In the Hopeless Pursuit of Retaining Sanity - ★★☆☆☆

DAY 29 Sometimes, it feels DAMN good to be the one that ruins someone else’s day.

“SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHUCKS!!”

The wild and infuriated eyes of Erik Black stared aghast at the image printed on the cover of his morning paper, depicting a CHAMPION standing triumphant in a wrestling ring, holding his star-spangled title belt overhead.

The boldened headline was as blunt as it was damning.

KUROYAMA RETAINS

The image disappeared into a crumpled mess as his hands angrily clawed and tore the paper it to shreds.

“Anzu is NOT going to be happy about THIS! Especially after that TRAVESTY in Minneapolis! Those ninjas were NOT cheap!”

Within seconds, his opulent French-themed high-rise breakfast parlor was littered with the shredded paper fruits of a laborious outburst.

“The COWARD! He waits right until he BACKS OUT of our partnership before he suddenly up and decides to be MISTER UNSTOPPABLE SUPER SURRIOUS WRESTLE MAN! Now he’s got the FIVE STAR! Second round of the FRICKING ALMASY! Hot, young NEW MANAGER! He’s practically PRINTING money!”

The former Universal Champion went to his mini-fridge, seeking a beverage to help him cool off.

But as the door came open, he was loathed to discover an empty box woefully staring back at him.

“FFFFFFRICK!!”

In a flash, the empty soda box was on the floor and unceremoniouslycrushed beneath his white charentaise slipper.

Black crossed the room to the wall-mounted intercom, his hand smashing the “call” button like it owed him money. Immediately, he barked into the receiver.

“KATYA DENNINGSEVSKY… I am OUT of DIET CAFFEINE FREE POP!! SEND UP MORE DIET CAFFEINE FREE POP, because I am EXTREMELY STRESSED RIGHT NOW!”

“At once, Meester Black,” replied the squeaky voice of a woman with a heavy Easter European accent through the speaker.

Black pushed himself off the wall, nervously running his fingers through his sweat-soaked hairplugs.

“Now he’s got to contend with some walking, talking piece of SLIME! Fred Di-di-DIII-DIII… ew, no, I am NOT saying that FILTHY word, so we’ll just call him FRED DINGLE! A LASAGNA-RUINING FREAK that SOMEHOW finagled his way into becoming a legitimate CHAMPION! And you know, I’d like to think that maybe he’s just DEPRAVED and DISGUSTING ENOUGH to be the ONE to finally throw that TURRIBLE TUSHY-LICKER off his game… but on the other hand, I’d be some sort of IDIOT to put my faith into a KNOWN POOPER of PANTS! And NO!! Don’t you DARE bring up that one time at ReVival ONE! EVERYBODY KNOWS I was a DIFFERENT PERSON then! At least when I SOILED MYSELF, it was with PURPOSE! It had MEANING! Or… at least it FELT LIKE IT DID at the TIME! I mean, it’s not like I was PROUD of myself! Now… hang on, what was I talking about again? AH, RIGHT, THAT GOSHDARNED KURRY KUROYAMA! So come on, TELL ME… what do I DO to FIX all of this KUROYAMA DRAMA?!”

His glare fell upon an unassuming corner of the room.

Standing there with a broom in his hands, Rocko Daymon, the man in white’s beleaguered handy-man, was nonchalantly sweeping up the last few tiny torn bits of newspaper into a neat little pile.

He looked up, mildly confused.

“Um… sorry, were you talking to me?”

“GOSHDARNIT, ROCK!!” cursed Black, exasperatedly throwing his hands into the air. “Who the HECK ELSE would I be talking to?! YOU’RE the one who TRAINED HIM! So TELL ME, Doctor CRANK-enstein… how do I STOP this MONSTER you’ve created?!”

Stoic as ever, the once acclaimed former wrestler turned lowly custodian shook his head and went back to sweeping up the erstwhile Goat Bastard’s mess.

“Erik… I didn’t create any ‘monster’,” he said. “Sure, I introduced him to the ring. I showed him a few holds. I gave him what I hope was some legitimately solid advice. Just as his father did for me when I was that age. But what Kerry has made of himself now? That’s all his. I can’t help you figure out how to ‘stop’ him… because honestly, I’m not sure he can be stopped. The more you try to hold him down, the harder he pushes. I’m afraid you’re on your own with this.”

Black grunted in dissatisfaction, and rewarded his confidant’s advice by way of hard kick to the swept up pile of scrap, scattering a wave of shredded bits of paper into a freshly made mess across the floor.

“This is why I PAY YOU to SCRUB TOILETS, Rock!” he seethed. “Speaking of, isn’t there anything PRODUCTIVE you could be doing? I mean, isn’t the DEATH RAY due for preventative maintenance or something?!”

Rocko nodded. “Actually, if it’s fine by you, I’d like to run more diagnostics on the fire alarm systems. Seriously, Erik, this building is an accident waiting to--”

“FINE! WHATEVER! GET TO IT! Just GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!”

Unfazed by the overly demeaning attitude, Daymon apathetically let the broom fall into the mess and took his leave.

With the room to himself, Black resumed pacing while angrily grumbling to himself.

“‘Can’t be stopped’, my FOOT…" he groused. "ANYONE can be stopped with the right amount of MONEY and CUNNING! I just need to come up with a SCHEME! Something MIRACULOUS! Something MARVELOUS! Something…”

His eyes went wide as the revelation hit him.

“...something… MAGIC.”

For the first time that morning, the devilish, deceitful smile of a goat in sheep’s wool spread across the face of the crooked man in white.

Once more, his palm slammed the button on the wall intercom.

“FORGET the DIET CAFFEINE-FREE POP, KATYA DENNINGSEVSKY!” he bellowed into the receiver. “I need you to put me through to… the AMAZING AMARETTO BROTHERS…”

DAY 35 PRIME literally only wants one thing, and it's fucking disgusting.

The air was thick with the unmistakable stench of a trap house.

That sour, stinging concoction of dried vomit, backed up sewage lines, and festering wounds.

Worse than the smell of decay. This was the stench of complete surrender of the mind and the will.

Kerry Kuroyama loathed that he was familiar with it.

“They say everyone in Seattle gets to know it, eventually,” said that voice from within.

With prudence, Kerry crossed through a living room littered with the gaunt and twisted husks of souls who had long since given up their own battles. They were set in unsettlingly crooked positions, draped over sofas and lying out across the floor, awake, dreaming, or caught somewhere in between.

None seemed aware or concerned with his passage through their haven of addiction.

“Look at all these future PRIME champions…”

Kerry looked over his shoulder and glared at the speaker following close behind.

Zack Daymon responded with a not-so-innocent shrug.

“What… am I wrong?” mused the young DEFIANCE talent with crystal clear sarcasm. “I thought this was the kind of shit they ate up over there. ‘Look kids… junkies! Aren’t they just hilarious?! Isn’t addiction just the funniest thing ever!? Hey, maybe one of them will overdose! By George, let’s give him every belt we have!’”

Kerry forced himself to a halt.

Swiftly turning around, the Five Star Champion of PRIME looked his cousin in the eye to let him know he was being serious.

“Go easy on him,” begged that voice from within.

Easy as could be managed, Kerry thought.

“I know it’s not easy for you to be here, Zee…” said Kuroyama. “But would it be too much to ask that you show a bit of goddamn decorum?”

Zack stared back with a defiant sneer.

It was suddenly clear to Kerry that this was no longer his “little” cousin.

“Let’s just do what we came here to do, yeah?” said Zack in obstinance. “Sooner we do this, sooner we can leave this shithole…”

Fully agitated, Daymon went on ahead.

Kerry followed. The living room fed itself into a central hallway. At the end of the corridor, a single “soldier” snoozed in a chair outside the door leading to one of the back bedrooms.

More importantly, their destination.

The emaciated man’s eyes fluttered open as they approached. Instinctively, he reached for his waistline to retrieve a piece, only to discover he had somehow misplaced it.

“...you cops?” he asked dreamily.

“No…” said Kerry. “But if you don’t let us through… I guarantee you’ll be needing to call them.”

Neither interested nor fit enough to challenge that particular dare, the guard lazily nodded them through before dozing off once more.

They went in, and the smell only seemed to grow worse. A quick lookover of the room revealed the same telltale signs of rot, neglect, and detritus as they saw in the rest of the house.

A gutterpunk kingpin of a dealer sat in a ragged armchair marked with hundreds of ancient cigarette burns. They walked in on him as he hunched over a round metal plate of the poorly cut piles of white powder.

He looked exactly as Kerry remembered him. Thin and lanky, dozens of shitty prison tattoos, fake gold chains and rings, tattered fur coat, and a filthy mophead of stringy blonde hair that stretched to his waist.

The room’s only other piece of furniture was a stripped, stained mattress, bearing a frail and pallid young woman wearing only the top part of her lingerie. Kerry initially assumed she was unconscious, until he noticed her eyes.

They were wide open, frozen in horror.

“Sooner we take care of this…” said that voice from within, echoing the words of his cousin.

Kerry waited until the dealer was in the middle of doing the next line before he spoke.

“Sup, Laird?”

A surprised snort kicked up a small cloud of power. The dealer shot up in his seat, looking up at the pair of interlopers through heavily dilated and bloodshot eyes.

“What the FUCK…?!” he blubbered in confusion.

The shock subsided as he gradually recognized their faces.

“...Zack? …K-Kerry?!”

Kuroyama nodded, and came further into the room.

“Business is booming as usual, I see…” he said disapprovingly.

Laird grinned again, revealing jagged yellow nubs of teeth embedded into an unnaturally blue-grey gumline.

“Yeah, ya know… living my best life!” he said, and chuckled in a manner that made the skin crawl.

Kerry felt his stomach turn.

It was hard to believe that at one time, the man had legitimate potential to be something in the ring. Then one day, Rocko caught the wretched bastard peddling his shit in the locker room of the old school… and that was the end of that.

After that day, Laird would forever be hampered by a limp.

The dealer bent over the plate once more, rewarding himself with another line.

“Heard you ain’t doin’ bad yourself, Ker!” he said through the ensuing snorts. “Big shot champ-een over in PRIME! But still too good to spread the wealth among the ol’ Seattle crew. So anyway, how can I be of service, gentlemen? Thought you Dojo brats were too good to party…”

“We’re looking for Beto,” snarled Daymon, growing irate. “You seen him?”

Laird paused at the mention of the name, leaving his straw hovering over the next rail of powder. Gears slowly turned in his head as he painstakingly tried to recall when and where he heard that name before.

“Wait… you mean Beto Gutierrez?” he said, and scoffed. “You came here to ask me about that goddamn flake? How in the fuck should I know?”

“It’s not rocket science, Laird,” said Kerry. “If he’s using again, you’re the first person he’d come crawling to.”

Laird threw his head back and let out a dry cackle. “HAH-HAH, ain’t that the truth! They all come crawling back… eventually!”

He leaned over, indulging himself once more.

Kerry looked to Zack. The latter was growing visibly impatient from the lack of cooperation they were getting.

“Well, color me surprised!” sniffled Laird. “The kid finally grew some hair on his nuts and ditched you stuck-up assholes.”

“Don’t waste an ounce of emotion on this prick,” said that voice from within.

“Have you seen him or not, asshole?” pressed Daymon, taking a step closer.

Laird wiped his gums with the tip of his pinky and smacked his lips.

“Suck my dick, ol’ Ball-Zack, you bitch-ass Daddy’s Boy,” badgered the dealer, flashing another disgusting grin. “I still remember the scrawny little shit you were back in the day. Now you’re grown up, thinking you’re all big and bad and shit. Fuck that. Your old man thought he was tough, too… right up until he became my best customer.”

Chuckling again in his annoyingly high-pitched voice, Laird bent over his plate once more…

…only for a hand to suddenly seize him by the hair and forcibly smash his face into it.

The dealer immediately reared up with a surprised gasp. For a brief moment, he sat paralyzed, with eyes wide with panic, white residue caked over his nose and around his lips, and a straw stuck halfway up his nose shooting jets of blood across the room.

Then the same hand found his neck, and yanked him out of the chair.

After a fit of shouting, pushing, and pulling, Daymon had the deprived heroin dealer flung against the wall with a forearm pressed up against his windpipe.

“Where is he, you junkie piece of shit?!”

Laird choked, sputtered, and kicked his legs in a panicked and futile effort to free himself. Kerry thought he looked like a living bug in an insect display, fighting against a pin impaled through its thorax.

“JESUS, FUCK, IT WAS A JOKE!” the dealer sputtered in desperation. “Look, c’mon, I didn’t even know the kid was back in town! Ain’t seen him in years! I loaned him a couple hundo for a bus ticket! Said he was gonna lay low in Vancouver, I think! Ain’t heard hide nor hair of him since! Come on, man, FUCK, that’s ALL I KNOW! HONEST!”

Zack looked quizzically to Kerry, his face seeking some sort of guidance on how to move forward.

“What does he have to gain by lying?” reasoned that voice from within.

All Kuroyama could offer his cousin was a shrug.

“Fuck this clown…” Daymon muttered contemptuously.

He pulled back and promptly stormed out of the room. Instantly, Laird was on the floor, clutching his neck and gasping for air.

Calm in spite of the circumstances, Kerry reached into his pocket for his wallet and withdrew two hundred dollar notes.

“Keep your ear to the ground, Laird,” he said, throwing the cash onto the dealer’s lap to pay tribute for services rendered. “Because I will be coming back…”

DAY 39 London was a vacation compared to this…

“That is all for today, koutavi…”

He was lying on his back, sucking wind and marinating in the sticky, wet layer of perspiration that blanketed the mat.

Slowly, his vision came back into focus. As it did, he blinked up at the digital clock hanging from the wall of his garage to confirm the time.

Kuroyama sighed in relief. So ended another grueling training session with his new “personal trainer”, the legendary To Minoikó.

“I would advise you not to push yourself too hard,” spoke the fiery voice of Ioanna Drakos. “We are not in London anymore.”

She stood over him, a silver-haired, bronze-skinned Cretan goddess of war, sterny looking at him in cold, silent judgment.

Even in her mid-sixties, to Kuroyama, she was one of the most ferocious-looking beings alive.

“You have a strong opponent ahead of you,” she chided. “And a long tournament beyond that. But your body will not make it to the end, if you force me to destroy it.”

The words lilted to the cadence of her thick Mediterranean accent. She offered him her hand.

Kerry obligingly took it into his own and pulled himself to his feet, wincing from the pain she left behind.

“Ami might have something to say about that,” he quipped.

Drakos chortled. “You have only my deep fondness for that girl to thank that I leave you in one piece, koutavi. Pray you do not disappoint her…”

Her sapphire blue eyes narrowed into slits.

“...or I will cripple you myself.”

Kerry nodded. The message was loud and clear.

“Noted.”

Their sparring left the air feeling heavy and damp. Kerry reached for the button to raise the retractable garage door, bringing relief by way of a fresh breeze of summer air as it slowly rose.

The two of them stepped out into the late afternoon light, discovering a black SUV idling in the driveway.

Ioanna's ride back to the hotel, right on schedule.

“We will review takedown fundamentals tomorrow,” she said, approaching the vehicle. “As you seem to have forgotten much of what I taught you last year…”

“Forgot?” scoffed Kuroyama with a shake of his head. “Nah… I simply improved on what you taught me.”

Unimpressed with his confidence, Drakos replied with an abjective grunt.

“Be mindful that your precious ‘stars’ do not go to your head, koutavi,” she forewarned. “Many warriors have claimed the title of ‘champion’. But only two can claim to have conquered this tournament. If you hope to become the third, you must abandon this notion that material trinkets like ‘belts’ give you credibility. Only passion for the fight is what matters.”

Kerry did not disagree.

To Minoikó pulled open the door to the vehicle’s back seat…

…and paused.

“Tell me again, koutavi…” said Drakos, in a rare moment of confusion. “Why again are the drivers in this city of Seattle all strange men wearing the mask of Charon?”

“Uhh… that’s kind of a long, crazy story…” Kerry replied, nervously scratching his head. “They wouldn’t go away, so… I kinda just hired them to be my personal chauffeur service.”

From behind the wheel, Cyan Reaper gave Kuroyama a dutiful salute.

Ami’s idea, naturally. After listening to him bemoan their existence for half a year, she finally turned him onto the idea of just outright hiring the idiots.

And yet, absurd as they were, the Rainbow Reapers actually had proven to be reliable gig workers. A nagging problem somehow morphed into a convenient solution.

Just one of several observable upgrades to his life since taking the Merry Little Mischief Maker on as his manager.

Regrettably, To Minoikó was not a fan. With a disappointed sigh, she shook her head.

“I suddenly just realized that I am spending the final productive years of my life training an imbecile… who wishes to be king of a circus.”

Kerry shook his head, and chuckled.

“You may know a lot, Io…” he began. “But in case you haven’t noticed, the whole world is slowly becoming a circus.”

Just then, mere feet away from where they were standing, a light, explosive POP accompanied the sudden appearance of two clouds of purple smoke.

Two figures in dapper sleeveless tuxedos and top hats emerged from the quickly dissipating purple haze.

From out of thin air, a pair of magicians had appeared on Kerry’s property.

Twin magicians.

“AVANTI, Monsignor Kuroyama!” said the first, in a voice that was as bombastic as it was grating. “And COWER in the PRESENCE of the AMAAAAAZING AMARETTOS!!”

“We are HERE on behalf of MONSIGNOR BLACK!” announced the second. “To STOP YOU from--”

The rest of the proclamation, regrettably, would go unheard.

Because as suddenly as the twin magicians appeared out of thin air, the Emerald Apex reached out and crushed their skulls into one another.

With a pair of painful grunts, the Amaretto brothers fell into two identical looking heaps.

Unperturbed by this diversion, Kerry promptly turned back to Drakos.

“This ‘imbecile’ is just trying to keep it sane.”

The Cretan master of combat stared at him questionably a moment longer, then shook her head before slipping into the back of the SUV.

“We shall see about that, Kerry…” she said ominously as she closed the door behind her.

DAY 43 Every circus has its lion.

Honestly, Fred?

I can’t think of a thing to say to you that hasn’t already been said by someone else.

Frankly, I have nothing to gain by beating dead horses.

Still, people are drawn to you. I recognize that.

I guess at the end of the day, more than anything else, people want to be entertained.

And while a man who proudly shits himself is probably the lowest hanging fruit in terms of entertainment… somehow, you get it done.

It’s impossible to see myself as an overdog in this.

Too many people are wishing to see the Emerald Apex finally slip. And after Rob’s fifteen minutes of relevance, your pack of dipshits are in desperate need of a spiritual victory.

But I know in my heart that a fading few remain who still believe in forgotten principles like working hard and doing the right thing.

For them alone, Fred… I must fight on.

Because while I may never be what the fans want… 

I will FOREVER strive to be what they need.