On the Road with Puppet the Psycho Dwarf
An intrepid AAJ Writer goes behind the scenes with the little men who are willing to bleed for your enjoyment
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After the show, the wrestlers, dressed in street clothes, mingle with the remaining spectators. They tell jokes, accept compliments, and pose for photos. Mexx is especially adept at charming whoever will listen with rehearsed stories.
Puppet shatters the good vibe when he finds out they've been charged $100 for drinking all of the beer in the ice bucket. "Don't worry, moneybags will pay!" he yells, storming to the cash register, where a manager is going over receipts. "Here comes moneybags!"
After Puppet pays, the wrestlers leave the bar dispiritedly, with him vowing never to do another show at the Vogue. A couple that had been at the show ask him if they can take a photo. "Not right, now, guys," he says. "Boycott this place, okay? They just fucked me over."
We head to a tavern next door and, as Teo stands by, Puppet climbs onto a stool. Over the next two hours, he drinks beer and Jagermeister until he's almost unintelligible. At one point, he turns to me, halting a conversation to make a point about my article. "Don't make me an asshole," he says, his face red and his eyes glassy. "Just don't make me an asshole."
Kato and Mexx wait in the parking lot. They've been drinking themselves, but for the most part seem exhausted, and the wrestlers have a flight to Orlando at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. When the bar closes at 3 AM, Puppet has mercifully had enough. "Midgets!" he slurs, as the bar turns all of its lights on to drive people away. "Let's go! Time to go!"
By a process of elimination, the four beers I’ve had to drink notwithstanding, I've become the designated driver for the 30-minute drive to the hotel. Spyder’s coming back with us, so that means there's now seven people stuffed into the small sedan. In the back, all four of the drunken wrestlers are piled over Cameo in a heap. Only her hand is visible. When I protest that five people in the backseat is excessive, Teo corrects me. "Technically, there's only three," he says, counting each dwarf as half of a person.
As I climb into the driver's seat, I stare at Puppet's makeshift pedal extenders. "Can't I take these off?" I ask.
"Takes too long," Spyder says, "and we have to use them tomorrow morning. I drive with them all of the time!"
"Then you drive."
"Dude, I'm in no state," he says. I look over, and he’s right. I push the gas with the tip of my shoe on the tiny bit of the pedal that hasn't been obscured by Puppet's contraption. The car lurches into motion, and then I jerk it to a stop at the parking lot exit. The wrestlers pitch forward and Cameo groans.
"Hey guy, how much have you had to drink?" Kato asks me suspiciously.
"What I do sometimes," Spyder says, "is just use the pedals with my hands."
I grip the duct-tape lever with my right hand, and loop the pinky of my left hand over the steering wheel, so that I can easily release it to slam on the brake. We move down the block with surprising smoothness, but looking in the rear-view mirror at the haphazardly piled wrestlers, unbuckled and ready to fly through windows, I put the experiment to an end If one of them was to be injured, Puppet would surely either sue or murder me.
"We need to take these things off," I tell Spyder, who finally concedes.
I get out and Spyder goes to work removing the extensions, which takes a few minutes. Spyder’s good at his job partly because he never seems to pause to reflect on the ridiculousness of his position, the title of which he refers to as “midget wrangler.” After he’s finished, I get back into the driver’s seat.
We make only one more stop before arriving at the hotel, at a gas station for the wrestlers to empty their bladders. I hold my breath when a city cop in a paddywagon glances at our car as we pull in. From his perspective, he can see the top of one head in the backseat. If he were to take a closer look, he’d have a story that would no doubt be the talk of the station the next day. Fortunately, he drives off without investigating.
When we finally get to the hotel, it’s 4 AM. The crew has two hours to sleep before they have to leave for their flight to Orlando, where, once again, they will jab each other’s heads with broken glass bottles as a drunken crowd cheers. A final question arises before I leave them for my room. “What’s the hangover like?” I ask.
“Brother, there’s been mornings where I open my eyes,” says Mexx, picking at the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of Bugles, “and just start screaming from the pain.”
