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**Vincent Lane** · (07-25-2016)

I saw your shitty promo, Scully. You couldn’t help yourself, huh? You had to find a way to make fun of a man’s hospitalized mother. Well, good for you, dude.

I also noted that you apparently took my advice and remembered that you were at your best when you were a fucking <img src="https://i.imgur.com/pUgtAVa.gif"> . Solid hypothesis, dude, but poor execution. You can’t just go and dive off of a fifty foot ladder and expect to get the same exact level of slop-browed mongoloid as you had before. That shit was precise. You have to have a very specific amount of CTE to mix into your pre-existing fetal alcohol syndrome, you know? As far as you know, you just gave yourself a brain bleed, or bruised the section of your cerebellum that keeps you from pissing all over yourself at night. Let me know in the morning if that last one’s true, okay?

Dude, I gotta tell you… you need better friends. Ted and Dave? Those two shitheads are gonna get you killed. Didn’t you learn anything when you fell down those stairs a few weeks back? Idiots, man. You know, if you think you are ever gonna be a champion, you’ll need a better entourage. A champion can’t be sitting around playing grab-ass with a motley crew of inbred fucktards like the Union. Trade up, kid. If they don’t get your neck broken knocking you down another flight of stairs they’ll just get you beaten to death by the next person who has to site through one of your shitty impressions, or even worse, your pet names.

Yeah, I’m talking about Vinnie Lame. That’s Gilmour levels of terrible, dude. Frodo came up with a better rib on my name in between popping chancres on his syphilitic dick, but you couldn’t do any better than ‘Lane sounds like lame?’ Fuck. I’m almost as disappointed as that one kid who came to your signing session’s gonna be when he Googles that action figure you swapped out with his limited edition Loverboy with snap-action superkick and realizes you cost him about forty-five bucks. The fucking removable bandanna on that figure is worth more than a rack of Scully’s.

Anyway.

I’m done talking to you, Scull. Done talking, period. I’ve got shit to do and people to see and not a bit of it has to do with your irrelevant, forgettable self. Get some sleep, dude, because the biggest moment of your life is coming at you tomorrow night in London, in the form of my fist connecting with your brittle English teeth.

I’m leaving you with one last thing. A secret, if you will. I mean, not a secret to anyone with any idea of how wrestling works, or any kind of fight for that matter. Or anyone with an IQ over 70. Whatever, none of those apply to you, so it’s a secret as far as we’re concerned. Here it comes. Exactly how this match between you and me is gonna end at Leap of Faith. Spoiler alert, Scully, this isn’t pretty.

Ta ta, fucker.

XOXO.

I’m sitting with my son in a Manhattan Starbucks. I feel like he’s grown a foot taller from the last time I saw him, but that’s not possible, right?

“How’s the macchiato?”

“Huh?”

I must have been daydreaming, staring at him but at nothing at the same time. Hearing words in the real world pulled me right out of it and brought me back to the present. I can feel the iced coffee in my hands again, and see the droplets of water flowing over my fingers clenched around the plastic cup. Pay attention, Vinnie.

“Oh! Oh, yeah, it’s…. good.”

“You haven’t taken a sip.”

Got me. He’s the one paying attention. I jam the green straw into my mouth and suck a mouthful of caramel goo in over my tongue. It’s a burst of cold sugar, with a caffeine aftertaste. I lick my lips and really savor the way I can feel the sugar dissolving, and then I realize I’ve been stalling for the entire time we’ve been sitting at this table. Time to stop trying to bullshit this kid and sack the fuck up.

“Bobby… I’m sorry…”

“Stop. I don’t need that. I invited you here because there’s stuff I need to tell you.”

“Stuff? Like… what kind of stuff?”

He swirls the straw in his iced latte for a moment, looking down and watching the colors blend. Now he’s the one stalling.

“You have to just listen, okay? Just listen and let me get through it all and finish, without interrupting. Can you do that? Keeping your mouth shut isn’t your most well-known attribute.”

Wow. This kid isn’t pulling punches. That one hurt worse than anything I ever got caught with in the ring, that’s for sure. But he’s right. Of course he’s right. That’s what hurt about it.

“Deal. My lips are sealed, dude… you can count on me, not a single…”

The stern gaze and rhythmic rapping of fingers on the table let me know that I’m literally not shutting up right this very second.

“Sorry. Go on.”

He waits. Takes a sip of his latte and looks around nervously. I can see him struggling with a decision. He doesn’t fully trust me, and why should he? The last time he did that I packed him up and put him on a plane out of my way.

“Okay… okay, look. This isn’t easy so it’s just got to come out. I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching, especially since coming up here to New York and meeting so many different types of people. I’ve been thinking about myself. About who I am.”

I almost fucked up. My mouth opened and I leaned forward. I swear I was just going to give some reassurance and let him know he has nothing to worry about, but the way he sunk in his chair let me know that all he saw was a narcissist dying to be a part of the conversation. So, I just brought that green straw back into my mouth and played it like that was the goal all along. His eye roll was proof that he wasn’t buying it, but he snickered. Not an angry one, either. A snicker that said ‘I see your effort and you look ridiculous, but I appreciate it.’

“You know… I watch a lot of what you do. I’ve always been into the XWF, even though I may have pretended otherwise. I was a fan of yours before I even knew you were my dad. You have a lot of… qualities… that I admire. Your look. Your attitude. Your… well… your blatant sexual confusion.”

That one got my mouth open again, but it just dropped that way, there were no words bursting from within. Did my son just accuse me of sexual ambiguity?

“I mean, you just put yourself out there, you know? You have this aura, this musk of raw sexual fury… it’s like androgyny but fiercely hetero. I don’t know the way to explain it. But I remember watching you go to the ring with your permed up hair, tight pink leggings, and all that make up… you were blowing kisses to the crowd and worrying about your hair as much as you were worrying about your opponent… and it was GOOD, you know? You were STRONG even though you were breaking out from this restraining bicameral gender structure. You were kicking normalcy right in the nuts every time you pranced out to the ring and beat someone too afraid to explore those things.”

At this point I’m not sure what’s happening. He’s complimenting me? I think? For being sexually confusing? I don’t know what to think about it, which is awesome because it keeps me from trying to talk.

“So… you inspired me, I guess. To be open to myself. To my own confusion.”

Oh. Ohhhhhhhhhh.

“We moved up here a couple months back and one of the first things I did was go online and try to find some local communities… some trans people, you know? And I talked to them, and I swear I never experienced anything like it before. Listening to their stories, the way they approached their transitions… it was like hearing my own confusion said out loud by another human being. They were telling me my own story.”

He starts to hang his head. I can see a combination of fear and confidence mixing together like the coffee and milk in his cup. He doesn’t hang his head after all. He looks me right in the eye.

“Dad… I’m a girl. I’ve always been a girl. I was born wrong, somehow, and I don’t understand all of it… but I’m not supposed to be a boy. I’m sorry.”

And that’s where we are. My son, my only child, whom I essentially abandoned not once but twice, is sitting across from me in a coffee shop full of hipsters and apologizing to me. Apologizing to me not for anything he did, but simply for who he is. Who she is? I’ll have to work on that.

I smile, and Bobby does too. We start to crack up. The tension falls away like autumn leaves and soon we’re just laughing together.

Me and Bobby finish our drinks and we get up together. I just wrap my arms around him without saying a thing, and he clutches to me. I don’t know what I was worried about, the way I was practically pulling my hair out by the root on the train here. Blood is always thicker than water.

“Hey… do you… I mean, are you gonna, like, change your name?”

More laughter. Neither of us know how these conversations are supposed to work. We’re learning together.

“Um… I think I like Bobby still. But, like… with an ‘I’ instead of a ‘Y?’”

“Oh, yeah! That makes sense! Cool!”

And that’s it. The story gets a happy ending. The father and his progeny are reunited. There’s nothing but future here, no past to suffer underneath of.

Bobbi and me walk out of the Starbucks and I wait with him while he hails a cab. I cover the fare, and throw in some extra. I know it seems hollow, but come on. I’m rich as fuck. It’s only right.

We hug again and I wave while the taxi pulls away. I watch the roof of the car weave through traffic and join up with a hundred others, like a school of bright yellow fish moving in a sea of other cars. Finally I let myself look at the cell phone in my pocket that’s been buzzing for an hour. No way was I going to let anything interrupt this time with my kid. No way.

It’s my sister. Half a dozen calls, voicemail icon flashing full. Finally, one simple text to blow out the candle on a great day.

“Mom’s dead.”

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