If you know me at all, you know that my tastes cover a range of wrestlers and wrestling. Lately, I’ve been keying off a lot on skinny boys. I love audacious skinny wrestlers who instantly make fans wonder out loud, “What the fuck is that guy think he’s doing climbing into the ring?!” I like them when they look breakable. Tantalizingly vulnerable, but with a fierce core of tensile steel and inexplicable fearlessness. Within the genre, I like them cute as buttons, with bright eager smiles and pinchable cheeks. Thus it surprises no one with a passing familiarity with my tastes in wrestlers that little Charlie Evans keeps reeling me in.
I also like my skinny boys with a chance. So, in Catchweight 9 when Charlie camps out underneath the BG East ring to sneak up on Gunner Baer from behind as the big muscle boy flexes and stretches, I’m cheering him on. Charlie leaps up on that broad, muscled back of Gunner’s, squeezing the big man’s torso between his legs and clamping down a blindsided sleeper gambit. He takes the muscle boy completely by surprise. As Gunner stumbles around for several seconds struggling to catch up with the chess match, I have fleeting hopes for a revenge of the nerds bout. With this uncharacteristic flash of foul play, perhaps Charlie is finally taking my longstanding advice to grab the wheel with both hands and swerve recklessly into the heel lane. Fuck, just how satisfying would it be to see a skinny boy instantly outsmart his preening, homecoming king, jock opponent and sadistically pry his luscious body apart in retribution for every towel snapping, homophobic bullying that the genetically gifted bodies take such pleasure in doling out during our compulsory education. Okay, perhaps that says more about me than about Charlie or Gunner.
Tragically, my unrequited longing to see Charlie’s heel turn continues unabated. Big Gunner reaches over his shoulder, grabs Charlie by the back of the neck, and easily, with one hand, flips the lightweight cheater head over heels. “Really? This is what they sent?” Gunner asks, giving voice to what countless fans have said upon seeing an ambitious skinny boy like Charlie dare to accept a match with a muscle armored hunk like Gunner.
I’m still undecided what I think of Gunner Baer. I mean, don’t get me wrong. He’s unquestionably fuckable. He has a teen angel thing going, with a stunningly gorgeous, delicately featured face atop a hypermasculine, thickly muscled, beautifully proportioned body. My question is not whether Gunner is a sexy mother fucker. Give me a bottle of lube and a couple of hours, and I’d muscle worship the fuck out of big Gunner Baer. The jury is still out for me as to what to make of him as a homoerotic pro wrestler. In his debut match, he was squashed like a bug by Flash LaCash, and he made a compelling case as a doe-eyed muscle jobber. Watching his musclebound pretty boy dreams get trampled under foot was seriously hot. This time out, though he’s large and in charge. He’s contemptuous and sadistic. He’s far more fallen angel than teen angel. I’m not sure which side of Gunner Baer I’m left wanting to see more of. And of course, that, in and of itself, is seductively sexy for me.
As for this match, holy fuck, Gunner beats the living shit out of little Charlie. There’s almost not suspension of disbelief necessary in this match. The only doubt you’ll need to dismiss is whether Charlie could take the amount of abuse he takes without broken bones, internal injuries to vital organs, and multiple concussions to show for it. As Charlie has pointed out to me, the trade off for staring down long odds every time he climbs into the ring is that fans will be treated to some of the most visually stimulating feats of lopsided strength available. There’s something just sublime about a fully extended, unending gorilla press. When Charlie gets tossed out of the ring, big Gunner follows his befuddled prey, picks him up, hoists him straight-armed overhead with barely an effort, and then overhanded flings him over the top rope, flying back into the ring to land about 10 feet away.
Gunner relishes the psychological dominance every bit as much as his physical dominance. “Say, ‘I’m a little bitch-boy,'” Gunner demands of Charlie before he’ll free him from a spine-damaging Boston crab. Charlie obeys. Prying his body in all the wrong ways like a twist-tie, Gunner refuses to accept another submission until Charlie cries out, “I’m a girly-man!” Flinging him to the mat, Gunner flexes his gargantuan biceps in Charlie’s slack jawed face. “Look at these 20-inch pythons,” Gunner crows. “You thought you could beat this?! I’m a Greek god!”
While my deep longing to see this skinny boy upend his bully and spank Gunner to tears is unsatisfied, I think I’ve got reason to hold out hope. In every conversation I’ve had with Charlie, he’s saccharine sweet IRL. My relatively colorful use of profanity has, quite literally made Charlie blush (of course, he’s such a ginger that’s not hard to do). Charlie literally, unselfconsciously uses phrases like, “oh, golly,” and “son of a beeswax,” fastidiously eschewing all coarse language in a way that seems astonishingly genuine and habitual. So when big Gunner snap mares Charlie so hard the ginger levitates about a foot off the mat on the rebound, it’s a little shocking to hear Charlie shout, “Goddam it!” Gunner hooks Charlie’s left knee behind his thick, jock neck and stands up, dangling Charlie off the ground by the straining, snapping tendons and ligaments in his knee. Abruptly, Charlie screams out, “Damn it! SHIT!!!”
It seems to me like the wear and tear of BG East action very well could accomplish what my powers of persuasion have been unable to. Dudley Do-Right Charlie Evans is resorting to openly cheating to try to level the playing field with the muscle hunks he’s forced to face in the ring. His virginal mouth is now driven to coughing, screaming fits of profanity. His earnest faith in hard work and fair play are already corrupted. His values have been compromised. And he’s persistently a serious student of the science and art of professional wrestling, learning new holds and moves by the minute. So yeah, I’m still hopeful to see this skinny boy finally snap, in a good way. Scratch an undersized gay kid with a lust for wrestling and there’s GOT to be a subterranean volcano of anger, frustration, and unresolved grudges bubbling just beneath the surface. One of these days, little Charlie Evans is going to climb into the ring with a contemptuous, musclebound, captain of the football team, Greek god of an opponent and fuck him up on behalf of all of us who were ever shoved into the lockers, wedgied, taunted and tormented back in the day.
Feel the power of the dark side coursing through your veins, young padawan.
Sidelineland 