"You ever feel like no matter what you do, you're just running in circles?" I ask, ostensibly to Isabel Mercier — PR savant and protégé to my dear absent (physically and emotionally) manager Zane Kingsley III — but mostly to myself. This whole song and dance we're doing, me with my feet up on her desk as she pretends to not notice, me being here at all, is just a formality. Something I do with her because I used to do it with him. Between Zane's absence and her apt pupil off on some mission to find himself while working as a bodyguard for Geert Wilders or something, we've been seeing a lot of each other.

Isabel sighs, pushing my feet off her desk with her elbow while her eyes don't leave her laptop's screen. "Normally I take that as a sign to get off the fucking track."

"No, like it's a goddamn chain around my throat, ya know?"


"God, I was that were me right now."

I scoff, placing my feet back where they were and shooting a glance around Isabel's uncharacteristically corporate catalog office. "What's got you in a such a mood?"

"The usual," she begins as my eyes narrow on the stock 'hang in there' kitten poster on her wall. "Most of Zane's old clientele won't speak to me, the ones that do only do so to tell me to fuck off, and for the third time this week I'm here, playing therapist to least self-aware 'self-aware' person I've ever met."

My gaze returns to her and I can feel the corners of my mouth twitch into a frown as I study her face. She's pissed; I can tell by the popping vein on her forehead. I swallow bile building in the back of my throat and swing my feet off her desk, standing up.

"Is that so?"

Through her narrow-eyed, glaring anger, she cracks a slight chuckle. "What's wrong, you big baby? Don't like when someone points it out?"

"Maybe you shouldn't talk like that to the one client you got that still takes your phone calls."

"Maybe that'd hurt my feelings if I were ever the one calling you."

I swallow hard on a mouthful of spit. She stares right through me, as if she's expecting someone else to walk through the door. I shake my head with my eyes shooting down to the floor and sigh. The floors are spotless — don't know where she's getting the money to pay the help.

She cuts me off as I open my mouth.

"You are running in circles, Luca. That's why you feel like it. You tell me that you wanna branch out, that you don't want to go the rest of your life known only as that one wrestler guy, then you turn down every gig I try and land you and for what?" She pushes out her chair and explodes out of her seat, jabbing a finger in the air at me. "For you to spit in my fucking face and put your name on an XWF contract without so much as a courtesy call. Every single time you make the slightest gesture in the direction of personal growth you plunge yourself back into the abyss like you're trying to recreate 2013. That's why Zane ghosted you, dumbshit."

My face, surely beet red, is on fire. There's a tightness in my chest that wasn't there twenty seconds ago. My hands shake, fists clenching and unclenching of their own volition as I catch Isabel, so fucking proud of herself, stifling a sneer. Oh, you got me all figured out, is that right?

"Why did he ghost you?"

She blinks, her eyes suddenly wide with shock. That's right, hun, I still got a trick or two up my sleeve.

"Who?"

"Zane. Finn," his name from my lips must feel like poison in her ear; she cringes at the mention. "Everyone you hitch your wagon to fucks off eventually. Does Zane even check in on his favorite student? When's the last time you even talked to the Sauerkraut Crusader?"

Taken aback, her eyes dart back to her desk.

"We're in the same goddamn boat, sister. Drop the sanctimony."

"You're an asshole, you know that?" Her voice breaks and she turns away from me. I can't help but smile.

"I've been told."

"Of course you have. That's your thing, isn't it? Treat everyone close to you like shit, and then worry yourself with the fear that none of them actually like you. That they'll throw you out like yesterday's garbage when you're no longer useful because who in their right mind would ever want to spend time with someone so fucking toxic? Did you go and get Austin Fernando hooked on coke?"

She turns back to me, a defiant smile on her face in spite of the lone tear streaming down her cheek.

"Right, right. I remember now, you two were never friends. He was just looking to be legitimized and you needed a new set of coattails to ride. Ain't that right, bag carrier?"

She wipes the tear away, leaning over the desk.

"You can keep turning all your fucking emotional hangups back on me, or you can sit down and tell me why you're going back to wrestling for the umpteenth time."

My sigh turns to a groan as I retake my seat, and Isabel retakes hers. She pushes her laptop out of the way and looks me dead in the eye, her face suddenly blank.

"I guess I'm just drawn to it. Like it's in my blood or something."

"But you hate it. You begged me to get you a gig that outside the business. You didn't even wanna be a wrestler in that new Refn project—"

"Did that ever get off the ground?"

"—no, which is a shame but is also not important. You stress that you don't want your legacy defined by being a C-level wrestler awkwardly forced into a B-level position. That maybe, if given a chance, you'd like to erase the memory of you as a wrestler from pop-cultural memory. But you can't."

"You keep saying that like there's some contradiction here."

"Isn't there?"

"Nah fam, that's true. All of it. I hate this fucking business and everything that it stands for. I hate everyone in this business with every fiber of my being. I'd rather rot in obscurity if it meant going back in time and convincing myself to stick to fucking gangbanging. But we're here now, bae. This is what my life is. So I'm going to keep on dragging myself back into the ring and making an ass out of myself until my heart explodes."

Isabel pinches her nose, shaking her head.

"Why now? Why do this now, when I finally line up work for you? Work that might actually help pull you out of whatever self-destructive cycle you insist on subjecting yourself to."

I cock my head, as if pondering the question, though the answer is obvious.

"Lethal Lottery."

There's that vein again. If looks could kill, I'd be one dead son of a bitch.

"You sabotaged an audition because of a fucking gimmick tournament?"

"Are you really that shocked, or do you just think you oughta be?"

She scoffs, her face in her hands. "Nothing you do shocks me, Luca. We're all collectively past that, now."

"Sounds like someone's trying to convince herself."

"Okay, I'll bite. Why Lethal Lotto? Why not literally anything else?"

"Because I've never been in one. Always seemed like I just missed those."

She leans back in her chair, rubbing her temples.

"I'm just going to let you keep talking while I fight the urge to leap over this desk and throttle you and/or throw myself out the window."

"Ain't much more to it than that, really. Like yeah, the itch has been there, but the timing just seemed to line up for once. And like you said, I love me a good pair of coattails to ride, don't I?"

Isabel rolls her eyes.

"And I suppose you came all this way in the first place to rant about your opponents to a captive audience. Maybe vent a little about Tommy Wish. Then in a couple of days we can both marvel as to how this entire conversation got leaked to the internet despite an apparent lack of any kind of recording device."

"That is always something I always wondered, but no. I'm not gonna talk about The Big Shank or Kris the Hammer von the Hammer von the Hammer von I keep repeating the Hammer because I forgot which nazi village he comes from."

"Bonn."

"Does Finn have friends up that way?"

"Wouldn't know."

"Right. But yeah, him. Von Maur. Nah, I don't think I'm gonna say anything about them, truthfully. Not to you, not to the subscribers of my youtube channel where I exclusively review different pairs of grip gloves, not to the press, should they come a knockin'."

Isabel eyes me curiously, a reluctant grin creeping across her face.

"Yeah, right. That's never been the Luca Arzegotti way."

"And a couple years ago, I'd be calling Kris a big fuckin' oaf with Ghost Tank syndrome and shrieking about Big Shank being a washed up has-been with absolutely zero sense of irony, really digging into their psyches to pull out the shit that cuts to the bone but right now, in the year of our lord twenty-hundred and nineteen, I don't think I will. You know why?"

"I'm sure you'll tell me."

"Because I've spent so much goddamn time doing it. Immersing myself in the worlds of these people I cannot stand, all in the hunt for content. And in doing so, in dragging myself through this shit in the name of maintaining a brand for being the guy who cuts deep, who hits hard, I realized something very important about myself. At the end of the day, I just do not fucking care about the inner lives of my co-workers. And it's had a terrible effect."

"What's that?"

I grin. Not smirk. Not sneer. Grin. Genuinely. For the first time in forever.

"Because all that time I spent amounted to one thing: all these people living under the delusion that it was about them. It was never about them. It will never be about them. It's only ever been about me. Everything I hit them on was something I wished I could fix about myself. The venom was always directed inwards. Because at the end of the day, when Luca Arzegotti's name is on an XWF card, that match, fuck it that entire show, becomes entirely about Luca. It's never 'I wonder if Tommy Wish can establish himself as a credible threat this week,' 'maybe Kris von Brunhilde can bounce back from a loss in his debut,' 'is this the first stop in Big Shank's legacy tour?'

"It's about 'how is Luca going to find a way to bite the hand that feeds him this time?' It's about what stunt I'll pull, how I'll try to humiliate myself, those around me, and the company that's the sole reason why my name is recognizable. No one tunes in to see me wrestle to see the other guy. And all the while I was dispensing false hope. Hope that the other guys were the attraction. That they needed to be defended. Cheered. You could book me against a broom and after buildup, that fucking thing would get the biggest of the night on its way down the ramp. It's never been about anyone conquering me; it's been about me getting conquered.

"So when XWF puts my face on the marketing material for the cutesily-titled 'Saturday Night Spooks!' despite my last regular appearance on XWF TV dating back to 2016, it's because they know that the moment I was booked, everyone else ceased to matter. Even if I get bounced this week, it'll have accomplished what they were looking for. The crowd pays to watch a couple dudes kick my ass, and for once they get what they paid for.

"As a matter of fact, it's really perfect that this pop-up occurs at Lethal Lottery. In this case, it really is just a couple of dudes. There's no beef here, no long running animosity. I've never met the two guys I'm going to be facing, and I've only had the faintest of interaction with Tommy. It's the ultimate test of my theory: can the existence of Luca Arzegotti in Lethal Lottery get audiences to form attachment to a literal thrown-together tag team (outside of the gimmick itself) by his sheer presence on the other side?

"Spoiler: probably. Another spoiler: Tommy and I are gonna swing dick on 'em. I guess if that counts as talking about them, or talking shit, then I've already failed my promise. But I don't think it does because again, it isn't about them. Maybe that's it, if you're looking for a deeper explanation of why now, Izz. Because I want a hard truth to be learned: that no matter who you are, what title you hold, what your resume looks like, when you're booked against (or with) Luca Arzegotti, there's only one person in the equation that matters, and honey it ain't you.

"Motherfuckers talkin' bout selling ice to eskimos like I ain't got a thriving AC business in Barrow. Try to swing dick like they ain't rocking three inches on a viagra diet. I'm Stevie Wonder to that bullshit, and truth needs to be spoken. There ain't no one out there like me when I'm on my bullshit, so maybe I should stop giving these cocksuckers free publicity."

A beat passes as I wet my throat. Isabel rolls her eyes at me, slowly clapping her hands in a mocking round of applause.

"Real inspiring stuff there, Luca. I give you three days. Tops."

"You know, I gotta say something else."

"I don't know how much more of your monologuing I can handle, dude."

"Nah, it ain't that. I appreciate you standing up for yourself like that. Most people in your position would've just taken it."

Isabel shakes her head, sneering. "They would've just fired you. Try as you might, this still ain't 2013."

I chuckle, despite myself.

"Oh, shit! Guess who just shot me a Twitter DM?"

"Erwin Rommel?"

"Felix Biederman."

I shoot a glance up to the ceiling. I can picture the guy, scruffy hipster with an oddly-shaped head, but I can't for the life of me pin why.

"The guy who did that MMA documentary?"

"Yeah, let's go with that."

"The fuck's he want?"

"The same thing that a hundred dudes with Halloween-socialist themed display names in my mentions want."

"What?"

"All he said was: Luca go on Chapo."