Post by babieseatme on Jun 29, 2015 19:47:31 GMT -8
He felt his name on the bracket, with a finger he guided it from it’s starting place to the next branch of the tree and then the next. He didn’t think to consider who would win with him or worry about who had a free round, he only stood in the locker room moving his finger until it stopped on the clipart of a trophy. The stamp of a cat wished him luck and raised that trophy high carrying victory in one hand and the symbol for it in two fingers he pictured slightly bent-- if they were his fingers then sometimes they curled over the other. He thought they might be.
Later that night out of breath and feeling a certain heaviness he found the bracket again and saw someone had already moved his name up before he could scratch it in tiny blue ink himself. This time with a hand clutching his shoulder and a chest ass red he looked at the names, he figured out how to sound out their names even though they were written with those funny little markings and even though he found he was gasping for air and felt as red in the chest as he did in the face. He looked to the match parallel to his before his own and figured out quick who would be the winner of that one. He was already moving a little slower, if he stayed on the ground he could see his skull getting mashed into a hundred pieces but if he just ignored the little needles, the dry heaving from hungry lungs and the burning numbness that every shot he stopped midtempo would deliver he thought it gave him a chance. The Badtime Rascal stuck his thumb out and smudged the name BURAI into his fingerprint. She was dead, he’d heard it as soon as he came back through the curtain and they all looked at him like it was expected for him to put on a jacket and zoom out of the parking lot. He had sat down and done his stretches and he had felt fine even though no one asked him if he felt fine.
Later in the ring he looked across at the Red Panda and found a reminder of himself if he had ever thought it was a good idea to obscure his vision while he did acrobatics. There was something in the body, the way it moved-- it wasn’t a gay thing, really it wasn’t. It was a vision of someone else he had known, something beneath the mask outwardly familiar in a way he couldn’t begin to touch. He looked at the mask of Red Panda, the shroud on a noggin he felt he would recognize in a second if he’d just pull back the skin. The bell rang and he walked forward hesitantly, he shook hands even though he had no reason to and scraped knuckles against a forearm when he saw the eye of fatima tattooed there. The unmoving face of an animal looked at him and spoke. “What are you afraid of in life?”
“Change.” He replied without a second thought, a shrug of his shoulders that could’ve meant anything towards the burdens he carried. Were they the ones crushing him or was he the one that every once in awhile got to around and putt the squeeze on them. “You?”
“Identity.”
There was a smile and it wasn’t in the thing’s mouth.
Two dancer’s brawlers and two artists destroyed. It was a match without any of the airborne poetry the two had banked their careers on and it was a match that the bloodthirsty sat on their hands for. He had no trouble kicking him in the back of the neck and then did it a second time to be sure he wasn’t getting up. When the Red Panda did he stopped and put his hands on his knees to breath out his last. He’d hit the brick wall enough times to be outlasted, he’d smashed his head into the same foot enough times that it was this last one he took that had enough behind it and preceding it to twist his head into his shoulder and crumble him into the ropes. When his head draped on the apron and his arms tangled in the red and white ropes of SPIRIT wrestling he was hit with the thought that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to stay there forever. He was pulled off quick and though his hands twisted into the advertising on the apron it wasn’t much of a struggle. He felt a familiar weight on him that gave him the push he needed to clear a nagging thought in his head as the referee tried with three attempts to bust his eardrum.
Oh.
I remember you.
He’d come home for the funeral then skipped it and saw a wrestling match instead. At the end he came over and for whatever reason they took him. That night contract freshly signed he met an old friend and then raised hell on another one. Out there in front of people he’d spit on and others who he had swung at he had expected to be run out of the building but instead when he strained his ear past the sound of the ocean he felt ringing in his head every now and then he heard something else.
They applauded him. They chanted his name. They stood on their feet and raised their hands and their out of wedlock kids.
Two weeks later he got put through a table, two weeks later he was the one who had hell raised on him and laying there he heard something different.
Boos. Hisses. Kids screaming. It was different it was new it was unreal and it left him shaking. He still didn’t know what it meant or how to take it.
He’d almost said spiders that night. It would’ve been a stupid answer but it would’ve been the better one. The one he gave was one he dwelled on the last few days. No one dwelled on spiders, they got smashed and they got tossed in the yard. Some people put them in a cup and moved them outside but Evan never did. He’d liked squishing them between his toes. You couldn’t do that with the answer he’d given. He’d stayed in a hotel since coming back, well a motel. He still lived cheap, he just was finding better places for that money than the pockets on his skin. He had a motel lived in and left the house empty and that was the way it should’ve been. Things being the same, all things considered was the better way of things.
He hung out waiting for his connecting flight in a seat he didn’t find very comfortable. He’d studied his man, had even watched a little of what he did and if anyone had said they saw flashes of Evan in Alex they were liars. Sometimes he saw flashes of Evan in Evan and other times he looked like someone else who wasn’t. He lived in a different country, a different place where trains had women only cars and the biggest star on the planet was a kitty cat. He was still trying to learn a language composed of scribbles, had given up trying to speak it months ago and he had a healthy paycheck to his name. A fat fuck still followed him around and that fat fuck still knew the best ways to crush a melon. Nothing was different it was all the same. He fished for the camcorder and left his carryon right there on the seat, decided maybe it wasn’t worth going back for. He entered the men’s room and bumped into someone who became a skeptic when they saw what was there in his hand. He moved to the stall that was the furthest back, took a breath of the rank air that he had been unable to escape whenever sitting at her kitchen table and he turned it on.
He moved through the long procession of urinals and even though the camera was on he didn’t spare it a glance. His eyes were on the mirror and for whatever reason he found himself staring at his baby blues, the eyes that weren’t half as sunken the last time he’d seen him. The natural gauntness of his body now had some meat on the bones. It was different than usual. He was often the shrimp of matches. “Alex Healey...”
He was supposed to be the shrimp but it was different now. The other guy had three inches on him but that just made the weight difference so much more pronounced. He had more muscle on his bones. Japan had put a wrestler’s body on a junky and a flex of his arms put a lump in his shirt that there never would’ve been otherwise. “Sorry guy, it’s been awhile. I don’t know if you remember who I used to be but I’m not against reminding you.”
“I’m Evan Griffith and I want your mug.”
“Ha. Scary right? I don’t mean your face. World’s Best Wrestler in the Whole Wide World, that’s the one I mean. I deserve that mug. You’ve seen me scrap I’m sure you have you’ve seen me take enough kicks to the head that even if I’m not the World’s Best Wrestler in the Whole Wide World I still deserve it as a consolation for being Almost the World’s Best Wrestler in the Whole Wide World.”
He wiped at his nose and then snorted, an old habit he still carried apparently that made anyone watching check his eyes. “Bring it to them atch first of all, bring it and if I don’t break it over your head I’m hoping I can lay down next to you when you’re all done and looking like a car wreck so I can purse my lips just like this and lap up some sweet sweet victory from it’s rim. I’m gonna mention your wife now only because it seems appropriate.”
“I’ve been the villain before, I’m still the villain it comes easy, I don’t think you ever met a man like me in your gymnasiums or your bars, I’m someone who doesn’t mind being the bad guy when it gets me a W but that doesn’t mean I’m better than you, it just means I want it more and Alex...”
“This is my debut. My real deal debut after I spent the last show picking wood chips out of my hair. I do want this more than you. I like that elbow you do, try and catch me with it maybe you’ll get six of them in, I wouldn’t put it past you.” Evan rubbed at his hair and set the camcorder down on the sink before stepping back, his arms outstretched. “Do that-do that, that big fucking kick you do! Hit me in the jaw with it! Ooooh that will hurt won’t it! Break my jaw with it, dump me on my chest and see a little trail of drool come out as my eyes glaze over and I’m staring at the kid in row 3 who I really hope decided that he had enough money not only to get the popcorn but also one of those polaroids I carry around! Flip me over! Pin me!"
"But I’ll kick out!”
He stopped again. The same hair flip and his voice quieted down. “Now I’m gonna talk about your wife. If you’re here to support your family you are in the wrong business. If you’re here to get your bones broken there’s not many better places to be. If you want to be a hero to gym rats everywhere, then get the hell out of the ring I’m borrowing for the eight minutes we tussle. I’m an international success now, I can do this and people can see me and they can be impressed by me a way you can’t be. I expect that sort of prestige returned in kind even if you don’t got it in you. Ha.”
“I know! I KNOW that you can fake it!” He pointed. “I know because I faked it! I faked it for years! I landed on my head I did all the flips they asked for I bled like a stuck pig and no one knew I didn’t belong here! I faked it and now I’m making it! What is your excuse if you don’t make it! What are you going to do if you get my paycheck by accident and see an extra zero at the end?”
“Your wife. I faked it and now I’m a sensation. I made it. I hope you can make it a good one because I’ll let you in on a secret. I don’t lose to Canadians I don’t fall for the old ‘maple syrup greasing the ropes trick’ or the friendly handshake. I hope you deserve better than gyms and bars. I hope you’re a hero only because you think someone has to be. Don’t fake it when we scrap. If you need that boost to be someone important, to not waste the gift I'm giving you in touching my greasy ass body remember the things I done. Don't think of me as the guy you first found in Golden Gate Wrestling all sprawled out on the floor with a broken body to match the table or the guy you saw in that youtube video that we won't talk about right now but you can find if you have your hand on a search bar and half the brain to click it."
"Remember me instead as the guy raising those titles high, the one where the ref has to reach for his shoulder to take off the streamers he got hit with and the garbage they flung at him after he ruined the prestige of ten different titles. Think about the drink I got hit with when I won in the east. Think of me as the guy who didn't stop twice before he nearly broke that pretty little redheads neck two years back. Watch that clip, if it makes you want to hurt me, watch it and then pretend she's blonde, picture she's got that sleepy look in her Bette Davis eyes you see every morning when you turn your head to cold side of the pillow and then put that face on Danni Thompson's head and watch as I guillotine that bitch. If that's what it takes."
"You better make it. Take me as the opportunity on a silver platter of success that I am, capitalize on my body, make me see enough stars that I can’t even find the star splitting my head open. Alex Healey, make it a good one or I might stop coming here, the spotlights on you and if you ain't careful it'll never be there again." He stepped back finally, the manic intensity drifting from his eyes and the arms he hadn't realized he was swinging drooping plainly to his sides. His frown quickly became a sheepish smile and the quick payday he had thought it would be had already become something else in his mind. "Make it stay where it belongs, son. I'll help you with the rest.”
