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By Root 1590 0

a secret code called carny, which was one of the first things I was taught when I finished wrestling school. The basic premise was you would add an E-Z sound in the middle of a word to disguise it. If you wanted to comment on a girl’s boobs when she was within earshot, you would say, “Look at that gezzurl’s teezits.” It didn’t take a mental giant to figure out what teezits meant when you were staring directly at the girl’s chest, but that was the idea. However, the English wrestlers had a much more clever code to disguise what they were saying.

We’d be standing around talking when one of them would say something like, “Look at those Scotch eggs,” as a girl walked by. I smiled and pretended I had a clue as to what was being said, but in reality I was completely in the dark.

After a few more of those types of statements, I had to know what the funk was going on.

“What are you guys talking about? What is a Scotch egg?”

Robbie laughed and explained that they were speaking Cockney rhyming slang. They would take a word that rhymed with the word they wanted to say and replace it. Therefore, Scotch egg would be used instead of leg. When they said, “Look at those Scotch eggs,” they really meant, “Look at that girl’s legs.”

Not just any rhyming word would do either. The term “boat race” was used for “face,” but you could only use “boat race.” You couldn’t say, “Look at that girl’s mace”...it didn’t work that way. There were specific words and you had to use them properly.

A Donald Duck, or a Donald, was a fuck.

A syrup and fig, or a syrup, was a wig.

Red reels of cotton, or red reels, meant rotten. And so on.

As cool as it was, this new code was much trickier to figure out than stinky old carny. It was simple to discern the meaning of, “I’d like to beezang this cheezick with the nice leezegs.”

But try to figure out: “Even though that bird with the syrup has a red reels boat race, she does have great Scotch eggs and I’d like to take her for a Donald.”

Huh?

But once I figured out the Cockney slang, I moved into the inner circle of the English boys. It didn’t hurt that I’d grown up singing “God Save the Queen” in elementary school and watching Fawlty Towers, Benny Hill, and Monty Python on the CBC, since Canada was a member of the Commonwealth and was very English-influenced.

Robbie and Doc also knew the best places to eat in the city. My favorite was a little hole in the wall called Freddie’s Imbiss. Freddie had the meal of a half roast chicken, noodles, and a liter of milk waiting for us every day. The meal was right up there with Mrs. Palko’s ham sandwich and chocolate chip cookies as one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

After the matches most of the crew went to a place called Ante’s, a Yugoslavian bar and grill run by a guy named—wait for it—Ante. He was always happy, his smile hidden by an enormous walrus mustache. His gorgeous daughters made us the Ante’s special, which was a plate of sausage, steak, and lamb. There was a jukebox filled with old blues tunes and all the boys and fans who knew about the place danced and drank until dawn every night. Then we’d all sleep till noon, hit the gym, go to Freddie’s for lunch, catch a nap, and go to work. We never had to travel to a different town, so the routine never changed. Tough life huh?

Everything in Hamburg was perfect—except for my matches. Because of my shit debut, I’d been booked into a series of opening matches with the rookie German guys. I just couldn’t get it going and I became the victim of another Hamburg tradition: If you had a red reels match, you would have to bring a case of beer into the dressing room as a peace offering. But you wouldn’t have to buy too many cases in a row because if you stunk it up too much Rene would simply give you the night off. You would still get paid, but it was like being benched by the coach. It was not a good sign. After I’d bought a case of beer two nights in a row, I decided that I’d bought my tournament limit.

The next night, I brought a case of beer and put it in the dressing room before the match had even started, which