How to Fight Your Landlord, the Heel
Pro-wrestling narratives are often driven by the villain, or heel—what Roland Barthes called “the bastard.” This figure “takes refuge behind the law when he considers that it is in his favor,” Barthes wrote, “and breaks it when he finds it useful to do so.” The other evening, at the Brooklyn Monarch, an industrial space in East Williamsburg, a copywriter named Jacob Knight-Thomas was preparing a wrestling-based production with a familiar urban archetype as its Big Bad. The show’s name: “The Fight Against Slumlords.” “You know what my landlord’s name is in my phone?” Knight-Thomas, a renter, asked. “Lame Ass Fuck.”
Knight-Thomas, who wore a green T-shirt with a yin-yang symbol on the back, was sitting by the stage with a MacBook, reviewing a slide deck. He was a novice event planner (“I don’t even really throw myself birthday parties,” he said), but, as a wrestling fan reared on political satire and MTV’s “Celebrity Deathmatch,” he’d hatched an idea for a night of topical comedic combat, carried out by locals. His first show had been called “The Fight for the Epstein Files.” Among its matches: Redacted vs. Redacted—two grapplers outfitted in black Lycra. Another was a “Last Island Standing” battle royale between the files’ big names. “Trump kept showing up in there, so we had, like, five Trumps,” he said. “Two of them started making out. He loves himself.”
At his laptop, Knight-Thomas reviewed story beats. “The slumlord’s gonna start victim-blaming him,” he explained. In the first match, the good guy would prevail, before a run of villains’ victories. “I want the audience to feel the harsh reality,” he said.
Beside a sign reading “NO FIGHTING,” a woman with green hair fit a bald cap onto a wrestler known as Cheeseburger, who would be portraying Eric Adams. Knight-Thomas had bought a plastic trash can for an ersatz Oscar the Grouch. Someone asked what he would do with it afterward. “I have the receipt,” he said.
“Where’s Mamdani?” Knight-Thomas asked—meaning Abraham Khan, a bearded millennial of Pakistani descent who’d be wrestling as Hizzoner. Josh Alba, a comedian playing the titular Slumlord, shrugged. Alba wore a suit with an open-collared shirt and had slicked back his hair. As a kid in Brooklyn, he said, “eight hundred bucks was rent for an entire apartment.” He’d remained a New Yorker till two weeks earlier: he’d moved to Philadelphia to get more bang for his renting buck. “I still commute to Manhattan three days a week,” he said.
Khan strolled in with a roller bag and an iced coffee, shook a series of hands, and conferred with Alba. Khan said that he typically performs as an antagonist. “When I play heel, I’m always virtue-signalling,” he said.
The crowd trickled in; the vibe was thrifted, power-clashing, pierced. In the show, when a wrestler named Delightful Dan the God Damn Candy Man shooed away a woman in a cockroach costume, she accused him of gentrifying his new hood. “I thought this city was built on immigrants,” he answered. The crowd seemed torn. A tag-team match ensued, which the roach and a man in rat garb won, to cheers. In another clash, Cheeseburger’s Eric Adams, billed as “straight from Turkey,” paid off an official with a cash-filled potato-chip bag. Later, a spate of bids for one of the Slumlord’s listings escalated into a six-person “gentrification scramble.”
Lex Rountree, of the New York State Tenant Bloc, watched while distributing pamphlets to showgoers. She wore a leather skirt and a T-shirt that said “ASK ME ABOUT TENANT POWER.” Knight-Thomas had reached her through Hot Girls Organize, formerly Hot Girls 4 Zohran. It was her first wrestling show. “I’m learning a lot,” she said. “There’s a catharsis to it.”
During the main event, as Alba’s Slumlord got into it with Khan’s Mamdani—slacks, tie, white button-down with pushed-up sleeves—another wrestler, in a fleece vest, stepped in to reveal himself as the Slumlord’s puppet master: Private Equity. In the chaos, the Mayor was slammed by two nepo babies, then saved by a duo in blue “Tenants for Zohran” tees. (Rountree whooped.) Khan hit his finishing move; the announcer shouted, “Rent Freeze! Rent Freeze!” The Mayor won the match and an oversized key to the city. The audience chanted, “Block by block!” Khan punctuated a victory speech by shouting, “Free Palestine!” The crowd roared.
Afterward, Khan, who has a day job in finance, posed for photos. “I’m very neutral on Mamdani,” he confessed. “I’m a middle-of-the-road individual.” Knight-Thomas said there would be another show soon. The theme: dating. ♦