one.
Although Pine Bluff is, and always has been, a God-fearing town, the nineties are the nineties and good ole boys will be good ole boys. Bad Bill’s Hawg Trawf (the Trawf for short) is the place where they generally went to do it. Bad Bill lived up to his nickname by charging patrons a one-time membership fee of twenty dollars, which stiffed all the out-of-towners, who in all likelihood would never come back, while giving the locals a place to water, dance, and raise hell without paying a nightly cover charge.
The Trawf was a metal building that covered five acres and looked like one of those enormous sheds used to house combines and cotton pickers. A crude cartoon of cowboys lined up at a slop trough to drink beer suds served as the invitation to all passers-by from the sides of the building. Bad Bill had a tidy cottage industry on the side selling t-shirts, ball caps, mugs, and you name it emblazoned with the cartoon and his logo. A Bad Bill’s t-shirt immediately notified one’s Pine Bluff neighbor on which side of the Christian equation you stood.
At the Trawf beer was sold in Mason jars at a dollar-fifty a pop. There were four pool tables, a shuffleboard, two video poker machines, a backgammon table (which went unused), a stage for the bands, a broken mechanical bull in the comer, and a stout hardwood table used for arm wrestling. In the ten years the Trawf had been in business—since liquor by the drink finally passed during a local referendum—arm wrestling had become a surprisingly popular form of entertainment. On Friday nights Bill held an arm wrestling tournament with the winner collecting two hundred fifty dollars in prize money. Farm boys from a ten-county area came to try their hand (and arm) at the sport, and Bill made a sweet profit charging each newcomer a membership fee plus a twenty-dollar entry for the tournament. Of course, the prize money was a small part of the action. The winner could, if he placed his bets at the proper odds, snag another four or five hundred dollars, better than two weeks’ take-home pay.
The tournament was closely followed by the locals who shouted out bets throughout matches. The action often became so heated that fistfights erupted among the spectators, mostly over drunken accusations of cheating. Bad Bill and his beefy bouncers made sure no one welshed on bets. But he could not have cared less if some of the boys wanted to take their arguments out to the parking lot.
Pine Bluff’s undisputed arm wrestling champion was Samson Jackson, a local rowdy who ran a used car battery shop. Samson seldom had an off night at the wrestling table, but that never stopped locals from trying to best him or from showing off for their girlfriends how long they could last. Unless he was beered up or in a particularly foul mood, Samson Jackson usually tried to make the other guy come off looking good. After all, it kept them coming back.
And it kept his name out there to attract fresh meat from out of town. Some guys drove all the way from Memphis to give him a go. They always lost.
❖ ❖ ❖
This particular Friday night Samson Jackson had his fill of beer and then some. Although a few of the boys had made him break a sweat, he had beat them handily, slamming his opponents’ knuckles as hard as possible into the table. Any kind of macho antics made the crowd hoot and yeehaw with all their heart, and Samson Jackson was not above playing to the hometown regulars.
“Well I’ll be a three-balled billygoat,” one of the hometown boys said as he pointed towards the entrance. “Take a gander at what just came through the front door.”
The two men who were paying their one-time membership fees at the entrance made several at the bar shake their heads to make sure they weren’t seeing things. The bigger man looked like the handiwork of a Gold’s Gym. He stood six feet four inches or so and had a twenty-inch neck with arms that seemed even bigger. He towered over the smaller man, who stood about five-five and was pinch-ass skinny. The small one was completely bald on top with hair growing from the sides that draped down to his shoulders. His black, deep-set eyes gave him a don’t-fuck-with-me appearance, like an Arab getting ready to gut an enemy. The larger man sported a spiky crew cut and a close-cropped beard. Both men wore identical t-shirts that read WE’RE QUEER DEAR.
But what drew every eye in Bad Bill’s tavern to the odd couple was the chain the big one held like a leash that disappeared down the front of the smaller man’s pants.
“Is he leading that fucker by the dick?” Samson asked to no one in particular.
“Look like a couple of tailgaters on the prowl,” another answered.
“Bad Bill ought to monkey-jump their faggot asses right out of here,” said the fellow who had just gotten beat at the arm wrestling table.
“Naw, he’s too interested in making a dime or two off ’em. He wouldn’t run off a couple of fudge-packing eight-balls like those two. Hell, he let you boys in, didn’t he?”
“I wonder what the hell they’re doing here in Pine Bluff in the first place. We keep the taxidermists busy enough as it is.”
The big man, with his partner close at heel, strolled over to the arm wrestling table and with a wide grin extended a huge right hand.
“Hi there. I’m Scud Matthews and this is my best boy, Itch. I know you folks ain’t too accustomed to our kind here in Arkansas, but you know the New Orleans gay community has some pretty badass arm wrestlers. I’ve heard a lot about you. You are Samson Jackson?”
“Yeah, that’s my name all right,” Samson answered in a wary, patronizing tone as he reluctantly proffered his hand. But, he had to admit, he was flattered. They had heard of him all the way down to New Orleans! It did bother him that the queer community knew about him though. He didn’t want anybody in Pine Bluff thinking he had gone funny.
“So what brings you girls here to Bad Bill’s?”
Scud narrowed his eyes and his grin hardened. “I thought we might do us a little arm rasslin’.”
“From the looks of things, I thought you boys might be more interested in playing round-eye than arm wrestling.”
Scud Matthews’s eyebrows forked together.
“Hell, I thought you were serious about this game. I’ve come all the way from New Orleans and I’ve got five hundred dollars that says I can whip your redneck ass. But if all you’re interested in is swapping bullshit…”
“Five hundred you say? Okay coach, you’re on…provided you wash your hands first. I don’t want to be catching any fag cooties or anything. And I want to see the five hundred first.” Itch reached in the back pocket of his drooping Levi’s and peeled off five Ben Franklins from a fist-sized wad of bills.
“All right, Hercules, now let’s see your five hundred.”
“The name’s Samson, gents. Bad Bill will vouch for me.” Bill solemnly nodded agreement.
“Then that’s settled,” said Scud. “Just one more thing. I don’t want no pussy-eating sonofabitch’s cooties getting on me. You wash your hands too.”
“It’s a deal. Let’s shake on it.”
Samson stuck out a hand and laughed and Scud Matthews, with a grin slowly working over his face, clasped it in a firm, manly handshake.
“Okay boys, it’s time for the rubber to meet the road,” said Samson. “Bill, you hold the money and do the refereeing. Pull up a chair, Scud. It’s clobberin’ time. Oh, one more thing. Why have you got your little partner there on that leash?”
“So he doesn’t get loose and kill anybody.”
❖ ❖ ❖
Samson Jackson one-eyed his opponent as the two men faced off on opposite sides of the table, their elbows resting on the table top and forearms sticking straight up in the air.
“Okay fellows, get yourself a good grip,” Bad Bill instructed them.
Both men carefully entwined their hands, making sure the grip was exact and without weakness. After a minute or so of adjustments, Bill looked at them and asked if they were ready.
“Ready.”
“Ready.”
Bill put his hands on top of theirs for a second, commanded “go,” and withdrew them quickly.
Samson Jackson had wrestled dozens of pumped-up Arnolds like this one before. Bodybuilders were easy money. They were seldom as strong as they looked and Samson had the added advantage of not having bulging biceps. Although both his arms were solid as marble, no one could tell that. Especially with his arms covered by long-sleeved flannel shirts. He had used his natural strength to his advantage even in the Marines. He won every drink during his whole hitch. This fag would go down easy.
Only thing is, he wasn’t. This guy was a lot stronger than Samson would have guessed and was stone steady. Their fingertips had already begun to turn a deep shade of blue, but their arms had barely budged, still locked at a perfect 90 degree angle from the table. Both men had begun to sweat through their clothes, and beads of sweat stung their eyes as they rolled from their foreheads into their faces.
Scud Matthews showed subtle signs of tiring and began rapid breathing exercises. Samson was no doubt beginning to grind his opponent down and he felt his arm begin to take control, inching forward, gaining ground. He wasn’t going to slam any knuckles, but he had him and they both knew it. The betting among spectators had increased to fever pitch.
Only inches away from defeat, Scud Matthews began to recite a mantra that to the crowd sounded like “oh-yum-yum.”
“Oh-yum-yum, oh-yum-yum, oh-yum-yum, oh-yum-yum,” and Scud began to rally, almost miraculously. Samson could not believe he was being pushed backwards.
When they had reached the 90 degree position again, Scud Matthews seemed to falter and Samson quickly forced his arm to almost a hair’s breadth of the table. Scud began to recite his mantra in double-time.
“Oh-yum-yum, oh-yum-yum, oh-yum-yum, oh-yum-yum,” faster and faster until he began to regain position. In an unbelievable burst of strength Scud Matthews had reversed their positions with Samson’s knuckles a fraction from the table. Samson, in utter panic, bellowed like a bull with a brand at its hide. His teeth were gritted so hard they seemed in danger of cracking to pieces.
His arm moved forward slightly and then crumpled. It was all over. He had been beaten. The crowd was in shock and soundless.
Both men glared at each other for what seemed several minutes, gasping for air. Finally, Scud Matthews wheezed, “I guess…I’ll take…that five hundred…and the prize money.”
“I guess…you won’t…you cheatin’ fag…I wouldn’t…give you…the sweat off my…”
“Fuck you asshole…I won…fair and…square.”
Bad Bill handed Scud his two-hundred fifty dollars in prize money. “Like he said, Samson, he won fair and square. Pay off your bet.”
Samson reached into his boot and pulled out a small .22 caliber pistol. The crowd parted like Moses’ waters.
“Put it down, Samson. You’re gonna wind up in jail or the electric chair if you do something stupid,” Bill coached him in a calm, fatherly voice.
“Tell you what I’ll do,” Scud hesitantly began, his eyes focused on the barrel of Samson’s small pistol. “I’ll wrestle you again. You win, I pay you the five hundred dollars. I win, you owe me the five hundred and not a penny more. I don’t want anybody saying I cheated, even if we all know I won fair and square. Let’s settle things here and now. My five hundred still says I can kick your ass.”
Samson smiled an ugly little smile. “Fine with me sissy boy. We’ll see how lucky you are a second time. Here, Bill, take this before I get really pissed off.” He slid the pistol over to Bill.
“This time I want to see your money on the table,” Scud said, thumping the table for emphasis. Bill and Samson pooled the money together and left it at the end of the table. Scud did the same at the opposite end.
Towels were brought and they wiped down and squared off across the wrestling table. Bill gave the command to go and both arms tensed at the ninety degree position. Scud began to move his arm forward quickly, then let Samson push him back. He did this in a toying fashion, chuckling to himself.
“You know, you really shouldn’t welsh on bets. Now I’ve got to collect a little interest.”
Through gritted teeth Samson hissed, “Fuck you, cocksucker”
“No, Hercules, you’re the one who’s fucked.”
With a lightning move, Scud bowed Samson’s wrist backwards until it nearly touched the hair on the back of his arm and began to bear down hard. In the space of one or two seconds, Samson let out a high scream that brought Bad Bill’s entire five acres to a standstill. A slow, wet cracking sound, like green wood being splintered grain-by-grain, was heard by all the spectators.
Samson’s scream abruptly stopped and, like a catfish out of water, he swallowed air for one long pause. His tongue then lolled out of his mouth and his face fell hard into the hardwood table.
Enraged, Bad Bill and his bouncers encircled Scud Matthews while he casually collected his winnings. As they did, Itch began to slowly pull the chain out from the front of his pants, which was attached to a special bore .38 revolver, customized to make maximum noise. Pointing it in the air, he pulled the trigger twice with two ear-shattering reports that rolled around inside the immense metal building like waves from a cannon blast. At least one hundred cowboy hats dove for the floor.
Scud and Itch calmly walked to the door and Scud turned and blew a kiss to the frozen faces.
“Stay smoochy, boys.”
❖ ❖ ❖
They skidded out of the parking lot sending rooster tails of pea gravel onto the gleaming Turtle Waxed surfaces of the rows of pickup trucks.
To a one, all they were after was a power fuck. The truth was, they got off on being pounded in bed like ground chuck and smothered in arms strong enough to snap their spines like a baby bird’s. Carroll Thurston aimed to please. If a pounding is what they wanted, a pounding is what they got. To them he was simply a dick with a smile and huge forearms at the end of it. For nothing extra, he’d throw in the promise of true love…if they wanted it.
Being the world’s second-ranked super heavyweight arm wrestler had its good points and its bad. Women regarded him as an irresistible sexual freak, and he saw nothing particularly bad in that. After all, he had a warm bed waiting any time he needed one. And pounding them was a lot better than pounding the alternative.
It never failed that dainty, bird-like women, usually around five-one or -two and tipping the scales at roughly one hundred pounds, couldn’t keep their hands off him. They wanted to know what physical power felt like. With his physique shaped like an inverted triangle, they were all too eager to scoot under his six- five, three hundred-pound frame to have a little piece of that power ground into them. Carroll couldn’t remember the last time he had kissed a woman during sex. But he had kissed a damn sight more headboards than he would care to remember. Not that Carroll was complaining. Just once, though, he’d like to hook up with some strapping big-boned gal who wanted to power fuck him. And a little intelligent conversation would go a long way. Maybe find one who had ever read a book. Or spent a semester or two in college.
Take Heather Madison, for instance. When she found out her Memphis bartender was famous for more than his margaritas, she began what Carroll referred to as the bird dance. It usually started with being peppered by questions about arm wrestling and the size of his arms, which he had to admit few could keep their eyes off of. It wasn’t every day you saw someone with twenty-inch forearms. Arms that big literally stopped traffic. It wasn’t uncommon for drivers to come to a screeching halt to gape at his arms. In Japan, Carroll had caused major traffic snarls just walking down the street taking in the sights. He joked that they thought Godzilla was on the loose.
After a few drinks (Carroll usually watered them down to see how much acting they were willing to do) they managed to find a way to touch him, to pet his arms.
“Want to wrestle me, hon?” they would get around to asking with a giggle and a blush.
“Your place or mine, sweetheart?” was his corny canned reply. It usually did the trick. It got him into Heather’s apartment.
Heather was the type who liked giving orders. “You get on bottom and I’ll get on top,” she instructed as she sat astraddle of him. “Mmm. Now hold me around the waist. No, tighter. Tighter! Now lift me up and down. That’s it. Oh yeah.”
He moved in and out of her like a short-stroked piston.
After twenty or thirty minutes of intensely aerobic lovemaking, they were both bathed in sweat. Women were invariably disappointed if they weren’t.
Heather slipped out of bed, kissed him softly on the lips, and returned a few minutes later carrying a warm towel for Carroll and two cans of Gatorade. In her own petite way, Heather was strikingly pretty. She was a hairdresser at a snotty Memphis salon called Prix de Beaute, and like all hairdressers she was studiedly into chic, sporting an ink-black Louise Brooks hair bob with matching black clothes all the way down to her tiny black panties.
Carroll picked up the panties and twirled them a second or two around his index finger. Heather, who was balled up next to him in a post-coital silence, suppressed a small giggle. On impulse Carroll brought the crotch to his nose and sniffed. It was Heather all right. She slapped his arm and said in halfhearted indignation, “Car-roll!”
“I love the way you smell.”
She managed a small smile. “Did I rate high enough for you to want them as a souvenir?”
“Sure.” Carroll was surprised that he wasn’t lying.
Heather fixed him with a sober stare. “Was this just another one-nighter, Carroll?”
“Most women consider one time enough,” he replied. “They’ve bagged their arm wrestler and go on to another trophy.”
“I’m not like that,” she spat back, fire in her eyes.
“Maybe not. You kissed me.”
“Of course I kissed you.”
“Well, you’re the first who’s really bothered to kiss me in three or four months. And I wasn’t celibate.”
“Sounds to me like you’ve been chasing the wrong women.”
“Could be.”
Monday nights were nothing but a bunch of drunk pricks playing grab-ass in the guise of watching Monday night football as far as Carroll was concerned. The Bombay, where Carroll tended bar, was normally an upscale cafe well-situated in Memphis’s small Overton Square nightclub district. Happy hour drew an eclectic mix of lawyers, hospital workers, and midtown bohemians who regarded The Bombay Bar as the only watering hole that mattered. For local color, it was certainly the most entertaining place to be. Monday nights, however, were a riot of loudmouths and lowlifes swilling pitchers of beer, eating mountains of free hors d’oeuvres, and screaming their lungs out while watching the big-screen projector TV.
Carroll did not find team spirit contagious. Monday nights for him meant tossing out troublemakers and cleaning up puke and piss. He mixed few drinks on football nights, but the taps flowed freely until closing time.
In the motion of bodies and faces Carroll noticed Heather Madison out of the corner of his eye. She was standing all alone among the heaving crowd, looking like a lost child. She was watching Carroll, unsure whether to approach.
Carroll smiled and waved her over to the end of the bar, away from most of the hubbub inside the restaurant proper.
As she sat down opposite him, Carroll leaned over the bar and kissed her full on the lips. The kiss lingered.
As their lips slowly broke apart, each felt a warm flush of satisfaction. It was good to be back together.
“You look great,” Carroll couldn’t help but notice. She sure knew how to fill out a pair of Levi’s, every ripe curve accented by a pocket, a seam, a metal stud. She wore a simple black bodysuit underneath, which tastefully revealed the rest of her graceful lines.
She brightened. “Thanks.”
“I’m glad you came hon, but I’m sorry it’s our noisiest night,” he shouted over a burst of cheers. “I was going to call you tomorrow when all this madness is over. Booker T. and the MGs are playing B.B. King’s club this weekend and I’ve got a couple of good tickets. How about it?”
“You are well-connected, Carroll. Sure, I’d love to go.”
A swell of voices rose in a cheer, as the crowd followed a field goal attempt.
“Ugh. I hate football,” Heather said. “I hope that doesn’t change your opinion of me.”
“Quite the contrary, sweetheart.”
“I figured a guy your size would love football.”
“Nah, never cared for the sport. My old man, he was the one who loved football. Was always after me to play. I never could quite see the point. All that hit, hit, hit shit. Plus, I never met a coach I didn’t think was some kind of goddamned idiot.” Carroll caught the sleeve of a waiter who had been helping out behind the bar. “Jay, my man. Can you take over for me for a little while?”
“Sure, no problem.”
Carroll walked around the bar and sat on a stool next to her. He hugged her again and kissed her on the cheek. She was all sunbeams and smiles.
“Carroll, how did you get into arm wrestling?” Heather asked when conversation seemed called for.
“Well, I was born strong. Real