Time...

[insert narrator's reflective, cringe-worthy, cliche quote about time that attempts to be poignant here]

And so that was that, with all of the time that had passed, all of my comedic failures served up in the form of room temperature shit sandwiches that I shovel down my pie hole with a glass of some toothless redneck's muddy water- I was at the end of my rope. My neck tightened in the noose and my foot pushing against the back of the chair.

I, Brian Cawood, was plunging into the abyss.

It was around March of 2018, and the initial shaky execution of my plans had started to fester up something fairly substantive. I felt as if we were in a good position even if it were an ill-shapen one nonetheless. Muddy Waters, the biological father of my subject, my documentary cash-cow, my awkward vicarious adolescent obsession, MY Dolly Waters, had just gotten beaten rather severely during an airing of Saturday Savage, losing his newly won XTreme Championship to James Raven.

This was all by design.

Build Muddy up a bit here and there, only to loosen the reigns long enough for him to completely embarrass himself in-front of the world.

Rinse and repeat.

And do it as many times as needed before the rightful heir to the Waters namesake would make her emphatic return to the XWF. Dolly Waters would recapture her glory while my cameras captured her most candid endeavors in doing so.

This I concluded was the only way to draw Dolly out of her seclusion; and not even the most feeble among us could find my interest with this specimen misplaced. She was a goddamned child prodigy for crying out loud. And my soon-to-be video tell-all of her rise from the ashes would've had the likes of Disney executives shitting the bed to get a taste.

But then it all fell apart.

Muddy went off the deep end after that defeat and retreated into rather scary state of heroin abuse and self deprecation in our Los Angeles flat. Jane , the woman who I had hired to be Muddy's on screen talent manager finally washed her hands of the nonsense, leaving us wallowing in our newfound conundrum.

Time. We were running fresh fucking out of time...

"Baahh urgph gotdamn"

My days soon grew consumed with episodes of ensuring Muddy didn't kill himself. My production assistant Matthew and I lifting Muddy's usually lifeless, vomit covered body from the floor and putting him into a tub of ice water, hoping that he hadn't injected lethal doses of fentanyl.

While Muddy would rest up from his binges, my focus shifted entirely toward constructing a means to find Dolly Waters. Scouring the internet. Consulting Private Dicks. Re-watching various footage of Dolly's final moments in the XWF for clues. This soon turned dark, obsessive and unhealthy, aided by cheap whisky and a growing crack-cocaine appetite problem of my own.

In the meantime, after several attempts at getting Muddy back into a suitable enough condition to compete, the XWF had moved on, and eventually moved to a new network. The door to my most reasonable of plans had closed entirely and I was left with nothing now other than to consult the believe-it-or-not even darker halls of my haze.

I had to become Dolly Waters.

How fucking cliche, right?

And even beyond that, how fucking strange. But seriously, isn't that what great psychiatrists, actors and detectives and shit do to become closer to the answers of what motivates them? All of that Sigmund Ledger, Agent Starling type of shit... wait, that's not right. Maybe I'll just pop on a blond wig, paint my nails pink, go learn hick speak and start beating men twice my size to a bloody pulp and BAM! Dolly Waters will fall right into my lap!

At this point I was unrecognizable anyway.

Being a naturally small guy as it were, the crack and booze diet and reduced my frame to a mere ninety pounds. My face shrunken and bony in the broken bathroom mirror's reflection.

"Muddy..."

I turned to my vomit covered friend in the bathtub,

"..."

His glossy eyes turned up from his gut to meet mine, peering out across the gulf between comatose and reality,

"I've procured us a home in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. It's small. But it should suit us well. I think it's best we get out of California."

"A'right..."

And so we did just that, Muddy, Matthew and I, after converting the final scraps of Muddy's XBux into actual currency, buying the small little back wooded shack in the most rural of areas in an already rural state, ventured back to the epicenter of the Waters. Their Old Kentucky Home.

After several months pillaging through exploratory bullshit into Dolly Waters, the ins, the outs, the what-have-you's- all of it almost as dreadful as this entire monological recap has been thus far, I had nothing. Zilch. Nada. Nathan.

Yet I had become consumed with this cramping swirl of meaningless information. It kept leading me back to the same conclusion. Some time around August of 2017, Dolly Waters vanished and no one that I would consider relevant with the information we know about her knew anything.

"For the last fucking time, I haven't heard from that girl in years! Now stop calling my office!"

Not her former manager, Paul Heyman.

"My daughter is dead goddamnit! And the sooner y'all leave it the fuck alone, the sooner I can start gettin' my social security check on her!

Not her fun loving whore of a mother, Nadine.

"..."

Not her former mentor, Morbid Angel.

"If I knew, I sure as fuck wouldn't tell some scumbag like you, or her miserable excuse of a father anything."

Not her former tag team partner, Thaddeus Duke.

There was nothing. And I was now nothing as well. It seemed as if the dragon I had been chasing all of these years was as real as any dragon ever were real.

And so here you've all found me now, years of my life and a once promising career down the drain searching for the ghost of that nightmare you keep waking up from, the one that drives you insane that you can't fall back asleep to finish. It has driven me to the end of this actual rope in my hand, my feet to the edge of this actual chair where I stand...









...but before I can finally fall to sleep...





















There's a bang at the door.










"Anderson County Sheriff's Deputy!",

I collapse down to the dusty floor of the living room in a heap, unaware if I had died already or not. I shiver my way back onto my frail legs and stumble over towards the door like some sort of loon who only knows how to gargle and groan.

With a reasonably unreasonable sense of reinvigoration, I swing the front door open towards me, instantly lifting up my arm to block the sun beams as they seared my retinas.

"'scuse me, son. Anyone by the name of Muddy Waters live here?"

The big grizzly bastard in the brown uniform asked,

"Mu? Murr?"

He's giving me this look that the rest of the Jacksons must have given Michael after he turned white

"Mu, muuu, MUDDY! Yeah, Muddy!"

The deputy's eyes widening as he slowly nods his fat head in agreement

"Yeah, umm..."

I hesitate. Why do I hesitate? Why would I care if Muddy is in an even worse state than me? He's probably been out and got caught fucking robbing someone or something again. I'm just ready for this nightmare to be over.

"Umm, yeah he's in the back."

The deputy looks on incredulously as I begin to lead him inside of our pit of a home. He seems to gag a bit at the door,

"Better yet, son. Why don't you just tell him to come out here."

"Whatever you say officer..."

And just as I step out of the doorway,

"JUST WHAT IN THE FUCK IS THAT?!"

he shouts, pointing toward the ill-constructed noose hanging from the light fixture in the center of the room,

"Oh, it's uh, well, for the, uh it's laundry..."

"It's Muddy's dreamcatcher. Always been mines. Got it from one them shaman native folks down at the fleamarket,"

Muddy emerges, shirtless and smelling of shit, weighing a good hundred pounds less than when we'd last seen him crushing a can of Natural Ice in his hand.

"Son, are you Muddy Fitzgerald Waters?"

"Damn straight..."

he said, in a glorious type a redneck way that only Muddy could pull off,

"You filed a missing persons report in California, for your daughter? Well we've been lookin' all over for you. We think we may have found her."

...to be continued...

3x XTreme Champion
2x Tag Team Champion (w/ Vita Valenteen, w/ Charlie Nickles)
2x Hart Champion
2x Television Champion

3x Star Of The Month
August ‘21, May ‘17, October ‘16

3x RP Of The Month
What light through sonder... my perception breaks.
Tranquility: For Old Times Sake
Manifest Victory

my loves:
[spoiler]