Post by Non Compos Mentis on May 21, 2015 18:51:38 GMT -5
A life spent on both sides of good and evil has taught me many things, one of the most profound is this: An evil man conducts his will with no weight on his mind, he ponders malevolence as a regular individual muses over their breakfast. A righteous man, however, takes the weight of all his choices on his shoulders, on his conscience… it is the good man that bears a heavy soul.
Meaty overtones waft through the air tonight, a local butcher needed stock taking off his hands and St Jude’s Shelter is always one to make a quick deal on such things. It’s a hearty lamb broth that fills the stomachs of Schenectady’s homeless this Friday, and tomorrow it’ll be a paupers’ oxtail stew. The next night? Maybe the butcher will have excess meat in his larder again, or maybe it’ll be an unpopularly bland vegetable soup once again. Whatever it is, the local hobos will go to sleep with their bellies a little heavier, while their minds remain the same.
For all the help Godfrey has offered me over the last six months, dragging me through my recovery kicking and screaming at times, there isn’t much we can offer the vagrants of this New York town besides a bowl of steaming sustenance. Every night we feed triple figures and we cannot talk to them all, most wouldn’t even want us to. The stubbornly destitute hold their issues as a badge of pride, not to be touched… their pains are the only souvenirs of the lives they left behind.
These people are not evil, for the most part. They are not wantonly malicious. They wish to live, survive, claw back a life lost long ago, or perhaps they simply want peace. Weighed down by their crushed spirits they walk into St Jude’s with heads bowed, looking for the strength to go on for one more day. Tonight, at least, the heavy-hearted hungry number fewer than expected.
“Slow tonight, must be getting warmer at night.” Godfrey ladles out another bowl, still with at least half an industrial-sized pan left at his disposal. He seems to have energy in his voice, more than usual. Over the last week or more I’ve seen his glance meet my eye, that stare searching out my soul and finding some renewed satisfaction in it since I rejoined PCW.
It’s true what he says, recently the night has grown warmer, but that alone would not keep the homeless away from sanctuary. For me, every night was as bitterly cold as the last. I could never escape the shadow that kept me in perpetual twilight, the torment of my own mind. “It was never warm enough for me.”
“Right, but you stayed out there anyway.” That wise, old voice mumbles through the air. He’s right, through the years of torture I never stayed the night in a hostel. I stumbled from night to desperate night on the streets and refused myself the luxury of a safe place.
“I didn’t deserve the shelter then.” I was still a man fighting himself, doing whatever despicable things I could to survive. I thought myself worthless and fit only for pain. I bore the burden of a good man doing evil things to ensure he didn’t die in a garbage filled gutter.
Can Joka relate to that at all? Somewhere, buried in that scarred psyche of his, there must be some of the real Byron Belasko left in him. At one time he might have been a good man, with his hopes and dreams still intact. What has that man collapsed into? A sadomasochist, a demented clown with sickness inherent in all his activities. He revels in pain, inflicted and received. I know a thing or two about pain, believing yourself deserving of it… that you need to be punished for your sins.
“And only reasonable men think they deserve punishing.” I stare into the murky, long-stewed broth as Godfrey lets out a sign and looks around the dining hall. The long, ramshackle wooden tables are thinly populated, though I barely pay attention as I give the stew a stir to prevent it burning to the base of the pan. “Look around, Sean. How many eyes do you see looking at anything but lamb stew? All decent people, all with eyes so heavy they can only look down.”
Lifting my head, I see the room semi-filled with despondent humanity. Every individual, be them an aging drifter or a newly destitute juvenile, lets their eyes drop to view the brown gloop. There is nothing hopeful in their gazes. This is their alone time, the time with their angels and demons as they sit otherworldly on their shoulders.
And yet, somewhere in that sea of maudlin melancholia and empty chairs, there is somebody with a slightly different look on their face. A young woman, hunkering down beneath a battered black jacket with her eyes glancing down not into a bowl of lamb broth but onto a piece of paper.
Her hair hangs unkempt but still holding an enigmatic darkness. It can’t shroud her eyes though, even from half a dining hall away. Sea blue, one can call them cold if there isn’t something burning behind them. Passion? Anger? Pain.
“You know, I think I can handle this on my own for now. You should grab a bowl, take some weight off your feet.” Godfrey mutters, one eyebrow lifted for emphasis. He noticed my gaze lingering in this burdened beauty’s direction longer than mere curiosity.
“My feet are fine…” More than curious, yes, but I need to concentrate on other matters. Distancing myself from everything but the Icemann Invitational and my competitors should be a priority. Standing here not dishing out boiling refreshment is the perfect opportunity to consider what I’m getting myself into.
“Then take some weight off your mind, boy.” This sounds less of a suggestion and more of an order. Now his other eyebrow is raised, and if it had its own lips it would say ‘Go, or I’ll beat your ass like a government mule.’
I do as I’m told. I grab a bowl from the more than available pile and fill it with steaming stew. Very visibly I walk straight in front of Godfrey on my way to the tables, almost in a march. ‘Yes Sir!’ my eyes holler as I go and a sly smirk creeps onto his mouth.
A weight off my mind? One of many but the weight remains enough to hold me to the ground. Since Rebekah I have not shared a meaningful word with a member of the fairer sex. I have drifted. I have exchanged pleasantries. I have uttered meaningless words and phrases. My scars held me back from showing anything in the way of affection. The weight of my conscience held me from lifting myself off the bottom of that barrel.
Others feel that burn of lost love, they hold it close, akin to comfort. Soft remembrance of times gone by for some, while for me it scours my mind like freshly sharpened claws. Am I the only one to feel that pain? Hear the scraping of knives on one’s mind?
Joka, Stormm, Wryght… do they feel the weight of their failings? Do they even see they have them? The psychopathic, sadistic, masochistic maniac-clown. The money-man with his family life and designs on being the positive face of Pure Class Wrestling. The disciple of the Black Hand, once devoted only to his ego and now to the destruction of all he surveys. As unlikely as it seems, Stormm may be the one of opponents with the closest thing resembling a conscience.
I place the bowl down on the table as lightly as I can and take a seat, leaving a gap of one so as not to seem too obvious. Risking a side-glance I spot the paper in her hands; typed, not handwritten, but clearly there’s an attachment. Her fingers, coated in thin woollen gloves that are the remnants of winter, gently brush against the words, hoping to bring them to life perhaps.
“What’s his name?” What’s the worst that can happen? She can stand up and walk away. She could turn around and slap me, or throw a bowl of boiling stew over my head.
Listlessly her head turns towards me, only half in acknowledgement that a question has been put her way. Glued to the page, her eyes don’t follow the movement until the tilt of her head demands they acquiesce. “Huh?”
Piercing blue eyes look at me with a mixture of emotion and confusion. Barely realising my own actions I pick up my spoon and begin to point as I try to justify my interruption. “A letter being held that carefully. The look of quiet longing in the eyes. You’ve barely eaten half your stew. Only love can do that.”
“And you’d know that because…?” Her voice has a definite New York twang to it, a local then. Now her whole body shuffles in her seat just enough to angle towards me with interest. I’m forty years old, a ‘well-worn’ forty at that, and she can only be twenty seven at most. A pretty, perky twenty seven.
Be honest with yourself. I tell myself. Be honest with her, what have you got to lose? So I plop the spoon back into the bowl and lean back, sucking in a telling sigh.“I loved a woman once, but I wasn’t the man I am now. I was sick, I was a danger to her. I hurt her. Before I could let myself do anything worse I ran away.”
“Is this how you introduce yourself to every woman you meet?” The young woman retorts, and what should I have expected?
I let out an involuntary crack of laughter, fully recognising the brutal and inconvenient honesty of what I had just said… the conversational suicide. “Only the ones that don’t look like they’ll run away. Unfortunately, there aren’t many around.”
She gives me a polite smile. She turns back to her letter and takes a mouthful of stew, leaving the air silent. It stays that way for a while as I stay in my seat, unsure whether moving would be the right choice at this moment. I put all my cards on the table and now it would be unthinkable to fold and walk away.
“Cesar, his name is Cesar.” After a long time I hear her New York accent again, so long I’d almost forgot we were talking. “And I’m Valentine.”
A beautiful name for a very attractive woman. I struggle to accept that she’s actually talking to me again but finally I collect my thoughts and try to reply. “I’m…”
“I know who you are, I’m pretty sure every homeless person in the country knows Non Compos Mentis. You’re kinda a ‘pin-up’ for us hobos.” She interrupts me, stuns me and knocks me for a home run in one swift move. Pin up? Now there is something I have never anticipated, but has there ever been a more publicised homeless person?
Still, is it a good thing to be held up as a paragon for a group of people? I tried that once, it ended with me trying to kill Murdoc in a rusty machine. Never again. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing…”
“It’s better than being a nobody.” Valentine replies, with a hint of regret pooling in her eyes. She tries to hide it but I know that look all too well. Her fingers brush the page once again as if in reassurance.
“Sometimes I’m not all that sure.” I try to reassure her that being the centre of adoration is not all it’s cracked up to be. Her icy eyes turn back to mine again and that languid tone from earlier is seemingly gone.“All those eyes watching you, wanting you to be a role model, a sign that things can get better… it’s a heavy weight to bear at times.”
“But you bear it anyway. You didn’t run away from it, you went back.” Does she know everything about me? My exploits are televised, my story a matter of public knowledge, but I am still only a wrestler. Perhaps my story has expanded beyond the murky underworld of wrestling fandom since I have been away.
But still, I cannot claim to be entirely pure in my reasoning for returning. It’s important she knows that I am not a saint, fighting selflessly for the safety of PCW. That is certainly a huge aspect of my return, but not the whole story. “I wish I could say I came back to PCW for entirely unselfish reasons, but that isn’t so. The success can be a powerful thing, and I have wanted it back for a long time.”
It’s true, I want to see Mikey Wryght and his Black Hand brethren gone, or at least out of a position to rule PCW with impunity, but I also went back for my own selfish need for competition. I can pretend that I’m above everyone else in the Icemann Invitational, that I’m in this only for the greater good, but that would be a lie.
At stake, and now within reach, is not only a chance to beat Billy Sadistic but a shot at the greatest prize in wrestling. Of course I want to hold the World Title once again, I would be mad not to. I can’t stand in that ring against Tha Joka and tell myself that I want to win only to prevent Mikey Wryght from securing another farcical main event for the Black Hand. I want my hands on the gold again and that is another weight that my soul lifts.
I want it, but the last time I had the coveted World Title in my hands it corrupted me like never before. What would it do to the already unhinged Joka? Would Stormm revert back to his past of skulduggery and subterfuge? Would Showtime somehow find his ego too great to ignore and stab his order in the back? Power has already turned Billy Sadistic from a backwoods psychopath into a danger for the very foundation of PCW. A man I once stood toe-to-toe with and defeated without fear is now the most feared man in the company, so feared he has the President under his thumb.
Yes I want that title, I want to dethrone The Phenom, I want to bring dignity back to my name and safety to PCW’s. At what cost, though? Guilt grips me, fear too, that I am not a good enough man to hold that title again without it poisoning my mind like it has Sadistic’s.
“We all have our reasons for holding on to things that might not be good for us.” Valentine responds softly, her words heavy with meaning. Her eyes are now back on the letter, staring a whole through the script. Is she really talking to me, or trying to talk to her lovelorn soul?
“And what are you holding on to? Cesar?” Pulling herself away from the text, Valentine quickly folds the letter over. A deep breath later and she tries to compose herself, tries to push the well of emotion back from the brink of spilling over.
A smile breaks out onto her face now, one for show that covers her entire face like a mask. I know that mask though, I have worn it myself many times over the years. It is called despair, desperation, pain and pity. A brave face to cover a heavy, dirty, crying soul. “This is crazy, but how would you feel about a little… field trip?”
Crazy, now that’s something I can cope with. Between my own issues, Tha Joka’s insanity coming toward me at full force and the assorted disorders of The Black Hand, I’ll be facing my fair share of craziness this week. A walk with a beautiful you lady? Well that’s hardly anything compared to a sadomasochist hiding his broken identity with madness. It’s hardly a thing next to Stormm’s power-craze and money-worship. And with Showtime’s narcissism, backed by the violent maniacal tendencies of the Dillinger Brothers, it’s a walk in the park. “It’s not the craziest thing I’ll have to deal with this week, trust me.”
Meaty overtones waft through the air tonight, a local butcher needed stock taking off his hands and St Jude’s Shelter is always one to make a quick deal on such things. It’s a hearty lamb broth that fills the stomachs of Schenectady’s homeless this Friday, and tomorrow it’ll be a paupers’ oxtail stew. The next night? Maybe the butcher will have excess meat in his larder again, or maybe it’ll be an unpopularly bland vegetable soup once again. Whatever it is, the local hobos will go to sleep with their bellies a little heavier, while their minds remain the same.
For all the help Godfrey has offered me over the last six months, dragging me through my recovery kicking and screaming at times, there isn’t much we can offer the vagrants of this New York town besides a bowl of steaming sustenance. Every night we feed triple figures and we cannot talk to them all, most wouldn’t even want us to. The stubbornly destitute hold their issues as a badge of pride, not to be touched… their pains are the only souvenirs of the lives they left behind.
These people are not evil, for the most part. They are not wantonly malicious. They wish to live, survive, claw back a life lost long ago, or perhaps they simply want peace. Weighed down by their crushed spirits they walk into St Jude’s with heads bowed, looking for the strength to go on for one more day. Tonight, at least, the heavy-hearted hungry number fewer than expected.
“Slow tonight, must be getting warmer at night.” Godfrey ladles out another bowl, still with at least half an industrial-sized pan left at his disposal. He seems to have energy in his voice, more than usual. Over the last week or more I’ve seen his glance meet my eye, that stare searching out my soul and finding some renewed satisfaction in it since I rejoined PCW.
It’s true what he says, recently the night has grown warmer, but that alone would not keep the homeless away from sanctuary. For me, every night was as bitterly cold as the last. I could never escape the shadow that kept me in perpetual twilight, the torment of my own mind. “It was never warm enough for me.”
“Right, but you stayed out there anyway.” That wise, old voice mumbles through the air. He’s right, through the years of torture I never stayed the night in a hostel. I stumbled from night to desperate night on the streets and refused myself the luxury of a safe place.
“I didn’t deserve the shelter then.” I was still a man fighting himself, doing whatever despicable things I could to survive. I thought myself worthless and fit only for pain. I bore the burden of a good man doing evil things to ensure he didn’t die in a garbage filled gutter.
Can Joka relate to that at all? Somewhere, buried in that scarred psyche of his, there must be some of the real Byron Belasko left in him. At one time he might have been a good man, with his hopes and dreams still intact. What has that man collapsed into? A sadomasochist, a demented clown with sickness inherent in all his activities. He revels in pain, inflicted and received. I know a thing or two about pain, believing yourself deserving of it… that you need to be punished for your sins.
“And only reasonable men think they deserve punishing.” I stare into the murky, long-stewed broth as Godfrey lets out a sign and looks around the dining hall. The long, ramshackle wooden tables are thinly populated, though I barely pay attention as I give the stew a stir to prevent it burning to the base of the pan. “Look around, Sean. How many eyes do you see looking at anything but lamb stew? All decent people, all with eyes so heavy they can only look down.”
Lifting my head, I see the room semi-filled with despondent humanity. Every individual, be them an aging drifter or a newly destitute juvenile, lets their eyes drop to view the brown gloop. There is nothing hopeful in their gazes. This is their alone time, the time with their angels and demons as they sit otherworldly on their shoulders.
And yet, somewhere in that sea of maudlin melancholia and empty chairs, there is somebody with a slightly different look on their face. A young woman, hunkering down beneath a battered black jacket with her eyes glancing down not into a bowl of lamb broth but onto a piece of paper.
Her hair hangs unkempt but still holding an enigmatic darkness. It can’t shroud her eyes though, even from half a dining hall away. Sea blue, one can call them cold if there isn’t something burning behind them. Passion? Anger? Pain.
“You know, I think I can handle this on my own for now. You should grab a bowl, take some weight off your feet.” Godfrey mutters, one eyebrow lifted for emphasis. He noticed my gaze lingering in this burdened beauty’s direction longer than mere curiosity.
“My feet are fine…” More than curious, yes, but I need to concentrate on other matters. Distancing myself from everything but the Icemann Invitational and my competitors should be a priority. Standing here not dishing out boiling refreshment is the perfect opportunity to consider what I’m getting myself into.
“Then take some weight off your mind, boy.” This sounds less of a suggestion and more of an order. Now his other eyebrow is raised, and if it had its own lips it would say ‘Go, or I’ll beat your ass like a government mule.’
I do as I’m told. I grab a bowl from the more than available pile and fill it with steaming stew. Very visibly I walk straight in front of Godfrey on my way to the tables, almost in a march. ‘Yes Sir!’ my eyes holler as I go and a sly smirk creeps onto his mouth.
A weight off my mind? One of many but the weight remains enough to hold me to the ground. Since Rebekah I have not shared a meaningful word with a member of the fairer sex. I have drifted. I have exchanged pleasantries. I have uttered meaningless words and phrases. My scars held me back from showing anything in the way of affection. The weight of my conscience held me from lifting myself off the bottom of that barrel.
Others feel that burn of lost love, they hold it close, akin to comfort. Soft remembrance of times gone by for some, while for me it scours my mind like freshly sharpened claws. Am I the only one to feel that pain? Hear the scraping of knives on one’s mind?
Joka, Stormm, Wryght… do they feel the weight of their failings? Do they even see they have them? The psychopathic, sadistic, masochistic maniac-clown. The money-man with his family life and designs on being the positive face of Pure Class Wrestling. The disciple of the Black Hand, once devoted only to his ego and now to the destruction of all he surveys. As unlikely as it seems, Stormm may be the one of opponents with the closest thing resembling a conscience.
I place the bowl down on the table as lightly as I can and take a seat, leaving a gap of one so as not to seem too obvious. Risking a side-glance I spot the paper in her hands; typed, not handwritten, but clearly there’s an attachment. Her fingers, coated in thin woollen gloves that are the remnants of winter, gently brush against the words, hoping to bring them to life perhaps.
“What’s his name?” What’s the worst that can happen? She can stand up and walk away. She could turn around and slap me, or throw a bowl of boiling stew over my head.
Listlessly her head turns towards me, only half in acknowledgement that a question has been put her way. Glued to the page, her eyes don’t follow the movement until the tilt of her head demands they acquiesce. “Huh?”
Piercing blue eyes look at me with a mixture of emotion and confusion. Barely realising my own actions I pick up my spoon and begin to point as I try to justify my interruption. “A letter being held that carefully. The look of quiet longing in the eyes. You’ve barely eaten half your stew. Only love can do that.”
“And you’d know that because…?” Her voice has a definite New York twang to it, a local then. Now her whole body shuffles in her seat just enough to angle towards me with interest. I’m forty years old, a ‘well-worn’ forty at that, and she can only be twenty seven at most. A pretty, perky twenty seven.
Be honest with yourself. I tell myself. Be honest with her, what have you got to lose? So I plop the spoon back into the bowl and lean back, sucking in a telling sigh.“I loved a woman once, but I wasn’t the man I am now. I was sick, I was a danger to her. I hurt her. Before I could let myself do anything worse I ran away.”
“Is this how you introduce yourself to every woman you meet?” The young woman retorts, and what should I have expected?
I let out an involuntary crack of laughter, fully recognising the brutal and inconvenient honesty of what I had just said… the conversational suicide. “Only the ones that don’t look like they’ll run away. Unfortunately, there aren’t many around.”
She gives me a polite smile. She turns back to her letter and takes a mouthful of stew, leaving the air silent. It stays that way for a while as I stay in my seat, unsure whether moving would be the right choice at this moment. I put all my cards on the table and now it would be unthinkable to fold and walk away.
“Cesar, his name is Cesar.” After a long time I hear her New York accent again, so long I’d almost forgot we were talking. “And I’m Valentine.”
A beautiful name for a very attractive woman. I struggle to accept that she’s actually talking to me again but finally I collect my thoughts and try to reply. “I’m…”
“I know who you are, I’m pretty sure every homeless person in the country knows Non Compos Mentis. You’re kinda a ‘pin-up’ for us hobos.” She interrupts me, stuns me and knocks me for a home run in one swift move. Pin up? Now there is something I have never anticipated, but has there ever been a more publicised homeless person?
Still, is it a good thing to be held up as a paragon for a group of people? I tried that once, it ended with me trying to kill Murdoc in a rusty machine. Never again. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing…”
“It’s better than being a nobody.” Valentine replies, with a hint of regret pooling in her eyes. She tries to hide it but I know that look all too well. Her fingers brush the page once again as if in reassurance.
“Sometimes I’m not all that sure.” I try to reassure her that being the centre of adoration is not all it’s cracked up to be. Her icy eyes turn back to mine again and that languid tone from earlier is seemingly gone.“All those eyes watching you, wanting you to be a role model, a sign that things can get better… it’s a heavy weight to bear at times.”
“But you bear it anyway. You didn’t run away from it, you went back.” Does she know everything about me? My exploits are televised, my story a matter of public knowledge, but I am still only a wrestler. Perhaps my story has expanded beyond the murky underworld of wrestling fandom since I have been away.
But still, I cannot claim to be entirely pure in my reasoning for returning. It’s important she knows that I am not a saint, fighting selflessly for the safety of PCW. That is certainly a huge aspect of my return, but not the whole story. “I wish I could say I came back to PCW for entirely unselfish reasons, but that isn’t so. The success can be a powerful thing, and I have wanted it back for a long time.”
It’s true, I want to see Mikey Wryght and his Black Hand brethren gone, or at least out of a position to rule PCW with impunity, but I also went back for my own selfish need for competition. I can pretend that I’m above everyone else in the Icemann Invitational, that I’m in this only for the greater good, but that would be a lie.
At stake, and now within reach, is not only a chance to beat Billy Sadistic but a shot at the greatest prize in wrestling. Of course I want to hold the World Title once again, I would be mad not to. I can’t stand in that ring against Tha Joka and tell myself that I want to win only to prevent Mikey Wryght from securing another farcical main event for the Black Hand. I want my hands on the gold again and that is another weight that my soul lifts.
I want it, but the last time I had the coveted World Title in my hands it corrupted me like never before. What would it do to the already unhinged Joka? Would Stormm revert back to his past of skulduggery and subterfuge? Would Showtime somehow find his ego too great to ignore and stab his order in the back? Power has already turned Billy Sadistic from a backwoods psychopath into a danger for the very foundation of PCW. A man I once stood toe-to-toe with and defeated without fear is now the most feared man in the company, so feared he has the President under his thumb.
Yes I want that title, I want to dethrone The Phenom, I want to bring dignity back to my name and safety to PCW’s. At what cost, though? Guilt grips me, fear too, that I am not a good enough man to hold that title again without it poisoning my mind like it has Sadistic’s.
“We all have our reasons for holding on to things that might not be good for us.” Valentine responds softly, her words heavy with meaning. Her eyes are now back on the letter, staring a whole through the script. Is she really talking to me, or trying to talk to her lovelorn soul?
“And what are you holding on to? Cesar?” Pulling herself away from the text, Valentine quickly folds the letter over. A deep breath later and she tries to compose herself, tries to push the well of emotion back from the brink of spilling over.
A smile breaks out onto her face now, one for show that covers her entire face like a mask. I know that mask though, I have worn it myself many times over the years. It is called despair, desperation, pain and pity. A brave face to cover a heavy, dirty, crying soul. “This is crazy, but how would you feel about a little… field trip?”
Crazy, now that’s something I can cope with. Between my own issues, Tha Joka’s insanity coming toward me at full force and the assorted disorders of The Black Hand, I’ll be facing my fair share of craziness this week. A walk with a beautiful you lady? Well that’s hardly anything compared to a sadomasochist hiding his broken identity with madness. It’s hardly a thing next to Stormm’s power-craze and money-worship. And with Showtime’s narcissism, backed by the violent maniacal tendencies of the Dillinger Brothers, it’s a walk in the park. “It’s not the craziest thing I’ll have to deal with this week, trust me.”
