1A: Who I try to be

“So tell me about yourself. What’s your story?” Steve Sayors shuffles in his chair as he crosses his right leg over his left. The cuff of his slacks catches as his legs settle, pulling up a little to reveal a sock emblazoned with the My Little Pony logo. His glasses sit half an inch lower than the bridge of his nose, at risk of falling off at a moment’s notice. The lenses are either perfectly clear, or non-existent. It’s hard for me to tell in this amber light, dulled further drawn blinds. It’s even harder to predict based on Steve’s penchant for fads that can’t be constrained by time, space, or how it actually makes him appear. Either way, he stares at me expectantly through the eyeholes in the frames.

I crouch atop an identical chair, perfectly equidistant to Steve’s from a white speck of lint on the hardwood floor upon which I fix my gaze. The piss-yellow acetate fabric on the quasi-ancient chairs has been worn down over the years to the point where certain sections of the covering are now a mere hair’s width. In these sections, the cumulative build-up of microbial growth and spilt fluids of both bodily and inorganic origin, has darkened the upholstery by several shades. Every time Steve or I move, samples of the chairs’ memories are released into the air of the low-budget hotel room we are socially distanced within.

I flick my eyes up towards Steve’s face, and then back down at the titillating lint. It’s easier to focus down there.

My body temperature rises for just a millisecond as the realisation sinks in that Steve doesn’t remember me. My cheeks flush, my heartrate quickens, and I feel a surge of both anger and embarrassment. The sensation rises from my abdomen and washes over my chest, neck, and face. It’s over as quick as it began, but the imprint on my psyche lingers.

Steve is a part of the foundations – a keystone. He’s been the sole percussionist in an evolving symphony of over one thousand different moving parts and has remained in that position even as the conductor changed: Brown; ; Warstein; Raven; Shank; right up to today. Always diligent, never credited. Steve Sayors may be the only person who holds any memory of the time a teenage boy named George squatted down in his mother’s basement, pants around his ankles, and birthed the XWF twenty-one years ago. If Steve’s ambition were greater, he could offer so much insight and wisdom to the world. Instead, he sits in a crumbling, damp hotel room, across from a neurotic,
shaggy dog of a man seeking refuge from the rain.

Just one in a thousand, I tell myself. That’s all I am. A guy who wrestled a couple of matches before fading into the background – a shadow of the more successful ‘others’.

“Did you hear me?” He asks, oblivious to the cockroach that flits across a crack in the painted ceiling just above his head. My eyes flicker again as I grunt a response. Steve scrunches his lips and looks up at the production team that partners him today. As my eyes rest upon the speck of lint once more, I see a shrug in my peripheral.

A gentle breeze steadily seeps through a gap in the imperfectly sealed windows. It catches the lint and shuffles it closer to a nail in the floorboards. The lint is temporary, like me. The nail, permanent. What would I have to do to be the nail? What would I have to do to be a part of the structure, and not a fleeting guest? Is that even something that I want?

Once… a decade ago maybe? Maybe more?

And now? Right now?

“My story…” I mutter, barely audible. I raise my head, hoping to find a spot over Steve’s right shoulder that I can substitute for the coquettish lint. I’ve used this technique before – it’s not comfortable, but I was told that it would make my audience feel more comfortable. I’ve been learning a lot about the evolutionary benefits that interpersonal relationships provided our ancestors. So far, I’ve yet to see the practical benefits, but what could it hurt to try?

…

I shouldn’t have asked.

Steve moved again in his seat. I should have noticed. I should have heard! I usually would have, But this time…

My eyes meet Steve’s. I look right through those stupid frames of his and see the desperate, cowardly joke that he really is.

Oh shit…

No!

I was doing so well!

I can still stop it. I’ve prepared for this! I can still fucking stop it!

Just breathe.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

No more lies! Not today. Not ever again.

…

Not fucking likely.

The corners of my mouth turn upwards and the blue in my eyes seems to lighten.

…

Fight the change! Fight the chang…

…

“My story…” I chirp. “Oh dearie, my story is one of wonder and amazement, full of astonishing tales of majesty and myth. Where to begin?”

-------------------------------------------

1B: Who I was

Perhaps… just a week ago.

A psychiatric hospital ward in Melbourne, Australia.

There I was, just playing cards in the common room with The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur…

“I’m sorry? The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur?”

“No interruptions, Steve! You’re being rude.”

As I was saying, I was just minding my business playing cards. When suddenly, my life changed forever!

On the vintage television cube in the corner, Sarah Lacklan speared Charlie Nickels through flaming tables at the end of the final day of XWF Relentless. After a few seconds, the screen flickered, and once more Lacklan speared Nickels through the flaming tables. This pattern continued to repeat over and over, just as it has done any time the TV has been turned on for the past month or so.

The TV was always fucking on. 8am to 8pm, every single day. I sometimes wondered if that as another form of therapy. Is there a psychological benefit to repeatedly watching useless cunts be useless? Maybe it bores the crazy out of people.

Ol’ Wacky Wally Watson had had enough. I can’t say that I blamed him. If anybody had been exposed to the ‘bore the crazy out of them’ technique, it was Wally. The poor sod was made to sit and watch 20 years of Centurion promos on repeat. 20 years, can you believe it? All that time, and still not a sign of character growth in sight.

“Actually, Centurion has significantly evolved…”

“I said no interruptions! Gosh, you’re worse than Chris Wallace.”

Wally was sitting with the Bobby Brothers; named for their shared first name rather than surname. Brothers from different mothers if you will. Bobby Book had was a lean man of average height, with dirty long hair that reached right down to the backs of his knees. Bobby Boot, on the other hand, was short and rotund. A short but full black beard, speckled with grey, covered his swollen cheeks and much of his neck.

“I was thinking…” Bobby Book began, as he stared longingly at a chive he had just plucked from his teeth. “What if plants are the ones who are actually farming us?”

Bobby Boot silently expressed his interest through a cocked eyebrow and a twitch in the right side of his mouth.

“I mean, think about it,” Book continued. “They provide us with oxygen to keep us alive, until eventually our bodies are put into the ground for the plants to consume us.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Wally objected. “Why wouldn’t the plants just kill us straight away? Why keep us alive at all?”

“I don’t know, man,” Book shrugged. “It’s their world, we just live in it.”

All Boot could do is pick his nose and eat it. For Wally, however, that was the breaking point. He slammed his hands on the table and rose to his feet. Everyone in the room turned their heads. Everyone except The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur of course.

“Uh… sure.”

“Last warning! No more interruptions, soy-boy.”

Wally began ranting and raving about torture and inhumane living conditions. At the time, I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. The lovely doctors were keeping us safe. I thought everyone understood and agreed about that. Outside of here, men named after birds would beat you up inside a cage. This was my lived experience. For a decade now, I had been safe here. Safe from Jimmy-Jam the Raven Man and all the other nasties. I couldn’t understand why Wally would want to leave. I guess that’s why I called him wacky.

Quickly, the doctor Angels swooped in on Ol’ Wacky Wally. They gave him a Love injection and he went off to his happy place. It was a pretty routine day, all in all. However, for reasons I still can’t explain, something seemed off. The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur nodded knowingly as the doctors escorted Wally out of the room.
I still remember the screech of the chair legs as I pushed it back from the table. By now, the other residents had gone back to their usual business of eating boogers and proselytising about our vegetative overlords. That was the usual process, you see. We were used to it. Now I don’t want to paint the picture that shooting Love juice into a resident was a regular occurrence, just every second day or so. I thought that was totally acceptable.

What was different about today was me. I approached the door that Wally exited through and spoke calmly – very calmly – to a beautiful man with a wonky, warty, nose.

“Is Wally okay?” I asked, innocently. At least so I thought. I had never asked a question like that before, though, so I guess I don’t know how it really came across. It must have been my fault that Wonky Wart raised his eyebrows at his tag team partners on the other side of the room.

It all happened so quickly from there. The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur was gone, and I felt the warmth of the Love being shot into my veins. It swept through me, flushing out all the bad and ugly. The next thing that I remember is awakening in chains, with a mask strapped to my face. I heard Wonky Wart tell a plump, elderly Angel that I had been cussing and cursing and swearing and spitting. Gnashing and biting and thrashing and hitting.

That didn’t sound quite right. I was filled up with Love. Why would I be so icky if the Love were pumping through my body?

It had to be true though. Why else would they have caged me up like a dog? Stripped of all my freedoms to cough and splutter on the old and the weak. Stripped of my right to spread whatever disease I want, to whoever I want. I must have deserved it.

Wonky Wart nodded to the Angel doctor and headed off down the hallway, leaving me alone with my saviour. His heavy footsteps echoed back and forth off the grey walls, making every step sound like six. For her part, the Angel turned to me and spoke with the heavenly voice of someone who has smoked a pack a day for the past forty years.

“Don’t worry, this will all be over soon,” she promised. Ripping my white shirt open from the Velcro that held it together, she applied a peppermint-scented lubricant to each off my three nipples. Following that, an electrode was attached to two of them leaving the third exposed to the cold air, tingling every time the Angel’s Violet Beauregarde-body displaced the molecules near it. She walked over to the far side of the room where a comically oversized, rusted iron switch was positioned.

“This will all be over soon,” she repeated, as she flicked the switch. Volts of electricity surged through my body and the entire room came alive with a neon blue glow. The sound of Zeus’s lightning-filled scrotum slapping against Hera’s dimpled butt-cheeks echoed across the Australian sky. The solitary window burst, spraying a shower of glass and the cobwebs that covered it into the room. The spider that called the web home does several somersaults and lands gracefully in a damp patch of the concrete floor before stumbling away to the safety of a crevice in the corner. The brick wall itself follows the window, blasting inwards as if Mjolnir itself was hurled through it in a confusing mash-up of ancient polytheist pantheons. Somewhere between the fourth arachnid McTwist and a completely undamaged single brick hit my Angel right between her eyes causing a lifelong personality change that will have ongoing ramifications for human rights in the Cabinda exclave of Angola (more on that never), my kinky shackles were shaken loose.

There I stood, with the sun sneaking in through the hole in the wall and empowering me through all three nipples like a perineum being bathed. Through the hole in the wall, I saw The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur beckoning me.

That clever bastard. I knew he would find a way out. I always suspected he would throw a hydrotherapy foundation through the wall or something like that. I never thought he would channel Xolotl himself. I mean, he has a cow’s head, not a dog’s. It makes no friggin’ sense.

But who am I to doubt the gods?

I stepped through the hole in the wall.

This was freedom.

Freedom from the box I was put in. Freedom from the fascists restrictions that I’ve been kept in for far too long now.

In one last act of defiance, I ripped the mask from my face and cast it aside. It clattered against the outer brick façade of the building, scaring the crap out of my spider friend’s family who were still clinging on for dear life.

I stood there, an outlaw. Guns on my hip and a desert whistle in my head.

-------------------------------------------

1C: I can’t figure out who the fuck I am or what my purpose in life is. I just keep making shit up.

“Hold on, hold on, hold on…” Steve harshly snaps. I rapidly blink several times. “What does any of this have to do with why I’m here?”

“What do you mean?” My eyes open wide, turning the lakes of my irises into seas.

“I thought I was coming here to interview someone about the upcoming XWF High Stakes battle royal,” he explains. “All I’ve gotten is a bunch of jibber-jabber about ancient gods, third nipples, and pink minotaurs.”

“Salmon,” I correct him. Accuracy is important.

“What?”

“You said pink. It’s The Salmon-Coloured Minotaur,” I clarify. “He’s very important to this whole story, but we can get to that later if you want. I just thought going through everything in a clear, logical structure would be easier for the viewer at home, but hey, if you want to jump all over the place, then let’s do it your way.”

Steve sighs and rolls his eyes. I know what he’s thinking, I’ve seen this look before. He wants to wrap this up as quick as possible.

“What do you want to know?” I ask, hoping he won’t just ask for my story again. It feels like we’ve already been through that a bit.

“You’re entering the High Stakes battle royal,” Steve begins. “Nobody knows who you are, nobody knows what to expect, what do you have to offer that puts you above everyone else?”

“Nobody knows who I am!” I exclaim. There’s that reminder again. “I’ve actually been here before. I’ve fought for the World Title on Pay-Per-View, and nobody knows who I am!”

I throw my hands up in the air.

“Okay, okay, okay! I was a flash in the pan at best. But that’s a good thing! Don’t you see that?”

“Uh… no?” Steve puzzledly replies.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” I despair. “You’ve got less big picture capacity than the Amazonian acai palm. Sheesh, it’s no wonder that the lianas will rule us all Bobby Book knows what he’s talking about.”

“…What?”

“I already know what everyone is going to say about me!” I ignore Steve’s confusion. “They’re going to call me crazy, weird, delusional, all of those lovely adjectives! They won’t believe my stories; they won’t believe my promises. Every single grub that signs up for the battle royal is going to look at me through the vanilla lens of modernity and expect that everything that’s old is bad, and everything that’s unknown couldn’t possibly be the gravest threat in the universe to their sense of self. I see what people don’t see about themselves. Every single word, every single name that people throw in my direction is going to be a reflection of them, not a representation of the true me.

When push comes to shove, here’s what’s going to happen: douchebag after douchebag will come into that ring. They’ll zig left, but I won’t zig right. I’ll go left to and punch them in their fucking throat. I’m here to make every single person confront their own pathetic realities, and I’m going to do it head on.

I just can’t wait to find out who I get to do the Lambada with.

Any further questions?”

“Uh… no. I think that about does it,” Steve says, seeing his exit, and taking it without even signing off. I seethe while he and his crew pack up their equipment.

Steve’s thinking about me the same way that all the other savages are.

I think people are going to need to see for themselves in order to believe.

-------------------------------------------

1D: The real me

“I don’t care if any of that makes sense. Fuck each and every one of you in your fat fucking asses.