Mahoney Lonesome: On Wrestling and Viruses

MAHONEY LONESOME

The victorious wrestler is an oiled rhinoceros in a green Speedo, stomping the ground with his delicate feet. His funeral barge arms are ceremonially poised above the golden sheaves of his mullet, shorn and curled like an offering in a rite of vegetative fertility. His muscles are burial mounds beneath the roiling prairie of his taut and blushing skin. His is the roar of a locomotive in pain, an avalanche of rocks crushing the family car.

His broad box-spring torso is a queen bed of slats, sleek and lumpy as after the coitus of mammoths. And the crowd, furious with enthusiasm, creating a broadband hiss like the white noise rush of the universe collapsing at the end of time, has filled the air with the reckless sacrifice of their larynxes and tongues, an exuberant abattoir of joy and rage.

But let’s talk about viruses. The tiny Whoville network of viruses on the wrestler’s tight trunks. Or one single virus, living at the end of a cellular cul-de-sac, attempting to seek life and to flourish, to find meaning and satisfaction, here on the brief green earth. The virus is a single word in the great wiki of hope and information, a mortal sleeperhold in spacetime, an earnest Tonga deathgrip on life. In the big world, there may be the end-of-days tectonic supernovae of bodyslams, the torque of tiger feint crucifix armbars on the topology of subspace, but the virus perseveres in its ardent intracellular replications, its ontological infections, its almost-endless epistemology of transmission.

They call our virus, Mahoney Lonesome, and it works its covert operations in the crawlspace beneath the organic stairs, a childlike and surreptitious spectator between parents in the interstellar parade of microscopic communication. It is both mail carrier and letter, firefighter and fire, gravity and galaxy.

It is a long and a short story. The klieg lights of the ring have been silenced, night achieved by a switch, and the wrestler returns home. Another human, child or lover, rushes to greet him. The Red Sea parts in an exodus of blood or memory, and the virus takes its plagues wandering into the desert of the other. Mahoney Lonesome, this virus, a shadow, a spirit, the jubilation of souls in contact, enters the other, a certain knowledge, a chinlock, the sun shining into night, a cobra clutch, a front chancery of love, forgetfulness, immunity, or chance. There is a vacant region in spacetime, bounded by ropes or string theory, which remains vacant but which will always remember. If the crowd believed it could exist in twenty-two dimensions, there’d be cheering. This virus, life and all its violence, a bite of the dragon, its springtime, its poison.