I've just spent the last half hour unloading my thoughts, feelings, and frustrations out on the table. Giving voice to all the problems I'm having in my life. I'm being employed by a professional wrestling company that refuses to treat me like a legitimate professional wrestler, rather than a big blue stage prop. A springboard for other peoples' careers.
If you had a list of traits to give the ultimate professional wrestler, strength, agility, durability, charisma, presence, a unique look, a keen wit, and so on and so forth ad nasuem, I'd check all the boxes.
But instead of having a massive seven foot tall woman for whom running the ropes does not mean bouncing back and forth, but running atop them like some kind of circus acrobat as the center of their product identity, instead my employer has decided to ignore me, and instead always focus on whomever I'm facing.
I'm the most unique wrestler on their roster, and three quarters of the time I'm just thrown into some random match without rhyme or reason. You'd think folks would be falling all over themselves to put somebody so unique and so popular with the fans in big time marquee matchups that the fans have been clamoring to see.
But nope. On the biggest wrestling show of the year I'm treated like leftovers. A meaningless match with a man in the twilight of his career who agrees that it's a meaningless match, that I'm going to kick his ass, and he doesn't understand why we've been put in the position we were by management.
I was "randomly" assigned the worst wrestler in the world title tag tournament as a partner and due to her incompetence was eliminated in the first round.
I won title contendership, ended up facing the three other folks from that match in various combinations for the next few months, and has said contendership completely and utterly ignored for three months.
I develop a friendship with one member of the roster, one actual, legitimate, decent human being. And because of that friendship we're teamed together, and shoved into a Tag Team title match with no build up.
The narrative the company tells is that we're undeserving upstarts. How dare we accept the tag team title match that we were given for no reason. What scum we are for doing our jobs and going out there to wrestle the people that management told us to wrestle.
Our tag team title shot is a sham, a ploy crafted by the very same people demanding the match be presented as illegitimate, solely to motivate another tag team to actually do their jobs and show up and wrestle.
As thanks for this service, of being branded illegitimate pretenders to the tag team titles awarded a match that they are not worthy of, management selects a random woman from the roster, grants her contendership to my partner's singles title, and present her in a positive light two weeks later.
Upset about the hypocrisy my friend leaves the company, leaving me all alone. After three months I FINALLY get the X-Limits title match I earned, long after anyone has ceased to care about it, and I FINALLY find somebody who is actually capable of giving me a fight. Because I let her hit me for five minutes to get an understanding of her capabilities.
I'm being "dominated."
For the first time in the UWA I get a legitimate fight with somebody who has actual capability.
And two weeks later? Two weeks later the pair of gals that my partner and I had been made bait for are awarded tag team title shots after they'd ruined my tag title match. At least until one of them gets herself suspended.
I'm a dragon, a walking elemental furnace. My digestive system is so efficient that I am physically incapable of becoming intoxicated via the consumption of alcohol.
With the help of a case of orange Mio to make the flavor suck less, I am however giving it the old college try and trying basically one of everything that the bar stocks.
My drinking partner, who hasn't done much more than sip at some weird microbrewery beer involving fermented jalapeno peppers, clears the table by shoving the pile of bottles, mugs, and glasses on the table into a Rubbermaid tub. It's the second time this evening he's had to do that.
"Professional wrestling is fucked." I grumble, ignoring the bar snacks in favor of biting the top off of a rather pretty looking blue glass bottle that had contained a rather horrible concoction that was vaguely watermelon flavored.
"Sounds about right. Professional wrestling is always fucked." says the man who trained me in the sport, the Dark Man himself, Desolation.
"I don't know what to do, Des. Happily going along with everything and not making a fuss didn't work. Vociferously complaining about it on air didn't work. Threatening to actually be destructive has done precisely fuck all." I sigh.
"So that leaves me only the option of actually going on a motherfucking rampage. And that's absolutely insane."
"Mmmhmm."
"By refusing to make things better for me they're basically telling me "Okay. Go ahead and ruin out meticulously planned television event. We don't mind." I wash down what is now a bunch of mushy blue sand with a half liter of water.
"Okay, question. I'm not keeping a tally, but between water and booze, I think you've consumed somewhere between ten and twenty gallons of liquid in the last hour or three and haven't gotten up to use the restroom."
"Connecting any body of primarily water to any other body of primarily water. I've been going down the list of everybody I've ever hated in professional wrestling and am systematically filling their toilets with pee."
"So you're just peeing in their toilets?"
"Fuck no. I'm peeing in the tank."
A number of emotions flicker over my drinking partner's face. Disgust. Awe. Amusement. And I think that last one's pride.
"That's disgusting."
"Yup." I sigh. "You had to put up with this shit for decades. How the hell did you do it?"
"To be perfectly honest for the last ten of them I put up with it because I was basically pulling off the Adam Sandler Strategy. Having other people pay me ridiculous amounts of money to go ridiculous shit with my friends." Desolation says with a smirk.
"Every time something went wrong, every time somebody decided to debut by jumping me, every time somebody decided to screw me out of a title, or to jigger a tournament to make sure I'd never have contendership I'd just shrug and grin. Because some stupid fucktard is paying me big bucks to put up with bullshit, beat the fuck out of people once in awhile, and do things like sit here in the middle of the famed gothic nightclub Purgatory in the middle of the day when the regular clientelle are still in their coffins and record the hijinx that occur when SPIDER is attempting to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that our mutual pal Xane is in fact a vampire."
I turn and give a momentary look to bartender across the room. The former chainsaw wielding amoralist, XHWF Champion, Tag Team Champion, Stables champion and a whole bunch of other titles. I murmur something under my breath, make a few small motions with my fingers, and had my left forearm not been covered by a big metal gauntlet, it'd be glowing with arcane runes that had been magically grafted to my aura.
"Yup. Vampire. Psychevore strain. None of the really obscene powers, but none of the usual weaknesses either. Enhanced senses and physicality, doesn't age. Scariest thing I imagine he can do is maybe levitate a little bit and stick to walls." I turn to look back at Deso.
"And he can probably do that effortlessly move really fast when nobody's looking at him thing that horror movie monsters and Claudia do."
"Spoilsport." says Xane from behind me, delivering a fresh assortment of bottles to the table.
"Sorry about drinking up all your stock like this."
"Are you fucking kidding me? I've had some of this shit sitting on the shelves for years." chuckles the vampire before zipping off at impossible speed when I stop looking at him.
"So what the fuck do you think I ought to do?" I say with a sigh, hoping that somebody with a hell of a lot more experience in the industry can see a way out of this that I failed to come up with.
"Rampage. Maim. Mutilate. Crush. Kill. Destroy." Desolation says simply.
"What."
"Give 'em a fucking rampage. Give them consequences to having jerked you around. But I think it's too late for that."
"What do you mean too late?"
"You've let them walk all over you for too long. The reaction isn't going to be "Kalinda was mistreated and lashed out, she deserves better." The reaction is going to be "That fucking dragon has finally snapped and is the horrible monster we always knew that deep down she is.""
"It's why people while let a chihuahua behalf like an obnoxious little prick, growling, snarling, biting, and attacking people. Because when it's on a teeny tiny little dog with no physical capacity to actually do damage it's comical and kind of cute."
"But when a goddamn two hundred pound Newfoundland does the same thing? It's fucking Old Yeller time." Desolation says, looking down at his beer in distastes and just throwing the damned thing across the room.
"It's bullshit. This whole industry is a gleaming facade of fakery on a castle of bullshit made out of bricks of bullshit built on a foundation of bullshit and surround by a flowing, majestic awe-inspiring moat of bullshit."
"They let down a bullshit drawbridge on bullshit chains to let bullshit knights in bullshit armor ride bullshit horses into a bullshit keep so that they come in, wading ankle deep through bullshit, and then kneeling down in bullshit to bow before a bullshit king and a bullshit queen."
"If you're not prepared to kneel down and kiss a ring made of bullshit, adorned with a polished square cut gem of bullshit, set in a charming four prong setting of bullshit, inscribed with bullshit showing a scene between involving bullshit and bullshit where the bullshit is bullshitting the bullshit, all the while menacing with spikes of bullshit… then yeah you're going to have a tough time."
"You generally end up with two kinds of people. The unpleasant, egomanical manipulative assholes that play the backstage political games and try to ride the weeping wave of bullshit to the top."
"Or you get people like you and me. Cynical, jaded, bitter assholes. You either find something to make the focus of your life outside of professional wrestling. You put up with all the politicking, the being conspired against, the being treated like dirt, the being ignored by management in favor of the new flavor of the month club pushed forth by whichever puppet master gets a turn at the strings this week."
Desolation sighs and shakes his head.
"I grew up in this sport. In the middle of three families that ran a little mom and pop operation that did a circuit involving shows in a general triangle of California, Texas, and Mexico."
"It's a place where nobody ever got rich wrestling, but everybody had food to put on the table. It was nice, safe, comfortable, and friendly. It was also no more or less bullshit than any other wrestling federation I've ever been in."
"I came into this world as the result of a supremely fucked up relationship. My Y chromosome donor was not a nice individual, and any and every attempt he made to insert himself into the life of my brother and I sucked."
"My brother went with my aunt and one of my older half-sisters to Germany for years to get away from dear 'ol "dad." My actual dad, though, lived and breathed professional wrestling. One of those May-December romances. Mom's old enough to be his daughter. Son of a gun is pushing 90 and is still training kids down in Texas. Everyone's pretty sure that if he stopped doing it, he'd just keel over dead about six months later."
"Pops did a lot of unheard of, progressive things for the sport that's become commonplace. Intergender matches and tag teams and what not. Those were there right from the start. That was how I made my debut. Teaming with a debuting half-sister."
"I got ignored. Pops had dollar signs in his eyes when he looked at her. She got the exposure. I got to be the afterthought. Me. The guy who is regarded as one of the best technical wrestlers of all time. The guy with so many title reigns I need a fucking accountant to pin down exactly how many I've had. The guy who was voted by his peers as the greatest ULW/IWC era wrestler of all time."
"And at the start of my career, I was the afterthought. Bet you didn't know that." Desolation gives a sad smirk.
"No, I didn't. You never, ever seem to talk about your past. And I can see why."
"Because it's pretty fuckin' unpleasant. I always figured people tuned in to listen to me talk shit about people, not piss and moan about how fuckin' awful my childhood was."
"Because if I did that I'd get into a Four Yorkshiremen style pissing contest with a bunch of other assholes about who had the suckiest childhood and most miserable life. Wrestlers lie. It's a fact of nature."
"No one wants to hear about how you were mommy and daddy's favorite kid, how you were captain of the football team or homecoming queen in high school, weren't treated like a special snowflake at college, found out that you weren't skilled enough with a ball to be in pro sports, weren't fast enough to be an olympian, and yet you still wanted to do something athletic and be pretty for a living and whatnot."
"And for athletic people, pro wrestling is a hell of a lot easier to get into than acting or modelling. But they don't want the fans to know that. So they're all self-made orphans from broken homes where mommy and daddy put cucumbers up their butts, and then they fell into a dark crowd of dyslexic cultists and started worshipping Satin and ended up in insane asylums."
"You're not going to win a worst upbringing contest with a bunch of pathological liars, so I wasn't even going to try." Desolation shakes his head.
"Anyway, what I'm trying to say and failing miserably at getting to the point of is that I was literally born into this industry, came into it into a fed my family owned a controlling stake in, and I was still treated like shit."
"I managed to make myself one of the best wrestlers in the world on sheer stubborn determination and a boatload of fucking willpower."
"You? You never had a chance." Desolation gets up and begins circling the table.
"You have something that nobody else on this planet will have in a million years. Well, maybe a million years if we master cybernetics and/or genetic engineering before we nuke ourselves to death, wreck the food chain, and/or turn Earth into a brand new greenhouse gas-covered hellhole like Venus."
"You're different. You're unique. You're special. You're literally magical. It's obvious to anyone who so much as looks at you. And as a result everyone is going to hate you for it."
"You're literally a being of magic and wonder from an alien world nestled in another dimension. And the pathological liars puffing themselves up to make themselves look impressive? They can't hold a candle to you because if they try to one up you they'll look even more like inbreds happily playing with forks and electrical sockets than usual."
"You have all the advantages in the world." Desolation says, "And every chance you get you state how you fucking hate it here. You're a big fish in a little pond, and despite everything you have, your end goal isn't to be the biggest, most popular wrestler with a big shiny belt, your face on t-shirts, and a lucrative merchandising contract in your pocket to support you when you're old and grey."
He puts a hand on my shoulder.
"Kal, they know that you don't want to be here, that wrestling's just a job for you, that it's a hobby, just something to pass the time until you manage to stick out your thumb, hop on a UFO, and fly back to your home planet. Because they have an IQ on par with Champion the Wonder Horse and can't remember you're a fucking dragon, except when they beat you so they can crow about how they're mighty "dragon slayers.""
"They need pro wrestling. They need to be the center of attention. They need to be on TV as often as possible, which is why they wrestle for ninety seven different wrestling federations and throw screaming hissy fits when one fed won't magically change the schedule so that they can appear on as many shows as possible without having to spend days flying back and forth across the country to film promos and wrestle matches."
"For basically everybody on that fucking roster, pro wrestling isn't their career. It's their identity. Without professional wrestling they'd be nothing. Or they're using professional wrestling to slingshot themselves into modelling or acting or some bullshit like that. Jumping the lines using the fame they've won in the ring."
"You're here just because you want something to do, you like fighting, and women don't have a 7 foot, 400 pound MMA division dedicated to them."
"The Ginger Nation gets their tag belts babied because they eat, sleep and breathe professional wrestling. And also alcohol. Dave and Drew spend so much time trying to get Alana Starr back into the ring because they know she's a fucking attention addict and a glory whore. If she throws a snit, they can manipulate her into coming back."
"You? If you step out of line what the fuck are they going to do with you? They've got no leverage with you. If you win a title and grab them by the balls over something, they're either going to have to cave, or they have that belt walk right out the fuckin' door never to return."
"They don't understand you, just like they didn't understand me. Because I never wanted titles; I have a whole room of the goddamned things. I didn't give a shit who they threw at me, just as long as I could get a decent match out of them. It's why they were pretty much caught with their pants down with Selena."
"They treat you like crap because they're treating you like most of the people you work with. That you're some kind of junkie here to get high off the thrill of manipulating tens of thousands of people in attendance and millions watching at home, to feed off of their emotions. To get your face plastered on… what was it? Fruity pebbles t-shirts stretching from sea to shining sea? Of making sure you just get your face out there as often as possible. You're on TV, you're getting exposure, what more could you possibly want?"
"And the really shit thing is that no matter what you do, Kal, this isn't going to change. They're not going to see you acting out against them as a sign that they need to improve things for you. Someone like Alana Starr is a yappy chihuahua. Noisy, obnoxious, yet ultimately harmless. Allowed to misbehave because no one's going to get hurt."
"But you? It doesn't matter that somebody's been throwing rocks at you for weeks, jabbing you with sharp sticks while you're at the end of your leash. You're going to be seen as a big, scary dog running around and causing mayhem. They're not going to laugh it off. They're going to have you put down."
"I hope I'm wrong, I honestly do. But with all my experience in the industry, I know how this ends, Kal. They're going to fucking fire you over this."
I nod. "Yeah, I figured they would. I'm sick of the bullshit, Des. For one night I'm going to do everything that I fucking want to. They'll either recognize my grievances and correct them, or they'll fire me and I won't have to deal with the bullshit anymore."
I stand up and finish off the bottle of vodka (filled with orange flavor) that I'd been working on.
"I don't need professional wrestling anymore. It's stopped being fun for me. I don't need to do this as a job, I had enough stuff on me to buy a small country when I got here. I don't need the fame. While fighting worthy opponents is fun, I don't need pro wrestling to give me that either. And I don't need to suck the mana out of a title belt to get home, either."
"If I'd overcome my dislike of adventuring, bit the bullet, and started monster hunting the moment I got here, I'd have been home months ago." I chuckle.
"I guess I literally did want to feed off of the emotions of the crowd, but not for the thrill, but for the raw power. All those people feeling the same feelings, all having the same thoughts, all directed towards the same thing in the same place. The respect and prestige that a well-promoted, well-defended professional wrestling title has. There's literally a power in that. One I thought I could tap into in order to get home quickly and easily."
"But the quick and easy path never seems to give out the good rewards. If you really want something you need to earn it, even if it's a slow, painful grind. In the end the sure thing will get you there quicker than hoping to catch a lucky break."
I give my teacher, instructor, and friend a hug.
"I've known that I was done with pro wrestling since Selena walked out."
"So why come down here and attempt to drown your sorrows?" the Dark Man says, waving at all the bottle debris.
"I can't get drunk, Dex. I literally lack the metabolic pathways that make that a thing." I grin.
"I a fucking fire dragon, you one eyed pirate bastard. I'm stocking my inner furnace to unleash a flaming, frozen over hell when I snap my leash, bite the pointy sticks in half, and chase some assholes up a tree."
Desolation laughs. "Go get 'em, kid."
-o-
Fuck the UWA.
The UWA, Drew Bryant, David Helms, and everybody else involved in this fucking shit show can go and drown in a cesspool of all the bullshit they've spewed for the past few months.
I have done my utmost to be the best professional wrestler I can, to do what's good for the company. For months I've done exactly as I've been told, and it's gotten me precisely fuck all.
Selena's gone. She got sick of the bullshit. The circumstances surrounding the tag team title match and the fact that she and I were basically used by UWA management as a tool to motivate Those Bitches into actually showing up and wrestling REALLY pissed her off.
But she would've stayed had it not been for the hypocrisy of this company.
When she told me exactly why she wanted to leave everything clicked in my head and it's a problem I've been having since day one with this company.
Let's called it "narrative control," shall we?
The way the UWA presents information, the way it has the commentators spinning what goes on in the ring.
Because, news flash, they don't just sit there at ringside and pipe in with whatever pops up in their silly little heads at any given moment.
No, the commentators have several voices in their headsets going telling them what to say and how to say it.
And for months the narrative where I've been concerned is "Look at how so and so is hurting Kalinda! Kalinda has never been attacked like this before!"
Not "Kalinda wants a to fight a worthy opponent, and so she tests their capabilities before attacking." Not "Kalinda is trying to be nice to the tiny peoples and letting them get in the first shot." Not "Kalinda is letting her opponents pound on her because she's basically a goddess-damned brick wall." Not "Kalinda doesn't want to be seen as a bully so she lets her opponents get in a few licks." Not "Kalinda has been so abused by the sport of professional wrestling that she is symbolically allowing her opponents to abuse her as the system has." All of which are varying degrees of true.
No, the image that UWA wants to get across is not that I'm letting people hit me without retaliating in the opening minutes of every single match I wrestle is that all this itty bitty people are somehow more skilled and better warriors than I am. Which isn't even remotely the case.
I only really started noticing it when I re-watched my singles match with Lilith Evans. That was the first time that I'd heard the announce team say "Kalinda has never suffered this much sustained offense before! Lilith is dominating!"
No. No she wasn't. She wasn't even close.
Because let's be perfectly honest, Lilith Evans isn't a particularly a very good wrestler. I know it. She knows it. The fans know it. Management knows it.
But I stated this fact on air. Plain for the world to see. I expressed my dissatisfaction at the fact that she was my partner in the World Title Tag Tournament. I stated that she was the weak link on the team, that she'd get herself crushed, and that she'd lose the match for us.
And that was exactly what happened.
So I was punished for speaking the plain, obvious truth. The announcers treated a period of sustained offense like it was some grand and dire situation for me. It wasn't.
The four year old sitting on top of her daddy's shoulders in the front row knew that Lilith wasn't going to win that one. I said that I was going to make Lilith Evans sorry for being such a failure and a fuck up and eliminating me from World Title contendership. I sure as hell wasn't going to make it quick for her.
I mean honestly, it's like you people have never seen a dragon hunt before. Well, I suppose you haven't. Okay, how about a cat, then?
A cat'll make a game of the whole thing. A cat can end the mouse's life any damned time it once to. But in order to make things more fun, it'll let the mousie run away. Give it hope. Let it wear itself out. Have it die tired.
Just beating Lilith Evans wasn't enough. What I did was slowly wring every last ounce of hope out of Lilith Evans of being able to beat me. You weren't seeing her dominating me, oh no, you were watching a dream die.
And then last week, it was all the same again. I let my opponent unload on me, I let them give me the best they have. Because I want to see how good they really are, and I want to show them how good I am at absorbing raw punishment.
And for the first time I actually had a challenging fight. I actually had a worthy opponent. For all her bullshit, Alana Starr showed me that beneath the egomania and dickishness she's actually capable of wrestling a goddamn proper, decent wrestling match when she's forced to.
I was overconfident, I was arrogant, and I wasn't expecting her to be as good as she was.
And she fuckin' pinned me.
And then I poured out a bottle of Evian on the floor, puddle ported back to my apartment, and I watched the replay.
And there was precisely fuck all to be had about me letting Alana wail on me.
The story was presented as Alana dominating me. That she was getting all her offense in because she was sooooo much better than me, not because I fucking let her. Just like I've let everybody do the same damn thing for months upon months trying to find somebody to give me a decent, fair, legitimate, honest to goodness fight.
And then Those Bitches were granted a tag team title shot without having to earn it. Without having to qualify for it.
And once again, there was not a word to be said about deservedness, about value, about worth.
Those Bitches versus the Ginger Nation was treated as if it were something wonderful, something good. While Ginger Nation versus Double Dragon was all about how awful Selena and I were, and how dare were have a title shot just handed to us. So horrible. Such unworthy. Very scum. Wow.
And then Kennady Street managed to get herself fired or suspended or something. I don't know why, so I'm just going to make up something amusing.
She got caught in Chattanooga shitting into a hideous, tacky purse that she'd recently shoplifted from Wal*Mart. And unlike certain wrestling federations that could be mentioned, the UWA has a zero tolerance policy on bag shitting.
So no tag team title defense. Alana without a partner, Kalinda without a partner. The logical thing to do to promote a feud between two heated rivals would be the pair them off against the tag team champions.
After all, Alana had been campaigning for a tag team title shot since for fucking ever, and the one I participated in was a complete and utter sham that existed solely to bait Those Bitches into appearing on UWA Television and start wrestling again.
Both of us believing we deserve a tag team title shot, and both of us without partners.
And then the call came down, the news hit the wire.
After finally finding a worthy opponent that would actually require me to get off my lazy tail and actually have to try in a match, who do I end up slated to face.
PERCIVAL. CLARENCE. WHITMAN. THE. THIRD.
The snivelly little shit that was so terrified of me he spent the majority of our shared span at the autograph table at the UWA Fan Fest passed out unconscious out of sheer terror of me.
The guy who outright refuses to wrestle women.
This is the last straw.
I'm fed up with the incompetence of UWA management. Between UWA's stupidity and the ULW's malice, I honestly prefer the malice. Because at least that way I knew that it was because somebody in charge was a colossal hooting dickhole, not because they have their head up their ass and thinking that me going from wrestling a competitive match with Alana Starr to wrestling a human ragdoll.
Honestly, I'd rather wrestle Ric Flair's proverbial broomstick, or that wrestling sex doll from DDT. Hell, I'd settle for a Universal Monsters match and have me as the Creature from the Black Lagoon coming out to Iced Earth's "Dragon's Child" and wrestle noted Japanese wrestlie Misuteru. Who is invisible.
I'm sick and tired of this.
I'm tired of being jerked around.
I'm tired of being used as nothing more than a prop for other people to clamber over me to propel themselves further up the company ladder.
And most of all I'm tired of awful opponents who will give me uninspired, unchallenging, shit-tier matches.
And I'm tired of giving Drew Bryant and David Helms warnings.
I've been saying for months that I'm not happy with the way I'm being treated around here.
I spoke up and aired my legitimate grievances with what was going on here. In return you had the announcers shit talk me every moment I was on the air for the better part of a month.
Fine.
If you're going to punish me for speaking up, I'm going to do something worth actually making you punish me.
And that's it.
That's all I'm going to say about it.
Because I'm sick of talking.
I've been talking and talking and talking, coming out here and venting my spleen to the world about my dissatisfaction with my job.
So on Outbreak I'm quite simply going to come into work as usual, wrestle my match, and for the rest of the night I'm going to make Drew and Dave just as miserable as they've made me.
After turning P. Clarence Whitman into Moron Pate.
Because, honestly, what the fuck were you two expecting I was going to do to the little shithead?
See you soon, boys!
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