..... In that moment when the crowd noise pulsed through the concrete floor, leaked through his sneakers and rose to his fortressed testicles, Eddie Longman knew it was time to don the mask of El Pequeno Diablo. He rolled down the spandex casing from the crown of his head and adjusted the spangled eyelets to ensure clear vision. In the dressing mirror he felt fatal and unblemished, prepared for great inflictions of cruelty. All of his physical complaints-wrecked joints, rent muscles, poorly mended bones going arthritic-suddenly sloughed free. Hatred throbbed.
..... The desire for mangling throbbed too. Throbbed and caught in the lungs so that he felt he was choking on his own accumulated lack. To name that lack was to know Pompeii Quartz. To know Pompeii Quartz was to see complete and terrible beauty reckoned then summarily despised.
..... The spotlight was a white hole in the platform surrounded by a square of triplet ropes. Plucking on the top rope, the beauty himself, Pompeii Quartz, lifted his greased arms to the cheering audience, his lank hair falling over the shoulder straps of his wrestling singlet. He had pinned yet another opponent into shame, and in that triumph was deaf to the pleas and warnings of the audience. With Vaseline smile, P.Q. slowly basked under their cheers, heedless of the treachery at his heels.
..... Longman torpedoed beneath the bottom rope and spun his small body with alacrity, crashing his full weight into the champion's vulnerable calves. With contact, the great man gave like wicker, and Diablo had once more felled his rival and boss.
..... Inside the ring, time slowed for Longman. The choreography of his assault was a sequence programmed into his body. No mind entered into it. His arms worked like matched serpents, encircling the large man's throat and twisting against the corded muscle that guarded his windpipe. P.Q.'s great blond head trembled in fury. As P.Q. wrangled and shifted his superior body for position, Longman slid like oil from one painful embrace to another, wreaking torment. The crowd deluged them with noise. It became the sound of one great beast stricken.
..... "Kill the little freak," a female voice screamed.
..... As if that had been the signal, which indeed it had been, since the woman who gave voice to the crowd's outrage was Retreat Diamond, P.Q.'s buxom wife standing now in the champion's corner, full glorious in her raven halter and bikini drawers, P.Q. snatched Longman from his back and hurled him to the canvas with a wet thump.
..... The champion was a study in technique and verve, lashing Diablo to the canvas time after time. Longman shook his head when P.Q. reached for the mask. When the hand came too close, Longman bit into the lovely fist. Blood sprayed. The crowd booed.
..... P.Q. cried out and cradled the wounded hand to his breast, a moment's inattention freeing Longman from the arm hold. The little man hurled himself into the ropes, rebounded high and launched himself boots first into the champion's tail bone. P.Q. cried again, this time with murderous rage as both his hands braced against his lower spine, throwing his whole posture back in a pantomime of high tragedy.
..... Longman circled, his arms raised in triumph. As the crowd hurled loose articles and defamed him, he grew agitated, shaking his head violently and promising vengeance to those who mocked. The distraction became ever greater, as if he were locked in combat with the spectators rather than with the champion. So much so, that he did not turn from their scorn in time to see P.Q. charge forward and wrench him high overhead.
..... Feeling the surreptitious pinch on the back of his neck that was the second signal, Longman tightened his abdomen and curled inward as much as he could. A second later the champion slammed his small body down, stamping his own foot at the moment of impact to amplify the sound of the crash. Longman rolled about in a daze before P.Q. threw himself contemptuously on top of Diablo and waited for the three count.
..... The crowd exulted in the midget's routine humiliation.

..... In the hot tub that was his daily due, Longman worked out the new injuries. They gathered in him like pathogens, swollen knots and distortions of tissue that could only be solved with the right treatment of steam baths, gurgling tubs and deep massage. He lived an uneasy truce with his physical turmoil. In time, the injuries would capitulate, as long as he remained patient, serene and dissatisfied.
..... A knock at the dressing room door.
..... "Come in, P.Q."
..... Pompeii Quartz entered, changed now into his evening wear, a stylish navy blazer and duck white trousers, white Gucci loafers clamped to his size 14 feet. His signature hair was bound in a tight sailor's queue.
..... "Good work tonight, Eddie," he said, dropping a rubberbanded bundle of twenty dollar bills on top of Longman's duffel bag.
..... "Thanks, boss. We gave them a hell of a show."
..... "We did do that. You coming out with me and the missus tonight? Paint this hick town red?"
..... "Sure, give me fifteen, okay?"
..... "You got it, Eddie."
..... The door clicked behind him.
..... Longman dried off and climbed up onto the chair to view himself naked in the mirror. Turning slowly, he inspected every plane of his body, making a tally of the new bruises and abrasions that he would need to conceal before his next bout. Once he was satisfied, he unfolded a pair of jeans and a black sweatshirt from his duffel and dressed. He tucked the Makarov 9mm in at the back of his waist, the barrel oily against his clean skin.

..... People liked to laugh at Longman. He realized this young, but as he grew into a man, the momentary trauma lost its sting. He learned to despise this squeamishness in others that masked itself as revulsion and shock. In time, he learned to love the hatred he evoked in them because there was nothing like the satisfaction of inflicting his deformity on those who believed themselves untouchable.
..... In truth, he had not seen his stature as a disadvantage since he left home at the age of sixteen, bumming his way across several medium sized cities throughout the Southeast. He attached himself to any number of the young and, for the most part, optionally poor who lurked outside of hippie headshops, banging on a tambourine for pocket money, filthy and reeking in thrift store duds, a rescue shelter mutt always at hand. Even if the tourists didn't care for his clanging and yowling, they dropped a few dollars in his hat because they pitied the dog.
..... One such evening, Longman was discovered. Standing outside a vintage record store, he approached a striking couple, a giant Scandinavian and his bombshell companion. He had procured an array of colorful glass pipes from a Chapel Hill dropout who had sought the romantic experience of hoboing his way across the state and had mistakenly fallen into Longman's company. The young collegiate had boasted of his prodigious drinking ability while sharing a long house constructed of stolen shipping pallets beneath a riverside bridge overpass. To test this claim, Longman produced a bottle of clear liquid purported to be grain alcohol of some extraction, and the youth fell to with purpose, meeting with drastic but not unexpected results. To make up for the cost of the consumed alcohol, Longman availed himself of the pipes, though he had no reasonable idea of their worth. This did not keep him, however, from trying to unload them on any common dupe on the street.
..... The huge man was amused by Longman's sales pitch. Not only did he buy each of the pipes, he invited Longman to join his wife and him for dinner at a nearby French restaurant that featured bottomless baskets of spicy mussels. Longman suspected he was being lured into some illicit sexual proposition, but the woman was beautiful enough that he decided he would suffer a quick cock in the mouth if it meant he could take a turn with such a lovely piece as she.
..... As the evening transpired, he was both relieved and disappointed that his erotic dilemma didn't bear out. After aperitifs, Pompeii Quartz described his unusual line of work as a professional wrestling entertainer, and the reason he'd wanted a chance to talk with Longman.
..... "It's a way to shove it back in their face, you know?" he said, tonguing a mussel from its shell.
..... "Whose face?"
..... "The ones out there," he waved his hands up at the stag horn chandeliers. When Longman didn't understand, he clarified, "The public. The assholes who like to scratch their asses and hand over good money to see us beat hell out of each other."
..... It was only then that Longman realized Pompeii Quartz was the first man in the world he had met who was a greater misanthrope than he. It excited him. He had not until that moment realized the beautiful and strong had as much reason to revile the world as did the disfavored and ill-born. From that moment forward, he listened to P.Q. attentively. He earnestly worshipped in the church of the beautiful man's hate.