May 24, 2024

Watching WWE

On a good neighbor.

You can see the room where Mario would watch TV from our backyard. In the winter, it would just be the blue glow from the screen through the little square window in the door, but in nice weather, he’d open the door, and you could look right in and see what was on.

Sometimes, it was Jeopardy or a soccer game or something that, somewhat inexplicably, you could tell was Italian (lots of close-cropped shots of people’s faces, very bright). But mostly, it was WWE.

I liked seeing Mario’s TV because it meant he was home and, ostensibly, doing all right. He was in his 90s, and while he had family in the area, he lived alone. So, I worried about him, though he rarely needed it.

We visited Mario as often as we could, which was still always less than we meant to. But we tried to make a point of going over on Mondays so we could all watch Monday Night Raw.

I don’t think I’d ever watched a single second of professional wrestling in my life until knowing Mario. It is, honestly, more fun than I thought it would be. There is a lot of spectacle, as I guess you can imagine, and also a lot of things that are genuinely funny. I’m sure it is not actually the case, but everyone involved seems to be having a great time.

We sometimes joked that Mario maintained his mental acuity—which was basically perfect, as far as you could tell—by memorizing and reciting literally everything about every person on WWE. He would tell us, in his thick Italian accent, all about their backstories—who was good, who was evil, who had betrayed whom last time, that someone was out for revenge, that this guy was that lady’s brother, that this was the match where this other guy was going to have to beat the really big guy to get his first belt.

The way Mario talked about it, too, it seemed he believed it was all real. There was no sense in asking more about it or trying to disabuse him of the notion. Mario’s life had been, for a long time, as they say, super real—he was a kid during WWII in Italy, left when he was barely an adult, found his way from South America to here, and made a life as a mason, which he just happened to learn how to do at some point. I wondered if, after all that, he just couldn’t really imagine the frivolity of, like, two dudes with makeup on pretending to kick each other’s asses. We also thought: Maybe he knows it’s scripted, but he doesn’t want to ruin it for us.

Mario got sick recently, and I hoped he might get better. He had told us many times that he wanted to make it to 100, and I just sort of believed that if anyone could do it, through sheer force of will, it would be him. Even after a few days in a row of noticing his TV had not been on, I still thought that maybe he could be home soon.

You have to be strong to do that, Mario would say about, like, some guy picking up another guy over his head and throwing him against the ropes. Pretend or not, that was true. You’re right, Mario, we’d agree. You really do.