Gone are the Thundercats, Bill and Steve, and the Hidden Pagans with their shiny red masks and secret signs; gone ais Paolo the Peruvian…” –Tony Earley, “Charlotte”
The wrestlers were, once upon a time, the trophies of Charlotte. You don’t know their real names, or you know part of their names, and that is how Earley wants you to know in terms of these muscled fighters. They are the shining beacons as one point, the one illustrious entertainment that Charlotte held onto until the tall, graceful basketball players substituted them. Now, the ones who are left, are nothing more but poetry readers and a glory robbed for all eternity. These names, these wrestler names in which the author lists off like trophies, are exactly trophies to Charlotte. Once these men are gone, Charlotte becomes nothing more but a hunk of dirt pile, as told on page 41. I think that Earley puts into these wrestlers more than just a history, but the image of something positive about a place that nobody should visit. The names, kind of like exotic creature names if you stripped them away from the human, are something like a tourist attraction in a way. When there are mentions of these names, there is a kind of dynamic energy that changes the prose of the story into something fast and quick. Meanwhile, the slow pace and almost static prose are left for the present, in which we see Lord Poetry recite his words and the narrator describing the current state of Charlotte. Earley set up the wrestlers’ names and their existences as not just a backstory of kinds, but also as a comparison between new and old Charlotte.