A love letter to the last of the believers aka Hoyt The Missing Years aka Ramblings of a Rumble

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.”

– Robert Frost

Hoyt’s Witnesses,

Fellow Believers of a better tomorrow in a few short weeks I will make my return to PRIME after a very long absence from in-ring competition. Over a decade, if I’m not mistaken.

I’m not sure who will get this e-mail, as I’m using a mailing list from the golden age of the internet before character limits and limitless corruption of truth.   The internet was a tool we once used to seek knowledge like who shot JFK, was Tony Rolo related to the candy empire, and what was swimming in Loch Ness?  The speed limit on the internet superhighway was so slow compared to the instantness of today, and the shysters and snake oil salesmen were yet to mine your mind knowing your every impulse and desire.  The ability companies have now to know if you’ve been naughty or nice is the closest earth has ever had to a God or a Santa Claus.  Terrifying times, and I’m kinda jealous.

My journey back to the ring all started a few months ago when my agent Ralph Sipowicz called me on my red desk phone that flashes when it rings.  It was an ode to Bruce Wayne and the innocence of the Adam West characterization of Batman in the 1960s.  The world has evolved so much that my desk phone is near obsoletion, and the anti-hero of Batman has been replaced in popularity by the mentally ill psychopathic Joker.  No wonder people vote the way they do.

Anyway, Ralph Sipowicz is a terrifying man whom dread follows in whatever Uber he pops out of. An alpha, straight-talking, no-nonsense kind of fella you want as an ally not an enemy.  To trifle with Ralph has made many a Hollywood hot shot weep tussling with their own self-worth after being made a fool of.   Ralph was honest with me. My Q score (a measurement of a person’s fame)  was fading faster than the Chargers on wild card weekend.

My limited appearances over the course of last year in PRIME didn’t exactly yield much movement.  A choice needed to be made – fade into the annals of obscurity making gameshow appearances next to William Hung (She Bangs)  and Byrd the ex-bailiff from The Judge Judy Show, or I could be like my Brother Jesus and rise up in April to get the world writing and praising my name for an eternity.  After all, it’s a family tradition.

Confidence is a lot like the box of garbage bags under the sink.  I personally have no idea how it lasts so long. I guess logically if you have a box with 100 bags and you go through 2 a week, that’s darn near a years’ worth.  Anyway, the point is they always seem to be there. You never really think about them running out until they do, and when they’re gone, it stinks.

The superhero strength of one’s youth is ignorance to the necessity of confidence.  When you get older failures collect and before you know it you start doubting your ability to function in many aspects of life.  To write, to listen, to love, and to even communicate comes in crisis once confidence fades.  The anxiety of change cements your feet, and the winds of indifference start blowing you towards the edge of a lake until you fall in and sink like a Vegas body in the 1970s.  A lack of confidence will kill the soul of a man long before sickness can cancel their body.

My confidence recently has been near an all-time low (Dear Maria, count me in) and the thought of stepping back in the ring was as scary as Nick Cannon at a raw orgy at a hedonist’s retreat in Aspen.  What if I fail?  If you watch kids fall from high places, you worry for a second and then laugh as they bounce up like nothing happened. However, when an old person falls you call 911 and hope for the best.  Failure is a lot like this.  Losses add up.  You get your heart broken and all the stages of grief to recovery become a real weighted counterpoint to if it’s worth trying and failing again.  In many ways I’d rather be dead than live in dread.

So, I left Ralph Sipowicz without an answer for a good month as I had to search my soul.  My father’s sickness, my age, and my sensitivity to failure weighed heavy on my mind and honestly it still does .  My work in PRIME last year didn’t exactly yield the results I was hoping for, but truth is, I hedged.   If it wasn’t me taking losses, my legacy would remain strong.  When you get old enough, legacy replaces dreams, as sleep becomes scarce and repetition becomes comfort.

My mother being murdered when I was a child sparked a lifelong fear of loss.  So much so I’m often afraid to take chances, even as a savior to the congregation; I’m often a coward to my own self-worth.  My mother was my protector who was there with an answer when the world confused of frightened me. When that protection is lost it becomes insanely hard to trust as everyone is suddenly trying to take advantage of you.  Even the son of God has insecurities.

The hardest thing to learn that comes with age is the ability to move on, be it from petty conversation and debates to the death of a loved one to the loss of an identity.  I look at this picture in front of me next to my laptop of my father and I at Ringling Brothers when I was about 8 years old, feeding peanuts to a mistreated elephant.  My old man was as absent as a drug dealer in community college.  Wrestling was his everything, and I was but his sometimes. My old man when he was around could charm anyone he encountered.  A waitress at the Howard Johnson, a cop pulling him over, and, naturally, his son just wanting his attention and love.   But I was just a mistress as he was married to the love of a roaring crowd in a dusty arena on any given Sunday night.

After my mother’s death, our relationship was rocky, and my father and I went years without speaking. The sadness of missed opportunity fills me with the cold darkness of the shores of lake Michigan in the heart of winter at 3am.  How many petty arguments turned into months-long stretches of silence because neither of us could move on?  Moving on is everything.   Once he’s dead I won’t forget him, but that’s not what moving on is.

When I left PRIME all those years ago, I thought I truly moved on. I thought I said and did everything that needed to be done and truthfully, I was running out of stories as my world views had become stagnant. When you dig deep enough into your own beliefs, the view really gets even more limited the further down you go.  I knew it was time, or at least I thought I did.  You see, like so many tales of people in their 20s and 30s I met a girl, and she changed everything.  What I thought I loved and needed was corrupted by the lure of love.

She was a flawless soul who went by the name of Porcupine, and she captured my heart, imprisoned my soul, and reformed my mind.  She was prickly, but cute, and I was smitten by her charm, following her around like a puppy.  That void created by abandonment in my childhood was suddenly filled. Oh! What a feeling.

Porcupine was a rave girl, and her world wasn’t mine.  People wearing furry tails, tutus, and tube stockings with an unhealthy addiction to neon, dazzling eyes, while molly and sick beats hypnotized the unhip like me.  It was a high-end counterculture of warehouse parties and self-aggrandizing artists who were as full of malarkey as politicians and Wall Street hustlers I already knew.  I was in my 30s, and it was a chance to slip into another world and try on another identity.  I didn’t need to be the savior or celebrity I had to be every day, every airport, every moment when I just wanted to be invisible. Jesus had the “missing years,” a period of unrecorded time in the Bible which he mainly spent on the streets of Mazkeret Batya doing street magic to hustle tourists while impressing the local yentas.  A lot of people don’t know this, but my brother was such a ladies man that to this day women still moan out his name in pleasure.  These were the start of my missing years.

Everyone in my wrestling world had become mundane and the conversations of restholds wore me down.  Porcupine was different in the way she talked, the way she moved, and most of all the way she dreamed.  I wanted to invest in her in any way I could, as I wanted her future to be linked with mine.  I felt she could bring me to the one state my wrestling career never took me in all my travels – the state happiness.  I wanted our dreams to be shared. The fire she lit in my soul excited me and made me feel alive for the first time in forever.  It was like the gasp of the crowd after a stiff chop. It was the pop of excitement after a high spot and a near pin. It was the clap-clap-clap from a frantic assembly of fans heightened to sensory bliss by our most basic movement.  It was everything I wanted and more. Everything I thought I needed? She took me higher than all of those wrestling pleasures .

We got an apartment, lived simply, ate healthy, and loved completely.  I changed everything from my politics to my friends to make her happy.  In many ways it made me happy too, but change is change and life is life and really, it’s all the same.  You’re going to find me somewhat different than who you knew me as before.  Life lessons have caused me to grow up some but that doesn’t mean I’m still not a rambunctious instigator of spiritual thought and shenanigans.  PRIME will once again be my playground of the absurd as I make people laugh while leaving them with a sermon before absolutely destroying and bludgeoning my opposition along the way.  Underestimate me.  Please.  I’m just the guy doing funny segments on the show, never mind the destruction caused along the way.  My believers, you will soon see.

Burning Man is probably not a place you would expect a stiff savior like me to find himself but somewhere in the dusts at the intersection of 3:30 and Glimmer, I did just that.  Burning Man sells itself as a place of inclusion and radical self-expression.  Yet all I saw was dusty white rich kids, half naked and hallow-eyed, searching for ayahuasca and DMT, riding bicycles naked as a babysitter on Pornhub.  It is what it is, and it is what you make it, and I guess at the end of the day that’s the point.

People in the counterculture demand independence from judgment while being some of the most judgmental close-minded egomaniacs you’ll ever run across.  The need to be different just so you can fit in with the rest of the different people was always perplexing to me. It’s like how goths have a uniform of informality. Burning man is where I met Hypocrisy for the first time.

One day I walked down a road trying to trade for some ice, and five guys dressed as bananas started coming towards me. A banana split of a second later a man in a purple gorilla suit riding a tricycle chased me away waving a father-damned fungo bat, just missing my head. I used my biblical abilities to smite him with a life of Crohn’s disease. Now lost down a side road, I sampled a beekeeper’s beer, a Mormons sermon, a stripper’s dreams, and a scholar’s ego before running into Hypocrisy while waiting for a port-a-potty to open up.  He was a massive man in a pelican’s mask wearing ass chaps and not much more.  His defined musculature told me he was a body builder whose look just screamed pro-wrestler.  We talked protein shakes and leg days, and before we knew it, we were the best of friends.

Hypocrisy was an insurance agent hoping to take over his dad’s practice in Plainfield, Illinois.  I told him I was the second coming of Christ, yet he still tried to sell me on a double annuity whole life policy. Being of an older age, I admired his dedication to his craft, a trait seldom found in the Me-Too Era.   I knew he could be a loyal disciple and perhaps with my crafting a fine wrestler.

Hypocrisy was the best thing to come out of Burning Man, and I did indeed find myself.  I was who I was, and I realized that I am who I am. The indecency and egotism of man is universal regardless of the jib of clothing.  So why pretend I’m someone I’m not if every road chosen leads to the exact same place? Why take the road less traveled when the other option is a well paved highway with a new rest stop that includes a clean, well-run Arby’s?   I needed to counter the counterculture and get back to my familiar way of life.

Playa dust is a gateway drug and I fell into a life of debauchery that I can’t go into many details on. Tte statute of limitation hasn’t expired in some states, and the fear of legal repercussions exists.  It was a wild few years post-Burning Man, but I slowly started getting my grip back.  I returned to my faith, started eating fried foods again, and bought a house in the city.

I bought stocks, started training Hypocrisy as a wrestler, and went back to giving sermons as a savior.  The only thing that wasn’t back was wrestling. Oh, and Porcupine.  You see what I thought was uniqueness and a wild free spirit turned out to be a chemical imbalance in her brain, a product of bi-polar disorder.  My issues of self-worth oddly combined with narcissism and her disorder were a toxic mix like Facebook and people’s political thoughts.  One day I came home, and she went full blown blue hair as did my feelings. We both called it quits and moved on.

It was painful. It was hard. I’m pretty sure my ability to ever trust enough to love again is gone.  Alfred Lord Tennyson can suck a fat tennis ball as both Jesus and I agree it’s not better to have loved and lost and would have much rather have never loved. Jesus still talks about Mary Magdalene for Dad’s sake.  Just have sex and forget about the love.  I told you some ideals have changed in our faith and scripture.  It’s a new era, fellow believer.

I gained weight, friends, and some anxieties, but, all and all, it was worth the travel even if I seem to have returned to the road I started on.  My goal was to manage Hypocrisy and not be a wrestler ever again.  What if I’m a hack and people see through my history and everything I ever built gets demolished by doing something I’m no longer good at? That’s why I made Sipowicz wait on an answer.

Another character that has made this return possible needs to be mentioned here. Brother Whitaker Privilege contacted me by snail mail, a nice touch that didn’t go unrecognized, and asked if I would train him. A true colossal of a man at over seven feet tall, Privilege isn’t no ordinary giant.  He’s also brilliant.  Graduated at the top of his class at Yale Law School and captain of the speech team.  A powerful body and an elite mind, this man is the future.

Born of good stock, Brother Privilege is a scholar with a real sense of moral obligation who is fully invested in our church and my return to the ring.  He is going to be an amazing asset as we combat this legalistic world.  Intune with social media he’s already shown us an increase in traffic on our TikTok and Jabber accounts. In no time we will pass Kenny Freeman as the king of the influencers. Every week on TikTok, I perform a miracle, and our numbers keep climbing.  Our newly minted ministry of misinformation has been making great videos of Ivan Stanislav doing knock-knock jokes with Reagan on Jabber.  Spiritual excellence.

Before I called Sipowicz back I looked over the roster and knew it was the right move for me.  The Russians are back and memories of duck and cover under the dirty desk of the 80’s as returned. Where the only real fear was getting chewed gum stuck in your hair from some sinner who stuck in under the desk trying not to get caught chewing it.  Ivan is a godless man and an absolute nightmare of a champion if he claims it. I can’t let that go, I can’t let PRIME get that corrupted.

The Anglo Luchador needs to understand he messed with the wrong guy.  He thinks he got somewhere beating the underboss not realizing he’s levels behind the end game and he’s running out of lives and saves.   Revenge is a dish best served with pink sea salt.

Youngblood.  Oh! The fun we can have tormenting him once again.  Such a purist, a sterling white meat babyface whom the fans just adore.  A false idol in a generation of influencers just needing to be reminded that God never forgets.  It’s so easy to stain people who wear white.

The more I looked into the roster I just knew what had to be done.  I mean the fans cheer for “Abe the Babe” and jeer me.  Lip – I’m not even going to type his last name since it’s so close to profanity – is a notorious religious oppressor who and I quote from his bio, “connects with his partners on their mutual dislike for Christianity”.  Are you Lipschitzing me?  This is what the fans adore?  I’m needed, so HOYT IT BE.

Up-and-comers like Adam Ellis who if you just look at his bio and the stupid blue pants he wears – he’s a complete fashion sinner – you’d understand my outrage.  Timo’s kid need’s a lesson in religion.  Old timers like Nova, Matt Ward, and the rest of the dust balls need a reminder.  A flockless pontiff, a kid who probably grew up idolizing me, Nates, and Neds, and Frenchmen.  An entire motley crew of heathenism that needs crucified and saved.  Ugh even women wrestlers.

Something needs to be done, and I’m that something.  So yes, I have insecurities and doubts, but I also have a rebirth of IMPERIUM with Brother Hypocrisy and Brother Privilege watching my back.  A great tailor in the magnifico Joe Burro, and most of all I have you, the believers, who never gave up on me.  Thank you. I’ll never forget that love and support.

Let’s write the history of tomorrow starting with winning a rumble that will shoot me up the rankings like a song on the charts off a Taylor Swift album.  It’s clearly God’s divine grace that created an instant ticket to the top.  Destiny?  Probably.  I hate to throw around words like that but being a third coming it only seems appropriate.  I WILL WIN.  IT IS TIME.  LET THE HEAVENS REJOICE!

You have believed and are the last of the faithful.

I will not fail you.  I will not let you down.  I am your Savior and so it is written so it is truth.

Praise be to Hoyt.

So, Mote it Be.

=w=

                                                                                               Hoyt Williams

                                                                                                   3/31/23