The Shine

Good question

Wrestling is a culture of bullshitting. Makes sense since wrestling is based on a shared delusion. No one thinks wrestling is real, but everyone agrees to pretend. Which is strange. When you go and see Stupid Superhero Movie #58, you don't pretend that Captain Pecs and Lady T&A are real people really fighting real space aliens that look like cosplay dorks. But when you go to watch wrestling, you pretend for a little while that it's a real sport. Kinda.

Due to that, 80% of what wrestlers say can be disregarded right off the top. Everyone of a certain age says they helped break in Hulk Hogan. Everyone in a certain area says that they trained Steve Austin. Every wrestler is a bad ass bar fighter who's fucked a hundred models and made and spent a million dollars. No one believes it but everyone says it. That's just how it is.

So when a wrestler tells you that they hunted werewolves with Dennis "Scrap Iron" Ray, what does that really mean?

I was going to let the werewolf hunter thing go. I drive a long way for no answers all the time. Why should this be different? The police weren't going to tell me anything. What was I going to do? Try and solve a 20-year-old murder on my own?

Ayep.

Between Kim and Wolfman Mack, I got some numbers for old timers that might have been around at the same time as Scrap Iron. I calling around to see if I could find anyone who knew him or even had just worked with him.

After 117 calls, I was on the road to meet two old-timers at Denny's in Rochester. Benji Vieux, a French/first nations person who wrestled as El Mirador from Mexico, and Tommy Rivera, an Irish-Puerto Rican fellow who wrestled as "the Russian Bulldog" Andrei Romanovich. See what I mean about the nature of wrestling?

According to them, Scrap Iron was still wrestling part time in the 80s when they were breaking in together. They became pals with Scrap Iron and late one night in a moment of booze and cocaine filled candor, he told them about all the people he'd killed. He was crying and carrying on because he was worried that they weren't really werewolves and he was just a mentally ill man who was killing innocent people.

Benji and Tommy tried to console him as best as piss ass drunk, violently high, emotionally repressed tough guys can. Of course they ended up at a shallow grave out in the woods. So they knew Scrap Iron was a murderer at least. Tommy was out at that point, but Benji was willing to give this werewolf idea some more of his time. He says that he and Scrap Iron started hanging around with a group of bikers that sold speed out of a double wide out in the county.

Benji says Scrap Iron never told him why, but that Scrap Iron suspected that the leader of this group and his girlfriend were both werewolves. Benji claims that one night some angry customers showed up upset about some bad shit they bought, one thing led to another, guns came out and once the shooting started, the leader "wolfed out" and started ripping people limb from limb. Benji said that in the fight, Scrap Iron shot the werewolf six times with a 44 magnum and that didn't finish it off.

I looked at Tommy at this point and he just shrugged. Like it was no big deal if this story was true or not. Like the existence of werewolves didn't matter.

Benji says that after this incident he went on several hunts with Scrap Iron until Dennis decided he was too old to do it anymore. Benji said that he wanted to continue the hunts on his own but he didn't have the sixth sense for them like Scrap Iron did. He claims that he lost his foot to a werewolf. When he went to the bathroom, Tommy said that diabetes took Benji's foot.

After I left Denny's I looked back through Dennis's journals and he did write about the bike gang. And the other hunts Benji mentioned matched up as well. But there was nothing in there about Benji. Scrap Iron's hunting logs are very detailed. Obsessively detailed. Why wouldn't he write about Benji? How much of Benji's story can I believe?

Tommy's contribution was to blandly ask me if I wanted to know who killed Scrap Iron. He says that Scrap Iron had beef with some drug runners (also werewolves according to Benji) and they killed him and buried him under his own trailer. According to Tommy, the man who did the deed was none other than Eterno Corazon Inmortal.

When I asked him how he knew this, Tommy just snorted and said "Everyone knew".

When I asked why no one did anything if everyone knew about it, he laughed humorlessly and asked why no one did anything when Bruiser Brody was murdered. "Everyone knew who did it and nobody did anything. People get killed all the time girl, what can anyone do about it?"

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