Black Holes and Revelations

Five stars.

Perfection.

Vindication, almost instant.

The sport you fell in love with loves you back. Lindsay Troy saw you beat her knight. Then she saw you exert your will over a bear, even if momentarily, sheer force of will and technique shrinking the chasm made wide as deep space by physical size. Then she had a front row seat at the uncut, electric atmosphere, pure combat, where you tapped the untamed monster, undefeated for two years.

All of this with a knife plunged into your back.

You tried to forget her.

You tried to forget your mother.

For a moment, it worked, because finally, you loved wrestling again and it loved you back. Standing toe-to-toe with titans, not just the Bear but the Murder Show too inside the cage. Retreading old grounds, forging new paths. For the first time in a long time, you felt refreshed. Rewarded even.

The stars lined up, one-by-one, until five formed a belt around the waist, not of Orion, but of a figure whose reward in those heavens was his ultimate goal, not glory on this earth. Five stars, gilded and shining bright, representing the light of men like Youngblood and Caesar, Julien and Uncle Nate, Ares and…

Snow.

Did you just see one of the stars’ light go… dim?

-

Taking a red eye flight after battling WALLACE, who was possibly not only raised by wolves, but still lives with his lupine mother, was ill-advised. Sure, victory was sweet, but when wrestling someone whose ferality is inversely proportionate to his body hair, it came at a price. Still, the painfully annoying commute - Heathrow to JFK, the Jersey Turnpike, hitting Philly at morning rush - was a cakewalk compared to the midday drive he took meandering from his cosmopolitan home near the Italian Market all the way through the cramped side streets around Snyder Avenue. How anyone parked on streets only a hair’s breadth wider than an alleyway continues to be a mystery to anyone who has never lived in South Philly. But the cozy, neighborly grid of rowhomes made him feel claustrophobic in ways he’d never felt on his home turf. Dumpy little brick homes felt like skyscrapers, towering over him.

The diaspora would claim South Philly ceased being their “home turf” when they let the immigrants - Vietnamese, Indonesian, Mexican, and the like - in. Racist scum. Enjoy South Jersey and Delaware County or federal prison for the Capitol stormers from January 6.. For Tom though?

His mother poisoned that ground.

He needed to find out why.

“Oh, Tommy! What a surprise, welcome. The pasta fazool just…”

“Cut the shit, Mom. You know why I’m here.”

The greeting took Joelle aback.

“I certainly do not, and don’t speak to your mother that…”

“Mom, why did you file all those noise complaints against my family?”

Her face turned sour.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do. Guido spilled.”

“Get in here. We’re not having this conversation with my front door open.”

Brow furrowed, he followed into his childhood home, slamming the door behind him.

“Where are your manners? That door…”

“Do you know how many times the cops came to our house? What in God’s name were you thinking?”

Her steely gaze dropped the temperature in the cramped parlor by several degrees.

“What was I thinking? What are YOU thinking accusing me of things like that?”

“I’m not. Guido is.”

“Guido lies like a rug.”

“Oh, don’t I know, Mom, but I listened to him enough in the first 30 years of my life before he decided being a racist scumbag was more important than having a brother or nephews. I know when he’s telling the truth.”

The gulp forming in Joelle’s throat could be seen from space.

“He told me the truth.”

His mother blinked slowly, turned around, and hastily sat on her plastic-covered sofa. Without making eye contact with her son, she took a short sip of the can of Diet Coke sitting on her endtable and spoke.

“Did you know your father rarely ever called home when he was on extended tours?”

Tom furrowed his brow inquisitively.

“Didn’t know if it was because he was too cheap or if he didn’t care. The Northeast tours were fine because even though the EWA paydays weren’t the best for someone of his stature, he was always close to home. But when it came time to get money for you brats and your Christmas presents, and he worked places that actually paid him like a main eventer? Like the Maritimes? Or even, ugh, England? That was hell.”

Tom shook his head.

“C’mon…”

“No, you c’mon, Tom. He thought bringing back a trinket for me or for you would make up for it. Always the cheapest shit too.”

She took another pull out of her soda can.

“I thought this fallacy of you getting back in the ring would have died last year. Getting beaten by all those boys half your age, especially that Best mongrel. Having that psychopath maim you not once, but twice. Seeing everyone else pass you by despite their similar age to you, that should’ve been your wakeup call not to be like your father and keep slogging on, to come home and be a family man.”

She finished her cola and crumpled the can.

“But no, that company decided to go to ENGLAND and you just zipped along, getting your head smashed in not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES.”

She turned her head to look her son in the eye for the first time since he last spoke.

“THREE. FUCKIN’. TIMES. You gabbadose!”

Tom’s expression turned angry.

“Did you tell Dad any of this before he died? How miserable it made you?”

“It was a different time, you wouldn’t under…”

“No, you don’t get to call me a brat and start insulting my career like he did, only worse because you actually fucking mean the words coming out of your mouth. Dad fucked me too, Mom, okay? I needed support, and he told me I was never good enough. NEVER GOOD ENOUGH FOR HIM. What kind of father does that?”

“One who didn’t want you to make the same mistakes he did? I don’t know. I don’t care either. I just don’t want you to throw your life away and become a terrible father and husband like he was.”

Tom violently shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“I’m the only one of your five sons who gave you grandkids and you’re telling me I’m a bad father?”

“No, I’m not. You’re a great… no, you were a great father. You gave the business up, and you stayed home and loved your kids, supported your wife. You were a champion father and husband, which is more than I could say for at least this foolish return. What are you thinking? Are you that selfish?”

Tom sighed. The conversation was getting tedious.

“Nah. But you clearly are. Call me when you’re ready to act like my mother and not like my daughter.”

Tom turned to walk out, but his mother had one more parting salvo.

“Remember this, son. All those times Tamara was angry at you because you did something utterly stupid in the name of this business. Do you really think she’s over them?”

A tear crested the duct in the corner of his left eye. He turned his head away from his mother and walked out the door as violently as he walked into it.

-

Stars are weird. The Sun is a bog standard, boring, single yellow star with some planets around it. Sure, it’s the only one we know supports life, but astronomically, it’s beige, bland, common. Neutron stars? Hot white stars? Red supergiants? Oh yeah, now we’re talking. Binary stars, those are the fascinating systems. Stars that do the loop-de-loop around each other, distorting gravity, spraying each other with solar flares like children running the streets in summer with Super Soakers. Binary stars can enhance each other’s light. Make each individual seem brighter than they would be on their own.

But then the inverse happens when one of those stars is a black hole. Oh yeah, gravitational vacuum cleaners. Much like a helpless victim locked in the clutches of Cecilworth’s Tarp, nothing escapes, not even light. And the bully of the cosmos siphons and siphons and siphons, dimming the luminosity of their partners, cramming it down the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram like a weary husband trying to put off taking out the trash, smashing down the refuse into the can with diminishing returns.

Parents can be stars for their children. A lot of times, they’re black holes.

Jason Snow wasn’t the first one to dim the light on one of the five stars you’re gunning for. He’s just the latest.

The constellar belt plastered across ten pounds of gold, and most of them are getting weaker.

You wanted to be a wrestler, Luchador. No, you wanted to be The Wrestler. This is the price you pay. Can you pay it?

Snow is one black hole. Mom is another.

What happens when the next one is s-s-s-SUPERMASSIVE?

-

He got the text message from the office right as he walked into his house.

“TAL. Winters. Five Star at 47.”

That would explain his night off for 46. “Extra time to prepare” was the first thought. But as he kicked the fridge door closed after nabbing a Modelo and popping the cap, the brainworms started kicking up. The zeal he found, pugna gratia pugnae, was it just another reason to hang onto his feeble self-absorption? His mother was right a lot, he thought to himself again. Rarely ever this mean, but Dad’s death did a number on everyone.

This match was going to be where Tom showed the world two men can get into a ring and wrestle with no pretenses, no ulterior motives.

Don Winters slinked into PRIME looking like the duplicitous serpent from the Garden of Eden. A Man of God. Many such wander the earth calling themselves similarly only to resemble the moneychangers in the temple whose tables Jesus would’ve put them through if he was an actual showman and not a short-tempered psycho.

Don shed his evil early on. It took humbling, a punishment akin to the one his savior suffered, but Tom could see man and not the cloth. Sincerity. Earnestness. Piety.

“Why would I want to punch him?” he muttered under his breath as he took the first crisp sip out of his sacred Mexican lager.

Did he secretly long for villains like Ivan and Paxton and Noble and Balaam to give him blood reasoning to hit back? Mort’s modulated voice in those vignettes, did he really want to be subject to mob hits and sneak attacks so he had a reason to get his bile up?

He felt selfish. Like his mother was right.

-

There’s a feeling of helplessness conveyed purely in theoretical terms, in fictional ones. The astronaut with life support systems prolonging the agony of drifting into the chasm of space, futilely flailing as if swimming in a vacuum with masses of water for your arms to catch onto will propel you back to your spacecraft. The closest you’ve ever gotten to experience that horror was the space mission in Final Fantasy VIII, when you kept fucking up the button sequence and Rinoa kept drifting away from your grasp into the infinite black.

Shoot for the five stars when four of them have singularities sucking their plasma down, each an individual leech tapping on the carotid artery, keeping them nice and sedated while their life force slipped away from them into the greedy gravitational field of their omnipotent parasites.

The vim and vigor in your step when you realized what wrestling could be dissipated, vaporized even, as reality yanked you back into what this life really is. A mass of forces drawing you away from meaning, from happiness, into a cold black void. And with your mind, higher-focused and cognizant of things like “purpose” and “responsibility,” the singularity accelerates your drift away from all you hold dear, the gravity atomizing you, gluon-by-gluon, digesting you while you barely know you’re hurtling towards oblivion.

Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars? Pfft, it’s a minefield out there, dickhead. The stars might not be all they’re cracked up to be.

-

The thing about drinking is that it doesn’t necessarily kill brain cells instantaneously. When partaken to the right intensity, the alcohol can break down lots of mental barriers one puts up to keep the brainworms from burrowing deep.

Tom probably would’ve felt decent after five or six Modelos after that commute home from the combined toll of Ivan, WarGames, and WALLACE, but the mental horrors of the apparent truths his mother flung at him let the intrusive thoughts flow at the heights of hundred-year floodplains. The impromptu trip to Mexico and all the financial repercussions stuck out most in his mind. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever really reconciled that with Tam. She never intimated that he was in the doghouse for more than a night, but Tom was never good at reading people. For example, his mother’s outright cruelty earlier took him by surprise. Ha. It was only afterwards he noticed times when her resentment seeped hot over the top like a boiled-over pot, l’esprit de l’escalier in the most intense waves.

He shot up off the couch and downstairs into Tam’s new home office, less roomy than the one in their previous house, but still an efficient sanctuary for her work.

“Hey, you got time to talk?”

Tam turned around from her laptop with an exasperated look overtaking every inch of her face.

“Is it important? Cuz Edwards is being difficult, capital D, again. Lot of fires to put out. Plus, are you ready to get back to England?

“Oh yeah.”

“And you’re coming back for The Madhouse and LUCHA ESPECIAL. Going to stay in Europe until Tropical Turmoil after that, right?

“That was the plan, yeah. But…”

“Look, we’re both busy right now. It’s okay. I do wanna hear what genius excuses your mother gave for being a gigantic psychopath to us, but, I mean…”

“Yeah. Edwards.”

Tom gave a half-hearted shake of his fist at the mention of his wife’s nemesis.

“It’s alright. Before you know it, we’ll have all the time in the world to talk, but for now… UGH!”

Tam turned back around to her computer monitor. Tom felt no less uncertain about all the doubt and fear swarming in his head than he did before he went downstairs.

-

In reality, if you get caught in the gravitational pull of a black hole, no one knows what really happens to you. Theoretically though, that’s a cosmic paper shredder and you? You’re a ream of questionable legal documents that need to disappear before the feds show up unannounced.

Wrestling at its heart is storytelling. It’s just written in the moment by two fighters with diverging viewpoints of how the narrative structure should build upon itself. A struggle of fists and limbs. Brutal in its unpredictability. Daytona Diamonds should’ve been compressed into the size of a single atom in the crushing gravity of Max Kael’s noose. But his deus ex machina came in the form of three of the grotiest motherfuckers on the roster.

You ain’t counting on Fred Dick, nor should you. Although having a STRONK around is nice. Still, you gotta be careful around singular brain-celled muscle freaks from HOW, no matter how different they seem from the last ones.

No, your salvation comes from the one star that shines brightest, unbothered by the celestial siphons greedily sucking up the other ones.

The bog standard star.

The boring star.

The yellow, life-supporting one.

The one your entire ethos as a wrestler believes holds the entrance to motherfucking heaven.

The gods forsook you or you forsook the gods. Irrelevant. Bridges aren’t burnt forever. That sun, your main man Huitzilopochtli, he’s calling you home, pulling you out of the gravitational decay towards oblivion.

Sol Invictus, baby.

And that Sun, that center of the belt. It’s where you’ll find the thing you need.

-

As he trudged up the stairs, he heard ruckus coming from one of the kids’ rooms. Tiptoeing towards the cracked door, the sounds of gunfire and adolescent trash talk burst colorfully out of his younger son’s room. Vinny’s heart would always be, like his father’s, with Nintendo, but his friends all played more mature games these days, the kind you play on an X-Box. He peeked in to see him on a beanbag chair, headset on, playing whatever war simulator game was hot among his classmates.

“Haha, owned my good bitch.”

Tom couldn’t hear what his friends had to say, just Vinny.

“You only got me that one time cuz you camped at the spawn site. Cheap shit.”

…

“Dude, back off, you can’t beat me up in real life.”

…

“What? Your dad’s an accountant. My dad’s the best fuckin wrestler in the world.”

…

“First off, if he won the Universal Championship, they’d have to retire it cuz no one could beat him for it. And second, your dad’s an accountant. Ivan would’ve beaten him in two seconds. My dad made that big Russian bitch bleed his own blood!”

…

“You’re damn right my dad can beat anyone. He’s the fuckin’ man! NOW GET WRECK’D, BITCH!”

Vinny pressed harder on the buttons of his controller, firing shots from his semiautomatic rifle into various other players in the virtual field of combat.

But Tom only noticed the innocence of his son’s trash talk. Even in the sheer virtual violence of their game, Vinny would go up to his friends at school tomorrow and slap their hands.

The trash talk, the fragging, even the scrapes in the schoolyard. They didn’t do it out of malice or hate. It was how they bonded.

Tom thought back to how he felt at school wrestling against his classmates. How afterwards, the beers were always colder. He remembered the last warmup match, the video Pom sent him before Culture Shock.

They bonded.

Over wrestling.

He didn’t have to hate Don Winters to put him in hell.

And he knew he’d at least have one raucous fan at home.

He still had doubts about everyone else. Moms really do have That Power. But for now, the brainworms died, at least momentarily.

Tom finally got it.

His reasons were there. Even with the other questions hanging over him, his other mistakes, he at least had some validation.

The time had come for him to seize it and make it real.

For himself. For Vincenzo.

For wrestling itself.

-

Sun? Son? Six in one hand, half-dozen in the other. Our kids are our brightest stars in the sky, or at least they should be. You know this to be true, and that’s why I can tell you, fuck Lorenzo Battaglia. Fuck Joelle Battaglia. They don’t know what they got with you.

You don’t even know sometimes, and that’s why you consistently fuck up.

There were never any black holes to begin with. I know you need to wrestle Jason Snow, or you think you do. Whether he comes around or not, it’s not on you. Either he’s bitch or he’s up for it. No in betweens.

Fuck needing to hate. There’s no hate in the glow of Sol Invictus, only triumph.

Triumph that is yours to seize.

Against a man who feels the same way about this sport, this savage, beautiful, fucked up, and sublime sport that attracts the most psychotic guys, gals, and non-binary pals in the world.

Now you know you respect Don Winters. You respect WALLACE. And that’s why you beat the latter, even in his drool-soaked fury.

That’s why you can beat the former.

That son of a bitch Stanislav? He can take his victory he bought with shortcuts and agendas. His paranoia, his hypocrisy, his cheap vodka and tarnished, bastardized ideology? They’re not deserving of respect. They deserve pity.

You, conversely, have no other reason to fight than to fight. Pugna gratia pugnae. The spirit lives in you, and now, you’re going to take your mantel. As a wrestler.

No, that’s not true. You’re not just a wrestler.

You’re The Wrestler.

And after ReVival 47 in Paris? You will have all five stars, in their luminous heat and intensity, to prove it.