Post by Everybody Hates Jenny Myst on Aug 11, 2023 17:08:20 GMT -5
It’s been a long time since I decided to stop being arm candy and step into that ring. So long now, that it feels as if it's an event that occurred in another person’s life. It feels like something that I read about, or imagined. Something illusory that I’ve inserted myself into.
–They say the human body replaces all its living cells every seven years, so I suppose that, physically, I am a different person than existed a decade ago–
As I stood outside John F. Kennedy International airport, my luggage trailed behind me, I attempted to flag down a cab. The Uber App isn’t worth a shit sometimes, and the airport Wi-Fi is spotty at best. I found one, and tossed my bag into the back as I climbed in next to it.
The driver was a bit different than you’d imagine for the role he played, different from the main crowd of ‘cabbies.’ He wore his sandy brown hair in a rough ponytail, facial hair raggedly fashioned into a handlebar mustache. His shirt was old and stained, and had a pocket on the left breast. I couldn’t see his pants, but I assumed he was wearing them.
A cigarette burned between his fingers, adding to the brown nicotine stain that colored the tips. Something struck me about the way he looked at me as I pulled out my vape–assuming that this was a cloud encouraging vehicle–he didn’t see me as a passenger anymore. There was a coldness in his gaze. Something else, too. A kind of pity, or disgust in his eyes. Half of me expected him to scold me for feeding such a filthy habit, but he didn’t. He didn’t say a word as he typed in the address for Madison Square Garden and the numbers began to blink in red. It was a long ride, with NYC traffic, so the only thing to do to break the insufferable awkwardness of silence was to talk. We talked about life, about how I was ready to expand new horizons and find myself as a person. I asked him how long it took for him to do the same.
“I used to think about it a lot,” he said, looking off into the distance, the skyline of Manhattan a barley visible blur.
“When you reach a certain age, you know who you are. I live in a little condo near a bar in Queens. I work 9-5 and drive on weekends. In between, I drink and there ain’t nobody there to stop me. I know who I am, and after all these years, there’s a kind of–victory in that.”
I didn’t expect this kind of conversation from a cab driver, especially one in the nation's largest city (hell, I didn’t expect him to speak English), but there was a solace that came over me when he began. Something pulled me into his words, something in me related to him, in a way. He seemed defeated. He seemed broken. He wore a wedding band, but to this point he never mentioned anything about a family. That is usually the first “small talk” topic that comes up, that and the ‘weather’. I chose not to pry.
We talked about my career, and what I had learned through my ups and downs as a multi-time champion and a mid-card gatekeeper. He listened, he nodded, but I got the impression that he was….uninterested. Somehow, unimpressed.
This irritated me a little. Sure my story was full of cliches and platitudes, but to dismiss my experience in a glance grated at me. I decided to switch it up, and asked him what he had learned in his time driving all sorts of different people around the metropolis. I immediately wished I didn’t ask.
“Some people in this town, they act like they’re not even aware that the outside world even exists, I might as well be living in a cave. This place is a gutter, one giant high-rise trailer park just floating through the universe, yet somehow apart from it. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be happy, it doesn’t mean they can’t have value. I mean, there’s no shame in being consciously happy while being unconsciously ignorant. That’s just it, kid, they’re consciously ignorant.”
He crushed the burned up remnants of his cigarette and tossed it out the window onto the freeway, then lit up another.
“I think human consciousness is a tragic mistake in the history of our evolution.”
He let that thought sink into my soul, while taking in a lung-full of smoke, exhaling lazily as his gaze remained pinned on the distant horizon, the skyline approaching us with rapid fluidity.
“We became too sentient, too self aware. Whatever drives the universe forced the creation of an element separation from itself. We humans are creatures that have no right to exist by natural law, we are beings that operate under the false pretenses of having a ‘self’. This chaotic mess of senses and feelings. All somehow assured that we are each somebody, when in fact, we’re all just nobody.”
I puffed in a lung full of my own toxin, the nicotine filled juice that sits on top of a lithium battery.
“So, I am guessing you’re not a religious man?” I chucked a bit, trying to lighten the mood. I felt rather accomplished as he chuckled at my question.
“Religion. Man, now there’s a thing.”
There was a faint smile on his face, the first one since I entered his lecture-cab. I could only hope the thought of it amused him as much as it amused me.
“The transfer of fear and self loathing to a figure of divine authority, I can understand the catharsis. ‘God’ soaks up their doubt and pain with his perfect Star Wars narrative.”
I puffed again. Raspberry Watermelon. Summertime.
“I don’t know, sir,” my voice had a light airiness to it, “sounds like you could do with a little old time religion.” Who was I kidding? I’d been an atheist since I knew what the word meant, but he didn’t have to know that. There was a pot there just begging to be stirred, and we were in traffic.
“If it’s good enough for grandma right…”
He smiled again, less faintly this time.
“At least I’m not rushing towards a cosmic stop sign.”
It was about this time that I confessed that I was shocked to hear him speak this way. Sure, I had been through my share of hardship, and was just getting out of a toxic relationship of my own–an eight year toxic relationship. He got to meet people all the time, made tips, and could control his own job and his own hours, and didn’t have to answer to anyone. I envied it. I rubbed my jetlagged eyes and when I brought my hand down they made contact with his. His look told me that he knew exactly what I was getting at, and not even to bother asking.
“You want to know what made me this way, dontcha?”
He had that same faint smile on his withered lips.
"A lot of people want to know that. I mostly tell them to piss off but you—”
He caught himself for a moment, shaking his head with that look of pity and disgust in his eyes that he had when I first slid into the ripped back seat.
“My wife, god rest her soul, she and I–well–we lost our daughter at a young age.”
All the emotion seemed to drain out of him while he spoke, and the air inside the cab seemed a lot heavier than it did previously, even with the windows open.
“I think about her now and then, my daughter and what she was spared. During the better moments, I feel sort of grateful for it. The doctor said she didn’t feel a thing, that the drunk driver sent her straight into a coma. And after a few weeks of sleepless, tear stained nights, somewhere in that dark room she was locked in, she slipped into another, deeper, kind of sleep.”
The words that left my mouth weren’t words I had ever said to anyone. “I–I’m sorry.”
It was all I could think to say. He heard my voice quiver with sadness and shock, but saw my eyes light up as something in my cerebral cortex registered on a deeper level.
“Nah. Don’t be. It’s a beautiful way to go out. Painless, happy, innocent. The trouble with dying later is that it's too late. The damage is done.”
He certainly had an odd way of reassuring me.
“You want kids?” He asked.
I shrugged. With my fast-paced and constantly traveling career, plus one where you are required to stay in shape, it never really became a thought of mine with everything else going on.
“Don’t.” His response was almost contemptuous.
“I think of how arrogant and cruel it is to force a soul out of the ether into this sack of rotting flesh, to condemn a life to walk blindly in this meat grinder. Sometimes I think I should go thank that drunk for getting behind the wheel after one too many. They spared me the sin of being a father.”
I confided in him that I believed there was more to life than just soul-crushing pain. That I knew all about how it felt to lose everything, to have to start from the bottom and work your way up, with a reputation that hinders you at every turn. Now, more than ever, people can act in ways that can change the world for the better. The wrestling world in 2023 is more influential than it's ever been. Social media is a tool that can be used for good, though so many use it for evil. This business has become my life, and everything in it. I can build myself back up, get back into the light from the darkness, build a new fortress for myself out of the ashes of the old one.
He disagreed, as I knew he would.
“You see, this is what I’m talking about.” He was growing a bit frustrated as he balled up another cigarette and flicked it out the window.
“Sure, there are broader ideas in play. Mainly what is shared between us as a species for our mutual illusions.”
He lit up again, and looked through me instead of at me.
“Ever seen a dead body?”
I nodded, sheepishly.
“Then you’ll know, when you look in their eyes. Even in the pictures, you can still read ‘em. You know what I see? I see that they welcomed it when it finally came. Not at first, but right there, in the final moment, its relief. They were afraid, and now they see for the very first time how easy it was to just let it all go. In those last few seconds of life, they saw what they were, what they had always been. You, me them, this whole comic tragedy was never more than thrown together presumptions and stupid blind will. What you need to do is just let go. To finally know that you didn’t have to hold on so tight to realize that all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your heartache…..it was all just the same thing. It was all just the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream of being ‘person.’”
We pulled up out front of Madison Square Garden, “The World’s Most Famous Arena”, the keys on his lanyard jangling as the car came to an abrupt stop.
“Good luck kid, you’re gonna need it.”
And like that, he was gone, blending into the blur of everyday life in the nation's most populated hellscape. Just like that, I knew that the hell I was about to go through–no matter how much pain and suffering is inflicted upon me inside this legendary building–that none of it, in the end, would matter.
I puffed on my vape again and blew out a cloud before wheeling my luggage inside. I could still taste it in my mouth.
Raspberry Watermelon. Summertime.
“There are complexities about myself that I never knew before, not because they didn’t exist but because I was blind to them. I wanted them so badly to not be true, that I refused to entertain the idea that they could be. I wanted so badly to be liked, to be a part of the community, to be a ‘team player’ in the locker room. I saw all of my peers forming these cliques and stables, and I wanted so badly just to be a part of something.
But I was different from any of them.
I never realized it then, blinded by my own sense of ‘friendship’, but I didn’t want to join them to be a part of them, I wanted to join them to eat them from the inside like a cancer. I thrived on it. It fueled me. Why do you think that when I wanted SO badly to join AX3 back in the day–just to have powerful friends and allies so I could say to the world ‘hey look, influential people like me!’--just to be plotting the entire time to bring them crumbling down like Jenga blocks from within? Because I am wired differently. Why do you think that when The Left Hand tried to force me to join their cult, I pushed back so vehemently? Because I wasn’t in control.
I wanted so badly to be liked and to ‘fit in’, that I didn’t understand my natural propensity to be the antagonist in this story we tell. All of these years, all of these hotels, jetliners, capacity crowds and taxi cabs, I have finally come to the realization that I…..am…..the bad guy.
Like me or hate me, Lycana (and let's be real, we all know you hate me because Jim tells you to), I am who I am. Reputation is reputation for a reason, people don’t change who they are. I broke off from Chaotic Inc, did my own thing, had my own success, and I am in no better place now than I was before in the ‘reputation’ department.
BACKSTABBING BITCH, ISLE 9!
At least when I was with Chaos people ‘liked’ me because I was a welcomed change to the overbearing asshole that he became. They didn’t really like me, they pretended to. They pretended to because that’s the narrative here—nobody has a problem until they have a problem. Everyone is a tough guy until they get punched in the mouth. That mean girl queen, that wasn’t me. That is the me I so desperately wanted you to accept. I didn’t want any of you to see me for me.
I never got to know you Lycanna, and it’s a shame. I was off doing my own thing, winning titles, headlining Pay Per Views, and creating one of the best storylines XWF has ever known (lord knows their creative team couldn’t come up with anything a fraction as good), while you were stuck fighting someone else’s battles and getting no credit for it.
That’s always been your M.O, hasn’t it? You’ve always been an intern, but never been a CEO. Your undying loyalty to Jim shows us that.
You can’t do it on your own, never have. You need that validity, that fall back, that person to coddle you when things don’t go your way. You need to be part of a unit, not sold separately. You’d never make it at IKEA.
The cold, hard fact of the matter is that you and I, we’re not much different. Or at least, we weren’t. I was guilty by association for supporting an overzealous asshole with his hand on the trigger, always having that judgemental eye cast over me because of my affiliation. Some things never go away, like an actress with a blockbuster hit–nobody can see her as anything else again.
I broke off from the moorings, you ran back to them. I did it ALONE for half a decade, you followed like a lost puppy when Jim’s hairy finger got to waving. Everything I’ve ever heard about you is that you’re so nice, so pleasant, so reasonable. Everything I’ve ever heard about him–and I know through my unfortunate interactions with him–is that he is a loose cannon who can’t decipher reality from fiction. He lives this fantasy life, and in a way we all do, that is part of playing a character on television, but the difference is that we can box it up and put it away when the lights go off. (And before any of you go HEY WAIT A MINUTE........Jim still claims he was possessed when Vaughn took his Universal title so it lines up. Sue me.)
I have a championship pedigree, what do you have? You are sticking sucking on the teet of Jim's legacy, hoping there is some more milk in those funbags. You don't get it, you don't see it, and you won't. Not unless big daddy tells you to. Shame.
Hell, doll.....
If you got to know me, you’d probably think I was a sweetheart. Hell we could probably go shopping and have a Quijaboard sleep over! But you won’t, because of your unyielding
Shame what I am going to do to you inside that ring. Shame that I no longer care how I am perceived. Shame that I will take great pleasure in causing you pain. Shame that I am going to prove to the world at Summer Madness that you’ve never been good enough to do this by yourself, and never will.
Say what you want about me, cuz lord knows the Caedus household can’t keep my name out of their mouth, but come August 13th the ONLY thing you will be able to say is that I beat you worse than Jimmy ever could."
1-1