In pro wrestling, victory isn't making your big comeback—it's staying away. I've dispersed this pearl of wisdom here and there since my last show with Incredibly Strange Wrestling in Bologna, Italy back in 2003. Bologna was an unusually glamorous destination for a low-rent, punk rock wrestling promotion that boasted such "stars" as El Homo Loco, El Pollo Diablo (the Devil Chicken) and the Poontangler, but that European tour saw ISW ending with both a bang and a whimper, or maybe it was more like a sputtering bang. The end of the line is still the end of the line is still just that, even when it comes in Northern Italy.

I think about my little saying on Saturday night as I climb up a rickety aluminum ladder onto the wet asphalt roof a biker clubhouse in Oakland to announce something called Bloodslam, a series of extreme matches involving tables, folding chairs, thumbtacks and a surprising number of old Dell desktop keyboards. Back in the 1990s this would be labeled dismissively as backyard wrestling, and in this case, it is being held in a backyard. With the ring taking up a good chunk of square footage, Shane the sound guy had to set up his PA and camera equipment on the roof, and the announcers had to go up there with him. I figured that some wrestler was probably going to take a leap off that roof at some point during the night so the least I could do was stand up there and talk for three hours.

But climbing that ladder also made me flash back on this incident from my ISW days where Kid Anarchy and the Missionary Man set up a ladder in the middle of this art show to perform some high-flying acrobatics off of it as a kind of publicity stunt. Anarchy got to the top of the ladder when some drunk asshole in the crowd got the bright idea to push the ladder over, sending Anarchy crashing to the hardwood dance floor when he wasn't expecting to. Needless to say, he didn't land right. The artsy crowd dripping with dot com largesse was soon sickened by the sight of Kid Anarchy writhing in pain as both of his forearms flopped around at unnatural angles. The next time I saw Kid Anarchy, he had casts on both arms up to his shoulders. But as soon as those casts came off, he was back in the ring again, even performing risky flips off the top rope. Pro wrestling inspires that kind of devotion in people.

"We've already been shut down by the fire department for having people up on the roof," one of the motorcycle club members tells me as I'm about to make my ascent, "so if the cops come, stay down so they can't see you up there."

I'm 42 years old. I'm a senior research analyst at UC Berkeley. I'm also a bestselling author. I climb the ladder anyway, or maybe I climb the ladder because of all of those things. I make it to the roof without incident. Ceasar, my co-announcer for the evening is already up there. Ceasar runs his own indie wrestling promotion called Fog City Wrestling out of San Francisco. He offers me a tall can of Miller High Life. I take it. We only have one microphone to share between us so we have to pass it around like a bong. Caesar is used to passing around bongs, so we're good to go.

Rasta Mysterio fights Anthony Butabi in a falls count anywhere match to start things off. The wrestlers brawl into the clubhouse where we can't see them. Caesar calls the match as if he can. The crowd laughs because he's getting it mostly right despite being stuck on the roof. The match is followed by a bout between the "Scarface" influenced Stony Montana and a very large man wearing fishnets and bondage gear called Otis the Gimp. Crime flicks of the 80s and 90s exert a strong influence on these guys. Otis wins by 69ing Montana.

"Bloodslam is total penetration with no protection," I exclaim. "These wrestlers are getting creampied tonight!"

"That's totally disgusting Dante," Caesar responds, "yet entirely true." 

Bloodslam doesn't even mark my return to the Bay Area alternative wrestling. That came night before with Hoodslam, held in the somewhat more civilized confines of a warehouse venue called the Oakland Metro Opera House just blocks from Jack London Square. My co-announcer for the first half of the show was Gay R, a homosexual parody of "J.R." Jim Ross, the WWE's cowboy hat wearing commentator. We both had our own microphones for this show and even chairs and a table. I found my rhythm half way through riffing back and forth with Gay R as the Mexican werewolf called Chupacabra battled a hefty white guy in a sumo wig dressed as E. Honda from the old "Street Fighter" videogame.

I'm a pretty good writer, and even a decent enough bass-player, but the one thing I really excel at is blurting out a stream of funny shit during absurd wrestling matches. It's my true talent, but I've mostly avoided it for seven years until Shane Dynasty, a member of ISW's old guard who’s now fallen in with Hoodslam, asked if I'd be interested in lending my golden voice to the upstart promotion. I said that I'd be happy to do it as a one-off. The Dark Sheik, Hoodslam's impresario and one of its main wrestlers, called me a couple of weeks later and asked me to work their show on October 7^th. I guess I did well enough that he asked me to come back for Bloodslam at the biker clubhouse on the next night. I took the show. So much for the one-off.

Hoodslam may be today's equivalent of Incredibly Strange Wrestling, but even at its highest level, it's so deep underground that you'd need to use fracking to bring it to the surface. The fans bring in their own 40-ouncers from nearby liquor stores. The wrestlers fiend weed before the matches. Hell, the wrestlers smoke blunts during the matches too, and so does the crowd. All that ISW ever had was Bob the Ref, "with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other." That seems kind of quaint like it's from the 1950s or something with so much medicinal marijuana smoke filling the air.

Maybe it's the blunts, but Hoodslam has one of the most welcoming backrooms I've ever been in (even when there isn't a backroom and the wrestlers have to change on the sidewalk behind the biker clubhouse). I kept on waiting for those "What the fuck's he doing here" glares from the top talent that I used to get when I was breaking into ISW, but they never came. Everyone went out of their way to introduce themselves to me by their first names, and Ike Burner, the show's tux wearing ring announcer, even gave me index cards with the night's lineup on them that he wrote out for me by hand. Nobody was living their gimmick or keeping it kayfabe. The remnants of that old dog-eat-dog carnie system that could still be felt in ISW and other local indie promotions in the 1990s had almost literally gone up in smoke.

Back at Bloodslam, a mass of bloody thumbtacks are swept out of the ring to make way for Francine Dead, a fire-eating burlesque performer with a backside that won't quit. Locals crash the show through the back gate and snap pictures of Francine with their cellphones as she twirls flaming skewers and shakes her body to a jazz soundtrack, but none of them stick around for the night's main event; a three-way bout between Rasta Mysterio, Juiced Lee and Scott Rick Stoner to crown Hoodslam's first ever Blood King. Shortly after the match begins, the ring is littered with busted up Guitar Hero controllers, crutches, old-school metal trash can lids, a hobby horse, and an assortment of obsolete home electronics. As pieces of garage sale bric-a-brac are used as weapons, Caesar points out that the green and red lights on this modem lying in the middle of the ring are flickering to life.

"Somebody's grandfather is attempting to send an email right now even as we speak," I say, as Juiced Lee sends blood flying into the audience with a dropkick to a deep gash in Scott Rick Stoner's forehead.

"I'm downloading 12 songs off of Napster with that bitch," Caesar retorts, "I go to bed and wake up in the morning and only five of them are done."

By the time that Scott Rick Stoner achieves the mantle of Blood King, his right to the title is a foregone conclusion. While Juiced Lee and Rasta Mysterio definitely have a battered look to them, Stoner is covered in a crimson mist still pumping out of the deep laceration somewhere above his eyebrows. All three men had worked two matches at Hoodslam the night before, and they're all set to do it again at a street fair the next day. With the show over, I make my way down the ladder. No drunks send me thudding to the ground like poor Kid Anarchy. The Dark Sheik pays me in little more than t-shirts and DVDs, but I'm already telling him how I want to come back for future shows.

On my way home across the Bay Bridge, the classic rock station plays "Round and Round" by RATT. Of all the crappy 80s hair metal songs, they have to play the one that Mickey Rourke tries to seduce Marisa Tomei to in "The Wrestler."

"Out on the streets, that's where we'll meet/You make the night, I always cross the line/Tightened our belts, abuse ourselves/Get in our way, we'll put you on your shelf…"

In the fatigue brought on by two late nights of strange wrestling lunacy, I start to believe that RATT vocalist Stephen Pearcy's helium-toned lyrics bear some kind of message for me, but this nearly nonsensical string of phrases could mean just about anything. They may be a warning, or they just might be welcoming me home.

This Friday, at the Hemlock Tavern (1131 Polk St, San Francisco), I'll be donning sequins and fake fur to host Figure Four CAPS Lock, Litquake's night of readings from pro-wrestling memoirs. I've assembled a stable of San Francisco Bay Area authors, comedians, librarians, rock musicians, burlesque dancers, educators and yes, pro wrestlers to read the most violent, hilarious and just plain wrong moments from the works of the Fabulous Moolah, Ric Flair and Mick Foley in an event that the SF Weekly has dubbed "the strangest lineup that Litquake has produced yet." For tickets and information go to litquake.org.