I had a dream once…
Like Dr. King, I had a dream of a better world, a better IWC. There was a time when I imagined that I was making a difference, that the things I was doing served some sort of purpose. I dreamed that when I hurt people, when I broke their bones and ground them into the mat and shattered their dreams, that it was for the greater good and it would all pay off in the end.
I was wrong.
***
[AWOL stands before what is obviously a green-screen image. At current it shows a shot of the Parthenon. As you watch, what is clearly just a PowerPoint presentation of scenic slides changes to Mount Everest. Somewhere, someway, perhaps Christian Savior will be happy to see that AWOL is not, in fact, standing before a generic background. In any case, we will not be mentioning it again.]
AWOL: Gentlemen. I believe congratulations are in order. The end of the year awards are out, and the two of you made off like bandits (temper tantrums about not winning aside.) You officially embody everything that’s wrong with the wrestling business today. Sit back and let the magnificence of your achievement soak in. You should really pat yourselves on the back. The IWC audience has spoken, and apparently your particular brand of nonsense is exactly what they’ve been waiting their miserable, squalid lives to see.
I have a hard time coming up with a compelling reason to condemn you anymore, honestly, so there’s really no reason to continue bothering. You’re doing what you’re doing and looking out for yourself, and who can blame you? There’s no profit to be found in standing on ideals anymore. Ideals get you retired. They leave you in a situation where you have no friends in a company you helped build, where you’re told by people with half your experience that somehow you’re a “retard” in the ring. You spend a career breaking down the Christian Savior and Shawn Hall’s of the world, ostensibly as a means of trying to improve it, and one day you wake up and discover that your only friend is a miserable, self-absorbed ego-maniac who is almost certainly going to sell you down the river at the first opportunity to advance his own career at your expense.
Does it shock you to hear me say that, Savior? It turns out I’m not a simpleton, despite the conclusion you’ve drawn. I know the score. I’ve known Johnny longer than you have, all the way back to before he was ever a champion and when everyone thought he was just a nobody that did funny videos for his promos. The blind tag and jumping into the match last week? Shocker. You mean that a man who has traded everything in his life to hold the world heavyweight title isn’t above pulling a dirty trick to get into the ring and eliminate any chance of not reacquiring the strap? My god, my entire paradigm just collapsed. Thank you, Christian Savior. Thank you for pointing out what was glaringly obvious to the entire world. Where would I be without you?
Why am I not furious? Why am I not cursing Johnny’s name up and down? Let’s think about this one. Item number one, the blind tag happened several minutes before the match ended, when the opposition was gaining a little momentum on me. It was a clutch move at an important moment in the match, one of the thousand little things that make us the most effective tag team in this company. Neither of us saw the ending of the match coming when the blind-tag happened, so what the hell is the point in getting angry that, while legally tagging himself in, Kingdom got the win? There isn’t one, particularly when you’re interested in getting the victory, no matter the cost.
Number two has to do with a word that I’m certain is unfamiliar to you: professionalism. I don’t need to crush my partner for my own advancement every time he makes the mistake of turning his back on me. I don’t play the double-dealing bullshit game because, unlike you, I can get what I want by doing a crazy thing called winning. It’s how I earned all my titles, and more often than not I did it under my own power and without interference. For instance, no one has ever won a title and then handed it to me, to cite a hypothetical example that clearly has no relevance on this match. If and when the time comes when I get an opportunity to fight Kingdom for the belt, he’ll get everything I can throw at him and then some, and I have every confidence I would win. Beating him twice previously in singles competition probably has something to do with that, although again, that’s not a point Savior finds all that meaningful or important. We were in a tag-team match at Riot! with the tag titles on the line, we got the win, and a belt that never should have been taken from Johnny in the first place was rightfully restored. Today, the Empire possesses the two most important titles in this company, the World Title and the Tag Team strap, and things are right with the world.
I know, they’re no Submissions or Cartel title, but we’re happy with them so I guess that’s what counts.
And now it’s a new week, and I’m stuck having to fast-forward through more of your terrible promotional material to prepare for another tag-team match where you get to have a fully functional, coordinated team and I’m stuck with Orlando Cruze. Feel free to torch him, by the way. I won’t dispute any of your points. To be honest, after he screwed the pooch on that Extinction match I was halfway tempted to just not show up on Riot! and leave him to be torn to shreds by you. However, the thought of another loss on my record to your group turns my stomach, so I’ll find a way to put the nausea aside until the final bell rings and make this work. Say what you will about us, the two of us put together have more wrestling accomplishments than anything you and the talking penis have in your entire stable. I know you think that somebody just walked down the aisle and handed us all of our title belts and wins over the course of our career (perhaps because that seems to be your method of choice,) but I assure you those things don’t happen by accident. We’re both very good professional wrestlers. No amount of trumped up facts, exaggerated failings, and flat-out lying on your part will change that.
Speaking of flat out lying, there seems to be a rash of that going on with your team of late. I blow spots, Porno Lad? Really? Which spots would you be referring to? Because, to my knowledge, I’m just as technically sound today as I was during the days when I was Submissions champ. Allow me to explain something to you quickly: I am a powerfully built individual. I have a strength advantage against the majority of my opponents, and I take advantage of this in the ring. I don’t need to be doing high flying maneuvers anymore than Rey Mysterio needs to start choke-slamming people. It’s your prerogative to think what you want about my abilities in the ring, of course, but I’ll be damned if I’m just going to let an out-and-out lie on your part go uncontested. It’ll just make it all the more sweet when you underestimate me and find yourself getting out-wrestled in the middle of the ring on Friday.
And I could harp on the irony of someone who seems to be barely able to communicate verbally calling me a “retard,” but it’s almost too easy, and you probably wouldn’t understand what the word irony meant anyways.
There was one thing you said where I agree with you however, Savior. A win is in fact a win. The “W” goes in the book for your team at Extinction, and I made it very clear that I don’t hold that against you or begrudge it. I do take some issue, however, with the implication that somehow you pinning a random spectator who interfered in the match while half of my team was in the backstage area and Johnny Kingdom had been knocked out with a chair is somehow equivalent to somebody putting a t-shirt on you and saying something spooky over the PA system. However, as you put it, a win is a win. So I’ll be expecting, from now on, to hear no more bitching about my pinning you, which I’ll point out came in a singles match where we were facing each other one on one rather than with three other bodies as backup. If you’re willing to do that, then yes, Christian, a win is a win. You’ll hear nothing else from me on the subject of the loss at Extinction. And when Cruze and I beat you tomorrow night, even if some fan in the crowd is holding up a particularly clever sign that somehow causes you to be distracted and lose to me again, that will be a win as well. Deal?
Come to think of it, I’m going to take back what I said about not contradicting you when it comes to Cruze. There is one thing you said that I thought was truly hysterical: this accusation of corruption on Cruze’s part. This would be, as far as I can tell, yet another of these examples of the two of you just making random shit up and spewing it out from week to week. Cruze is corrupt? Really? That might be the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard since…well since a person who honestly said the sentence “His ring work is like a raging retard playing a piano sure he can hit all the keys but he cant play real music well me I am Mozart” called me retarded. Nevermind the fact that he’d actually have to have done something in his role as GM for any of it to qualify as corruption, the few times he has attempted to be of use he’s done it in a fashion that is flat-out irreproachable. You honestly think that putting Johnny in a situation where he has to specifically pin Simon Cagero in a tag-team match is doing him some kind of favor? There was only one out of the eight possible outcomes to that match that involved him regaining the belt, and Cruze certainly didn’t come down to the ring and make Cagero tag in to put his belt at risk. If your puppet champ was too stupid to come into the match with a game-plan, that isn’t Cruze’s fault either. And really, you are aware that the World Champion has a mandatory rematch clause in his contract, right? So Johnny was going to get at least one more shot at that belt anyway and, frankly, I doubt even you are deluded enough to think that he would NEVER have gotten a title shot again.
But put all that aside for a moment, and let’s get down to who the whistleblower is on this particular outcry against graft. You’re Christian Fucking Savior. You are the EMBODIMENT of corruption. Every week I see you booking matches that favor yourself or your stable. You’re blackmailing Dan Douglas into giving you a title shot (and, seriously, the submissions belt? Way to reach for the brass ring, Christian.) Everything you do is a calculated move with exactly one beneficiary, yourself, and you damn well know it. And yet, somehow, you have the gall to claim that Orlando Cruze, the boyscout of boyscouts, is somehow corrupt? Christ. If people Google “Pot calling kettle black” the first thing that pops up on the search results is going to be your promo. Cruze is Mother Teresa compared to you, and trying to push the lie any further just makes you look even more ridiculous.
But that’s what it boils down to for the Society, isn’t it boys? It’s not about wrestling talent. It’s not about wins or losses. It’s about pushing the lie. If you tell people often enough that you’re good, eventually they believe you. If you spend enough time claiming that you don’t care about any of the top belts in the company and that, somehow, holding mid-card belts is an equivalent achievement, the people will follow. If Porno Lad just manages to put enough sex and depravity into his promos, eventually they’ll forget that he’s nothing more than a phallus with a mouth that, apparently, doesn’t have a functional brain attached to it. If Christian Savior can just find enough hyperbole and exaggeration to base his promo around, eventually the fans will just accept that he must see something they don’t and, in fact, the world actually does revolve around him. It’s straight out of the Carl Rove playbook, the same sort of garbage that can somehow convince the gullible masses that voting for a staunch right wing congressman in Massachusetts to reestablish gridlock in the Senate is somehow a vote for “change.” Give ‘em the old Razzle Dazzle and they’ll never catch wise.
And hell, let’s not kid ourselves, it works. I have only lost a handful of matches since I came back, all of which happened through 5SS interference, and yet I find myself always the underdog on the weekly predictions lists. Porno Lad is the Superstar of the Year. The Five Star Society is the stable of the year despite only being in existence for the last few months. The masses are asses, and we all know it. So keep it up, fellas. Tell people I’m a sidekick. Tell people I’m irrelevant. Tell people that in a tag match I’m the first one to go. Lie, lie, lie, and when you’re done, start lying again. Just be careful you don’t start buying your own propaganda, because I’ve built a career off of defeating people who underestimated me. The list of opponents who thought they had me under their thumb only to find their entire world destroyed by yours truly could about fill a book, and I assure you that you will be just as surprised and disbelieving as they were when I add your name to it. You say you’ve got nothing to prove? Well I do. If nothing else, I have to do my little part to restore some semblance of reality to this place, and I can do that by reminding you and the world that, in fact, I am far from an afterthought and, in fact, I am the most dangerous man in this match. I am angry. I am motivated like never before. And I am coming for you tomorrow night. You say you’re going to make me into a burning sign?
Fucking.
Try.
It.
***
I still have a dream, but it is a very different one today. It’s not a dream of a better world. It’s a dream of destruction. It’s a dream where this bloated, twisted, putrid excuse for a wrestling organization is burned to the ground. It’s a world with streets littered with bleached skeletons, an empty, desolate world where I sit on a throne of skulls surrounded by the broken bodies of enemies. The last, grasping hand of those standing lined against me reaches to claw at the ground, one fingertip just barely grazing against the tarnished, charred golden plate of the World Heavyweight title resting at my feet. I look out upon the devastation, watching the towering edifice of our pride and bloodlust and greed burn to the ground. Dark forms twist and turn in the street, rings of spectators watching violent bloodsports with no need for talking or promotional material. The animalistic cries of the audience rise into the air with every pure blow of competition, and it is music to my ears.
The faintest hint of a smile rests upon my sooty, ash covered face.
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