I kept writing the start of this as “sorry I haven’t posted for a while” but I’m not sorry. I don’t know why people always say sorry for everything. A couple of concerned people did post in the comments asking where I was and if I was okay. Several more unconcerned people made less pleasant comments. I did not die in a car accident, I will someday, but I have not yet.
I hit a rough patch. I was working a match with a wrestler called Bloody Mary. Not a very imaginative name but it would have been just fine if she had a supernatural or freaky gimmick. She doesn’t. She’s just normal. Not normal normal, she’s six two and built like a linebacker, but wrestling normal. She doesn’t have a have a scary gimmick that should go with a name like Bloody Mary. She does have the word “Devour” tattooed on her stomach. Maybe she has Heinz as a corporate sponsor.
Remember those old Devour commercials where the guys wanted to fuck the food? Can you imagine being in that pitch meeting? “Alright, here’s the ad campaign, the food is so good you want to have sex with it!” And a lot of people responded positively to that. So many people that it actually happened. I need to get into advertising, that’s a world where nothing you do matters.
The plan for the finish was Mary was going to bash me on the head with a chair half a dozen times. Of course it was going to be my fetch instead of me. Even though everyone’s known since the 1850s that getting hit in the head scrambles your brains, just a few years ago real sports decided to care about it. I don’t know why. If you do know why, let me know because there are other well-known problems I would like society to start caring about. A few years after real sports decided concussions were bad, wrestling decided to go along with that as well. Sort of.
This means you don’t see chair shots to the head much anymore. It would have been a pretty cool spot. But when I was under the ring the spell fizzled and the fetch didn’t appear. Tangent – I got a couple comments asking how that works since I explained that it takes a long time to cast a spell. What I do is that I complete most of the spell before I go out to the ring and then stop right before it comes together. I hold it there and finish it when I’m under the ring. It’s like when you need to piss but you hold it – except someone is standing on your bladder. You can keep it together for a while, long enough for a match.
Royale Fantastique called that a spell matrix. He said that if you get really good at magic you can keep a couple of them going at the same time. And for days at a time if not weeks. Seems impossible to me. When I was under the ring in the match with Mary, I had the spell simmering and then it just went out of my mind. It’s like when you have a list of things to buy in your head and then all of a sudden it’s gone. There’s no getting it back.
I should have just scrubbed the whole plan. Bloody mary would have screamed bloody murder and told everyone that I fucked the match but it’s still what I should have done. Maybe that’s hindsight talking. What I did instead was come out from under the ring and roll back in – this already threw her off because I told her she was going to have to come out to get “me”. She had the chair in her hand and I grabbed it and pretended to fight over it and told her to switch the finish – just hit me once and then pin me.
This was a bad plan anyway because I never learned how to get blasted in the head with a chair “safely” and I’m sure she never learned how to be the blaster “safely” either. I take responsibility for that much. I think what you’re supposed to do is partially block it with your hands – which the fans shit on but fuck them. I think you’re supposed to also turn your head to protect your nose and teeth. I did neither of those things. She hit me right on the top of my forehead. It was literally enough to drive me to my knees – just the force, not even the pain. Of which there was plenty.
Did she hit me with the chair again because I went down to my knees instead of going all the way to the ground like she expected? Or did she hit me again because she didn’t hear me tell her to switch the finish? Or did she hit me again because she’s a fucking chickenshit bitch whore who I hate? The fact that she hit me seven or eight more times after that makes the think the last one.
The next thing I remember is being in a bathroom, the public one I think, holding onto the sink and bleeding buckets into it. I’ve heard that head wounds bleed a lot. That’s true. There was a hugely obese guy there wearing a singlet. He must be a wrestler but I don’t remember him from the show. He was saying that I needed to go to the hospital. There’s plenty of fat guys in wrestling but they’re usually big – this guy was just fat.
The next thing I remember is sitting in the bathtub still in my ring gear in a motel bathroom. My entire body hurt. Hurt in ways I can’t understand. The soles of my feet hurt. The inside of my asshole hurt. If you’re a doctor can you explain that? Is that what having brain damage feels like? I felt like I was going to throw up but never did. It wasn’t dry heaves, it was that hot acid-mouth feeling you get right before you puke. It never happened. I looked up on my phone how to make yourself throw up but I couldn’t do it. I just wanted that feeling to go away. I remember the plastic of the bathtub feeling ice cold on my arms but my body feeling like I was burning up.
I must have driven myself there and gotten a room but I don’t remember doing it. I hardly remember anything from the first three days I was there. I remember the manager coming in at some point and me screaming at him and throwing some crumpled up twenties at him. I remember showering a bunch of times and watching the blood run off me like in a horror movie. I remember trying to use my healing spell on myself but I couldn’t do it. Doing magic with a concussion is a bad idea, but you can’t comprehend that it’s a bad idea when you have a concussion. It’s a paradox.
I don’t know if it’s true but I’ve heard that if you go to sleep with a concussion you can die, so I was terrified to fall asleep. By the fourth day I felt “okay” enough to crawl into the bed and sleep. When I woke up I had a message on my phone from a promoter telling me I could never work in the business again – he would get everyone to blackball me. I had missed a show and not even called. That’s bad. The good news is no one I work for has the clout to get anyone blackballed.
I stayed at the motel a few more days which is stupid because it completely wiped me out. I was so dizzy I was afraid to drive. I called and cancelled my next show. I was left with zero money and a third of a tank of gas – not enough to get me to the next show I had booked after the show I cancelled.
I watched an episode of Law and Order on the motel TV where a woman who grew up in foster care and was never adopted finds out her real mother is a rich model, and her real father is a super-rich millionaire. Something like that has probably happened in real life once or twice. I don’t normally waste time feeling sorry for myself but at that moment I really wished that someone would come and say “oh, we found your parents and they’re rich, so now you are too.”
Here’s the fucked up thing, if I was suddenly given 80 million dollars I have no idea what I would do. I don’t really have any hobbies or interests. Before, my life was 100% survival. Now it’s just driving from show to show. If I suddenly didn’t have to do that what would I do? I think I might keep wrestling, how stupid is that? A rich person destroying their body for no reason.
I don’t know how rich David Arquette is, but he wrestles – and he does some crazy shit in the ring too. Can you believe that? Maybe he’s one of those famous people who’s actually broke but his wife is hot so he probably has money. Why else would she be with David Arquette? So if I got 80 million dollars I would be like David Arquette probably. Only I’m never going to be WCW world champion.
I think I would keep doing it because this is the only thing I’ve ever tried to do. I wouldn’t feel good giving up without ever getting good at it. Stupid, but it’s a reason. Once I was sort of coherent, I got really enraged at Bloody Mary. So much so that I went into my car, which now looks like a crime scene from all the blood on the front seat, and started looking in Royale Fantastique’s trunk for a curse spell I could put on her or something I could do to hurt her with magic.
In my three week tutelage with Obaluaiye, one thing he said is that you never use magic to hurt anyone. Ever. Not ever. Fantastique said something similar although he was a little more flexible in terms of defending yourself. They both said that a spell that hurts or kills someone is black magic and you don’t do it lightly. You don’t do it ever. But if you do you need a good reason.
I don’t know what would have happened if I had found a spell right away, probably I would have tried it. But I came to my senses and walked away. There’s probably nothing like that in there anyway. If Fantastique had any spells like that I doubt he wrote them down. Still, if I ever see her again I’m going to ambush her with a baseball bat and crush her fucking skull. I don’t need magic for that.
Normally I make sure I always have enough money to make it to the next show no matter what. Skipping meals is a popular way to cut corners, as is sleeping in the car. This multi-day motel stay had fucked that all up. That’s when a miracle happened. And when you see how it turned out you’ll get an idea or what kind of miracles I get in my life.
I got a call from Natasha– that’s her wrestling name, I forget her real name. I have no idea how she got my number, I had never spoken to her before. She was on television for about three years in the late-2000s, she was the wrestling “it” girl for a few months. WWE used to turn those out regularly. Seriously, go back and look at the WWE Diva’s champions from that time – half of them you’ve forgotten were ever in the biz. The other half you wish you could.
She looks like a young Lena Heady and she did cameos on shitty sitcoms, she was in a cell phone commercial with a mascot that looked like a giant dildo, and she was in a straight to DVD movie about roller derby. Riding this wave of success, she quit wrestling to become an actress and was promptly forgotten. I think she booked a movie with Rob Schneider and that was it. Her business now is going to conventions selling crap and an Onlyfans site. She’s been saying she’s going to un-retire for a decade.
She was calling me for an MMA fight of all things. I guess her boyfriend is involved in some third tier UFC rip-off. There was a show in Creve Coeur the next night with one female fight on the card. One of the scheduled female fighters had withdrawn without much notice. Maybe due to injury, maybe due to not wanting to get her ass kicked. For some reason the promoters were really keen on keeping a women’s fight on the card so they were looking for a sub – and by sub I mean someone to come in with no time to train and get bashed. I think it’s the same plot as Rocky.
I had enough gas to get to Creve Coeur and the pay was a thousand dollars! It was actually two grand but I found out later that Natasha was pocketing half. No one mentioned that you get the same amount again if you win because there was no chance I was going to win. Natasha said she picked me because of my “boxing background” which for the record is none. I’m sure I was “picked” because I was the only one who might do it. I was too desperate for the grand to question any of this. I still have no idea how it happened.
I drove to Creve Coeur for Indiana Fighting Championship 44 – Inferno. Do you need a license to be an MMA fighter? Fuck if I know. No one asked, that’s for sure. I was set to fight “The Traveler” Julia Williams. She looked more like a Bond girl to me than a fighter. She looked like the one from Die Another Day. I had no idea what was going on or what I was supposed to do. I was just hanging around the venue waiting for someone to give me any information. One guy I asked flipped his lid because I told him I didn’t have any MMA gloves. Some woman with a headset brought me gloves. So hey, free gloves.
If you’re not sure, getting into an MMA fight with no training is not a good idea. A week after getting a concussion is probably about the worse time to go into an MMA fight with no training. The question is – why did I try to fight her? I’m a wrestler, I should know better. If there’s one thing I should know it’s how to make a fight look good and then lose without getting hurt too much. I should have just let her grapple me and then tapped and taken my grand.
They say every time you get a concussion you become more likely to get another. They also say that MMA is the worst sport for concussions because you get hit after you’re knocked out. That seriously damages your brain. I don’t remember most of what happened. I know that it lasted into the second round – which doesn’t say much for the Traveler. I know that I lost. I would swear to you that I was disqualified for kneeing her in the head, but that makes no sense because I remember her knocking me down with a combination of punches and then jumping on me and the referee stopping it. So she must have won by TKO. Can you knee someone once in MMA and get a warning? I don’t fucking know.
When I woke up I was sitting in the corner in a janitor’s closet. Did I go in there and sit down and pass out or did those MMA fuckers just shove me in there? I was pretty messed up but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the Bloody Mary experience. There’s only about a day and a half I don’t remember from getting my bell rung by the Traveler.
I’m now a 0-1 MMA fighter. So I’m better than CM Punk at MMA. And just as good as Bam Bam Bigelow, Nathan Jones, and Steve Williams. So I got that going for me.
That’s why I haven’t posted in a while.
