Just Be Your Selfs

“Cut the shit, Chan.”

Aubrey Calvino, de facto chief everything officer of Tsuperstar Enterprises, sounds exhausted with her cousin.

The two of them are true to their respective selves as they huddle over breakfast at a local cafe. Aubrey’s meal has military precision: grapefruit, granola, and skim yogurt in exact, prescribed proportions. Chandler picks with minimal interest at an egg white omelet.

“No, I’m serious,” Tsonda says. “It takes a man to admit when he’s licked. Maybe I’m cooked. Flambeed. Fricasseed.”

“Been watching a lot of Top Chef?” Aubrey says. She spoons up granola and yogurt.

“Maybe like Padma says, I have to pack my knives and go.”

“You’re in a funk,” she says, lowering her eyes at her cousin and, technically, employer.

“Guilty.”

“You thought you’d walk back into not just fans chanting your name, but easy walkover wins and, oh, by the way, being the same guy at nearly fifty—”

“Watch it,” Tsonda snipes.

“Being the same guy at nearly forty-eight,” she says, without losing stride, “that you were at thirty-five.”

“Fans were chanting,” he responds.

“And most of all: you forgot that losing is part of this job,” Aubrey says, reading him cleanly. “You’re out of practice, ‘cuz you spent the better part of the last decade secreted away on your Scrooge McDuck money pile in your fortress of solitude.”

“Solitude and bespoke hand-wrought eco-friendly lighting fixtures.”

“Chandler,” she says. “This isn’t a big joke, and you can’t smartass your way out of it.”

He sighs with his whole body, and glances with disdain at the omelet, a rising sour taste in his mouth. “You got all the answers, then? Tell me what to do.”

“Please,” she smiles, “the only thing you want to do less than face failure is have somebody else tell you what to do.”

“Humor me,” Tsonda says. “Let’s both assume I’m a man of principle—”

“Stubborn,” she translates.

“…who is looking for fresh perspective,” Tsonda continues, trying to ignore her.

“In existential peril, facing the loaded gun of a mid-life crisis,” Aubrey offers.

“Do you need me for this, or do you want to do both sides of the conversation?”

“Cousin, I’m messing with you,” she says, putting her spoon down. “But if you want my advice, my real advice?”

He looks at her expectantly. Though she’s the younger of the pair, and can’t tell the difference between a dropkick and a drop toehold, Tsonda craves direction from someone so self-assured.

“I say: get yourself a freakin’ therapist.”

“Your million dollar advice is to get someone else’s advice?” he asks. “Isn’t that like asking the genie for more wishes?”

“You prefer mental health consultation from someone who went to community college?” Aubrey says, gesturing to herself with both index fingers.

“I believe in our nation’s public education system,” Tsonda replies, not convincing either of them.

“You’ve been to therapy before.”

“Been a pro wrestler before too, and see where that got me.”

“It’s like riding a bike,” Aubrey says.

“Annoying, exhausting, and easy to sustain a head injury?” Tsonda counters.

“As the acting CEO of TE—”

“We don’t call it ‘TE,” he cuts in.

“Acting CEO does. And as your acting CEO, go talk to somebody.” She hands over a business card. Simple black lettering on white cardstock, winning no design awards. “This guy would be a start.”

He looks over the card, then up at his cousin. She meets his eyes, nods, and then returns to spooning out grapefruit innards. She clicks her tongue before getting the final word.

“And stop leaving those damn tickets.”

/~/~/~/~/

“Tickets? Like Willy Wonka?”

“I guess so. There’s, like, so much to catch up on with this. It’s like getting a part on Game of Thrones in Season 7.”

Jake Nguyen sits at a Macbook, poring over screens and screens of PRIME history. He blinks and looks at the clock. It’s been more than an hour since he sat down for “ten minutes” of research.

The strong chin, raven black hair, and broad shoulders aren’t just familiar. The man could, at anything short of a long and studious look, pass for the Model Citizen. It’s this uncanny resemblance, a decent-if-dickish-agent, and a solid table read, that landed Jake the role of “Doppeltsonda” in the first place.

“That’s so random,” his girlfriend Jessie calls from the other room. “So your guy won one of these Golden Tickets?”

“No, his best friend did,” Jake says, squinting at the screen. “It’s a key part of their lore together. But it was a long time ago.”

“And your guy just came back after he was off the show for ten years?”

“Well,” Jake says, looking over his shoulder towards the other room. He knows this answer by heart. “The whole show was off the air for most of that time. And then it came back. But I didn’t come back until a month ago.”

Jessie Akiha walks in from the study slash Peloton studio slash Twitchstream cave. Without consistent bookings for either of them, the couple doesn’t make enough to afford a house in Silver Lake, but they love being near the reservoir, so they rent. It’s not easy being Not Rich in LA.

She plops down across the couch, her feet spilling onto Jake’s lap and breaking his hypnotic gaze at the laptop.

“Babe, ugh, you’re gross,” he says, sweat dripping off of her.

“You don’t love me when I’m stinky and sweaty? Maybe if I was…” She lowers her voice several octaves, and does a flex of her not-quite-22-inch pythons. “Mr. Mean Wrestler Xander Tsonda, here to punch your face and steal your chick.”

Jake has to collect himself after cackling at her horrible impression of what she thinks of his role.

“It’s Chandler Tsonda,” he corrects her. He strokes her post-workout hair lightly, even in its damp greasy state.

“Aren’t these guys supposed to choose names like, I dunno, Dick Hammer or Bruce the Barbarian?”

“Where do you get this stuff?” he asks. “His…I mean, my whole thing is that I used to be a model, so I don’t think I could credibly be a ‘barbarian.’ I’m a pretty boy who can do a bunch of cool flips, and I’ve got a golden tongue. Really one of the greatest insult-givers in entertainment history.”

“I’m really proud of you, babe. I know you think it’s silly, but I think this could be big for you.”

“Just another day in PRIME wrestling for a former Universal Champion like me,” he says, and winks.

“My little method actor,” Jessie says playfully, and hops up. Her eyes have a light glow.  “Scene?”

“Ok, ok,” Jake says, setting the laptop aside.  He closes his eyes, and then when he opens them, his voice and bearing are different.

“Hey dipshit,” he says, smarm dripping in the hard consonants, “I came here to do two things: kick in some faces, and look pretty. And I’m not out of looking pretty, but I’ve been doing it for a while, and I’m easily bored.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Chandler!” Jessie calls back. “I’m gonna embarrass you out there in the ring, and I’ll pee on your grave when I’m done doing it!”

Jessie’s promo is nontraditional, but the couple keeps playing the scene. Show must go on.

“I thought I smelled a little eau de piss on you, Bobby Dean,” Jake as Doppeltsonda says, wagging a finger. “That start running down your leg when you saw The Sultan of Style walk in?”

“Wait, you laughed at Bruce the Barbarian, and your guy is the ‘Sultan of frickin’ Style?”

“Stay in the scene, babe!”

“You’re doing great, Mr. Tsonda,” she says, leaning down to kiss him on the cheek. “Thanks for letting my boyfriend play your role for your weird little wrestling show, and I hope you never come back in person.”

Jake grabs his laptop again, as the shower starts running. A little curl of a smile appears on his face, as he clicks to another section of PRIME’s history. And he thinks: There’s something real here for me.

/~/~/~/~/

“What’s something real to you? Something meaningful or profound.”

The sports psychologist is prying. Chandler knows it’s his job, knows it’s probably healthy to have even one scant place to have an honest conversation, no smarm, sass, or sarcasm. No joking through the pain.

And yet.

“The magic of cinema, and Nicole Kidman’s fervor for it,” Tsonda says, arms folded across his chest.

Chandler is not the picture of open-minded acceptance.

Dr. Lisser’s smile widens, a gleaming set of bright whites splitting the gray of his beard. He wears glasses, which Chandler expected. He’s jacked, which Chandler didn’t expect. According to the website bio that the Model Citizen read a half-dozen times before picking up the phone, Lisser’s experience as a collegiate rugby player, and then a professional abroad, got him interested in the psychology of athletes.

“I’m perfectly comfortable shooting the breeze with you for the rest of our time, Chandler. Though I got the sense from your intake questionnaire that you want to deal with some real issues.”

“Got plenty of those,” Tsonda says. He reclines further back into the loveseat, the only furniture for patients in this small but warmly provisioned office. “I just, no offense, don’t think talking to you helps me solve them. It’s a wins and losses thing. You either go out there and win, or you don’t.”

“Have you ever played team sports?” Dr. Lisser asks.

Chandler barks out a cold laugh. “You’ll never believe this, but I wasn’t the type. Did a swim team once. Didn’t play nicely with others. I won a couple races, and then broke my hand on my teammate’s nose.”

“What happened?”

“What does it ma…” Tsonda sighs and relents. “He said ‘I didn’t know you could swim. I thought it was all boat people where you come from.”

“Pretty awful,” Dr. Lisser says, in the warm but amoral voice familiar to Tsonda from years of therapists. “Can you tell me why you think your job is so binary? Just wins and losses?”

“They put your record up in big bright blue letters on the world’s most trafficked pro wrestling website,” Tsonda answers. “They put it up on a chyron every time you walk out of the back on TV. Winners sell t-shirts and losers get squeezed on their next contract. Winning is the, whaddyacallit…the coin of the realm.”

“If I understand how your organization works, then I believe your name also shows up in a chyron edged with gold to indicate that you’re already a Hall of Famer. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you said in your questionnaire that you worry ‘not at all’ about money. Is it accurate to say that you never need to sell another shirt no matter how long you wrestle?”

“I don’t need any of this,” Tsonda says. Does he mean the therapist’s office, the return to PRIME, the attempt to get back in the wins column? Shrug emoji.

“That’s great,” Dr. Lisser says. The doctor must see Tsonda’s side eye, because he clarifies, slowing down as he explains. “That’s a very healthy way of looking at your work. If you don’t need the validation of success, what about it fills your cup? What energizes you?”

“They’ve yet to make a drug that feels as good as throngs of people chanting your name, or hearing the hammer against the bell in the short space before they announce you as the winner, or professionally, legally putting someone in the dirt who has to call you the better man if they can’t beat you.”

“Do you think you’d be happy if your career ended tomorrow?”

“Fuck no,” Tsonda says. An involuntary cringe curls his lips. “Sorry, but no. Hell no.”

“And why do you think that is?” Dr. Lisser asks.

“‘I’m still too good at this to do anything else.”

Nobody speaks. Tsonda knows the doctor’s technique, and that it’s intended to keep him talking. He loves talking.

“No really. I’m too entertaining on the mic, and too gifted in the ring,” he says. “When I’m on TV, those are the segments, the matches, the moments that are just…better. And I’m in the rarified air where I can admit it, say it out loud, and twenty thousand screaming loonies – and I mean that with love and respect – agree with me.”

He’s on a roll. The promo’s on fire. He keeps going.

“They say in therapy – you know, regular therapy for just trying to be a person on Earth and not go insane or drive over a bridge without stopping halfway – that we all have ‘neighbors,’ right? Those various voices of self-talk in our head. And when I do this, when I step out on the stage or through the ropes, my neighbors all sing, in perfect harmony, you’re the fucking best to ever do it.”

Tsonda extends his arms out on both sides, and smiles.

“And I believe them.”

The crowd in Tsonda’s head goes wild.

“So why are you losing?”

The crowd in Tsonda’s head makes a sound like they’ve just seen someone’s career end.

The Sultan of Style stares back at Dr. Lisser, squinting like the answer might be on the man’s glasses in tiny script somewhere.

“What?” Tsonda replies.

“You have the confidence and the ability. Tell me why you’re losing.”

“And if I do, do you pay me for this hour? Because I don’t take Blue Cross Blue Shield, and I’m real expensive.”

“What’s your best guess?” Dr. Lisser asks.

“I mean, the competition is tough. Tougher than I’ve ever seen. More talent for the same few spots on the mountaintop. More crabs, same size barrel. I’m rusty. I underestimated how long it takes to get back to being the absolute best after such a long time away. And bad luck. Put all that in a witch’s brew and I think you got it.”

“Respectfully, Chandler, no.” Dr. Lisser says this with certainty that takes Tsonda back.

“What do you mean ‘no?”

“Those things may be true, and if I were a little better at the self-interest side of my job, I would tell you we need four or five more sessions for me to get to the root of what’s going on. I’d certainly have a nicer house if I operated that way, but there’s only one thing I see standing in your way.”

People don’t talk to Chandler Tsonda like this. Well, a few do, and he’s legally allowed to beat the shit out of them between four posts. But not civilians.

“Ok,” Tsonda says. “Fine.” He takes a deep breath, and starts his answer.

“I’m treating this like a victory lap, a postlude. The bookend to something already written. I dominated, and I went out close to the peak of my powers. I never reckoned with what it’d mean to be done with my profession, my craft, my one true love. And here I am, treating my comeback like an epilogue for something that’s already over, already proven.”

“And you and I both know,” Tsonda continues, “that in order to win at the highest levels, to compete with the world’s greatest, you can’t have a mental backup plan. No parachute. You can’t have ‘I’m already great’ running through your mind. ‘Well, if I lose then I’m still a Hall of Famer’ has no place in my story anymore. This has to be something new, an admission of starting back from relative zero, or it’s just a Vegas residency for a legacy act that might as well be in a fuckin’ museum.”

Dr. Lisser softly nods his head, looking a little taken aback. “Not bad. Wait, where are you going? We’ve got—”

Tsonda shutting the door behind him concludes this session.

/~/~/~/~/

The film session, Jake realizes, is going on its fifth hour. Jessie watched her wind down reality show, and went to bed, hours ago. She came in to kiss him goodbye; he’s supposed to be up in a few hours to make the drive to San Diego. But he’s alone in the otherwise dark room, blue light dancing on the wall behind him as he stares at his laptop. The TV sits unused a dozen feet away. Sure, he could watch these old Chandler Tsonda clips on the bigger screen more comfortably, but he’s in the attention economy’s great whirlpool of auto-play suggestions.

Jake is aided by the prescient hivemind of the algorithm. It knows who he wants to watch, and it can’t know why, but the steady stream of YouTube clips, in and out of context, have him putting together puzzle pieces.

He watches Chandler Tsonda exorcize his demons. He sees his muse forced to confront his closest friend. Jake goes back almost twenty years to see Tsonda when he was younger than Jake is now.

Jake watches it all. He devours tape, like an athlete studying an opponent. And as his eyes grow bleary, he cannot get past one thing: Chandler Tsonda is a performance. It’s acting. And yes, they’re all playing a role. But this guy, this guy is Daniel Day-Lewis; sunken entirely into a role so deep that it’s hard to say if he’s more persona or person.

The little research he’s done has shown Jake that some wrestlers, mostly Mexican ones, take great pride in wearing masks. The masks are characters and totems all in one; this one might mean you are a literal phoenix, and that one might mean that you are descended from a long line of men who use “the dragon” as a symbol of their power. But for this man, the man Jake has to inhabit for as long as the gig pays, “Chandler Tsonda” is the mask.

And he thinks: anyone can wear a mask. *I* can wear a mask.

/~/~/~/~/

Tsonda puts the mask over his face, and pulls his hat low. Turns out a KN-95 is the perfect way to avoid being recognized. And while he still lives nearby, it’s a different thing to be back in San Diego proper. There, the people know Chandler Tsonda. So his solution as he walks up to the Petco Park box office is to don a mask that wards off viruses and marks.

“Hi!” he says, a little overeager, and trying to project his voice from behind the mask. A woman who appears to be in her 20’s, with a streak of blue through her hair, looks back at him from behind the glass typical of ticketing cubicles. Her name tag says MIKAELA.

“Welcome to Petco Park, how can I help you?”

“My name is Chandler Tsonda. T-S-O-N-D-A. This is for Sunday night’s event. There are two tickets being held in my name and I just wanted to make sure they’re all set.”

If she recognizes the name, she makes no show of it, and leafs through several printed sheets of paper.

“Yep, it’s right here,” she says. “Two lower bowl tickets for…” She scans the tickets in front of her, and reads off of them. “Tropical Turmoil. Valid for Night One and Night Two.”

“Great. And the name for pickup?”

She looks down at her list.

“Sorry about that, Mr. Tsonda. That field is blank. Who should we leave these for?”

He feels a pinch in his guts, a twisted shard stuck somewhere below his ribs.

“His name is…” Tsonda looks down at his hands. Sees a scar that reminds him of the man he’s been leaving tickets for. “Hey, you know what?”

Mikaela looks back blankly.

“Do you want to go to the show?” Tsonda asks.

“I don’t think you can—”

“I can. It’s wrestling. Pro wrestling. You got a little brother or a cousin or something, Mikaela?”

“Brother,” she answers.

“How old?”

“Twelve. He likes the Padres.”

“This is like if the Padres whacked each other with bats for three hours, with a bunch of pyrotechnics and flips. He’ll love it.”

“What about your friend?” she asks.

“My friend’s not coming. He’s old news,” Tsonda says. “If your brother doesn’t want to come, then you go, or sell the tickets. Whatever you like. But don’t hold those for me.”

“Umm, ok. Thank you?”

“Don’t mention it. Have fun.”

Chandler’s walking away before he can think too hard about what he’s done.

He takes off the mask. He decides to start something new.