Mommy, Why’d You Let The Drunk Beat Me Up?
by Matthew Damascus
Seems like there’s a lot more wrestling writing than usual here at Ink 19.
Hmmmm.
This purple color scheme makes me feel like Prince.
And just what the fuck happened to Raven?
What about Raven? What about Raven? It’s not sounding so rhetorical anymore.
I mean, come on, I just got done watching the ECW “Living Dangerously” pay-per-view (and at this point I could go on about how I seriously considered clawing my eyes out during the course of that near-abortion, but I’ll save it. Hey, at least I saw Gedo and Jadoh on American television, right?) and I had the misfortune of blinking so I fucking missed Raven in the semi-main event tag title match. Good fucking god, did the man even get an entrance? I think I heard his theme music for a split second.
All the elements were there for Raven to be a major player tonight, in a pay-per-view where ECW was in DIRE need of some psychosexual junkie bloodfiend charisma. He DID walk into that match one-half of the tag team champions with utter freak-of-nature/monster Mike Awesome. That to me spells “integral role.” Oh, my mistake I guess he wasn’t a valid champion rather just a fucking stopgap hat-rack to drape the belt across for the evening until it was returned to the “Impact” Players. AND he had Francine with him, in full-on heel punk/glam/trash metamorphosis mode, and she’s a walking subplot in herself. She could have been a factor in the match. As long as I’m here, I might as well point out that Raven has recently fallen under the control of that-guy-who-used-to-be-James-Vandenburg-and-now-he’s-like-the-devil, so perhaps he should have made a brief and machiavellian appearance. Were any of these elements exploited to their proper degree? Nope. At all? No.
Oh, but he did do that grotesque snot rag thing. Of all the redneck, crowd-pleaser signature moves. Raven, bloody Raven, who once broke Tommy Dreamer’s fingers one by one with nauseating precision and attention to detail, is now known for pulling a hanky out of his back pocket, blowing liberally, and sticking it in his opponents face with a flourish? Jesus, Raven, I love you to death but ditch this gimmick like the plague. It’s fucking bad, trailer park, crazy uncle, kind of shit. The snot rag doesn’t make sense. The gesture in itself is not particularly vile or sinister, it’s more bizarre like that kid who ate paste and boogers in second grade. AND RAVEN IS NO PASTE EATER! He’s Jim Morrison/Charles Manson/Jean Paul Sartre reincarnated as the perfect wrestler. Snot has nothing to do with it. Besides, Chris Benoit has been doing that “snot-rocket” weirdness for like two years now, leave this one in Canada.
As quickly as Snotrag-Gate happened, and I must have been stamping my foot in blind rage like Rumpelstiltskin, Raven’s team (the TAG TEAM championships) were handily eliminated, swatted aside like moths. WHAT THE HELL? Raven wasn’t even in the ring. Give it -100 million stars!
What is so special about Raven, you ask?
Fools. Raven has the rocking perm as once sported by Roger Daltrey and he wears Neil Gaiman’s Sandman shirts to the ring and yet he gets like two punches in. The horror, baby, the horror. To say nothing of the fact that when I saw him at the Tallahassee TV taping he spent like half of his ring time laid out flat on his back after his opponent clocked him with a chair. How thrilling.
You’re Raven. You’ve done a classic interview where you compared the Sandman to your drunk abusive stepfather and you made it brilliant and fucking legitimate tragic. You’ve got like six good possible angles you can milk for maximum hate (HAAAAATE) potential from the fans, you’re a total death metal rock star, you have a devout fan base and you’re still young. Despite all this, you were a bit part player in a pay-per-view severely lacking that intangible something that makes the spectacle “great” instead of “wow ain’t wrestling neat.” Perhaps you should consider a change of locale before… oops, sorry, I’m dabbling in heresy now.
Messy, messy, messy.
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