The Lonely Death of Nate Nawrocki.
Sept 29, 2021 18:34:46 GMT -5
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Post by Downfall on Sept 29, 2021 18:34:46 GMT -5
All I have left are memories. Memories of when I was a part of something. Memory, prickly like grasping blackberry vine. It sticks and pokes, and you draw your hand back. I've had a lotta time to think on that metaphor...
Frowning, I open the old clamshell phone, pressing start on an ancient, Myspace-era selfie video, taking me back into the bramble of the past.
("Yea-yea, itcha boi, Redd Dizz-Awg in the hizhouse, Inna Circle reprasentin' ya'heard, tonight me an' the main homie Downfall gonna CRUSH them fuckin' Twiztid Nightmares and take our Tag titles back here live at tha big show, Downfall tell em what's up-"
"Redd I swear to god if you don't get that fucking cameraphone out of my face - get ready for the match! Now! If you lose us this match against fucking Boca Del Inferno and Darkdragon, you're done.")
(The camera jostles as a familiar figure, his gloriously, feathery blonde hair streaming past his shoulders and his punk vest not as ragged, brusquely pushes the holder out of the way. Tracking on the blonde man, strutting like a Napoleonic martinet, with a bottle-blonde, leggy woman in a too-tight skirt following, heels clacking. Then the camera zooms up-nose angle, like a bad Blair Witch, continuing the documentary. He stutters, but then recovers.
"You wanna hear me bust a rap on Boca and Darkdragon?
Yo. Yo.
You two the juggalos, but you gots-ta goes, when I hit the Street-Sweeper the whole crowd know, I'll go home with your jugga-ho-"
"REDD," snaps a terse voice from off the camera, "SHUT THE FUCK UP.")
Those were the good old days.
I've got so much footage from back in the day that I once thought to stitch together... I was obsessed with Cribs, Yo MTV Raps, all that shit back then and the celeb lifestyle, the inside baseball lifestyles of the rich'n famous stunting all appealed to me. Even when what I was living, was not that. I really thought I was living that life... but the real talk is, I was just a dumb as fuck kid with three matches in indy feds that drew 20 people before Downfall found me when I was 19 and recruited me to be part of his Inner Circle... and I deluded myself that I was joining a Crew.
Yeah, every kid growing up in Brooklyn Heights wants that life. When you're raised on New Jack City, on Scarface, on Boyz In The Hood, you want to be the kid who rolls around with a crew. Knowing one day, you'll be the boss.
("Except it didn't come true... did it, Redd?")
Jason's voice comes to me in my dreams. I refuse to join him... because he's speaking inside my ears, calling like the god damn snake in the garden, but I know if I just close my eyes and picture it I'll see him standing in his penthouse, overlooking the lights below. He's far away... but he's still... managed to be inside my head, and I...
No. I will not let him in. I will not let him win.
Breath shuddering. I try not to focus on the glinting, glimmering sharp laying on my bedside table. I try to put it aside, but the knife is calling, as is the little baggie of powder I know is waiting inside my jacket pocket.
See, I lied to Danny twice this week.... and it's my secret shame.
I lied when I told him that was all my stash, when he and Chelle flushed it down the toilet and locked me in the car to let me dry out for three days on the road... because honestly, bein' with them again was a welcomely pleasant sensation, it took me away in a natural high that made me think maybe I didn't need the smack. I was even able to fool myself, that some'a that tough love, knocking some sense inta my head from Danny would straighten me out again... that if I just allowed it, I could go back on the road with Downfall, be a supporting player to him and Michelle. And I wouldn't need the heroin anymore.
But I also lied to Danny about not knowing where Jason was...
And Danny has been searching for Jason so hard that I know, if he knew what I knew, he wouldn't forgive me for not telling him.
("Ahhhh, addicts gonna addict, Redd, what can you say. It's not your fault that you're this way, you know... acting squirrelly, hiding cards close to the chest, that's just the way addicts get by," Jason muses. "But who broke you this way? Who hurt you so badly that you're a shell, a living ghost with a beating heart, animated only by faint memory and a spike of junk in your armpit? Hmm, I wonder.")
I...
It's true. I wasn't... always this way.
Youngest Inner Circle member, rookie of the year in 2004, briefly a dual champion in 2005 co-holding the Tag belts with Downfall and one of six handlers to be the IEW Television champion before it got sullied by a reign with a pineapple.
A world away (literally), Jason smiles at his reflection in the glass. He smiles at me, knowing.
My hands are bleeding, ragged from the thorns of memory, and shame. Yeah. Youngest Inner Circle member, the prodigy. The blue chipper. Until I started to lose.
Until the white kid from the ghetto act started to wear thin and it became bad business for Downfall to have a member of his stable losing every week and being laughed off as a joke, as Malibu's Most Wanted. In the corporate world, they have euphemisms for it - downsized, golden parachute, restructuring. In the land of the Inner Circle, it was, Downfall hired a new gun, someone even more ruthless, and their first act was to destroy the clown prince.
I have this video on the old clamshell phone, too. It's triggering to look at and makes me want to reach for something... but my hand is working the phone in it's habitual way. I always end up consuming something that'll punish me.
(Jimmy Bradley, the color commentator on Mayhem, is squealing "Oh my - Oh my god! That's Sicko! That's the monster Sicko!" as the person shooting the cell-phone video, blurry and washed out as it was, tried to capture the spectacle of a 400 pound man wearing clown makeup landing a flurry of strikes to an undersized cruiserweight.)
I shut my eyes, but I can see the beatdown in my head.
("Why is Sicko doing this?? For what reason is he destroying Redd Dogg?!"
"Wait a minute, that-that's Downfall on the stage! Downfall is barking orders at Sicko!"
"Sicko is wrapping the chair around Redd Dogg's leg! God somebody stop this!")
The sickening crunch as the jaws of the chair closed around my ankle like a vise resound in my mind. It's a song I can never get out of my head.
Bad breaks, requiring surgery. Medicine, to help with the pain after surgery. "Medicine", when some oxys and vicodin wouldn't take the sharp edge off the chronic pain, or make the phantom itching of the pins in my knee stop. Just... stop.
("And to think, Redd, all because you didn't fit the mold Danny was looking for. Because you didn't "fit in" with our aesthetic... Downfall recruited monsters, increasingly sadistic men to fit in with his rep for Anarchy once he began going down the punk, anti-establishment riot gear path. Isn't it enough to drive you mad? Isn't it enough to make you go apeshit?" Jason muses, and then, I can almost see him in his penthouse, looking over his shoulder at someone I can't quite make out. They're bringing him a glass of champagne on a platter.)
It is, though.
It is enough to make me want to go apeshit...
My brow furrows with angst as my teeth feel something sour. I had all of this done to me.
I was cast aside from the Inner Circle just as it began to really take off. Four more Tag championships, World title reigns for three members, main event status and holding the distinction of being a cornerstone of the IEW until it closed in 2010. And for all of that, I was thrown out...
I didn't deserve it? Because I wasn't mister perfect Daniel Fehl, or his gun moll Michelle, and I didn't have a place in their perennial story? I was consigned to be a forgotten side piece, a nobody they forgot about? I -
No.
No, I can feel the fingers of Jason's corrupting influence digging into my mind, pushing me in that direction, and I block it off. I'm not being drawn into the black hole that's standing at the top of the world, looking out from his penthouse across an unfamiliar desert. I'm here, right here, in my hotel room.
("I want you here with me, Redd. Just like old days, old Inner Circle days," Jason says, then he looks down and off from me, "I'm building my own little gang and it's going to be just as good as what Danny ever made. So I need to give you my pitch.")
No. I won't listen.
I'm panting, though. The effort of fighting off the incursion into my mind is draining, and I don't have the strength to fight it anymore. I've fought for so many years. I'm tired.
("Listen to me, Redd. Creation is built upon the promise of hope, that things will get better. That tomorrow will be better than the day before.
But it's not true. Cities collapse, populations expand, people get ruder. You can't go to the grocery store without getting in a fight with a guy in the checkout line who refuses to wear a mask during a pandemic.
Filthy streets. Drive-by shootings. Bomb blasts and body counts. Permissible amounts of rat-droppings per hot dog. Terror in the streets, on the internet, and in your living room. Pain is ever-present, no matter how hard you try to escape it, and love is statistically false. The only option you've got left is to numb the pain with drugs.")
I won't. I WON'T.
But the baggie in my hoodie pocket.
I draw my attention back to Jason. Turn to him and now we are both standing on the balcony of a penthouse, a world away. I've flipped. I pick that word up from his head, that the reason Danny hasn't found him is that he's flipped elsewhere. I don't know where... all I can sense is the bustle of the street below, and the neon, gaudy lights of a strip. And a Black Pyramid, out there in the desert, and I -
No, I turn back from it. The illusion flickers, impermanent, as I haven't fully crossed over.
Jason holds his arms out to me, wanting me to be present there, to flip to the penthouse overlooking the Strip and join him and his protege.
("Think about what I'm saying to you, Redd. There, you are alone. If you come here, you'll be part of something new. You'll be part of a family.")
"I had a family, Jason. For a while, it was the best family I've ever been part of."
("And yet, you refuse to let them know you're still using, and won't let yourself be around them. Are you afraid, Redd, that he'll think you're too weak, and cast you out again?")
I have to crack a smile at that. Because Jason will never understand. But then, my mind firms as I dummy up for what I have to do.
There's only one way this can go.
No, I can't let them in on it... I can't see the hurt on Michelle's face when they come to see me again. But I can't let Jason keep getting into my mind. When I flipped to his penthouse out there overlooking the desert, I saw the corrupted girl standing by him, connected to him by a slender cord around her throat. Her eyes were blank, void of emotion, and her stormy expression was lost. This was the answer, to Jason, for how he wanted his "Inner Circle" to navigate the world.
("I see what you're doing. Redd. Stop this right now. If you do this, you're going by yourself. You'll be alone.")
I reach for the sharp, glinting knife laid sideways on a mirror on my bedside.
But what I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of the old days, where I was part of something. I find comfort in memories, they're all I have left.
And I'm scared. Fuck, of course I am.
But I can't let myself be used against the man who gave me a chance when I was starting... and when I was at my lowest, found me and tried his hardest to make up for what he had broken.
The knife bites flesh, and I instantly know I've hit deeper than I thought with a gasp. But I'm in it, now.
I will not be a weapon anymore. Not for any Inner Circle.
And I will not be a disappointment.
This isn't the answer to how to really stop Jason... but I fall onto my back knowing, with a smile on my face, that he doesn't get the satisfaction of ending my story for me. I write my final words. Me, alone.
They're all I have.......
(A world away, in the city of Las Vegas, Jason curses as he breaks the mental connection. His eyes return from their glowing state, and his mouth twists into a snarl. Glaring down at the strip below, he holds the champagne, but in a fit of pique he dashes it against the bay window behind him.
"He's gone, Serenity."
"The little coward cut his own wrists rather than give in to my probing."
"I'm... sorry, Jason," she says, flatly. Robbed of everything, of agency, of personality. She's an obscene puppet.
Jason blows a breath, and tries to compose himself, although the lines on his face are showing and it's apparent that he's losing some control.
"Whatever, it's fine... the little coward didn't have the balls to tell Danny what he knew, right? We're safe here, in our little nest..."
"Yes, Jason," she says, with a frown.
"Who needs Nate," he says, almost too quickly to himself, "This is a brand new start out here in Sin City... here, we can build something."
"You're so right," Serenity says, pursing her lips, something dancing on the edge of her tongue. She had the spark of an idea, but her mind being dulled, she couldn't get it to form. Something about Nate Nawrocki's fate had caused a ripple in the pit of her soul, niggling at her core.
In the dimmed hind part of her brain, when Jason had gone to sleep, Serenity would begin to question what it could all mean.
And once she did, the world trembled, and rightfully so.)
Frowning, I open the old clamshell phone, pressing start on an ancient, Myspace-era selfie video, taking me back into the bramble of the past.
("Yea-yea, itcha boi, Redd Dizz-Awg in the hizhouse, Inna Circle reprasentin' ya'heard, tonight me an' the main homie Downfall gonna CRUSH them fuckin' Twiztid Nightmares and take our Tag titles back here live at tha big show, Downfall tell em what's up-"
"Redd I swear to god if you don't get that fucking cameraphone out of my face - get ready for the match! Now! If you lose us this match against fucking Boca Del Inferno and Darkdragon, you're done.")
(The camera jostles as a familiar figure, his gloriously, feathery blonde hair streaming past his shoulders and his punk vest not as ragged, brusquely pushes the holder out of the way. Tracking on the blonde man, strutting like a Napoleonic martinet, with a bottle-blonde, leggy woman in a too-tight skirt following, heels clacking. Then the camera zooms up-nose angle, like a bad Blair Witch, continuing the documentary. He stutters, but then recovers.
"You wanna hear me bust a rap on Boca and Darkdragon?
Yo. Yo.
You two the juggalos, but you gots-ta goes, when I hit the Street-Sweeper the whole crowd know, I'll go home with your jugga-ho-"
"REDD," snaps a terse voice from off the camera, "SHUT THE FUCK UP.")
Those were the good old days.
I've got so much footage from back in the day that I once thought to stitch together... I was obsessed with Cribs, Yo MTV Raps, all that shit back then and the celeb lifestyle, the inside baseball lifestyles of the rich'n famous stunting all appealed to me. Even when what I was living, was not that. I really thought I was living that life... but the real talk is, I was just a dumb as fuck kid with three matches in indy feds that drew 20 people before Downfall found me when I was 19 and recruited me to be part of his Inner Circle... and I deluded myself that I was joining a Crew.
Yeah, every kid growing up in Brooklyn Heights wants that life. When you're raised on New Jack City, on Scarface, on Boyz In The Hood, you want to be the kid who rolls around with a crew. Knowing one day, you'll be the boss.
("Except it didn't come true... did it, Redd?")
Jason's voice comes to me in my dreams. I refuse to join him... because he's speaking inside my ears, calling like the god damn snake in the garden, but I know if I just close my eyes and picture it I'll see him standing in his penthouse, overlooking the lights below. He's far away... but he's still... managed to be inside my head, and I...
No. I will not let him in. I will not let him win.
Breath shuddering. I try not to focus on the glinting, glimmering sharp laying on my bedside table. I try to put it aside, but the knife is calling, as is the little baggie of powder I know is waiting inside my jacket pocket.
See, I lied to Danny twice this week.... and it's my secret shame.
I lied when I told him that was all my stash, when he and Chelle flushed it down the toilet and locked me in the car to let me dry out for three days on the road... because honestly, bein' with them again was a welcomely pleasant sensation, it took me away in a natural high that made me think maybe I didn't need the smack. I was even able to fool myself, that some'a that tough love, knocking some sense inta my head from Danny would straighten me out again... that if I just allowed it, I could go back on the road with Downfall, be a supporting player to him and Michelle. And I wouldn't need the heroin anymore.
But I also lied to Danny about not knowing where Jason was...
And Danny has been searching for Jason so hard that I know, if he knew what I knew, he wouldn't forgive me for not telling him.
("Ahhhh, addicts gonna addict, Redd, what can you say. It's not your fault that you're this way, you know... acting squirrelly, hiding cards close to the chest, that's just the way addicts get by," Jason muses. "But who broke you this way? Who hurt you so badly that you're a shell, a living ghost with a beating heart, animated only by faint memory and a spike of junk in your armpit? Hmm, I wonder.")
I...
It's true. I wasn't... always this way.
Youngest Inner Circle member, rookie of the year in 2004, briefly a dual champion in 2005 co-holding the Tag belts with Downfall and one of six handlers to be the IEW Television champion before it got sullied by a reign with a pineapple.
A world away (literally), Jason smiles at his reflection in the glass. He smiles at me, knowing.
My hands are bleeding, ragged from the thorns of memory, and shame. Yeah. Youngest Inner Circle member, the prodigy. The blue chipper. Until I started to lose.
Until the white kid from the ghetto act started to wear thin and it became bad business for Downfall to have a member of his stable losing every week and being laughed off as a joke, as Malibu's Most Wanted. In the corporate world, they have euphemisms for it - downsized, golden parachute, restructuring. In the land of the Inner Circle, it was, Downfall hired a new gun, someone even more ruthless, and their first act was to destroy the clown prince.
I have this video on the old clamshell phone, too. It's triggering to look at and makes me want to reach for something... but my hand is working the phone in it's habitual way. I always end up consuming something that'll punish me.
(Jimmy Bradley, the color commentator on Mayhem, is squealing "Oh my - Oh my god! That's Sicko! That's the monster Sicko!" as the person shooting the cell-phone video, blurry and washed out as it was, tried to capture the spectacle of a 400 pound man wearing clown makeup landing a flurry of strikes to an undersized cruiserweight.)
I shut my eyes, but I can see the beatdown in my head.
("Why is Sicko doing this?? For what reason is he destroying Redd Dogg?!"
"Wait a minute, that-that's Downfall on the stage! Downfall is barking orders at Sicko!"
"Sicko is wrapping the chair around Redd Dogg's leg! God somebody stop this!")
The sickening crunch as the jaws of the chair closed around my ankle like a vise resound in my mind. It's a song I can never get out of my head.
Bad breaks, requiring surgery. Medicine, to help with the pain after surgery. "Medicine", when some oxys and vicodin wouldn't take the sharp edge off the chronic pain, or make the phantom itching of the pins in my knee stop. Just... stop.
("And to think, Redd, all because you didn't fit the mold Danny was looking for. Because you didn't "fit in" with our aesthetic... Downfall recruited monsters, increasingly sadistic men to fit in with his rep for Anarchy once he began going down the punk, anti-establishment riot gear path. Isn't it enough to drive you mad? Isn't it enough to make you go apeshit?" Jason muses, and then, I can almost see him in his penthouse, looking over his shoulder at someone I can't quite make out. They're bringing him a glass of champagne on a platter.)
It is, though.
It is enough to make me want to go apeshit...
My brow furrows with angst as my teeth feel something sour. I had all of this done to me.
I was cast aside from the Inner Circle just as it began to really take off. Four more Tag championships, World title reigns for three members, main event status and holding the distinction of being a cornerstone of the IEW until it closed in 2010. And for all of that, I was thrown out...
I didn't deserve it? Because I wasn't mister perfect Daniel Fehl, or his gun moll Michelle, and I didn't have a place in their perennial story? I was consigned to be a forgotten side piece, a nobody they forgot about? I -
No.
No, I can feel the fingers of Jason's corrupting influence digging into my mind, pushing me in that direction, and I block it off. I'm not being drawn into the black hole that's standing at the top of the world, looking out from his penthouse across an unfamiliar desert. I'm here, right here, in my hotel room.
("I want you here with me, Redd. Just like old days, old Inner Circle days," Jason says, then he looks down and off from me, "I'm building my own little gang and it's going to be just as good as what Danny ever made. So I need to give you my pitch.")
No. I won't listen.
I'm panting, though. The effort of fighting off the incursion into my mind is draining, and I don't have the strength to fight it anymore. I've fought for so many years. I'm tired.
("Listen to me, Redd. Creation is built upon the promise of hope, that things will get better. That tomorrow will be better than the day before.
But it's not true. Cities collapse, populations expand, people get ruder. You can't go to the grocery store without getting in a fight with a guy in the checkout line who refuses to wear a mask during a pandemic.
Filthy streets. Drive-by shootings. Bomb blasts and body counts. Permissible amounts of rat-droppings per hot dog. Terror in the streets, on the internet, and in your living room. Pain is ever-present, no matter how hard you try to escape it, and love is statistically false. The only option you've got left is to numb the pain with drugs.")
I won't. I WON'T.
But the baggie in my hoodie pocket.
I draw my attention back to Jason. Turn to him and now we are both standing on the balcony of a penthouse, a world away. I've flipped. I pick that word up from his head, that the reason Danny hasn't found him is that he's flipped elsewhere. I don't know where... all I can sense is the bustle of the street below, and the neon, gaudy lights of a strip. And a Black Pyramid, out there in the desert, and I -
No, I turn back from it. The illusion flickers, impermanent, as I haven't fully crossed over.
Jason holds his arms out to me, wanting me to be present there, to flip to the penthouse overlooking the Strip and join him and his protege.
("Think about what I'm saying to you, Redd. There, you are alone. If you come here, you'll be part of something new. You'll be part of a family.")
"I had a family, Jason. For a while, it was the best family I've ever been part of."
("And yet, you refuse to let them know you're still using, and won't let yourself be around them. Are you afraid, Redd, that he'll think you're too weak, and cast you out again?")
I have to crack a smile at that. Because Jason will never understand. But then, my mind firms as I dummy up for what I have to do.
There's only one way this can go.
No, I can't let them in on it... I can't see the hurt on Michelle's face when they come to see me again. But I can't let Jason keep getting into my mind. When I flipped to his penthouse out there overlooking the desert, I saw the corrupted girl standing by him, connected to him by a slender cord around her throat. Her eyes were blank, void of emotion, and her stormy expression was lost. This was the answer, to Jason, for how he wanted his "Inner Circle" to navigate the world.
("I see what you're doing. Redd. Stop this right now. If you do this, you're going by yourself. You'll be alone.")
I reach for the sharp, glinting knife laid sideways on a mirror on my bedside.
But what I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of the old days, where I was part of something. I find comfort in memories, they're all I have left.
And I'm scared. Fuck, of course I am.
But I can't let myself be used against the man who gave me a chance when I was starting... and when I was at my lowest, found me and tried his hardest to make up for what he had broken.
The knife bites flesh, and I instantly know I've hit deeper than I thought with a gasp. But I'm in it, now.
I will not be a weapon anymore. Not for any Inner Circle.
And I will not be a disappointment.
This isn't the answer to how to really stop Jason... but I fall onto my back knowing, with a smile on my face, that he doesn't get the satisfaction of ending my story for me. I write my final words. Me, alone.
They're all I have.......
(A world away, in the city of Las Vegas, Jason curses as he breaks the mental connection. His eyes return from their glowing state, and his mouth twists into a snarl. Glaring down at the strip below, he holds the champagne, but in a fit of pique he dashes it against the bay window behind him.
"He's gone, Serenity."
"The little coward cut his own wrists rather than give in to my probing."
"I'm... sorry, Jason," she says, flatly. Robbed of everything, of agency, of personality. She's an obscene puppet.
Jason blows a breath, and tries to compose himself, although the lines on his face are showing and it's apparent that he's losing some control.
"Whatever, it's fine... the little coward didn't have the balls to tell Danny what he knew, right? We're safe here, in our little nest..."
"Yes, Jason," she says, with a frown.
"Who needs Nate," he says, almost too quickly to himself, "This is a brand new start out here in Sin City... here, we can build something."
"You're so right," Serenity says, pursing her lips, something dancing on the edge of her tongue. She had the spark of an idea, but her mind being dulled, she couldn't get it to form. Something about Nate Nawrocki's fate had caused a ripple in the pit of her soul, niggling at her core.
In the dimmed hind part of her brain, when Jason had gone to sleep, Serenity would begin to question what it could all mean.
And once she did, the world trembled, and rightfully so.)