CEMENTING LEGACIES

 

03/25/2023
8:40 PM (CDT)

“She let me in.” a voice called out from the void, speaking to no one in particular.

Cold open. Arthur Pleasant looked like a “post-Child’s Play 3” version of Chucky with a series of fading scars scattered across his war-torn face. He stared down at a contract sitting on a battered and tattered beige rug with an empty studio apartment providing the backdrop to where he sat crisscross tomato sauce. Cheap-looking wall paneling and jaundiced, smoke-stained, ten-cents a square-foot sheet vinyl flooring stretched throughout the entire open space, providing a sense of squalor that one might’ve been able to smell through the power of visualization and mind trickery. And Smell-A-Vision, if you were so lucky to have that technology.

Those aforementioned scars? They were a gift from his former tag team partner in High Octane Wrestling, Jeffrey James Roberts. An everlasting present bestowed upon him by someone he actually won the HOW Word Tag Team Championships with. It was a pity the facial reconstruction surgery Arthur Pleasant endured would go unavenged since the demon who did this to him had disappeared. Or rather, sent down into whatever maximum security hell he was sent to. You can only disappoint Lee Best so many times before you were erased from society entirely. 

Tracing the scars on his face inattentively, he simply stared into the pages of the contract with intense, unbreakable concentration. 

PRIME Wrestling.

“Of all the fucking places.” he thought to himself. 

Arthur never imagined in a million years he’d sign with PRIME Wrestling. At least, not while Lindsay Troy ran things. But here he was, about to sign on the dotted line for a spot in the highly anticipated Culture Shock Battle Royal. 

In his first match for PRIME Wrestling, he would find himself in the main event of a major Pay-Per-View show. Talk about unprecedented circumstances!

Wrestling’s Worst Nightmare ruminated about this for hours and hours. For so long, in fact, that he no longer had any feeling in his legs. Mostly, though, his thoughts were specific in where they hovered.

Lindsay Troy.

The legend herself. 

The QUEEEEEEN Almighty. 

A real hoot in just about every wrestling circle in the world. Rightfully so, too. She was damned good, and if anybody could possibly know that, it would be Arthur Pleasant. After all, they fought up and down, forwards and backwards the world over for the last few years in countless promotions. So, in many ways, it seemed as if they were attached at the hip. 

This time, though? Things were different. Incredibly so. 

Now? They weren’t wrestling each other. Nor were they teaming together in some oddball pairing heading into a War Games match in High Octane Wrestling. This time, it was employer and employee. This time, Lindsay Troy was his boss and he was her subordinate.

Many thought a working relationship like this would be impossible to maintain given their violent history. But, to his surprise? She called his bluff. Lindsay Troy let him in, right then and there, on the only episode of ReVival he ever deigned to grace his presence with.

To be perfectly honest? That was not something Arthur counted on. Instead, he aimed to show up on her broadcast, mock the nature of the invitational aspect of this Battle Royal, condescend and make whatever elitist pissant that stood in his way irrelevant and get thrown out in handcuffs for inconveniencing Lindsay. 

It was supposed to be a fun little prank to pass the time and get his name back in the game. 

She wasn’t supposed to let him in.

But, goddammit, she sure as hell did. 

Now? The plan has changed. 

The plan had gone from a mere prank to needing to win what could quite possibly be the most important match in his entire career. From zero to sixty, the importance of his appearance on ReVival and, more importantly, the aftereffects of it, pivoted harder than Michael Jordan in Game 6 of the Last Shot.

Game on.

Daylight slowly surrendered to the transcendent beauty of magic hour, allowing him to sink comfortably into his unfolded lawn chair, further contemplating everything that was headed in his direction. The instant doubt. The underestimations of the abilities of someone who didn’t have a rich and storied history with PRIME. You know. The usual bullshit an outsider faces when they climb the fence and make it safely and unscathed to the other side.

The Man PRIME Would Love To Hate sipped on his Yamazaki 12 -Year Single Malt Japanese whiskey. The plummy sweetness of the delicious wine took him back to his early beginnings as a professional wrestler, training in the Japanese dojos owned by the Inagawa-kai. He took another slow and enjoyable sip from the hatch-styled, diamond patterned whiskey glass, shaking the ice cubes just enough to hear that satisfying clinking sound. Sighing aloud, Pleasant stood up from the bare floor, contract in hand. 

“Fasten your seatbelts.” he declared out loud with a chuckle that metamorphosed into a lordly laugh.

Reaching for a pen that had been magnetically held up on the right door of his French door refrigerator, Arthur smacked the contract against the rust-ridden surface of what used to be an eggshell white door. Placing his John Hancock on the bottom of the first, second, and third pages in black ink, Arthur placed the pen back onto the holster of the magnetic strip from where he grabbed it.

Culture Shock wasn’t just a catchy Pay-Per-View name for Arthur Pleasant anymore. 

For him, it’s actually a way of life.

His way of life.

Soon, he need would show thirty-nine other competitors why that was the case.

03/31/2023
3:32 PM (CDT)

Arthur Pleasant stared at the 15.6-inch screen of his Lenovo IdeaPad, scrolling down to where the McKenna Blue invitation for PRIME’s Battle Royal was located within his email’s inbox. While humming something light-hearted–and at the same time inaudible–his eyes found it not too long after beginning his scan in the first place.

A voice disrupted his deep concentration. Peeking to the side of his laptop, Pleasant raised his eyebrows at the source of the interruption.

“Arthur. C’mon, now. You’re not seriously considering it, are you?” said a bespectacled, well-dressed man in such a jittery, tormented manner that it could’ve given the stubbornest of mules a panic attack. 

Shutting the laptop closed rather gently, Arthur adjusted his cognizably neutral, charcoal-colored tie; or, more specifically, the four-in-hand knot just underneath his dress shirt’s collar. 

The unidentified man stared back at him, as if he had been waiting for a response for hours instead of seconds. Soon, though, this man realized his counterpart was not at ALL smiling. Nor was he blinking. In fact, he couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. 

“Uh, no. I’m not considering it, Arliss. Don’t worry.” falsely assured Arthur, kicking up his oxblood red, gold-buckled monk straps on the edge of the furnished oak desk.

The man he’d been conversing with, identified as an attorney according to the ‘Arliss Peters, Esq.’ engraved triangular nameplate that sat front and center on his desk, breathed a massive sigh of relief. 

“Thank God!” Arliss exclaimed. “You nearly had me going there for a mi—”

Wagging a finger, Arthur shook his head. He waited for Arliss to fall for it, and he did not disappoint. Hook, line, and sinker.

“—aaaaaactually, I’ve already decided to do it.”

Arliss ceased blinking. Like, completely. Frozen in time, forevermore and shit.

“Hey. Don’t look at me like that! You asked if I was considering it. Which, I did. But now I’ve decided to do it. Fuck it, y’know? Guess I should have just opened with that, huh?” Pleasant added rather jocularly. 

The silence was so thick you could take a rolling pin to it and make delicious cookies out of its uncomfortable dough. Somewhere… some place… Bobby Dean defied the laws of physics, kipped up

, and found himself wanting to down a sleeve of Chips Ahoy. 

“So here we go again, then?” Arliss asked somewhat rhetorically. The resigned tone in his voice suggested he had already yielded to the notion of Pleasant stepping foot inside another wrestling promotion’s sacred grounds, prepared to desecrate it like the pro-wrestling heretic he had become.

“Here we go again.” Arthur confirmed, chuckling at the absurdity of it all.

Arliss laughed nervously while fumbling with the plastic covering on his large desk calendar that featured a multitudinous number of appointments, addresses, and names all scrawled across each three-inch square.

“You don’t know when to stay away, do you? Jesus, man.” Arliss expressed, shaking his head.

Pleasant shrugged while flashing a wry smile. The rapport he had with his longtime lawyer was an unconventional one. At least for him, it was. Rather than attorney and client, they were, to a greater extent, friends who liked to soundboard their life issues off each other.

“I’ve never been one to stay away solely on the principles of others wanting me to. If I stayed away and crawled into some dark, dank hole, like 99% of the other would-be opportunists out there in Wrestleland would have me do? Then, shit man, I wouldn’t be true to myself, would I? Nor would things in this industry of mine be as interesting as I inevitably make them.” he proudly shot back in all of his infinite wisdom. 

The vastness within the specificities of his wording, i.e., ‘this industry of mine’, was not lost on Arliss. The Man of U.L.C.E.R.S. facepalmed on the desk, muttering something incoherent under his hot, eucalyptus-scented breath.

“Look, I get it.” Arthur essayed in assuaging him. 

“Do you, though?” Arliss responded abruptly, garnering a peccant smile in return from Arthur. “Even after the atrocities you’ve committed in the past?” Arliss maintained, seemingly unfiltered with his thoughts.

“I do. But you’re ignoring an invaluable lesson here, Arliss. Despite the actions of my past? Be it in Japan with the Yakuza, or back home as a ten-year-old boy under that infernal Midnight Sun, I’m still very much embedded in history with pro-wrestling. Much to the frustration of certain individuals, even with all the malignancy I’ve been known to bring in tow, I’ve made a habit out of winning. Consistently. Wherever I go.”

Arthur paused in his words, permitting Arliss to read between the lines. The grin that attached itself to his devilish facade for the majority of their conversation suddenly vanished.

“Except for the big one.” Arthur concluded somewhat wistfully.

Several moments passed by before either of them said a word. Being the like-minded individuals they were, they both tried to break through the silence with a word and failed by interrupting each other. Arliss relented, however, and Arthur nodded. Picking up his cue, he resumed his train of thought.

“But now? I’m not looking to simply embed my name in the archives. Nor am I seeking to etch my name in a title history somewhere. At least, not with some piddly reign under a championship that bears no significance on one’s legacy in this business.” he says, his face turning a bit more serious. His normally unscrupulous demeanor wavered, supplanted by the slightest quiver on the left side of his cracked upper lip.     

There was another silence. This one seemed to be a bit longer than the previous one. So much so that things were getting awkward between them.

“So what’s the plan, then?” Arliss finally added, breaking through the endless, amaranthine void.

“Plan? What plan?!” Pleasant laughed. “I’m supposed to have a plan other than to win the whole goddamned thing? I’m supposed to have some sort of strategy other than to kick an inordinate number of fucking faces off the skulls of people who know as much about me as I know about staying out of the middle of controversy? Sure, let’s come up with one, then. You first. I’ll wait.” 

“Well-”

“-Now that’s just a terrible idea! Why don’t we listen to mine, yeah?”

Arliss couldn’t help but let out a laugh. As much as he wanted to show disdain for Arthur’s next terrible life choice, he couldn’t help but find himself charmed by the son of a bitch.

“It’s a battle royal, Arliss. The up and over game. It’s a game of hitting and hiding.” Arthur said, matter-of-factly.

“Battle Royals have fewer rules than a game of dodgeball, with slightly more violence and significantly fewer wrenches being thrown around. Stick it out as long as you can until the other chest puffers get enough of their shit in until they tire themselves out. Then you dump every motherfucker over when they least expect it. WHAM. Thanks for coming. It’s a golden ticket to whatever prize lies in wait.” he said, lavishing his counterpart with excitement.

Arliss blinked. 

Then he blinked again.

“Aren’t you oversimplifying it just a smidge? From my understanding, the rules are a little different for the one at Culture Shock.” he asked with a soupçon of intimidation.

“What?! Oversimplifying it?!” Arthur shrieked while standing up from his chair and smashing his hands down on the desk, rattling every trinket one would find on a dressed up workstation such as Arliss’s.

“Wait. How are the rules different from this one than others?” Pleasant asked with his curiosity rising.

“Well, from what I can gather, it’s forty competitors.” 

“Okay. Well, that’s more than the traditional twenty.” Arthur admitted, “Still… not really a big deal, though.” Arthur continued, shrugging off what had become a doubled headcount from the traditional battle royals he’d been in before. 

The office phone rang, but Arliss ignored it. Whoever it was, they could wait. Besides, his clients knew he never stayed at the office past 4PM.

“There’s more, though. It’s not forty from the start. It’s uh… one-by-one intervals.”

“Like a GAUNTLET Battle Royal?!” he inquired with a hint of disgust.  

Sheepishly, Arliss further elaborated. “Well, sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of’?!” Arthur shouted.

Arliss debated whether to reveal the penultimate set of rules for the Culture Shock Battle Royal. After another moment, fearing Arthur becoming unhinged, he continued despite the danger his gut told him he was in. 

“Eliminations don’t begin until after all forty competitors have entered the match.”

“Jesus CHRIST. What kind of fanboy-serving contrived fucking BULLSHIT is this?! Is someone’s fucking Mommy on a pole, too?! Do the final four compete in a #ChaChaSlide TikTok challenge?!” he yelled, swiping papers from Arliss’s desk in an explosion of frustration from the growing complexity of the match.  

Arthur looked around like somebody from PRIME might be listening to their conversation.

“Please tell me that’s it.” he pleaded.

“Well, actually… no. That’s not it.” he said, pausing for unintentional dramatic effect, “The final two competitors then compete in an actual match. The winner of that wins the Culture Shock Battle Royal.” he concluded.

Arthur blinked.

Then he blinked again.

“You’re fucking shitting me.” he uttered despairingly.

Arliss shook his head, not wanting to elaborate any further.

For the next several minutes, Arthur took all of this information in. Absorbed it like a sponge. Digested it like a delicious gourmet meal prepared by a world-renowned chef. He tried looking at the intricacies of the match-up from all angles and all corners, and soon enough… it all came together. At that moment, Arthur was the computational equivalent of a mathematician while making sense of the numbers, and he conjoined them like a balanced equation.   

“Eh, fuck it. The plan remains the same.” he said, his smirk returning to his face.

Arthur closed his eyes and chuckled at the thought.

He slapped his hand on the hard oak desk, startling Arliss. Reaching across the desk, he grabbed both cheeks of Arliss Peters, Esquire, and kissed him right on the forehead.

“Thank you. This… this is good.”

Completely taken aback by Arthur’s kiss, Arliss was speechless. Arthur, meanwhile, looked at the Vacheron Constantin watch wrapped around Arliss’s wrist from an upside-down perspective. 

“Damn. Is it really Four-Thirty?!” asked the remarkably happy man once known as ‘The Provocateur’.

“Somewhere you need to be?”

“Yeah. I do. Now that I’m up to speed on what I need to do…”

Arthur stopped himself after thinking about elaborating.

“Thanks for the info, friend.”

 

*****

I am not at all a man of culture. 

I say bad words. Lots of them.

I punch people in the face when the situation calls for class and respect.

I don’t chew with my mouth closed or even eat with the correct cutlery positioned on the correct side of the plate. 

I don’t put the seat down after I take a long piss– which, come to think of it, is probably the genesis of my storied rivalry with your Queen, Lindsay Troy. I mean, why else could she possibly hate me so much?

Furthermore, when the fat, disgusting neckbeards out in the crowd are all clamoring for a five-star classic, I prefer to smash a motherfucker with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire across their dumb fucking face. I’d rather inflict violence than out-wrestle someone and give these three-chinned, armchair quarterbacks sitting at home on Mommy’s couch a reason to celebrate on social media. Thanks to my Father, I actually detest wrestling itself. But I must digress since that’s a massive story for another day. 

But, I do it anyway. Why? Because I can… and because I love to see the reaction in people’s faces when I beat people who are genetically built, both physically and mentally, to be better than a loutish asshole like myself. 

So, the sweet irony that I’m making my PRIME Wrestling debut at an event called CULTURE SHOCK? Yeah, it’s not lost on me. Nor should it be on any of you. Because it’s fucking perfect, actually. It’s fucking poetic, even. 

The ‘never say never’ trope has become fully realized with my presence, and you’re all going to hate it. Soooo, so much. Alas, there’s not much any of you can do about that, I’m afraid. Blame that dark-haired Amazonian, though. Not me.

After all, she’s the one who made her rounds across the landscape of professional wrestling, furry mink cap in hand, begging and prostituting herself to the masses all for spreading the good word of PRIME. Had she not spread the gospel and invited the masses, there’s a good chance I’d never even be here, right now, letting you know what’s what.

But that’s just it, isn’t it?

Everyone has a legacy to uphold. 

Based on that, I understand why she wanted PRIME to be available to outsiders. Whether it’s about a promotion built on the foundation of historic title reigns, blood feuds, or how they were able to amass such talent all under one roof… it all comes down to one thing: cementing one’s legacy.

And it’s about fucking time that I cemented mine.

That’s why you’re looking at my ugly mug right now.

Not because I’m doing what I want to do.

But because I’m doing what needs to be done.

One body being thrown over the top rope after another, my undeniable legacy will take shape. Then? After I put down whomever I have to when it’s mono-y-mono? PRIME’s culture will receive the shock of a lifetime.

So, I don’t give a fuck who the PRIME Universal Champion will be when the time comes.

‘Cause, no matter who you are? No matter who you think you are?

I’m standing tall when the dust settles on this fucking thing and cementing my legacy at the top of the industry.

Where it goddamn belongs.