Post by Kyle Shane on Jun 17, 2019 17:40:51 GMT -5
"Get on, you mangy mutt! Get!"
The stray looked over it's shoulder, scampered forward ten paces, then cut it's hangdog eyes back to the diner owner who was still brandishing the broom out by the grease trap. It let out a pathetic whine, and it's doggy brain was running in a mix of emotion between hurt and the displaced, lonely feeling of never knowing the peace or ability to rest in it's endless hunger. It looked back, a predator turned prey animal weakened by trauma. The human was still cursing, swatting the broom at empty air as if it would make up the space between them. With long strides, a tall figure passed by the alley, and the mange-spotted runaway slipped by him. The tall, hoodie-wrapped waif, his eyes deadened and bleak and not comprehending the movements around him, tilted a look into the alley, and the proprietor looked bleakly back at him, as if to ask him if he wanted some of the broom.
Kyle squinted back, looking at the stray dog shambling down the Common, and in the background he heard the angry yelling of a mob.
He wanted to avoid it, if possible. He was not feeling personable, this night.
How could he be?
He frowned, hearing the chants of "We're straight, no hate; we aren't second rate!" and other, mixed, confusing and jumbled jeers several blocks over, and his eyebrows knit together. It had not dawned on him to check Twitter (he'd been avoiding it, going social media dark, in fact) but he felt a tingle at the base of his scalp, vaguely recalling the defaced Pride flags around Jamaica Plain and the Mass Transits. He then did start to check his phone, wanting to text Array, but then he decided against it. He stood there, phone in hand, weighing a million options of where to go or what action to take. And he just stood there, indecisively. It seemed like everything in his life was in this sort of confused flux, stay or go, call or stay dark; he winced at the on the nose irony at the fact that he was standing under a crosswalk sign.
The crosswalk currently had an upturned red hand. It blinked twice, signalling that it was drawing close to it's changeover.
He listened to the varied, jumbled, garbled chants of a mob of raised voices two streets over, and again, he looked down at his phone, trying to decide that to do.
The stray dog was standing, just as unsurely, yards away from him, and the pooch looked at him. It was, underneath it's patchy scruff, a mutt of indeterminate breed. A skittish, anxious, shifty look stayed on the dog's mottled face, but it raised only one of it's ragged ears as it looked at him. The two kept their eyes locked in a long, meaningful beat. He just stared into the ugly mongrel's eyes as if the chocolate orbs were asking him all of the deepest questions he wasn't asking himself right now, and it just kept looking back. Finally the dog's long cocked ear flopped back against it's nape, and it jumped and skittered away.
The long second passed, and the red crosswalk hand flicked over to a white stick figure, that tapped, twice.
The stray dog hurried across the street, to range on down the street, pausing to look back over it's shoulder with fear, and as he watched it go, a peaceful, intrigued calm passed over him. He watched it go out of sight.
He had watched the mutt serpentine down the empty Common for so long that he hadn't noticed the white stick figure crosswalk had turned back into a red hand.
Before I get too deep into the story of the night Straight Pride came to Boston, I think there's enough to unpack from last time around. I tried my best to move on from the nightmare Hiro had put a handful of people through wearing my face. And doing so gave me a lot of time for reflection about the person that Hiro knew me as, the person he knew himself as when he was with me and the person I had wanted to become. And me, I had come out of it assessing all of it. Unfortunately it was not just my feelings, or even my reputation that needed. Things were bad, between almost all of us. And there were so many things I hadn’t forgiven myself for; and it was too late to apologize to Array for Hiro's actions. So we've all been sitting on these complicated emotions for weeks, and I haven't given it the attention it needs because I've been dealing with my own shit. In a way... that is the complete opposite of what I wanted and what I talked about before. We're all at different sections of this crosswalk. And we're all standing still.
She paces the cage, holding her taped fists up to the roar of the seedy, smoke-filled room, sweat glistening off of her rock-solid triceps and plastering her blonde mane to her forehead. Marki roars back, around her mouth-guard, and in that moment she seems less like a cage fighter in a dingy underground hole, and more like a valkryie letting loose with a triumphant war cry, like a gladiator standing in the sand pit of a colisseum and holding aloft a head to the thumbs up of the Circus Maximus. Shredded, corded muscle, body oil slick sheen with sweat, a few splotches of blood on her wrist tape, as the orange halogen of the lights overhead the cage shine off of her. She literally glows.
As Array sat at the table overlooking the cage, raising a shot to her lips, she raised a curious eyebrow, not having the experience to suss out what this raised in the back of her mind.
Marki exited the cage, leaving the muscle man curled in a fetal position in the middle of the ring and plucking up her towel. The deejay is moving on, his voice the buzz of metro transit over speakers barely audible over the crowd that comes to this under-underground dive to watch this sport. Nobody pays Marki more than a passing, intimidated glance, nor meets her eye as she comes over to the table Array sits at, surrounded by a cast of raucous characters fit for a cantina such as this.
She looks the Amazon, the Erinye over, the tight band of the sports top and the bike shorts. She's towelling off the sweat after picking up a spirited smashing in a basement chicken fence fight club, in the middle of a bar on the bottom of an underpass, and despite it all Marki radiates energy, vitality and power. Array just gives her a little, intimidated shake of the head. "Totally different world from serving drinks at frat bars," she jokes.
"Ah, babygirl, you wanted to get out of your house!" Marki says good-spiritedly, signalling to the hostess to bring them more vodka. "I know all the spots to have whatever fun is on your mind." She begins stripping off her wrist tape. And yet, Array cannot stop looking at her hands.
"You are... a mystery, Mar," Array said, smiling despite herself. She had to speak up a little over the noise of the crowd sitting cageside, as the kazoo-voiced deejay spat another match announcement through the PA. Array met Marki's eyes sincerely. "I mean, I can't thank you enough for being such a good friend in the last week..."
Marki got, and took a quick swallow, of vodka off a tray, biting it down and brushing the question off with her usual direct humor. "You needed a friend that was in your sphere of influence, I mean... unless I missed my guess, your only female companionship was... that forty year old therapist chick?"
Array rolled her eyes skyward, laughing off and saying they shouldn't go there with that stuffy academic. But then her eyes downcast, her finger ringing around the rim of a glass. "I just haven't had much chance to... I mean - Thing is I was miss popular in my sophmore, junior years, I mean I was the Queen Bee at Malden Technical school, head cheerleader, model UN, all of that you know. But then... things had to... change..." she trailed off, and her valkyrie followed her train of thought, having heard stories of Array's exit from school and jettison into an adulthood. Marki's face therefore stormed over, and she looked like she wanted to break something.
"Anyway," Array continued, her voice deepening as she picked up the empty glass, her eyes dulling. "My life didn't turn out the way that my parents... perhaps would have liked... and we can skip over a few lean years but suffice to say I didn't meet very many... girls my age living out of motels... So..."
Marki was looking at her somberly. Then, she rather pointedly went back to removing her wrist tape. Array, looking to change the subject, brightened up. "But you, you must meet a lot of cool people, right? You're a part of their parties and, and mixers, and... stuff."
Marki laughed, and patted Array gently on the hand. "I think you've entered enough spaces with rich, Ivy League white boys passing around drinks for a lifetime, don't you? Not someplace you wanna hang out and meet people." Array's mouth quirked, and she looked down at the ashen rug, chagrinned, mumbling a meek 'touche'.
Marki, tongue in cheek, watched the two fight club members circling the pit, putting their fists up, and watched as one of the men threw a punch. Array leaned in, at first watching Marki's reactions as she assessed the fight with a practiced eye, and then shifting to how each fist thrown laid in to the flesh.
Before long she was absorbed in it. Array's eye stayed locked on the two men, now wrapped in a clinch, trying to push and maneuver each other around the cage, but gaining little ground as their limbs were wrapped up together. A long, meaningful beat passed, as the two of them grunted, and strained. And Array got so in tune with the sweaty dance that she zoned out.
Finally, Marki took a sip of vodka, lips pursed in disgust, and said "This isn't going anywhere. They're stopped." The long second passed. Array shook herself from her reverie, looking over at her bartender valkyrie.
"How do you do it?" Array asked with sudden urgency. "How do you stay so... poised and ready for anything?"
Marki chuckled, and her pretty lips turned up in a stunning smile, "Ha, um. Well. I just feel like life is out there for you to grab on to. You can't stay stuck in place, you got to take the crosswalk when the light comes. Ya know?"
Array's confused look as she puzzled over the words, and looked down at the table, then back up to Marki's face said it all. "But I mean... you're a badass. You're... confident, and where you want to be, it seems like, and I'm - " she flipped a hand out, indicating so many things, her modelling career, her personal life, her home life. And that isn't even to start with the nightmare of going home and confronting a face that she was not prepared to deal with. A face that flashed into her mind right now, bright red and flashing like a trigger warning, his lustful leer as he had pulled her blankets back that night. As soon as the thought came it triggered like a gunshot, and everything crumbled around her. Her throat closed up, and she let out a choked breath.
"Hey, hey-hey-hey," Marki soothed, "Stay with me, babygirl. Breathe. You need some air. I am going to help you up and walk you out of this room, and while we do that you are going to stay grounded; listen and focus on my voice as we get out of here. And tell me things that you hear, things that you smell, and things that you see. We're going to get through this."
Her chest clenched tight with an iron band as the panic attack gripped her. She was close to hyperventilating. The room spun around them as faces of jeering fight club patrons loomed around her in a complete circle. And she weakly rasped out "...dart board... smell of stale beer... masculine waitress..." between breaths.
The door to the bar boomed open, and Marki was hauling Array up a set of steps leading from the underpass to the street, and Array, choking on what felt like vomit and anxiety, groaned "Sounds of men sh-shu-shouting... D... Dog..." Marki laid her against the side of a building, fanning her face. "Breathe, Array, it's okay, babygirl."
Her breathing slowed. Her eyelashes fluttered, and her eyes met with Marki's steel gray gaze, their lips inches away from each other. "...My hero..." Array finished describing her surroundings; becoming fully grounded with Marki's piston arms holding under her armpits. Another long, pregnant beat passed. Array just stared into the valkyrie's gray eyes as if they were asking her all of the deepest questions she wasn't asking herself right now, and Marki stared back, her eyes piercing, probing.
The dog Array had noticed stayed at the periphery of the tableau between the two women, nervous, it's head with the subservient, bowing posture of a frightened animal who's been kicked. He seemed to be asking the two of them, so close to the space where he was foraging, if it was okay if he just passed by. The girls paid him no mind, and as Array regained her composure she was very aware of the small space between their bodies, and the heat that was coming from their now slow, nearly synched breath. But the moment couldn't last, and they both became more aware of their surroundings, including the fact that coming up the street, rounding the corner, was a rising mass of angry shouts and epithets hurled in the air; a dozen conflicting chants. "We're straight, don't hate - " and "Straight pride! Straight pride!"
The dog, hearing the commotion first, broke and ran off down a side ally as a swarm of men came up the street, spreading in all different directions.
The two of them watched it come.
If I am... detached, it is because I honestly don't know how to react anymore. I went through a million emotions in the wake of losing. I lost a lot this go round. I lost the last friend I had from a bygone era. Hiro is a free man, but he has to live haunted by what he did to more than one person, and the complete collapse of his personal life, while behind me he left nothing but scars in the household he invaded. And then I... in thinking I could take a parable from Hiro's example, and applying myself more steadfastly to breaking out of a fucking endless cycle I was finding myself in, got slapped down hard, kicked to actual rock bottom professionally. And with my home life a shambles, professionally was all that I had. I spoke at length about trying hard and achieving something. I gave getting to the finals of the 2019 Icemann Invitational Tournament a huge, personal, weighted stake. And having fucking lost that, and come away with nothing, where can Kyle Shane even go from there? IS there a second chance for Kyle Shane? Does such as I even deserve second chances? Or did I just find myself right back at the start of a cycle, waiting for the God damn crosswalk to tell me it's my turn again?
He felt like he had been waiting at this light for ages. Hell, hadn't he been caught at every crosswalk since he'd begun? The thin line of cars was backed up all the way down the street, and the first car in the queue beeped at him in annoyance. "Fuck it," he mumbled to himself, and he was starting to get both anxious and annoyed because he had gone on this walkabout to get out of the house, and now no matter which was he was turning he was hearing the incessant chanting. He thought he saw the haunches of the stray flying past him, moving hurriedly, but when he turned his head it was no longer there. This was not the type of place he wanted to be.
And matter of fact, he just wanted to get inside, find some food because he had been aimlessly walking the streets this night pondering his melancholy questions, and he hadn't had fuel for the machine, and he felt like he was at his lowest ebb. And so when he scanned across the expanse of the huge, metropolitan square of the Common, he saw the brilliant flash of comfort food beckoning to him. And he trudged towards the shining orange-painted mecca across the parking lot from him like a gallant soldier returning from the Crusades. "Fuck yeah," he finally said, just now realizing as he came to the little roped-off twisting line to the front he'd completed his thought out loud and that a pair of old people sitting in a hard plastic booth were staring at him, mouths agape, having never heard such language obviously. He kept walking, putting them out of his mind. Old people are always staring about something. He was about to get his Doritos Taco on, and there wasn't shit to do about it. And, as with the old days, he knew some comfort food was what was needed to help him out.
Minutes fly by as he stands at the top of the line. Not a rustle of activity in the kitchen, and he can see premade tacos growing cold and congealed in ways that made him unspeakably angry. Five minutes, ten. He was growing outraged now. Unfortunately no body is manning the counter, and thus there is no body to bitch to. Kyle leaned over the counter top to shout towards the back. "Hey, what the hell is taking so long? This ain't fucking Arbys you know!"
The side door to the "kitchen" opens and out walks the biggest, yet frighteningly familiar looking fry cook Kyle had ever seen, jabbing his gums with a toothpick as he sneers, "Hey yo, do you... have a problem... with the cook guy?"
For one of the few times in his life, Kyle is at a loss for words and can only sputter out, "Scott Ha-!"
The wrinkled, careworn and haggard face of the Bad Guy, once known far and wide for his tenure as the best Al Pacino impersonator to be paid a healthy salary and his time in one of the most feared stables of all time, laughs at the sound of his old moniker while trying his best to hide the smile that creeps up on him every time someone like this recognizes him from his glory days. "Hey, chico, that ain't the name... on the Hall of Fame ring. Ya know." And, laughing wondrously, Kyle comes around to fist bump the old soldier, who arguably hit his creative nadir as the subject of a Game Boyz documentary.
Raz motions for Kyle to follow him, and they slide under the rope divider, to the glass booth leading to the outside. Stepping out into the cool breeze Hall pulls a pack of cigs out of one pocket and a flask of booze from another. With a nod of his head he motions for Kyle to join him on his break.
Kyle looks at the flask, "Is there booze in there?"
Raz shrugs, "Yeah chico, and my manager... is always giving me shit for it."
Kyle chuckles, "Well next time he asks what you're drinking just tell him it's Dallas' special concoction, helps burn weight in yoga or whatever."
Raz shakes his head slowly as he looks up into the evening sky. "Heh, I should have done that... instead of giving him the Razor's Edge. Then I'd still have a job after he wakes up."
Kyle's eyes have a momentary, involuntary pop open wide, the reaction still of the six year old who watched this sport long ago on a 12 inch, black and white TV catching local channels and falling in love with the scrambled figures. Sometimes... he missed that kid. Still, Kyle takes the moment to sit and bask in Scott's aura of perpetual Bad Guy charisma, and silently breathes "Fuck, you're awesome." The epitome of cool, his old friend and promo subject takes a long drag on his cigarette and slowly exhales, gauging the unhappy young adult with a calculating look.
Kyle wants to keep the reunion light and frothy, continue to zing off lightning quick banter. But the jokes died on his lips, and he recalled the most fun of hanging out with Scott back in the day had been his and Hiro's awed reactions at meeting the famous Outsider and trying on his vest. And now, despite the patent absurdity (to hang a lampshade on it) of the universe sending him his Bad Guy here, tonight, on a night when he could hear angry marching in the streets and the yelling of a handful of slogans, he thought instead of those old Scott and Game Boyz promos, leading him to thinking of Hiro. And all of the dominoes that fell along with his friend. And he looked away from Scott, the mirth and the quick quips turning to ash. Because nothing seemed funny anymore.
"Scott .... Razor. I think..." he swallowed, his head hanging a little bit, and he looked bitterly at his Chucks... "I think you're the only friend left I got from the old days... like the old, good days, and I ..."
"Awww, come on, chico... can't be that bad."
"No, it can", he retorted, bumming the cig from his cohort and taking a bitter drag. "Hiro is going to be persona non grata even if we can't specifically charge him with any crimes, but he... Raz, he tried to bring me, and him both back to who we are when we knew you, and it just didn't work. And now Array is so hurt, so shell-shocked by... what he did, I can't even begin to find the words to heal the damage, or bridge the distance between us. And I think about my constant anxiety, my fear that everything I touch I ruin and God, this year has just proven it. Professionally, personally, financially.... I've left nothing but fallout everywhere I go. My son - Raz, I have a fucking son, and he's... I fucked everything up. Because of my stupid pride. How... how can I go back and ask these people for a second chance? Do I deserve it?"
The legendary wrestler looks a bit perturbed by the list, and doesn't even seem to know where to begin with any of it. This not being the silly, goofy twenty year old he knew. He himself had a lifetime of burned bridges, but it seemed like Kyle's ranting about his personal experiences was all he wanted to hear. "So what do you want to do to make it better? I've learned... you need to start taking personal accountability when you mess up, own your failures and move on."
Kyle looked at him askance and held his arms out, looking skyward, "That's the thing, I TRIED that, when I put the incident with Hiro in my rear view I wanted nothing more. And it still didn't do me any good. What more can I do when people didn't want to hear the message I was talking about?"
His old friend looks dissatisfied, then grimaces around the lid of his flask. "Well, chico... it sounds like... you just need to stop being a bitch about it."
Kyle raised a harsh eyebrow. "Scuse me?"
"So life is hard and you feel trapped. You can always find a way out if you push yourself, but you back yourself up into a little box and then try and fight out of it. Nobody is going to hand you a better life, brother. You can't walk a road of redemption and not expect some bumps along the way."
Kyle's mouth formed a slit, as he soaked in the real talk from the notorious bridge burner. But at length, his eyes squinted with scorn and he said, "What do you know about it? I tried my fucking best to pick myself up, and nobody wanted to hear it. They were just so fucking fascinated about listening to a guy talk to himself about 2006."
The Bad Guy was getting annoyed by the arrogant little asshole, that he sat up off the rail, turning to face Kyle. "This is really the way you want to play it? You're such a piece of shit. You gamer brat. You only want people to suck your cock and tell you that you're doing the best work of your life and that nobody should ever be able to beat you. If you were as good as you think you are, and that the world owes you so much for you gracing us with your presence then you would do something that matters."
Kyle rounded on his friend, really the last, tenuous friend he might have had left in the world, eyes blazing, fired up. Because how dare he. "I'd rather be that than be some old piece of shit still trading on his past," he spat out each word, venomously.
He pushed the former wrestler. Scott stumbled back, a shocked look on his face, and he squared up as if he wanted to hit Kyle, but he was just so stunned by the hatred and spite written on Kyle's face.
Kyle didn't even bother with parting words to Scott. The last friend he maybe had left right now just stared at him, haunted. He looked back, wanting to say something, and then he retreated. He walked down the street, alone.
You see, I thought I knew how to read what Pure Class Wrestling wants. I can always admit that I get a little full of myself, a little up my ass with my own message, but I perhaps was a little too quick in thinking that this was a federation that wanted to keep moving forward. You can't have people continuing to keep doing business the way they've always been done. That was the clearest thing in my mind, what really stood out to me from the Hiro fiasco. Hiro Sasuke was my best friend, but he was also content to relive the only frame of reference that he could relate to wrestling. And I didn't want to think that of PCW, but the more I see it the more it's true. Rather than double down and push the future of this company they sincerely don't think there is anything wrong with the way things have always been done. But I... spoke. At length, with conviction. About my need to be better than I was. My need to move on with my life. It was the only fucking thing that made sense after Hiro deludedly tried to relive his college years. I wanted - I NEEDED, to push for a future that was different than I've given you before.
And what did Pure Class Wrestling fucking do.
They fucking shit on it.
Here's my impression coming out of that.
That nobody. NOBODY. In this fucking company. Can ever pin me fairly to the fucking mat without a laundry list of controversies. Is it so hard? I'm fucking 210 pound of bones. And yet of the five times Stormm and I have tangled, this time is the time he gets to win, because referees can't make up their minds? Stormm has lost cleanly and decisively by my hand time and time again, but he gets to win the time that matters, and I'm supposed to just accept that and move on?
And my second impression is that you actively don't care about the future.
You do not care about someone trying to be innovative, different, better than they were before. How the fuck could you be? Stormm described in detail the semi-finals of an entirely different tournament a decade and a half ago, and gave this big emotional spiel about his relationship to Luis Malave that started back then, not one bit of which makes a wet fart of difference in 2019. All he had to say about me was smugly talking about the matches he'd wished he'd had with me for the World Title he thought he was owed and the TIIT finals he was certain he was going to be in. But that wasn't important, what matters was his relationship with his mentor Icemann.
So since life has spat me out, my dedication to moving on has been rejected in favor of pointless nostalgia, and my personal life is in freefall, I have nothing left. I'm feeling like a stray, rejected, a ghost that is forced to walk the streets at night spooking people.
But maybe that spirit is an angry one.
Maybe I'm not detached, maybe the more I think about... everything the angrier I get. About Hiro. About Array. About Pure Class Wrestling. About making a big, passionate spiel about moving onward and upward with your life. About why I'm in the final analysis unable to follow that advice and let go. About everything. Everything is in broken pieces around me. And I'm no better than I was before. Some fucking little smarmy shit named Darren Hughes with an 0-3 record is saying he's the cause of my collapse and showed I'm mortal. And Pure Class Wrestling offers me another crack at Stormm, in a triple threat with David Hunter.
A second chance.
And if I felt even at all that Pure Class Wrestling was hearing what I was trying to say, maybe that would have excited me. Maybe the idea of David and me tearing it up, showing why we are the best and most innovative acts this company has, would inspire me. But I don't believe you want that. Fucking Stormm will probably talk about meeting Luis in a tiki bar a decade ago and you'll all think it's the best thing you've ever seen.
So right now, I bite the hands that are stretched out to me. Not even caring as I cross the crosswalk, or waiting for the red hand to turn to the white stick figure, if a car hits me, it hits me. I make my way down the street.
They watch the march, side by side. For a long time, neither one spoke.
It was an angry, uncoordinated mob, it had picket signs and propaganda being waved, but in the final analysis it was a large crowd of incel rage. The men behind it were bellowing, red-faced, throwing out hateful rhetoric about how their way of life was being pushed to the background. It was a violent rejection of the tenets of love and inclusiveness, these Twitter-baited jackasses roaming the streets of Boston tonight shouting "Straight pride" were angry about many things, and their signs bore evil dogma of all kinds, anti-feminism, anti-abortion, just anti.
Finally, Marki took Array's hand, saying "I think we should go," but Array, her panic dissipated, stood stone still, even as the mob were taking notice and started hurling slurs. Her eyes panned over the scene, as the protestors who didn't even know what they were protesting pointed at them and shouted "Go home".
Some of the marchers had made their way over. One toothpick with bad teeth was now being towered over by Marki as he began to spit out creative curses, all of which revolved around her sexuality and her haircut. The long stream of invective may as well have been white noise.
Array was looking across the street, where a bunch of protestors were gathered in a circle. Her eyes focused on that, and despite the rising cacaphony, she heard an animal yip, hurt, wounded, and crying for help. Before she was aware of it, she had stepped forward. Moving on legs that were autopiloting her across the street. She drifted through the marchers coming towards her, yelling abuse from every side as they slung insults at her. She was just looking at the four gathered together in a circle, who were laughing with the juvenile, nihilistic sadism that the worst recesses of the internet had bred these incel boys to be.
Marki shoved someone out of the way. "Watch where you going, [redacted], you don't got no right to this street," the petty, insolent townie jeered, "These streets are for straight, right, alpha males tonight, baby!" Marki's lip curled in abject disgust as she shot him a withering glare, firing back "If I see any of those I'll let you know."
Marki darted after Array, grasping for her hand, but the younger girl pulled free, her eyebrows knitting together with concentration, focus, and with a growing negative glare. In this moment all of her problems were on the backburner, and she didn't... even think about the face that was haunting her. It was the gentle crux of her current dilemma, when she got the triggers and flashed back to that night, she felt panic, but underneath the surface, when she dug through the crusts of fear, paranoia that Hiro was still in control and he hadn't switched back at all, depression, there was a deep, deep well of rage. Ironically, something that he might have been able to relate to. Rage at being powerless for so much of her life. Rage at being hurt by someone she cared about. Just rage, rage hot enough that it scalded her, brought bile up to her throat as she choked it down every night, sitting in the bathtub and sobbing. Rage that felt like a volcano, bubbling and building to a Krakatoa explosion. Rage so hot that it might burn the world.
She was feeling it right now, as the dog yipped and whined. The boys around it were laughing ugly, petty laughs. One of them came in with a stiff kick to the dog's ribs. It squealed, a sound you wouldn't hear from a dog.
"Ugly mutt," they jeered down at it, "fuckin mangy, gross animal."
"Fuck this ugly mutt," a second one put in, "Got no right to live"
"It's cruel to leave it living like this," a third one put in, this one more reasonably, as if them surrounding and torturing the poor dog was the most humane thing they could be doing.
A fourth one extruded a switchblade knife, bringing out the blade with a practiced flip, and said "Yeah, let's put it outta it's misery, ugly tramp..." and he brought the knife down towards the stray dog's eye.
Array plowed into his back with a shoulder, knocking him off balance and throwing him to the side with a body check that was purely instinctual. The muscle memory of defense tricks she had learned from living off the road were kicking in, and her face was a frenzied snarl of pure molten rage. She let out a strangled cry. And Marki, bringing up the rear, just watched her, in awe. The other three boys were whirling around, and Array grabbed the wrist of the one with the knife. She banged on the wrist enough to make his grip loosen, as his free hand came up to gouge at her face.
Marki was at her side then, kicking out furiously with a blow to the solar plexus. She did not say anything to her companion, not even that her attacking these malicious boys in the middle of this parade was drawing attention. Array was busy hitting her first target, over and over again, and his eye was starting to swell. Marki kept his friends off of her back, dumping one to the ground. Array yelled, incoherently.
And Marki saw it in her. Saw how Array put herself between the wounded animal and the other boys, and how she was furiously pounding on the one with the knife. How this girl had a fierce side, she was a fighter in her own right, and she would do anything to help the little guy. But she also saw the desperate, drowning, flailing anger, and that it threatened to burn her out from the inside.
Of the four boys, two were down, the last one was retreating, and Array continued pounding on the one in her grip, yelling. Marki turned to the Straight Pride crowd, daring them to come forward and looking every bit as tuned up and ready for violence as she had earlier that night in the cage. Surprisingly, none of the boys who were so vehemently positioning themselves as alpha males and true inheritors of pride were willing to come forward, and the mob dispersed a little bit around them.
Off down the street, spotlights turned on some of the crowd, and police cruisers were pulling in lights flashing. A voice came through, amplified by bullhorn, and said "WE NEED YOU TO DISPERSE. CLEAR THE STREET. PLEASE DISPERSE."
Marki tugged at Array's shirt gently, trying not to provoke a trigger, but murmuring, "Array, babygirl... he's done. Come on. If the police catch you with this guy beaten to a pulp, there's gonna be questions."
Her breath was a rasp, like her throat was sandpaper, and her eyes were wild, coming back into full consciousness and questioning. "The dog... he had a knife... was gonna hurt the dog... is the dog okay?"
She looked around, and saw it curled into a ball, submissive and passive to any further harm, it's spotted and diseased flesh trembling and shivering. It peeked it's head out, one eye looking over the approaching girl. Array bent down, forgetting all else in the moment. Her need to nurture, to heal, superseded everything else. And therein lay the answer to her anger, if she could fix things for others maybe she'd be okay, if she could help this poor, wounded, stray dog maybe things would be fine.
She reached a reassuring hand out to it. She came close to it's head, bending down to give it a pet.
It raised it's head, it's pain-maddened eye flashing, and it reared back and snapped it's jaws, biting the hand that was coming towards it. Array flinched back, letting out a surprised, pained and embarassed "OW!"
The stray dog pulled itself to it's feet, despite it's wounds, and it scrambled away from the two women. Array looked after it, her mouth open and looking on with a mixture of empathy for it's plight and shock at it's violent lashing out at her when she was just offering it a helping hand.
The dog gave it's furtive look back over it's haunch, but didn't trust the bigthings not to begin the assault that had kicked it down and put it in such pain. In a flash, it was scampering, and then breaking in to a full trot.
The stray dog retreated down the street in a long, and lonely arc, and their eyes followed it as it made it's way off into the night.
The stray looked over it's shoulder, scampered forward ten paces, then cut it's hangdog eyes back to the diner owner who was still brandishing the broom out by the grease trap. It let out a pathetic whine, and it's doggy brain was running in a mix of emotion between hurt and the displaced, lonely feeling of never knowing the peace or ability to rest in it's endless hunger. It looked back, a predator turned prey animal weakened by trauma. The human was still cursing, swatting the broom at empty air as if it would make up the space between them. With long strides, a tall figure passed by the alley, and the mange-spotted runaway slipped by him. The tall, hoodie-wrapped waif, his eyes deadened and bleak and not comprehending the movements around him, tilted a look into the alley, and the proprietor looked bleakly back at him, as if to ask him if he wanted some of the broom.
Kyle squinted back, looking at the stray dog shambling down the Common, and in the background he heard the angry yelling of a mob.
He wanted to avoid it, if possible. He was not feeling personable, this night.
How could he be?
He frowned, hearing the chants of "We're straight, no hate; we aren't second rate!" and other, mixed, confusing and jumbled jeers several blocks over, and his eyebrows knit together. It had not dawned on him to check Twitter (he'd been avoiding it, going social media dark, in fact) but he felt a tingle at the base of his scalp, vaguely recalling the defaced Pride flags around Jamaica Plain and the Mass Transits. He then did start to check his phone, wanting to text Array, but then he decided against it. He stood there, phone in hand, weighing a million options of where to go or what action to take. And he just stood there, indecisively. It seemed like everything in his life was in this sort of confused flux, stay or go, call or stay dark; he winced at the on the nose irony at the fact that he was standing under a crosswalk sign.
The crosswalk currently had an upturned red hand. It blinked twice, signalling that it was drawing close to it's changeover.
He listened to the varied, jumbled, garbled chants of a mob of raised voices two streets over, and again, he looked down at his phone, trying to decide that to do.
The stray dog was standing, just as unsurely, yards away from him, and the pooch looked at him. It was, underneath it's patchy scruff, a mutt of indeterminate breed. A skittish, anxious, shifty look stayed on the dog's mottled face, but it raised only one of it's ragged ears as it looked at him. The two kept their eyes locked in a long, meaningful beat. He just stared into the ugly mongrel's eyes as if the chocolate orbs were asking him all of the deepest questions he wasn't asking himself right now, and it just kept looking back. Finally the dog's long cocked ear flopped back against it's nape, and it jumped and skittered away.
The long second passed, and the red crosswalk hand flicked over to a white stick figure, that tapped, twice.
The stray dog hurried across the street, to range on down the street, pausing to look back over it's shoulder with fear, and as he watched it go, a peaceful, intrigued calm passed over him. He watched it go out of sight.
He had watched the mutt serpentine down the empty Common for so long that he hadn't noticed the white stick figure crosswalk had turned back into a red hand.
Before I get too deep into the story of the night Straight Pride came to Boston, I think there's enough to unpack from last time around. I tried my best to move on from the nightmare Hiro had put a handful of people through wearing my face. And doing so gave me a lot of time for reflection about the person that Hiro knew me as, the person he knew himself as when he was with me and the person I had wanted to become. And me, I had come out of it assessing all of it. Unfortunately it was not just my feelings, or even my reputation that needed. Things were bad, between almost all of us. And there were so many things I hadn’t forgiven myself for; and it was too late to apologize to Array for Hiro's actions. So we've all been sitting on these complicated emotions for weeks, and I haven't given it the attention it needs because I've been dealing with my own shit. In a way... that is the complete opposite of what I wanted and what I talked about before. We're all at different sections of this crosswalk. And we're all standing still.
She paces the cage, holding her taped fists up to the roar of the seedy, smoke-filled room, sweat glistening off of her rock-solid triceps and plastering her blonde mane to her forehead. Marki roars back, around her mouth-guard, and in that moment she seems less like a cage fighter in a dingy underground hole, and more like a valkryie letting loose with a triumphant war cry, like a gladiator standing in the sand pit of a colisseum and holding aloft a head to the thumbs up of the Circus Maximus. Shredded, corded muscle, body oil slick sheen with sweat, a few splotches of blood on her wrist tape, as the orange halogen of the lights overhead the cage shine off of her. She literally glows.
As Array sat at the table overlooking the cage, raising a shot to her lips, she raised a curious eyebrow, not having the experience to suss out what this raised in the back of her mind.
Marki exited the cage, leaving the muscle man curled in a fetal position in the middle of the ring and plucking up her towel. The deejay is moving on, his voice the buzz of metro transit over speakers barely audible over the crowd that comes to this under-underground dive to watch this sport. Nobody pays Marki more than a passing, intimidated glance, nor meets her eye as she comes over to the table Array sits at, surrounded by a cast of raucous characters fit for a cantina such as this.
She looks the Amazon, the Erinye over, the tight band of the sports top and the bike shorts. She's towelling off the sweat after picking up a spirited smashing in a basement chicken fence fight club, in the middle of a bar on the bottom of an underpass, and despite it all Marki radiates energy, vitality and power. Array just gives her a little, intimidated shake of the head. "Totally different world from serving drinks at frat bars," she jokes.
"Ah, babygirl, you wanted to get out of your house!" Marki says good-spiritedly, signalling to the hostess to bring them more vodka. "I know all the spots to have whatever fun is on your mind." She begins stripping off her wrist tape. And yet, Array cannot stop looking at her hands.
"You are... a mystery, Mar," Array said, smiling despite herself. She had to speak up a little over the noise of the crowd sitting cageside, as the kazoo-voiced deejay spat another match announcement through the PA. Array met Marki's eyes sincerely. "I mean, I can't thank you enough for being such a good friend in the last week..."
Marki got, and took a quick swallow, of vodka off a tray, biting it down and brushing the question off with her usual direct humor. "You needed a friend that was in your sphere of influence, I mean... unless I missed my guess, your only female companionship was... that forty year old therapist chick?"
Array rolled her eyes skyward, laughing off and saying they shouldn't go there with that stuffy academic. But then her eyes downcast, her finger ringing around the rim of a glass. "I just haven't had much chance to... I mean - Thing is I was miss popular in my sophmore, junior years, I mean I was the Queen Bee at Malden Technical school, head cheerleader, model UN, all of that you know. But then... things had to... change..." she trailed off, and her valkyrie followed her train of thought, having heard stories of Array's exit from school and jettison into an adulthood. Marki's face therefore stormed over, and she looked like she wanted to break something.
"Anyway," Array continued, her voice deepening as she picked up the empty glass, her eyes dulling. "My life didn't turn out the way that my parents... perhaps would have liked... and we can skip over a few lean years but suffice to say I didn't meet very many... girls my age living out of motels... So..."
Marki was looking at her somberly. Then, she rather pointedly went back to removing her wrist tape. Array, looking to change the subject, brightened up. "But you, you must meet a lot of cool people, right? You're a part of their parties and, and mixers, and... stuff."
Marki laughed, and patted Array gently on the hand. "I think you've entered enough spaces with rich, Ivy League white boys passing around drinks for a lifetime, don't you? Not someplace you wanna hang out and meet people." Array's mouth quirked, and she looked down at the ashen rug, chagrinned, mumbling a meek 'touche'.
Marki, tongue in cheek, watched the two fight club members circling the pit, putting their fists up, and watched as one of the men threw a punch. Array leaned in, at first watching Marki's reactions as she assessed the fight with a practiced eye, and then shifting to how each fist thrown laid in to the flesh.
Before long she was absorbed in it. Array's eye stayed locked on the two men, now wrapped in a clinch, trying to push and maneuver each other around the cage, but gaining little ground as their limbs were wrapped up together. A long, meaningful beat passed, as the two of them grunted, and strained. And Array got so in tune with the sweaty dance that she zoned out.
Finally, Marki took a sip of vodka, lips pursed in disgust, and said "This isn't going anywhere. They're stopped." The long second passed. Array shook herself from her reverie, looking over at her bartender valkyrie.
"How do you do it?" Array asked with sudden urgency. "How do you stay so... poised and ready for anything?"
Marki chuckled, and her pretty lips turned up in a stunning smile, "Ha, um. Well. I just feel like life is out there for you to grab on to. You can't stay stuck in place, you got to take the crosswalk when the light comes. Ya know?"
Array's confused look as she puzzled over the words, and looked down at the table, then back up to Marki's face said it all. "But I mean... you're a badass. You're... confident, and where you want to be, it seems like, and I'm - " she flipped a hand out, indicating so many things, her modelling career, her personal life, her home life. And that isn't even to start with the nightmare of going home and confronting a face that she was not prepared to deal with. A face that flashed into her mind right now, bright red and flashing like a trigger warning, his lustful leer as he had pulled her blankets back that night. As soon as the thought came it triggered like a gunshot, and everything crumbled around her. Her throat closed up, and she let out a choked breath.
"Hey, hey-hey-hey," Marki soothed, "Stay with me, babygirl. Breathe. You need some air. I am going to help you up and walk you out of this room, and while we do that you are going to stay grounded; listen and focus on my voice as we get out of here. And tell me things that you hear, things that you smell, and things that you see. We're going to get through this."
Her chest clenched tight with an iron band as the panic attack gripped her. She was close to hyperventilating. The room spun around them as faces of jeering fight club patrons loomed around her in a complete circle. And she weakly rasped out "...dart board... smell of stale beer... masculine waitress..." between breaths.
The door to the bar boomed open, and Marki was hauling Array up a set of steps leading from the underpass to the street, and Array, choking on what felt like vomit and anxiety, groaned "Sounds of men sh-shu-shouting... D... Dog..." Marki laid her against the side of a building, fanning her face. "Breathe, Array, it's okay, babygirl."
Her breathing slowed. Her eyelashes fluttered, and her eyes met with Marki's steel gray gaze, their lips inches away from each other. "...My hero..." Array finished describing her surroundings; becoming fully grounded with Marki's piston arms holding under her armpits. Another long, pregnant beat passed. Array just stared into the valkyrie's gray eyes as if they were asking her all of the deepest questions she wasn't asking herself right now, and Marki stared back, her eyes piercing, probing.
The dog Array had noticed stayed at the periphery of the tableau between the two women, nervous, it's head with the subservient, bowing posture of a frightened animal who's been kicked. He seemed to be asking the two of them, so close to the space where he was foraging, if it was okay if he just passed by. The girls paid him no mind, and as Array regained her composure she was very aware of the small space between their bodies, and the heat that was coming from their now slow, nearly synched breath. But the moment couldn't last, and they both became more aware of their surroundings, including the fact that coming up the street, rounding the corner, was a rising mass of angry shouts and epithets hurled in the air; a dozen conflicting chants. "We're straight, don't hate - " and "Straight pride! Straight pride!"
The dog, hearing the commotion first, broke and ran off down a side ally as a swarm of men came up the street, spreading in all different directions.
The two of them watched it come.
If I am... detached, it is because I honestly don't know how to react anymore. I went through a million emotions in the wake of losing. I lost a lot this go round. I lost the last friend I had from a bygone era. Hiro is a free man, but he has to live haunted by what he did to more than one person, and the complete collapse of his personal life, while behind me he left nothing but scars in the household he invaded. And then I... in thinking I could take a parable from Hiro's example, and applying myself more steadfastly to breaking out of a fucking endless cycle I was finding myself in, got slapped down hard, kicked to actual rock bottom professionally. And with my home life a shambles, professionally was all that I had. I spoke at length about trying hard and achieving something. I gave getting to the finals of the 2019 Icemann Invitational Tournament a huge, personal, weighted stake. And having fucking lost that, and come away with nothing, where can Kyle Shane even go from there? IS there a second chance for Kyle Shane? Does such as I even deserve second chances? Or did I just find myself right back at the start of a cycle, waiting for the God damn crosswalk to tell me it's my turn again?
He felt like he had been waiting at this light for ages. Hell, hadn't he been caught at every crosswalk since he'd begun? The thin line of cars was backed up all the way down the street, and the first car in the queue beeped at him in annoyance. "Fuck it," he mumbled to himself, and he was starting to get both anxious and annoyed because he had gone on this walkabout to get out of the house, and now no matter which was he was turning he was hearing the incessant chanting. He thought he saw the haunches of the stray flying past him, moving hurriedly, but when he turned his head it was no longer there. This was not the type of place he wanted to be.
And matter of fact, he just wanted to get inside, find some food because he had been aimlessly walking the streets this night pondering his melancholy questions, and he hadn't had fuel for the machine, and he felt like he was at his lowest ebb. And so when he scanned across the expanse of the huge, metropolitan square of the Common, he saw the brilliant flash of comfort food beckoning to him. And he trudged towards the shining orange-painted mecca across the parking lot from him like a gallant soldier returning from the Crusades. "Fuck yeah," he finally said, just now realizing as he came to the little roped-off twisting line to the front he'd completed his thought out loud and that a pair of old people sitting in a hard plastic booth were staring at him, mouths agape, having never heard such language obviously. He kept walking, putting them out of his mind. Old people are always staring about something. He was about to get his Doritos Taco on, and there wasn't shit to do about it. And, as with the old days, he knew some comfort food was what was needed to help him out.
Minutes fly by as he stands at the top of the line. Not a rustle of activity in the kitchen, and he can see premade tacos growing cold and congealed in ways that made him unspeakably angry. Five minutes, ten. He was growing outraged now. Unfortunately no body is manning the counter, and thus there is no body to bitch to. Kyle leaned over the counter top to shout towards the back. "Hey, what the hell is taking so long? This ain't fucking Arbys you know!"
The side door to the "kitchen" opens and out walks the biggest, yet frighteningly familiar looking fry cook Kyle had ever seen, jabbing his gums with a toothpick as he sneers, "Hey yo, do you... have a problem... with the cook guy?"
For one of the few times in his life, Kyle is at a loss for words and can only sputter out, "Scott Ha-!"
The wrinkled, careworn and haggard face of the Bad Guy, once known far and wide for his tenure as the best Al Pacino impersonator to be paid a healthy salary and his time in one of the most feared stables of all time, laughs at the sound of his old moniker while trying his best to hide the smile that creeps up on him every time someone like this recognizes him from his glory days. "Hey, chico, that ain't the name... on the Hall of Fame ring. Ya know." And, laughing wondrously, Kyle comes around to fist bump the old soldier, who arguably hit his creative nadir as the subject of a Game Boyz documentary.
Raz motions for Kyle to follow him, and they slide under the rope divider, to the glass booth leading to the outside. Stepping out into the cool breeze Hall pulls a pack of cigs out of one pocket and a flask of booze from another. With a nod of his head he motions for Kyle to join him on his break.
Kyle looks at the flask, "Is there booze in there?"
Raz shrugs, "Yeah chico, and my manager... is always giving me shit for it."
Kyle chuckles, "Well next time he asks what you're drinking just tell him it's Dallas' special concoction, helps burn weight in yoga or whatever."
Raz shakes his head slowly as he looks up into the evening sky. "Heh, I should have done that... instead of giving him the Razor's Edge. Then I'd still have a job after he wakes up."
Kyle's eyes have a momentary, involuntary pop open wide, the reaction still of the six year old who watched this sport long ago on a 12 inch, black and white TV catching local channels and falling in love with the scrambled figures. Sometimes... he missed that kid. Still, Kyle takes the moment to sit and bask in Scott's aura of perpetual Bad Guy charisma, and silently breathes "Fuck, you're awesome." The epitome of cool, his old friend and promo subject takes a long drag on his cigarette and slowly exhales, gauging the unhappy young adult with a calculating look.
Kyle wants to keep the reunion light and frothy, continue to zing off lightning quick banter. But the jokes died on his lips, and he recalled the most fun of hanging out with Scott back in the day had been his and Hiro's awed reactions at meeting the famous Outsider and trying on his vest. And now, despite the patent absurdity (to hang a lampshade on it) of the universe sending him his Bad Guy here, tonight, on a night when he could hear angry marching in the streets and the yelling of a handful of slogans, he thought instead of those old Scott and Game Boyz promos, leading him to thinking of Hiro. And all of the dominoes that fell along with his friend. And he looked away from Scott, the mirth and the quick quips turning to ash. Because nothing seemed funny anymore.
"Scott .... Razor. I think..." he swallowed, his head hanging a little bit, and he looked bitterly at his Chucks... "I think you're the only friend left I got from the old days... like the old, good days, and I ..."
"Awww, come on, chico... can't be that bad."
"No, it can", he retorted, bumming the cig from his cohort and taking a bitter drag. "Hiro is going to be persona non grata even if we can't specifically charge him with any crimes, but he... Raz, he tried to bring me, and him both back to who we are when we knew you, and it just didn't work. And now Array is so hurt, so shell-shocked by... what he did, I can't even begin to find the words to heal the damage, or bridge the distance between us. And I think about my constant anxiety, my fear that everything I touch I ruin and God, this year has just proven it. Professionally, personally, financially.... I've left nothing but fallout everywhere I go. My son - Raz, I have a fucking son, and he's... I fucked everything up. Because of my stupid pride. How... how can I go back and ask these people for a second chance? Do I deserve it?"
The legendary wrestler looks a bit perturbed by the list, and doesn't even seem to know where to begin with any of it. This not being the silly, goofy twenty year old he knew. He himself had a lifetime of burned bridges, but it seemed like Kyle's ranting about his personal experiences was all he wanted to hear. "So what do you want to do to make it better? I've learned... you need to start taking personal accountability when you mess up, own your failures and move on."
Kyle looked at him askance and held his arms out, looking skyward, "That's the thing, I TRIED that, when I put the incident with Hiro in my rear view I wanted nothing more. And it still didn't do me any good. What more can I do when people didn't want to hear the message I was talking about?"
His old friend looks dissatisfied, then grimaces around the lid of his flask. "Well, chico... it sounds like... you just need to stop being a bitch about it."
Kyle raised a harsh eyebrow. "Scuse me?"
"So life is hard and you feel trapped. You can always find a way out if you push yourself, but you back yourself up into a little box and then try and fight out of it. Nobody is going to hand you a better life, brother. You can't walk a road of redemption and not expect some bumps along the way."
Kyle's mouth formed a slit, as he soaked in the real talk from the notorious bridge burner. But at length, his eyes squinted with scorn and he said, "What do you know about it? I tried my fucking best to pick myself up, and nobody wanted to hear it. They were just so fucking fascinated about listening to a guy talk to himself about 2006."
The Bad Guy was getting annoyed by the arrogant little asshole, that he sat up off the rail, turning to face Kyle. "This is really the way you want to play it? You're such a piece of shit. You gamer brat. You only want people to suck your cock and tell you that you're doing the best work of your life and that nobody should ever be able to beat you. If you were as good as you think you are, and that the world owes you so much for you gracing us with your presence then you would do something that matters."
Kyle rounded on his friend, really the last, tenuous friend he might have had left in the world, eyes blazing, fired up. Because how dare he. "I'd rather be that than be some old piece of shit still trading on his past," he spat out each word, venomously.
He pushed the former wrestler. Scott stumbled back, a shocked look on his face, and he squared up as if he wanted to hit Kyle, but he was just so stunned by the hatred and spite written on Kyle's face.
Kyle didn't even bother with parting words to Scott. The last friend he maybe had left right now just stared at him, haunted. He looked back, wanting to say something, and then he retreated. He walked down the street, alone.
You see, I thought I knew how to read what Pure Class Wrestling wants. I can always admit that I get a little full of myself, a little up my ass with my own message, but I perhaps was a little too quick in thinking that this was a federation that wanted to keep moving forward. You can't have people continuing to keep doing business the way they've always been done. That was the clearest thing in my mind, what really stood out to me from the Hiro fiasco. Hiro Sasuke was my best friend, but he was also content to relive the only frame of reference that he could relate to wrestling. And I didn't want to think that of PCW, but the more I see it the more it's true. Rather than double down and push the future of this company they sincerely don't think there is anything wrong with the way things have always been done. But I... spoke. At length, with conviction. About my need to be better than I was. My need to move on with my life. It was the only fucking thing that made sense after Hiro deludedly tried to relive his college years. I wanted - I NEEDED, to push for a future that was different than I've given you before.
And what did Pure Class Wrestling fucking do.
They fucking shit on it.
Here's my impression coming out of that.
That nobody. NOBODY. In this fucking company. Can ever pin me fairly to the fucking mat without a laundry list of controversies. Is it so hard? I'm fucking 210 pound of bones. And yet of the five times Stormm and I have tangled, this time is the time he gets to win, because referees can't make up their minds? Stormm has lost cleanly and decisively by my hand time and time again, but he gets to win the time that matters, and I'm supposed to just accept that and move on?
And my second impression is that you actively don't care about the future.
You do not care about someone trying to be innovative, different, better than they were before. How the fuck could you be? Stormm described in detail the semi-finals of an entirely different tournament a decade and a half ago, and gave this big emotional spiel about his relationship to Luis Malave that started back then, not one bit of which makes a wet fart of difference in 2019. All he had to say about me was smugly talking about the matches he'd wished he'd had with me for the World Title he thought he was owed and the TIIT finals he was certain he was going to be in. But that wasn't important, what matters was his relationship with his mentor Icemann.
So since life has spat me out, my dedication to moving on has been rejected in favor of pointless nostalgia, and my personal life is in freefall, I have nothing left. I'm feeling like a stray, rejected, a ghost that is forced to walk the streets at night spooking people.
But maybe that spirit is an angry one.
Maybe I'm not detached, maybe the more I think about... everything the angrier I get. About Hiro. About Array. About Pure Class Wrestling. About making a big, passionate spiel about moving onward and upward with your life. About why I'm in the final analysis unable to follow that advice and let go. About everything. Everything is in broken pieces around me. And I'm no better than I was before. Some fucking little smarmy shit named Darren Hughes with an 0-3 record is saying he's the cause of my collapse and showed I'm mortal. And Pure Class Wrestling offers me another crack at Stormm, in a triple threat with David Hunter.
A second chance.
And if I felt even at all that Pure Class Wrestling was hearing what I was trying to say, maybe that would have excited me. Maybe the idea of David and me tearing it up, showing why we are the best and most innovative acts this company has, would inspire me. But I don't believe you want that. Fucking Stormm will probably talk about meeting Luis in a tiki bar a decade ago and you'll all think it's the best thing you've ever seen.
So right now, I bite the hands that are stretched out to me. Not even caring as I cross the crosswalk, or waiting for the red hand to turn to the white stick figure, if a car hits me, it hits me. I make my way down the street.
They watch the march, side by side. For a long time, neither one spoke.
It was an angry, uncoordinated mob, it had picket signs and propaganda being waved, but in the final analysis it was a large crowd of incel rage. The men behind it were bellowing, red-faced, throwing out hateful rhetoric about how their way of life was being pushed to the background. It was a violent rejection of the tenets of love and inclusiveness, these Twitter-baited jackasses roaming the streets of Boston tonight shouting "Straight pride" were angry about many things, and their signs bore evil dogma of all kinds, anti-feminism, anti-abortion, just anti.
Finally, Marki took Array's hand, saying "I think we should go," but Array, her panic dissipated, stood stone still, even as the mob were taking notice and started hurling slurs. Her eyes panned over the scene, as the protestors who didn't even know what they were protesting pointed at them and shouted "Go home".
Some of the marchers had made their way over. One toothpick with bad teeth was now being towered over by Marki as he began to spit out creative curses, all of which revolved around her sexuality and her haircut. The long stream of invective may as well have been white noise.
Array was looking across the street, where a bunch of protestors were gathered in a circle. Her eyes focused on that, and despite the rising cacaphony, she heard an animal yip, hurt, wounded, and crying for help. Before she was aware of it, she had stepped forward. Moving on legs that were autopiloting her across the street. She drifted through the marchers coming towards her, yelling abuse from every side as they slung insults at her. She was just looking at the four gathered together in a circle, who were laughing with the juvenile, nihilistic sadism that the worst recesses of the internet had bred these incel boys to be.
Marki shoved someone out of the way. "Watch where you going, [redacted], you don't got no right to this street," the petty, insolent townie jeered, "These streets are for straight, right, alpha males tonight, baby!" Marki's lip curled in abject disgust as she shot him a withering glare, firing back "If I see any of those I'll let you know."
Marki darted after Array, grasping for her hand, but the younger girl pulled free, her eyebrows knitting together with concentration, focus, and with a growing negative glare. In this moment all of her problems were on the backburner, and she didn't... even think about the face that was haunting her. It was the gentle crux of her current dilemma, when she got the triggers and flashed back to that night, she felt panic, but underneath the surface, when she dug through the crusts of fear, paranoia that Hiro was still in control and he hadn't switched back at all, depression, there was a deep, deep well of rage. Ironically, something that he might have been able to relate to. Rage at being powerless for so much of her life. Rage at being hurt by someone she cared about. Just rage, rage hot enough that it scalded her, brought bile up to her throat as she choked it down every night, sitting in the bathtub and sobbing. Rage that felt like a volcano, bubbling and building to a Krakatoa explosion. Rage so hot that it might burn the world.
She was feeling it right now, as the dog yipped and whined. The boys around it were laughing ugly, petty laughs. One of them came in with a stiff kick to the dog's ribs. It squealed, a sound you wouldn't hear from a dog.
"Ugly mutt," they jeered down at it, "fuckin mangy, gross animal."
"Fuck this ugly mutt," a second one put in, "Got no right to live"
"It's cruel to leave it living like this," a third one put in, this one more reasonably, as if them surrounding and torturing the poor dog was the most humane thing they could be doing.
A fourth one extruded a switchblade knife, bringing out the blade with a practiced flip, and said "Yeah, let's put it outta it's misery, ugly tramp..." and he brought the knife down towards the stray dog's eye.
Array plowed into his back with a shoulder, knocking him off balance and throwing him to the side with a body check that was purely instinctual. The muscle memory of defense tricks she had learned from living off the road were kicking in, and her face was a frenzied snarl of pure molten rage. She let out a strangled cry. And Marki, bringing up the rear, just watched her, in awe. The other three boys were whirling around, and Array grabbed the wrist of the one with the knife. She banged on the wrist enough to make his grip loosen, as his free hand came up to gouge at her face.
Marki was at her side then, kicking out furiously with a blow to the solar plexus. She did not say anything to her companion, not even that her attacking these malicious boys in the middle of this parade was drawing attention. Array was busy hitting her first target, over and over again, and his eye was starting to swell. Marki kept his friends off of her back, dumping one to the ground. Array yelled, incoherently.
And Marki saw it in her. Saw how Array put herself between the wounded animal and the other boys, and how she was furiously pounding on the one with the knife. How this girl had a fierce side, she was a fighter in her own right, and she would do anything to help the little guy. But she also saw the desperate, drowning, flailing anger, and that it threatened to burn her out from the inside.
Of the four boys, two were down, the last one was retreating, and Array continued pounding on the one in her grip, yelling. Marki turned to the Straight Pride crowd, daring them to come forward and looking every bit as tuned up and ready for violence as she had earlier that night in the cage. Surprisingly, none of the boys who were so vehemently positioning themselves as alpha males and true inheritors of pride were willing to come forward, and the mob dispersed a little bit around them.
Off down the street, spotlights turned on some of the crowd, and police cruisers were pulling in lights flashing. A voice came through, amplified by bullhorn, and said "WE NEED YOU TO DISPERSE. CLEAR THE STREET. PLEASE DISPERSE."
Marki tugged at Array's shirt gently, trying not to provoke a trigger, but murmuring, "Array, babygirl... he's done. Come on. If the police catch you with this guy beaten to a pulp, there's gonna be questions."
Her breath was a rasp, like her throat was sandpaper, and her eyes were wild, coming back into full consciousness and questioning. "The dog... he had a knife... was gonna hurt the dog... is the dog okay?"
She looked around, and saw it curled into a ball, submissive and passive to any further harm, it's spotted and diseased flesh trembling and shivering. It peeked it's head out, one eye looking over the approaching girl. Array bent down, forgetting all else in the moment. Her need to nurture, to heal, superseded everything else. And therein lay the answer to her anger, if she could fix things for others maybe she'd be okay, if she could help this poor, wounded, stray dog maybe things would be fine.
She reached a reassuring hand out to it. She came close to it's head, bending down to give it a pet.
It raised it's head, it's pain-maddened eye flashing, and it reared back and snapped it's jaws, biting the hand that was coming towards it. Array flinched back, letting out a surprised, pained and embarassed "OW!"
The stray dog pulled itself to it's feet, despite it's wounds, and it scrambled away from the two women. Array looked after it, her mouth open and looking on with a mixture of empathy for it's plight and shock at it's violent lashing out at her when she was just offering it a helping hand.
The dog gave it's furtive look back over it's haunch, but didn't trust the bigthings not to begin the assault that had kicked it down and put it in such pain. In a flash, it was scampering, and then breaking in to a full trot.
The stray dog retreated down the street in a long, and lonely arc, and their eyes followed it as it made it's way off into the night.
