The Last Kyle Shane Story, pt 1. (Underground Title)

[Kyle Shane]

The Tea and the Tillerman.

We all want a stirring origin for heroes.

If they espouse values that sync up with ours, we want all of their values to coincide with what we think. We like our heroes clear cut, decisive and confident. Someone that you don't have to worry about jumping in front of, because they're going to be out in front of you, and you would willingly follow along with them.

But origins are messy and complicated, and too often nowadays the reality of heroes falls.

This reporter is sitting across the table from a woman in a small diner in one of the Southie-est parts of Southie, Boston, a few miles out of the city on the Mystic River proper. This type of eaterie is so quaint that it's positively archaic. Gentrified specialty restaurants selling ethnic cuisine have been the way most inner cities have gone for decades. As she stirs a cup of brewed hibiscus tea with the end of a spoon, a glance out the window of the little art deco kitsch gives a snapshot of the area. If this was an origin story, this would be where the hero had his humble beginnings. The skyscrapers of Beantown are giving way to a rapidly blue collar area that's been romanticized by filmmakers like Affleck and Scorcese to death. But as you start looking into people's faces on the street, you start seeing hopelessness and worry lines among these people. And you start wondering how a someone as precise as Kyle Shane could ever come out of here. This neighborhood is etched in grease and factory sweat and low-rent crime. It's as dichotomous as Shane himself.

Back to what we want out of heroes not always meeting the mark. Kyle Shane personifies this almost as much as his beating heart is this city. But who was he? Bratty man-child, or broody, new Wave emo pretty boy? Arrogant, preening elitist or the most overlooked and underrated breakout star anywhere he roams? Was he angry? Does he laugh? Was he the type to cheat his way to victory as in his beloved video games, justifying himself by evincing the ends, or is he strictly the type of player that glorifies personal achievement as it's own merit? It was clear as soon as the tape recorder went on, that just one sit-down wasn't going to be enough to pierce the heart of this. This was a boy who claimed to be part of an underground hacker cult that took responsibility for a terrorist attack on Times Square a few decades ago, after all. And yet, far from being Underground, he was out there on TV every week, in your face, brash as the one percent and in your face.

Any normal person who traded under such mystery and such contradiction would break, without any question.

So how did Kyle Shane keep from breaking for so long before he finally fell?
The recorder has an audible click. The woman across from me is not looking amused by my silent notes. She has a very much no nonsense, clinical look to her. She's severe, white dress suit and silver hair pulled back into a practical bun. Her face is lined with years of care. But I recognize her from her credentials, Krista Miller, LCSW, MD.

"Doctor, thank you for taking the time to meet me," I say to her. "I know that even to this day, you've been approached by a lot of people in the publishing world - "

"Well, it's a big story, still." She says, curtly. "Even after all of this time, people still want to know what happened to Kyle Shane."

She cuts right to the point of this visit. From her, large, functional and formless leather bag she withdraws an old-fashioned newspaper. I didn't even know people still read those.

It's a special edition, print first newspaper, with the headline reading "God of Gone?" I'm instantly embarrassed by whoever came up with the pun. His face, as it was back when he was youthful and in his prime, is angled dramatically, in the type of promotional look that would have been taken for a poster.

She notices me looking at the silly photo, and rolls her eyes. "Professional headshots. The wrestling world loved them." She has a wistful look in her eyes as she turns the paper back to herself, angling the copy so that she's looking into his eyes.

"Ahh, yes, that is, part of his story we were interested in," I hedge a little bit. "Certainly, it's a part of his mystique. There's quite a lot of questions about him, and the more that we try to add them up, the more it falls apart."

"He's become something of a mythological figure," Krista says, not unsympathetically, and then she looks up as the waitress comes, bringing Krista a refresher for her esoteric tea. Krista's laugh lines crinkle as she looks at the waitress, a slim young girl with vaguely dark features. "Thank you, Brandy. Brandy here makes the best pot of tea in the neighborhood," she says to me proudly, as if this is an achievement on par with balancing the city's budget.

I grunt a little, mumbling, "What a good wife you would be." Krista thanks her young charge, who goes off to serve the next seat with a warm, folksy welcome. Krista's face turns back to ice. "A large part of the reason for that is because the nature of what being mythological means. You would have to imagine, how intriguing it would be then for someone who was very young when they were exposed to trauma. Who lived a life letting other people define who he was until he had enough. How this person would take coming to terms with the idea of being the only person who got to define their own terms."

"Metaphorically speaking, of course," she says, her eyes cutting over the rims of her glasses.

"I think I understand," I assure her, not understanding one bit. She gives me a sardonic look, as if she knew. She held out her hands, in a dizzyingly sudden display of trust, and tells me to come on.

We leave the diner and start walking, getting down into the streets. "To know who Kyle Shane was, you have to start where he came from. And Kyle, Roxbury was where it all started. Imagine being a small, fragile white boy in this neighborhood before the cleanups. Before it started getting urban renewal money, before people with man-buns and beards a few years out of style began investing money into air bars and microbreweries in old warehouses. When the city was unsafe. It was a breeding ground, but it was also a nightmare place to grow up in. It was the type of place that cut at you every day, every edge of chain link fence. Every crack in the sidewalk. Growing up here, was transformative."

I nod, trying to follow along. "Uh-huh, go on..."

It feels like Krista is leading me somewhere as much as we're just walking, but we're side by side. Still, she continues. "We had talked about this a lot, and I think the environment, coupled with troubled family life, acted as a catalyst in his mind."

She waved an arm around, "Growing up here, it forced Kyle to become who he was... and what he was was a reflection of Roxbury. A reflection of these streets as they were. And that may have been someplace small, but someplace that stuck with you. A type of place that got inside of your head, and beat you down over and over again. A type of place that berated you, told you that you could never become what you were, and it dared you to confront the ugliness in yourself and try. It dared you to accept your own limits and tell the world that they were part of who you are and what made you special. I think, in a lot of ways, Kyle Shane became the person he was in spite of that, as much as because of that."

"The kind that would berate you just as much into a course of action. He learned that lesson well from Roxbury," She said, softly, looking around them "But the kind that, when pushed down, when told he could not succeed, when some outside force decided that it would control his destiny, he refused. He steered his own ship. He was his own tillerman on the boat. That's who Kyle Shane was at his core. I think I never saw that more than all those years ago, that whole thing with Hiroshi Yukio."

I knew what she was talking about even though I hadn't followed wrestling since I was a kid. Anybody knew what Kyle Shane did in that match, it was engraved in the minds of pop culture. "I remember that..."

"Then you'll know the central lesson behind why Kyle was confident that he could overcome it. Here you have this giant of a man, possibly one of the heaviest fighters in professional wrestling, beating Kyle down week after week, telling him that there was nothing Kyle could do. There was no way he could win. So Kyle tried everything he could to get him down. He tried it the honorable way. He tried it through hitting him from behind. But it was more than physical limitations. Hiroshi Yukio represented, to Kyle, the ultimate expression of what he had been told all of his life, by this environment, by his father. Stay down, take the beating, submit. So he was more determined to overcome that block. He fought it mentally, knowing there were ways to goad the big man into a fight that would put him at a disadvantage. And he fought it physically, with all of his might. Never backing down. The actual results were secondary to what the entire thing represented to him. Winning the match was secondary. It was the fight that he needed most of all, to show that he COULD. Because rising above that, and fighting was an act of courage, of dare, that most people would never attempt in their life. Not here, not then. They would have been scared. They would have been intimidated by the rules, by the environment. But that was the ultimate expression to him of taking your limitations and rising above."

"And in the end result? Does the match matter, now, so far down the road? Maybe to historians and sports trivia people. But the takeaway from the entire encounter is this... the only person who can hold you back, is you. Dare to push yourself past."

"The only thing that ever stopped Kyle Shane was Kyle Shane." I mused, thinking it sounded like a good soundbite, but I didn't know how to fit it in just yet.

Krista shook her head as we kept walking, "Everything else, was kept vague because he wanted it to be. He didn't want to be defined by other people's expectations of him. That's why he tried so hard to make himself so larger than life, while keeping people at a distance. Because the truth is, his human failings were always part of him. He was mortal after all. I mean..." We've finally stopped, and I know why.

We're at a small, dwindled memorial, little more than a wreath that's weeks or possibly even months old, laid in front of a spray-painted outline. This was where he had died on the street, those years ago.

Mortal, after all...

Brandy, You're A Fine Girl.

Krista looks to be choked up and takes a few moments to gather herself.

"I'm sorry," She apologizes at length, gathering her composure. She is a clinical lady, after all, and she obviously doesn't let her guard down a lot. "It just strikes me as unfair, after all this time."

I've long since forgotten the recorder in my pocket, but this story has me hooked and intrigued in a way I can't put my finger on it. "Unfair, why?"

"Because, after all Kyle did for Roxbury, and for Boston itself. This little place was nothing but broken factories and mobile homes, cramped row-houses once, and while it will never be a metropolitan wonderland... This is where Kyle found who he was. And so he always wanted to give something back." She throws the newspaper, in disdain, down at the foot of the memorial. "As I said, hipsters with man-buns and tight pants were throwing a lot of money into making the place safe for upper middle class, and pushing the residents out. Money that was allocated for public works was going into attracting buyers. The Roxbury of old was getting thrown away, and some would have said good riddance. But him..."

I know there had to have been something between them now. Maybe not romantic, but more than clinical. It's in the way that she looks at where he was, with notes of passion and regret in her voice. At what might have been. "After the Grey hacker group combusted, we were just a loose group of broken people with various skills left behind in it's wake. Kyle took us all and gave us a mission, here, to get some money out of what we had all helped break apart, and funnel it towards something good. We took a lot of the money from the frozen assets of a company called Shinron - don't worry, kid, before your time - and moved it into off-shore accounts, and disseminated it between five different shell companies before putting it to work."

"And we did put it to work, here, in these cities. Paying for that park, the upgrades to those schools, to libraries. All of it done anonymously... but every one of us that worked on moving that money fell in love with this project, because Kyle was pouring all of his effort into finally showing the place that created him... the place he left when he was 17.... that he cared. He did it without ever letting them know it was him, but he gave the residents of Roxbury something to be proud of for themselves. He gave this city hope, and an example that you can rise above any background and find your way to the top."

"And that's how he saved this city."

I have to pull out my pen and inhale some sweet peach after that, letting the vapor enter me, as I take it all in, the man and the legend that I was researching. This was all so much bigger than I'd anticipated. And it's beautiful, but -

"But what does this have to do with where Kyle Shane went?" I pose the ultimate question, and she's about to answer, when debris and trash cans cause a huge commotion as they shift. We're not alone in the alley.

"Krista, Krista, Krista..." says a voice, and a masked figure is on the other side of the alley from us, facing away from the memorial and it's pathetic, old wreath. "Just like you to tell tales out of school... You always were a horribly unethical therapist." His face is obscured by the ski mask, and all that can be seen are his eyes, which are slitted with hate. Likewise, his voice is twisted in scorn. He's slight of build, and two of us could possibly rush him, except for the silenced gun he's waving around.

The gun which goes off. I flinch, and then when I look to my left, Krista is grasping at her midsection. She makes a short gurgling noise, and her eyebrows are knitted in confusion. "No!" I hear escape my lips, although not sure if because of shock or because the story is going off the rails. It was just investigating who Kyle Shane was and where he had gone, if the cryptic mysteries about the night he died on the streets of his home neighborhood were accurate. For two decades all that were able to be assembled were the edges of the jigsaw, everything in the middle remained a vague, half-formed jumble.

Lightning crashes, and the sky opens up with a harsh cloudburst. Amid the cacophony, I hear someone yelling, entering my field of view from the side, and... the girl from the diner comes charging in, smashing into the masked figure with both feet in a running dropkick like maneuver. He goes sprawling. The gun slides across the street.

She moves amazingly well for a coltish young girl in a dress and an apron and a scuffed pair of sneakers. The masked assailant is also amazed to see her, goggling at her. "You!" he spits harshly.

"I know why you're here, and you'll never find it," Brandy says, and she tucks, rolls and comes up in a fighting crouch. She snatches up the gun. Again, she's going all of this in the uniform she wore in the diner. She pops off a few silenced rounds.

The black masked assailant ducks and the bullets eat into the wall, leaving little craters. "I don't need to find it, little one, I just need to find her!"

"I'll stop you before that happens, I swear I will!" Brandy retorts, but it's empty bravado. The gun she has is empty now. She lets out a terse, annoyed "Shit!" and throws the gun aside. The masked person now has straddled a small scooter, one I can't believe I didn't see, and throttles it raucously. The scooter races past us. For a second, Brandy looks like she'd follow it. Then she looks at Krista, gasping for air and holding her gut wound, and she looks at me. A frown creases her young face.

"That- that was amazing - " I stutter.

"Shut it, reporter boy, I don't wanna hear anything from the man investigating my dad," She spits viciously, her eyes like green cats eyes. My mouth goes agape at the revelation. "Why did you have to come into town and stir up all of this trouble?"

"Brandy -" wheezes Krista. The older woman is nearing her last gasp. Brandy, taking off her apron, uses it to staunch the wound. "We can't let him get to it. You know what he'll do if he finds -"

"I know... I know, I know, I know..." Brandy repeats, distracted, worried, "And I can't just leave him here, in case someone doubles back for the notes he's been taking. Because he's getting close to finding it."

I look from one's face to the other, then hold my hands up innocently. "Oh, what, me? No... I don't know anything, I swear, I won't tell anything -"

"Take him to her, Brandy. You have to," says Krista, "Only she'll know the way to stop them from coming in contact."

"Take me to - Who?!" I can't help being petulant. I'm wet, it's raining, there's dying people telling me cryptic riddles and I've been threatened twice, and now my notes are part of this. "What has this to do with Kyle Shane?!" I ask, feeling like it's for the tenth time.

"This is all because of his legacy," Brandy says, grimly, and she stands up to her feet. And then, in a keen flash of insight, I looked down at the memorial. In the scuffle, the wreath was knocked sideways, and some of the old flowers on it are starting to fall apart in the rain. This had started as a simple puff piece examining where this colorful folk figure had come from, an unlikely folk hero's origins, but this was about his leavings and endings... All of this was about the night he went away... and who put an end to him. But maybe the only things that stopped Kyle Shane... were Kyle Shane.

Brandy is brusque as she takes me by the arm. "We're running out of time. And the only one who can explain further is Array. His wife."

The recorder in my pocket long forgotten, as the rain bears down on Roxbury sideways, and the wilted flowered memorial starts letting petals break free and spiral down a storm drain. "Wife." Is all I can think to say, mouth agape.