If It's All Come Down To This, It's All Just Comin' Down.
Oct 8, 2022 17:09:12 GMT -5
Gerard Angelo likes this
Post by Downfall on Oct 8, 2022 17:09:12 GMT -5
Friday, 7:54 pm, one shot.
As he stepped into the room, there was a Japanese twenty-something going all-in on his karaoke performance. Gracelessly, tone-deaf wailing the lyrics loudly would make up for them being off-key, making his way through the oldest karaoke staple in the book, good old Sinatra, backed by the blaring saxophone. Daniel huffed as he looked around.
It was cleaner than it would have been, twenty years ago. No acrid cigarette smoke clouding the room, no smell of flop sweat and stale beer, no garish glowing tubes of neon on the walls contorted into Natural Ice logos, but this was still a dive bar.
Of all the places in his city - in his neighborhood - to meet, Adam had chosen the most on-brand.
"Regrets, I've had a fewwwwww
But then again too few to mention
I did what I had to do
I saw it through without exemption
I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway
And more, much, much more
I did it, I did it my wayyyyyya..."
"Thanks for meeting me here, Daniel," came the voice from the booth to his left. He didn't startle, didn't whirl, didn't show surprise. But he allowed himself to turn, and to stare, brazenly.
"You called, after all this time. And y'know, it's been that type of year, Warpath..." the snarling, not-subtle interposition of Adam Miller's nom-de-guerre over his plain-jane, everyman civilian retiree identity, not allowing this to get informal off the bat. Not Daniel, the frosty tone says. Not to you, may never be again. "Been a year with old ghosts popping up from my life left and right. Redd, Jason, Hinata Fugikawa... so you'll forgive me if I ask, what do you want, Warpath?"
He didn't rise to the bait, just poured himself another shot, gesturing for Daniel to sit down.
At 6'6, Adam had once been a massively-muscled machine, a white man with an incomprehensible, unlikely background of being an orphan who had made his way to Mexico and been taken in by a kindly, elderly luchador. Now, peace and retirement had softened his body, expanded his gut, but he was still a looming, hulking presence in the bar.
Sighing, "I just have questions about this life you're living, Daniel... I've watched you on TV, and you're throwing your career away against this kid Bacchus... this is the second time in your life you're letting a blood feud push your buttons to such an extent that you'll put your own career up against someone to get them out..."
The first, culminating at Frosts of Fury, December 2007, had been against Warpath. The tension hung in the air, palpable and alive. Adam eyeballed him, calculating.
"This life you're living... you're pushing out everyone that could love you... you have this compulsion with feeding your darkest impulses and getting in deep with criminals... I'm even hearing that you're taking money from the businesses on Pine Street to protect them from the Black Dragon?"
Daniel scoffed, ridiculous. "No, I am not." He was lying.
"You're tail-spinning, man... and I think you need someone to give you advice, too... someone who's seen you at this before... Someone who was there and saw it all the last time you threw everything away."
Slamming his palms on the table, so that the forest of empty glasses rattled, he leaned down, barking. "No, fuck you. You don't throw that in my face. You have no idea what I'm going through, and how dare you swagger into my neighborhood and tell me -"
"Sit down, Daniel..."
Other patrons were looking, edging nervously away, but still, "No. I refuse. We're done."
"Heard from Michelle any, the last few months? Where's she?"
That made Daniel stop, and he turned away. Satisfied, Adam grinned a little. "Yeah, see... someone who sees this for what it is... You constantly need that anchor, that tether to humanity that makes you listen to your better angels... If you don't have that, you're lost, Daniel... I see it. I see this for what it all is... The attempt to give your career away again, the constant fascination with crime, darkness and death... this is a death wish. You won't be satisfied until you've crashed and burned."
Still not looking at him, Daniel's eyes were on the floor, pensive. Then, he sneered over his shoulder at Adam. "You don't know shit."
"Don't I?" Adam inquired, eyebrows raised, but he invitingly waved a hand to the booth. Daniel grimaced, and defiantly, picked up a backed chair, setting it across from Adam, and he warningly put a finger in Adam's face as the music resumed, "Don't think you know shit about me because of what you've seen... death wish, there's no death wish here..."
He was lying.
Friday, 9:16 pm, six shots.
Their boisterous laughter ripped through the bar, as a karaoke set of two girls nervously dueting Alanis wailed in the background;
"-So god knows why we were even playing hockey at the time, but I just remember Redd skating up to you and saying in that bad, blaccented stutter 'Yo man, I got this rhyme I just wrote out, tell me whatchyall think,- " Adam, remembering this dimly, but feeling the mirth infectiously is already beginning to chuckle. Daniel, loudly telling the story as if it's the funniest thing, cackles, "And he starts going 'Yo, yo...' and you just say 'It sucks,' and skated away. Me and Jason lost our shit."
Adam grinned as he poured another finger into the glasses. "The good old days of the Inner Circle..."
Toasting that, Danny lifted a glass, "Where nobody ever knew a damn thing and we had a semblance of privacy..."
As if correcting him, Adam took up his own shotglass, "Where it never got that deep, and even a blood feud between two rivals was usually contested between dueling promos set in front of a grey backdrop..."
Not afraid to give shit, Daniel smirked, "Or, say, meeting your partner in a dive bar..."
"What? I like lowkey dive bars..."
"It's the most cliche setting for a wrestler to visit there ever was... second only to working out in a gym... God, it comes off so fake and forced, what are we, gonna go find some bikers in leather chaps and beat up on them with pool cues to prove our toughness... It's... ugh, it's sad."
Adam's eyes narrowed... "Well, maybe some of us would prefer that over fucking... fighting wizards on beaches maybe."
"I - that's really reductive." Soured, he puts the shotglass down.
Grinning, Adam twists the knife just that little bit, "It's easy to get lost in the minutiae when you're experiencing visions and communing with ghosts and walking through hotels... but it feels like the more you go, the further you get lost from who you are."
Coldly, "I know who I am..."
"I'm just saying, man... your life is... incomprehensibly weird, fucked up and I don't understand it half the time."
Now the bite was back in his tone, "Maybe some of us never wanted to be you, Warpath, maybe, just maybe I always want to find new ways to do what I do because I look at your approach to your career and it sickens me. It's nostalgia. That's all you ever gave to the game after you hit your veteran point, selling a brand of nostalgia. Where all of your promos were callbacks to shit you did in 2003, where every note you hit was a washed out, bleeded-dry reference to some inside joke, some line that popped people back when we were in our twenties. Fuck, man, you became as dry and soulless as a Disney remake. I wanted to be more... I wanted... I deserved to be so much more, dammit!" In a pique, he swept the bottle and a few glasses off the table with his arm, and it crashed, riotously, to the floor. Singing and conversation stopped... a waitress, a small girl with big glasses, cowed, began moving in with a few towels.
Unphased, Adam stared at him, half-lidded. "You done?"
Danny flipped a hand dismissively, brooding.
"Wow, I had no idea you were still so salty about our time in WCWA..." Adam said, sarcastically, poking at an old wound.
"Yeah, well, you lost one match and left me high and dry, so..."
"And I can apologize for that til the end of days, but I left wrestling because of that... because I was just becoming an old man with nothing in the tank left to give."
Now Danny squinted at him. "And, by insinuation, that's what you think of me?"
"No, Daniel, I -"
"Because that's not what this thing with Bacchus is. I'm not looking for my exit, Warpath or looking for a way to bow out. I'm doing this because there is no other way for us to coexist... Do I see the parallels here between you and me? Absolutely. When things broke down between us... when we went from clashing over leadership to just clashing - "
"You threw me out of your boys club, remember -"
"- When the blood turned boiling between us and there couldn't be a way for us to exist in the same building, one of us had to go. But this isn't me being petulant because someone is trying to usurp my stable from me... This little shit has stood in my way for too damn long. He's cost me matches, he cost me titles, he -"
"And I did the same once, what's your point?"
He grunted, grasping at the air for a second, fully in the moment unable to articulate the feelings of being trapped that he had been dealing with. And perhaps, if he was going to give Bacchus any credit, maybe there was something there that would let him allow that he needed Bacchus gone so that he would have no excuses left. But he couldn't get there.
Adam picked up on it, though. "Cold, hard, truth, Daniel. Nobody is to blame for you not being the star you thought you should be except your ego. Your self-destructive pride... You saw this from the beginning as something you were promised. And you were so talented. If you didn't let it consume you, you could be as regarded as Corey Black or Odin Balfore, a legitimate twenty-year vet who's risen to the top anywhere he went."
Obstinately, he pooched his lower lip out, "We'll see who's remembered the last... when I'm done. I'm not done here... This? This is not my ending..."
Slipping the waitress compensation and a murmured word in Okinawan, Adam asked for another round, but he clicked his tongue a bit and shrugged his head. "And if it's not? Do you just keep going on as you are, begging for the end? Pissing off people you shouldn't, parading yourself around as a thug?"
"I'll go on as I've lived... unapologetically myself, and free."
Adam eyed him as a new bottle of top-shelf whiskey arrived on a tray, and a round of shot glasses. "Maybe you might... but what about the cost to those around you?"
"That's something I've calculated and answered," he said, and he wasn't lying, but still sat in disquiet, because the riddle of the cycle lay twisted like a Gordian knot inside his gullet.
Friday, 10:37 pm, twelve shots.
Face flushed, Daniel pinned his forefinger down on the table to exacerbate his point. "No, what Bacchus does is more a form of communalism... the organization of grass-roots politics in the communities, the outreach, the martialling strength to protest and push for reform or change. In it's purer form, communalism is more a form of libertarian socialism, a call for less government overreach in communities. However, these kids today aen't preaching anarchism, which is individualist at it's core..."
Adam, frustrated by the dogged insistence of his counterpart of his ideology, argues back, " - Daniel, you really are barbaric, communalist theory is about establishing a social construct that eschews the need to government oversight, because people are helping each other. If you read Bookchin - "
"God, I'm not a child, Warpath, I've read Bookchin, but these ideas stem more from Piotr Kropotkin, who established the idea of mutual aid in treatises like the Conquest of Bread. But I feel that William Godwin's take on the individual's responsibilities in the community are more telling, as in his work with Thomas Paine on The Rights of Man dictates - "
"You really haven't changed, you read V For Vendetta when you were 22 years old and you formed the basis of your worldview on the Land of Do As You Please speech," Adam laughed, and drained his shotglass.
"Hey, that's not fair, I've changed!" a beat, "I'm all for community, I stepped up to be the protector of this neighborhood, I have an Asian family living in my office..."
Weighing his tongue carefully, Adam smiled a little, "You set yourself up as a pedagogue... as a de facto authority figure... as a king... that's the central crux of your shoot against Bacchus, isn't it...? That he pretends to be a hero of the people but makes himself a martyr, a centralized figure, and that therefore negates his entire anarcho-commie street cred?"
"It's not the same," he begins.
"Okay, so?..."
He bites his lip, then finally answers. "None of this was done as a reaction, or reflection of being like Bacchus, or showing him I cared about my community too. It was just..." I tried to establish a home here... but everything I touch turns to dust, and everyone I take in around me comes to harm, and I'm poisoned and evil, he thinks but doesn't say.
The truth about him and Bacchus, he allowed himself in this long, dark night of the soul, lay in the details... was Johnny right? Did he hate Johnny and want him gone because Johnny only ever reminded him of a him that was younger, more idealized and saw gold and glory, before the broken world got in, before it all got so dark?
There was a very honest part in him that wanted to kill Johnny Bacchus just for suggesting that. For insinuating, that they were anything alike. Who are you, you little worm, to compare yourself to me? That was the part that said that he wanted to get Johnny out just so he could expunge that irritant, be rid of the ever-present factor of annoyance in his life...
But what if, says the terrible voice inside? What if there is something to the theory that he wants to kill a part of him that was there when he was younger?
All of this obviously flickered over his face in less time than it takes to tell.
"The best intentions," Adam says, eyes narrowed.
He shrugs.
"And no intention of leaving."
His eyes meet his old partner/adversary/man-who-killed-his-career-once. "I still have work to do. Call it rehabilitation, call it redemption -"
"- Call it falling deeper into darkness, call it damnation..."
All in all, he thinks that neither he nor Johnny ever really understood each other, the way he and Warpath did.
He sneers at Adam, "Yeah, whatever. I ain't done. I'll build on ruins if I have to."
Adam sighed, and drank his whiskey, "There's the Downfall I know..."
Friday, 11:12 pm, sixteen shots between them, numerous beer chasers.
The big finish with the horns gives a sweeping, orchestral flourish along with a measure of sadness to the whole mood, despite the cacophony.
"FOR WHAT IS A MAN, WHAT HAS HE GOT?
IF NOT FOR HIMSELF, THEN HE HAS NAUGHT,
NOT TO SAY THE THINGS HE TRULY FEELS
AND NOT THE WORDS OF SOMEONE WHO KNEEEEELS
LET THE RECORDS SHOWS,
I TOOK THE BLOWWWWS,
AND DID IT
MYYYYYYYYYY
WAAAAAYYYYYY"
They're arm in arm, swaying on the stage, faces flushed, laughing through it all, and looking disgusting, and the patrons of the bar, mostly college kids, eye them in amusement as the two rough and tumble men in their distressed jackets and ropey lengths of muscle give it a drunken burst of energy.
Saturday, 2:52 am, slightly sobered up now...
Their legs sway in the open air, dangling in the fire escape grate as they overlook the alleyway. In the time it's taken them to start coming down, they've left the bar, gone and gotten a bottle of preemptive hair-o'-the-dog, and are staring out at the street, somewhere between watchful, sentry-like vigilantes and mentally-addled homeless people. Daniel, head pounding, grunted at that analogy, figuring that it was as apt a description of the people truly in his life as any.
"Are you scared of it?"
He raised an eyebrow to the man at his elbow, asking what he's talking about.
"Losing your career."
He didn't have the fight left in him to yell at Adam, or bark denials.
Adam continued, "Are you scared of what's on the other side of it? Because I walked away from a life like this, Daniel... and it's easier. Peaceful. Don't you want peace?"
"If we're being honest, I never have wanted that. I don't want peace, I wouldn't even know what to do with it." Because, I don't deserve it. "No... I have to win this, because whether I buy the conceit that my career is snakebit or failed or any of that... there remains the fact that this is still the longest I've hung in to a company and given them my all in..." (since the IEW, when you shattered me, you fuck...) "...A long time... and I still have promises to fulfill. I have a legacy to uphold."
"Why?" Adam seemed genuinely curious, "I'm not talking about losing your AW career. I'm not talking about, you move towns and start over in a new fed. I'm saying, why can't you let this go?"
There were many reasons, he weighed each one.
Maybe it was more the fact that without this game which he dedicated himself to when he was fifteen god damn years old, he had nothing... maybe this game had taken and taken and taken and so infrequently loved him back, and yet he allowed it to consume him so utterly that he chased it like Ahab... let this go? To what end? Was it madness that made him act this way? Or was Warpath's thesis correct, and his inability to be satisfied, his hunger for more in actuality just a prolonged suicidal ideation, that he would plunge into the bitter, bloody depths week in and week out willingly because somewhere, out there, was a real, true ending for him?
"Well?"
"I'm trying to think of one."
"See, that's what I'm talking about, though. Your ego leads you to this, and yet deep down, you feel like you don't deserve it, so you sabotage... so you throw your life away... And you just... hop in your damn Corvette and move on. That's all ya've ever done, Daniel, since 2007..."
"I have to..."
"You have to what?"
"To keep moving. To prove it wasn't for nothing. I will not let it be for nothing," he said, forcefully suddenly. "Don't you get it, Adam?" Adam started at the use of his name.
"Don't you think I recognize the creeping rot that infested you towards the end? I saw it in my father, whether I wanted to admit it or not, at the end of his career... and I don't want that to be me. But it's begun to hit me, that there is a natural cycle to... everything that I cannot help but to get trapped in. You, me, Bacchus. It's all the same thing. The same fight, repeated..."
"So.... why did you call for the same ending? Why ask the same thing from Bacchus as you did from me?"
He grits his teeth, staring out at the city. "I have to break the cycle. I have to be better than I was in 2007... I have to be better than I was when you beat me, and I have to be better than I was before that. You know, for the longest time, I just - assumed, my career WAS cursed. But maybe you're right. It's only ever been me."
Adam watches him, rapt.
"And... what happens if you lose?"
He quiets for a moment, considering all of these philosophical, existential points of the night. "Then at least I'll know one way or the other..."
He looks over at Adam. "Funny how you reached out to me about this, though... just when I needed someone to talk to, to process these feelings. Turns out, it's an old enemy."
Adam shrugged, "You talk about cycles... we went from enemies, to Inner Circle teammates, to enemies, to teaming again in WCWA, to..."
Impatiently, he cuts Adam off. "You were one of the ones who was there at the start, but again... this isn't where I want it to end. But still... if there's one person i never expected to be facing a threat to my career with, it would be your sorry ass."
Adam grins around the lips of the bottle, "What's the old saying, then? 'If it all comes down to this, then s'all just comin' down...'"
Daniel laughs a little, but his brow furrows at length, and he goes quiet as he looks at the lights and lanterns of the marketplace, where he can hear the fish merchants shouting. He thinks about the cycles in his life... of the curse he felt in his blood every passing day, the rot he feels inside of his heart that spreads everytime he touches something... and that, if there is one thing in the world he was gifted at, it was this, his one opportunity to take something and make it good, if only for a little while.
He will not let that all go away for nothing.
There had been times when he hadn't trusted that. Hadn't let that good thing come in his own time... when confronted by the choice to stay and make something work, he had chosen differently. It was a cycle.
He was tired of cycles... and he knew, deep in his heart of hearts, that it was time to start breaking them.
All of that passed on his face as words he couldn't say. And yet, somehow, he knew, Warpath, his opposite and his equal, the reflection of an end to a bitter cycle, knew what he was thinking.
Adam toasted the bottle, "So let it not be the end, then... prove me wrong. Break your cycle, Daniel. Build something better out of this. Don't feed the wolf... don't feed your ego only. Be your best self."
"It isn't my best I'm going to need to be. It'll be my worst."
Adam sighed, and slapped his thighs forcefully as he stood up. "If you change your mind..."
He started to climb down the fire escape ladder.
Defiant to the end, Danny called down after him, "I'm not going to repeat the same mistakes this time... I'm going to give Bacchus exactly what he's asked for, no less... and I'm going to come back here and rebuild my legacy. Give what effort I never sustained, 100% of my attention, and attain longevity that I never had before. That's how I break the cycle, Warpath, that's how I live forever."
"It sounds like you've got it all figured out," Adam called back up, from the street.
"I do," he said, softly.
He wasn't lying, he thought.
He watched Adam leave the alley, and round the corner out onto Pine Street, getting lost in the crowd at the fish merchants, and then Danny took a sip from the bottle again.
Far away, in the crowd, he wouldn't have been able to see Adam Miller pull out his cell phone and quickly dial a number, pause a bit, and then respond, laconically and coldly, "Yeah. It's me. Put me through to Hinata..."
His face is an impassive mask as he listens for a beat, then: "...Yes, Hinata. I made contact. No, he didn't listen... it looks like our timetable is going to have to make some changes... unless you want me to get him on board."
"...Ah. Well. I understand."
He hangs up the phone, and walks on through the market; amazingly, how even such a big man as him is able to get lost in the crowd.
As he stepped into the room, there was a Japanese twenty-something going all-in on his karaoke performance. Gracelessly, tone-deaf wailing the lyrics loudly would make up for them being off-key, making his way through the oldest karaoke staple in the book, good old Sinatra, backed by the blaring saxophone. Daniel huffed as he looked around.
It was cleaner than it would have been, twenty years ago. No acrid cigarette smoke clouding the room, no smell of flop sweat and stale beer, no garish glowing tubes of neon on the walls contorted into Natural Ice logos, but this was still a dive bar.
Of all the places in his city - in his neighborhood - to meet, Adam had chosen the most on-brand.
"Regrets, I've had a fewwwwww
But then again too few to mention
I did what I had to do
I saw it through without exemption
I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway
And more, much, much more
I did it, I did it my wayyyyyya..."
"Thanks for meeting me here, Daniel," came the voice from the booth to his left. He didn't startle, didn't whirl, didn't show surprise. But he allowed himself to turn, and to stare, brazenly.
"You called, after all this time. And y'know, it's been that type of year, Warpath..." the snarling, not-subtle interposition of Adam Miller's nom-de-guerre over his plain-jane, everyman civilian retiree identity, not allowing this to get informal off the bat. Not Daniel, the frosty tone says. Not to you, may never be again. "Been a year with old ghosts popping up from my life left and right. Redd, Jason, Hinata Fugikawa... so you'll forgive me if I ask, what do you want, Warpath?"
He didn't rise to the bait, just poured himself another shot, gesturing for Daniel to sit down.
At 6'6, Adam had once been a massively-muscled machine, a white man with an incomprehensible, unlikely background of being an orphan who had made his way to Mexico and been taken in by a kindly, elderly luchador. Now, peace and retirement had softened his body, expanded his gut, but he was still a looming, hulking presence in the bar.
Sighing, "I just have questions about this life you're living, Daniel... I've watched you on TV, and you're throwing your career away against this kid Bacchus... this is the second time in your life you're letting a blood feud push your buttons to such an extent that you'll put your own career up against someone to get them out..."
The first, culminating at Frosts of Fury, December 2007, had been against Warpath. The tension hung in the air, palpable and alive. Adam eyeballed him, calculating.
"This life you're living... you're pushing out everyone that could love you... you have this compulsion with feeding your darkest impulses and getting in deep with criminals... I'm even hearing that you're taking money from the businesses on Pine Street to protect them from the Black Dragon?"
Daniel scoffed, ridiculous. "No, I am not." He was lying.
"You're tail-spinning, man... and I think you need someone to give you advice, too... someone who's seen you at this before... Someone who was there and saw it all the last time you threw everything away."
Slamming his palms on the table, so that the forest of empty glasses rattled, he leaned down, barking. "No, fuck you. You don't throw that in my face. You have no idea what I'm going through, and how dare you swagger into my neighborhood and tell me -"
"Sit down, Daniel..."
Other patrons were looking, edging nervously away, but still, "No. I refuse. We're done."
"Heard from Michelle any, the last few months? Where's she?"
That made Daniel stop, and he turned away. Satisfied, Adam grinned a little. "Yeah, see... someone who sees this for what it is... You constantly need that anchor, that tether to humanity that makes you listen to your better angels... If you don't have that, you're lost, Daniel... I see it. I see this for what it all is... The attempt to give your career away again, the constant fascination with crime, darkness and death... this is a death wish. You won't be satisfied until you've crashed and burned."
Still not looking at him, Daniel's eyes were on the floor, pensive. Then, he sneered over his shoulder at Adam. "You don't know shit."
"Don't I?" Adam inquired, eyebrows raised, but he invitingly waved a hand to the booth. Daniel grimaced, and defiantly, picked up a backed chair, setting it across from Adam, and he warningly put a finger in Adam's face as the music resumed, "Don't think you know shit about me because of what you've seen... death wish, there's no death wish here..."
He was lying.
Friday, 9:16 pm, six shots.
Their boisterous laughter ripped through the bar, as a karaoke set of two girls nervously dueting Alanis wailed in the background;
"-So god knows why we were even playing hockey at the time, but I just remember Redd skating up to you and saying in that bad, blaccented stutter 'Yo man, I got this rhyme I just wrote out, tell me whatchyall think,- " Adam, remembering this dimly, but feeling the mirth infectiously is already beginning to chuckle. Daniel, loudly telling the story as if it's the funniest thing, cackles, "And he starts going 'Yo, yo...' and you just say 'It sucks,' and skated away. Me and Jason lost our shit."
Adam grinned as he poured another finger into the glasses. "The good old days of the Inner Circle..."
Toasting that, Danny lifted a glass, "Where nobody ever knew a damn thing and we had a semblance of privacy..."
As if correcting him, Adam took up his own shotglass, "Where it never got that deep, and even a blood feud between two rivals was usually contested between dueling promos set in front of a grey backdrop..."
Not afraid to give shit, Daniel smirked, "Or, say, meeting your partner in a dive bar..."
"What? I like lowkey dive bars..."
"It's the most cliche setting for a wrestler to visit there ever was... second only to working out in a gym... God, it comes off so fake and forced, what are we, gonna go find some bikers in leather chaps and beat up on them with pool cues to prove our toughness... It's... ugh, it's sad."
Adam's eyes narrowed... "Well, maybe some of us would prefer that over fucking... fighting wizards on beaches maybe."
"I - that's really reductive." Soured, he puts the shotglass down.
Grinning, Adam twists the knife just that little bit, "It's easy to get lost in the minutiae when you're experiencing visions and communing with ghosts and walking through hotels... but it feels like the more you go, the further you get lost from who you are."
Coldly, "I know who I am..."
"I'm just saying, man... your life is... incomprehensibly weird, fucked up and I don't understand it half the time."
Now the bite was back in his tone, "Maybe some of us never wanted to be you, Warpath, maybe, just maybe I always want to find new ways to do what I do because I look at your approach to your career and it sickens me. It's nostalgia. That's all you ever gave to the game after you hit your veteran point, selling a brand of nostalgia. Where all of your promos were callbacks to shit you did in 2003, where every note you hit was a washed out, bleeded-dry reference to some inside joke, some line that popped people back when we were in our twenties. Fuck, man, you became as dry and soulless as a Disney remake. I wanted to be more... I wanted... I deserved to be so much more, dammit!" In a pique, he swept the bottle and a few glasses off the table with his arm, and it crashed, riotously, to the floor. Singing and conversation stopped... a waitress, a small girl with big glasses, cowed, began moving in with a few towels.
Unphased, Adam stared at him, half-lidded. "You done?"
Danny flipped a hand dismissively, brooding.
"Wow, I had no idea you were still so salty about our time in WCWA..." Adam said, sarcastically, poking at an old wound.
"Yeah, well, you lost one match and left me high and dry, so..."
"And I can apologize for that til the end of days, but I left wrestling because of that... because I was just becoming an old man with nothing in the tank left to give."
Now Danny squinted at him. "And, by insinuation, that's what you think of me?"
"No, Daniel, I -"
"Because that's not what this thing with Bacchus is. I'm not looking for my exit, Warpath or looking for a way to bow out. I'm doing this because there is no other way for us to coexist... Do I see the parallels here between you and me? Absolutely. When things broke down between us... when we went from clashing over leadership to just clashing - "
"You threw me out of your boys club, remember -"
"- When the blood turned boiling between us and there couldn't be a way for us to exist in the same building, one of us had to go. But this isn't me being petulant because someone is trying to usurp my stable from me... This little shit has stood in my way for too damn long. He's cost me matches, he cost me titles, he -"
"And I did the same once, what's your point?"
He grunted, grasping at the air for a second, fully in the moment unable to articulate the feelings of being trapped that he had been dealing with. And perhaps, if he was going to give Bacchus any credit, maybe there was something there that would let him allow that he needed Bacchus gone so that he would have no excuses left. But he couldn't get there.
Adam picked up on it, though. "Cold, hard, truth, Daniel. Nobody is to blame for you not being the star you thought you should be except your ego. Your self-destructive pride... You saw this from the beginning as something you were promised. And you were so talented. If you didn't let it consume you, you could be as regarded as Corey Black or Odin Balfore, a legitimate twenty-year vet who's risen to the top anywhere he went."
Obstinately, he pooched his lower lip out, "We'll see who's remembered the last... when I'm done. I'm not done here... This? This is not my ending..."
Slipping the waitress compensation and a murmured word in Okinawan, Adam asked for another round, but he clicked his tongue a bit and shrugged his head. "And if it's not? Do you just keep going on as you are, begging for the end? Pissing off people you shouldn't, parading yourself around as a thug?"
"I'll go on as I've lived... unapologetically myself, and free."
Adam eyed him as a new bottle of top-shelf whiskey arrived on a tray, and a round of shot glasses. "Maybe you might... but what about the cost to those around you?"
"That's something I've calculated and answered," he said, and he wasn't lying, but still sat in disquiet, because the riddle of the cycle lay twisted like a Gordian knot inside his gullet.
Friday, 10:37 pm, twelve shots.
Face flushed, Daniel pinned his forefinger down on the table to exacerbate his point. "No, what Bacchus does is more a form of communalism... the organization of grass-roots politics in the communities, the outreach, the martialling strength to protest and push for reform or change. In it's purer form, communalism is more a form of libertarian socialism, a call for less government overreach in communities. However, these kids today aen't preaching anarchism, which is individualist at it's core..."
Adam, frustrated by the dogged insistence of his counterpart of his ideology, argues back, " - Daniel, you really are barbaric, communalist theory is about establishing a social construct that eschews the need to government oversight, because people are helping each other. If you read Bookchin - "
"God, I'm not a child, Warpath, I've read Bookchin, but these ideas stem more from Piotr Kropotkin, who established the idea of mutual aid in treatises like the Conquest of Bread. But I feel that William Godwin's take on the individual's responsibilities in the community are more telling, as in his work with Thomas Paine on The Rights of Man dictates - "
"You really haven't changed, you read V For Vendetta when you were 22 years old and you formed the basis of your worldview on the Land of Do As You Please speech," Adam laughed, and drained his shotglass.
"Hey, that's not fair, I've changed!" a beat, "I'm all for community, I stepped up to be the protector of this neighborhood, I have an Asian family living in my office..."
Weighing his tongue carefully, Adam smiled a little, "You set yourself up as a pedagogue... as a de facto authority figure... as a king... that's the central crux of your shoot against Bacchus, isn't it...? That he pretends to be a hero of the people but makes himself a martyr, a centralized figure, and that therefore negates his entire anarcho-commie street cred?"
"It's not the same," he begins.
"Okay, so?..."
He bites his lip, then finally answers. "None of this was done as a reaction, or reflection of being like Bacchus, or showing him I cared about my community too. It was just..." I tried to establish a home here... but everything I touch turns to dust, and everyone I take in around me comes to harm, and I'm poisoned and evil, he thinks but doesn't say.
The truth about him and Bacchus, he allowed himself in this long, dark night of the soul, lay in the details... was Johnny right? Did he hate Johnny and want him gone because Johnny only ever reminded him of a him that was younger, more idealized and saw gold and glory, before the broken world got in, before it all got so dark?
There was a very honest part in him that wanted to kill Johnny Bacchus just for suggesting that. For insinuating, that they were anything alike. Who are you, you little worm, to compare yourself to me? That was the part that said that he wanted to get Johnny out just so he could expunge that irritant, be rid of the ever-present factor of annoyance in his life...
But what if, says the terrible voice inside? What if there is something to the theory that he wants to kill a part of him that was there when he was younger?
All of this obviously flickered over his face in less time than it takes to tell.
"The best intentions," Adam says, eyes narrowed.
He shrugs.
"And no intention of leaving."
His eyes meet his old partner/adversary/man-who-killed-his-career-once. "I still have work to do. Call it rehabilitation, call it redemption -"
"- Call it falling deeper into darkness, call it damnation..."
All in all, he thinks that neither he nor Johnny ever really understood each other, the way he and Warpath did.
He sneers at Adam, "Yeah, whatever. I ain't done. I'll build on ruins if I have to."
Adam sighed, and drank his whiskey, "There's the Downfall I know..."
Friday, 11:12 pm, sixteen shots between them, numerous beer chasers.
The big finish with the horns gives a sweeping, orchestral flourish along with a measure of sadness to the whole mood, despite the cacophony.
"FOR WHAT IS A MAN, WHAT HAS HE GOT?
IF NOT FOR HIMSELF, THEN HE HAS NAUGHT,
NOT TO SAY THE THINGS HE TRULY FEELS
AND NOT THE WORDS OF SOMEONE WHO KNEEEEELS
LET THE RECORDS SHOWS,
I TOOK THE BLOWWWWS,
AND DID IT
MYYYYYYYYYY
WAAAAAYYYYYY"
They're arm in arm, swaying on the stage, faces flushed, laughing through it all, and looking disgusting, and the patrons of the bar, mostly college kids, eye them in amusement as the two rough and tumble men in their distressed jackets and ropey lengths of muscle give it a drunken burst of energy.
Saturday, 2:52 am, slightly sobered up now...
Their legs sway in the open air, dangling in the fire escape grate as they overlook the alleyway. In the time it's taken them to start coming down, they've left the bar, gone and gotten a bottle of preemptive hair-o'-the-dog, and are staring out at the street, somewhere between watchful, sentry-like vigilantes and mentally-addled homeless people. Daniel, head pounding, grunted at that analogy, figuring that it was as apt a description of the people truly in his life as any.
"Are you scared of it?"
He raised an eyebrow to the man at his elbow, asking what he's talking about.
"Losing your career."
He didn't have the fight left in him to yell at Adam, or bark denials.
Adam continued, "Are you scared of what's on the other side of it? Because I walked away from a life like this, Daniel... and it's easier. Peaceful. Don't you want peace?"
"If we're being honest, I never have wanted that. I don't want peace, I wouldn't even know what to do with it." Because, I don't deserve it. "No... I have to win this, because whether I buy the conceit that my career is snakebit or failed or any of that... there remains the fact that this is still the longest I've hung in to a company and given them my all in..." (since the IEW, when you shattered me, you fuck...) "...A long time... and I still have promises to fulfill. I have a legacy to uphold."
"Why?" Adam seemed genuinely curious, "I'm not talking about losing your AW career. I'm not talking about, you move towns and start over in a new fed. I'm saying, why can't you let this go?"
There were many reasons, he weighed each one.
Maybe it was more the fact that without this game which he dedicated himself to when he was fifteen god damn years old, he had nothing... maybe this game had taken and taken and taken and so infrequently loved him back, and yet he allowed it to consume him so utterly that he chased it like Ahab... let this go? To what end? Was it madness that made him act this way? Or was Warpath's thesis correct, and his inability to be satisfied, his hunger for more in actuality just a prolonged suicidal ideation, that he would plunge into the bitter, bloody depths week in and week out willingly because somewhere, out there, was a real, true ending for him?
"Well?"
"I'm trying to think of one."
"See, that's what I'm talking about, though. Your ego leads you to this, and yet deep down, you feel like you don't deserve it, so you sabotage... so you throw your life away... And you just... hop in your damn Corvette and move on. That's all ya've ever done, Daniel, since 2007..."
"I have to..."
"You have to what?"
"To keep moving. To prove it wasn't for nothing. I will not let it be for nothing," he said, forcefully suddenly. "Don't you get it, Adam?" Adam started at the use of his name.
"Don't you think I recognize the creeping rot that infested you towards the end? I saw it in my father, whether I wanted to admit it or not, at the end of his career... and I don't want that to be me. But it's begun to hit me, that there is a natural cycle to... everything that I cannot help but to get trapped in. You, me, Bacchus. It's all the same thing. The same fight, repeated..."
"So.... why did you call for the same ending? Why ask the same thing from Bacchus as you did from me?"
He grits his teeth, staring out at the city. "I have to break the cycle. I have to be better than I was in 2007... I have to be better than I was when you beat me, and I have to be better than I was before that. You know, for the longest time, I just - assumed, my career WAS cursed. But maybe you're right. It's only ever been me."
Adam watches him, rapt.
"And... what happens if you lose?"
He quiets for a moment, considering all of these philosophical, existential points of the night. "Then at least I'll know one way or the other..."
He looks over at Adam. "Funny how you reached out to me about this, though... just when I needed someone to talk to, to process these feelings. Turns out, it's an old enemy."
Adam shrugged, "You talk about cycles... we went from enemies, to Inner Circle teammates, to enemies, to teaming again in WCWA, to..."
Impatiently, he cuts Adam off. "You were one of the ones who was there at the start, but again... this isn't where I want it to end. But still... if there's one person i never expected to be facing a threat to my career with, it would be your sorry ass."
Adam grins around the lips of the bottle, "What's the old saying, then? 'If it all comes down to this, then s'all just comin' down...'"
Daniel laughs a little, but his brow furrows at length, and he goes quiet as he looks at the lights and lanterns of the marketplace, where he can hear the fish merchants shouting. He thinks about the cycles in his life... of the curse he felt in his blood every passing day, the rot he feels inside of his heart that spreads everytime he touches something... and that, if there is one thing in the world he was gifted at, it was this, his one opportunity to take something and make it good, if only for a little while.
He will not let that all go away for nothing.
There had been times when he hadn't trusted that. Hadn't let that good thing come in his own time... when confronted by the choice to stay and make something work, he had chosen differently. It was a cycle.
He was tired of cycles... and he knew, deep in his heart of hearts, that it was time to start breaking them.
All of that passed on his face as words he couldn't say. And yet, somehow, he knew, Warpath, his opposite and his equal, the reflection of an end to a bitter cycle, knew what he was thinking.
Adam toasted the bottle, "So let it not be the end, then... prove me wrong. Break your cycle, Daniel. Build something better out of this. Don't feed the wolf... don't feed your ego only. Be your best self."
"It isn't my best I'm going to need to be. It'll be my worst."
Adam sighed, and slapped his thighs forcefully as he stood up. "If you change your mind..."
He started to climb down the fire escape ladder.
Defiant to the end, Danny called down after him, "I'm not going to repeat the same mistakes this time... I'm going to give Bacchus exactly what he's asked for, no less... and I'm going to come back here and rebuild my legacy. Give what effort I never sustained, 100% of my attention, and attain longevity that I never had before. That's how I break the cycle, Warpath, that's how I live forever."
"It sounds like you've got it all figured out," Adam called back up, from the street.
"I do," he said, softly.
He wasn't lying, he thought.
He watched Adam leave the alley, and round the corner out onto Pine Street, getting lost in the crowd at the fish merchants, and then Danny took a sip from the bottle again.
Far away, in the crowd, he wouldn't have been able to see Adam Miller pull out his cell phone and quickly dial a number, pause a bit, and then respond, laconically and coldly, "Yeah. It's me. Put me through to Hinata..."
His face is an impassive mask as he listens for a beat, then: "...Yes, Hinata. I made contact. No, he didn't listen... it looks like our timetable is going to have to make some changes... unless you want me to get him on board."
"...Ah. Well. I understand."
He hangs up the phone, and walks on through the market; amazingly, how even such a big man as him is able to get lost in the crowd.
