The Anglo Luchador
“Cool! A Luka jersey! Thanks Mom! Thanks Dad!”
Christmas morning at the Battaglia household is a spectacle of excess. Neither Tom nor Tam wanted their kids to feel like Santa skimped on holiday spirit, even after both were old enough to know the real St. Nicholas was an amalgam of their parents. As Zo hurriedly put the jersey of his favorite player over his pajamas, Vinny took the immediate cue to open the next of his presents. Rectangular in shape, loosely wrapped. He squeezed it first with his eyes lighting up in a moment of anticipation before tearing into the paper as if he were a hungry badger sinking claws into unctuous and tactile marmot skin.
“I… I love it!”
He held aloft the Wrestling Buddy plush pillow/stuffy. It was his father in his gear, part of the Series 1 line available at the PRIMEporium, along with Brandon Youngblood, King Blueberry, and Hayes Hanlon. Tom couldn’t hold back the single tear from his eye as he watched his son beaming with exuberance over his present. He was about to lift the novelty coffee mug that read “Luchadores do it muy caliente” when he felt the vibration in his pocket from his cellphone. He wryly smiled at the thought of yet another Merry Christmas text in the flurry he’d been receiving, but his face turned sour when he saw who was on the ID.
Killean Sirrajin.
“The fuck… it’s Christmas, can’t this work shit wait?” he muttered under his breath so as not to dampen the joy of his children unboxing their obscene bounties.
“You, Pax. Main event ReV 21. Barbed wire. Announcement after lunch. Thought I’d give you heads up. GL.”
He plopped on the couch and slumped over. There wasn’t anything or anyone else in the world he wanted to look at other than his two sons, still ravenously tearing at wrapping paper. Their movements appeared in bullet time to the old luchador, Vinny using his new Wrestling Buddy as a weapon to antagonize his brother. Zo swatted it away with an uppercut, and at that moment in time, the blood in Tom’s veins grew cold enough to freeze nitrogen.
–
Paxton Ray whispered something in Jon Rhine’s ear as the fans at ringside cheered, not knowing was coming next. A shove. A lift. An uppercut. Jon probably wasn’t paralyzed here. No one’s really sure which of the Lullabies did it, or whether it was the brainbuster. But the first one was the shock and awe, the onset of blitzkrieg, the terror.
–
“You know, I’m not at all shocked that you’re having regressions, Tom.”
Dr. Steven Barone did not look up from his notepad in his address at this particular point in another therapy session with the PRIME Intense Champion.
“Even back to our first session, you were quite shaken that your friend Jon had suffered trauma. Now, you’re in the ring with the man who did it to him. It’s normal to feel feelings of fear.”
Tom sighed deeply, squirming in his seat as if it were on fire.
“Fear.”
“What, did that word strike a nerve? I feel it’s the most appropriate thing to describe how you’re feeling. Unless you’ve got a better way to describe the stuff going on in your head.”
He finally looked up from his book.
“It’s clear you see parallels. And this Paxton fellow, he’s shown that this violent streak is a bloodlust. So it’s natural to think that maybe he could do to you…”
“That’s not my issue.”
Tom shot up from the couch and put both his hands on his head.
“I… I’m not allowed to be afraid. I can’t fear.”
“Look, if you start quoting Dune to me, I’m going to have to charge you double.”
The doctor’s attempt at humor landed flat.
“I’m just saying, I can’t be afraid because I’m the guy who walks through hell and has to get out on the other side alive. And if not, who the fuck am I?”
“A human being?”
Tom flopped back onto the couch.
“I can read your body language though. You are afraid. But you have to know that what happened to Jon happened because his guard wasn’t up. The odds of you suffering grievous injury for yourself are not as high, and PRIME has shown it will pay…”
“I’m not afraid for me, doc,” he interrupted.
The doctor looked at him inquisitively, waiting for him to continue. Tom hyperventilated. The admission of fear took as much out of him as his battle with Tony Gamble at Colossus.
“I’m afraid my kids will see me, especially Vincenzo. They’ll see me broken, in a heap. I don’t wanna fail them, doc. I… I’m…”
“It’s okay. You won’t fail him if by the minuscule chance your career ends because of the capricious actions of another competitor…”
“But that’s the thing, doc. Why am I doing this? Why? Why did I want a piece of his mud-caked ass after he did what he did to Jon? Even after Jared took his ton of flesh? I went into the offices, I told Lindsay. I told Killean. I even told Matt before I knew his fool ass was coming back. I told them I wanted the wolves. I wanted the danger.”
A pregnant silence.
“And then,” he continued, “I got scared. When it all hit me. And now I’m afraid I’m gonna be a worthless douchebag in a wheelchair all because I got exactly what I wanted. Some father I am.”
“You know…”
“Doc, can we cut the meeting short this week? I’m not really in the mood anymore.”
–
Mark Lemon just wanted to get a footing coming out of college. For his troubles working at the MGM Grand, he had to shadow around King Blueberry, the dipshit alter-ego of the far more nuanced and well-intentioned Jared Sykes. He didn’t ask for it, but the moment his bosses gave him his assignment, he was bound for tragedy. Urine soaked his pants. Blood stained his clothes. His body healed, but only he could tell you how Paxton Ray throwing him through a plate-glass window scarred his brain. He would probably lie to you and say he was okay too.
–
“Uce, can you believe it?”
Timo Bolamba and The Anglo Luchador walked at different paces back into the locker room at the Honda Center, victorious in their tag match at PWA-1 against SAIGO, SHOOT Project’s puroresu technicians. It was Timo’s first match in 15 years, yet he moved more gracefully than a gazelle, flew more beautifully than a crane ascending from a pond, hit harder than a mama bear swinging at a threat to her cubs. Yet he was the one with a spring in his step. The old luchador moved as if he was the one who bled buckets in the match, not one of his poor opponents.
“C’mon man!” Timo said with a playfully aggressive shove. “We won! Wear that glory!”
“Oh yeah. That was killer, man. I can’t believe we spammed top rope moves TWICE on them during that thing. I don’t remember going high that much in forever.”
“Then why are you acting so glum?”
His mask could not hide the lack of exuberance. The match lasted nearly 42 minutes… 42 grueling, bloody minutes. It was a tag team war in every sense of the word, and Tom felt it in his joints and his muscles. The physical pain didn’t weigh on him nearly as much as the mental baggage did though.
“They weren’t even trying to hurt us, uso.”
“What in Tagaloa’s name do you mean? It’s a wrestling match.”
“Yeah, but there’s a difference. Trying to win and trying to maim, right? I mean, you’ve been there. Giving and receiving end. I watched the Ambulance Match with Gibson.”
Timo put his arm around his friend’s shoulder.
“What is this about, Tom?”
“I feel like hell now. What happens when the guy on the other side of the ring doesn’t have to break a ref’s count? What happens when the guy on the other side of the ring isn’t trying to win a match as much as he’s trying to end a life?”
Timo realized immediately what it was about.
“Tom, I’m going to tell you this as a friend, a peer, and as an uso – you’re ridiculous.”
Tom looked away.
“You act as if you don’t have any agency in the matter,” the Silencer continued. “You don’t keep that belt you have because your opponents are polite. Paxton Ray…”
“…is a monster.” Tom interjected finally. “He’s a monster, and I’m not afraid I can’t do anything. I’m afraid I can’t do enough. He doesn’t stop, ever. Didn’t you see how far Jared had to go to put him down? He had a reason more than a belt or pride. What if my reasons don’t have enough weight?”
“I know why you fight, Tom, uso. I know why you fight and those reasons are enough. Tell me, those ghosts you saw this time last year, the ones you told me about. When was the last time you saw one?”
“They’re not the…”
“Answer me.”
“I don’t even remember.”
“That’s right. I don’t even know if you were hallucinating or making shit up or, by the hair on Maui’s head, you really did see gods appear before your eyes, but you said they gave you a quest. To be the Spear of… who?”
He sighed. “Huitzilopochtli.”
“Yeah. And the fact that they haven’t appeared to you tells me either the lesions on your brain magically healed or you fulfilled your quest and have become their warrior.”
“I didn’t expect you to remember that.”
“Samoans don’t forget things easily, Tom. Also, you have two sons that look up to you. And Jon is as much your friend as he is mine. You have skin in this game, but you wouldn’t need it anyway.”
Tom stood silently for a moment before undoing the laces on the back of his blood-spattered mask.
“I think you’re full of shit, Timo. But you know what, you’re right. Now’s not the time to worry about bullshit.”
He yanked the mask off his face.
“Let’s go get shitfaced to celebrate the man of the goddamn hour. Timo fuckin’ Bolamba, the true winner of PWA-1.”
Timo let out a hearty laugh as they went to their locker stalls to get changed.
–
Justin Wheelwright didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. As soon as Paxton Ray threw the first of his interminable number of punches, his endpoint for the evening would be a local hospital in St. Louis. Neither did Sammy Broadway, although everyone in the Grays camp SWEARS that one was accidental. It’s hard to give the devil the benefit of the doubt. Peach Backshots looked like she was going to be the third of his opponents at the Belmont Classic to spend the night hooked to a monitor. Wheelwright and Broadway, what happened to them was sad. But Tom didn’t attend the Belmont as part of their parties. He was there for Miranda Dos Casas. The blows started raining down. She barely moved to avoid them. The towel. He grabbed a towel from the ring doctor and heaved it in the ring to make sure she’d make it out alive. There was one problem.
She threw that motherfucker right back at him.
–
“Andale! Andale!”
Whenever Pedro “El Mofongo” Santamaria wasn’t satisfied with the pace sparring, he would yell for his charges to pick up the pace. Miranda Dos Casas was game. Her opponent, a kid by the name of Jose DeLeon, was not. Normally, Jose was quick on his feet, ready for a challenge. However, the two bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 he drank the night before left him with a hangover that would’ve rendered Michael Jordan unable to finish off the Utah Jazz in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals. The erstwhile Peach Backshots sprung him with an armdrag, and waited to give another. And waited. And waited.
“Arriba! Mira, attack if he’s not going to spring up!”
“Ugh, I can’t even with him, Mofongo. Give me someone I can sink my teeth into.”
“Okay, I volunteer as tribute.”
Tom stepped forward from the musty shadows in the poorly-lit wrestling school.
“Pfft, you boomer. You don’t even have your gear with you.”
Both Pedro and Tom laughed at Mira’s outburst.
“I’m going to go find Lazaro, see if he laid off the cervezas last night.”
As Pedro walked off, Mira slid from the ring effortlessly to find a seat on the apron.
“So what are you doing here?”
“Eh, need to clear my head. There’s a lot on my mind.”
“Clear your head? Here? It smells like 1972 in here.”
“And how would you know what that smells like, Miss ‘I Call Everyone Even a Day Older Than Me a Boomer?’”
“Shut up, boomer.”
They both shared a laugh.
“Anyway, I got a question for you. Why did you throw the towel back at me?”
She shot him the world’s longest recorded side-eye.
“Are you seriously going to litigate this shit again? I think I proved exactly why you were a scaredy-pants stage mom throwing it in the first place.”
“Well yeah. But you know what he did. If there wasn’t that pause in the match…”
“Shut up, oldhead. I did what I did because of what people like Pedro taught me. What he taught you. The fight is the fight. It’s not over until it’s over, and if it’s over, unless you’re one of those losers like Ned Reform, someone will make sure it’s over.”
“The generation gap is closed by dunking on Ned Reform. God bless the simple things.”
“I mean, you see him up close. It’s giving total unwashed ass when he’s around.”
As a dad, Tom was no longer bound to remain hip to the lingo of the cool kids, so he just smiled and nodded, pretending he was awash in the zeitgeist of all the people who use that phraseology in real life.
“Look, what happened to Jon took everyone by surprise. But the only way that happens to you, Tom? If you let it. And you don’t seem like the kind of person who’d let it happen to you. You wouldn’t let it happen to me, even though there was no chance in hell I was going to let it happen to me.”
“What the fuck man.”
Peach shot him another glance, this time in disbelief.
“I’m the old one,” he continued. “Why the fuck is it you’re the one teaching me shit?”
“Because I’m young and stupid, and you’ve been dropped on your head way too many times, oldhead. I mean, for someone who’s this arch luchador, you really don’t wrestle like one.”
“Hey… shut up.”
“Alright, alright,” Pedro’s voice called from the back of the school. “Lazaro didn’t spend last night drinking, and he’s ready to go.”
With a wink and a smile, Mira rolled back into the ring to press on with her training. Tom stood by, observing the progress she was making.
–
It replayed in his mind on loop. Paxton picks Jon up. Paxton throws Jon in the air. Paxton uppercuts him like video game Mike Tyson does to Little Mac. Jon crumples in a bloodied heap. Yes, the count was officially seven, but the loop doesn’t stop in his head. It’s an endless stream of the blunt force attempts at decapitating Jon Rhine, but lately, Jon’s face gets less and less visible. It’s masked, and the hand grips the Intense Championship. With each Lullaby, the grip on the title loosening. A fist like a hammer slams into his jaw, the thud sickeningly reverberating through the murky and nebulous space where this corrupted memory plays on repeat. A luchador goes flying comedically through the air, his title belt careening away from his grasp. He turns his gaze away from his attacker to see someone in the crowd with a towel raised.
It’s Vinny.
The white terrycloth floats in the air with his boyish toss, landing a few inches from his masked visage, blood oozing from each opening from the repeated blows to his face. He looks at the towel, then his son. He knows what he has to do.
He throws that motherfucker right back out of the ring.
–
“Vinny keeps bugging me to let him watch your match at the next show.”
Tom sat on the plastic Adirondack chair in his backyard, rim of a bottle of Pacifico pressed to his bottom lip in the unseasonably warm and humid January afternoon. Tam’s words caused a dead stop in his sip. “Of course, he can watch it,” he thought to himself. “He’s seen every single one of my bloody wars.” But he knew Paxton Ray was different. After all, he’d been setting the precedent all week.
“I know we both have our concerns, babe,” he said before downing a quick slug of Mexican lager. “But I’m not sure you can tell him no. I mean, you let him watch me vs. Royko. That was a bloodbath.”
“You and I both know Paxton Ray is different. We haven’t gotten any updates from Shweta about Jon lately. It’s a long road for him, and who knows if he’ll even be able to walk it again.”
“Look…” he said trailing off momentarily. He took another sip of his beer, fraught for the words he needed to say. “I know I’ve been in hysterics since Christmas. But I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”
He paused again, putting the beer down on the cheap plastic endtable, the sure sign of a white suburban family in the Northeast United States. He looked deeply into his wife’s eyes.
“I did a lot of thinking. A lot of soul-searching. What happened to Jon. That was a sucker punch. He won’t sucker punch me, and if he does, then I fucked up. But the point is…”
He looked upon the basketball hoop on the blacktop. Zo, wearing his Luka Doncic jersey, handled the basketball with the grace and swiftness of the man whose shirt he wore, utterly dumbfounding his brother Vinny’s attempts at playing defense.
“…I don’t know if I’ll win. I mean, I know I can win, but this is PRIME. No easy outs, right? Paxton is a real motherfucker.”
Finally, Vinny saw his opening out on the court. He saw his brother go uncharacteristically wide with his handle, and he poked his hand in wildly. Flailing fingers caught just enough of the ball to send it flying wildly onto the grass. Vinny couldn’t get control of it, but he stopped his brother from yet another easy layup.
“DAD! DAD!” he shouted. “I did it! I stopped Zo! Are you proud of me?!”
Tom smiled and picked his beer back up, nodding to his younger son. He turned back to his wife.
“But win or lose, Vinny isn’t going to have anything to fear. I’m going to make him proud.”