Watchmaker. (1,491 words)
Oct 19, 2022 16:06:46 GMT -5
Holden Ross, Gerard Angelo, and 1 more like this
Post by Downfall on Oct 19, 2022 16:06:46 GMT -5
Very few ever knew that my grandfather fixed clocks for a living.
I remember watching, eyes rapt with fascination, a tow-headed waif at his beefy elbow, as hands with calloused, sausage fingers and yellowed-horn nails delicately manipulated tweezers, extracting gears from a mechanism a bit at a time...
It was giving my brain a concept I didn't know how to name.
How Harold would open up the back of a carved, ornate Swiss timepiece, gingerly point to it and tell me, "From here, we remove each piece and give it a thorough cleaning, so we can find what's gumming the gears and slowing the hands down."
I was 24 the first time I picked up a crowbar as a weapon.
My rival for the IEW Extreme Title was an idiot named Boca Del Inferno, garden-variety Juggalo trailer trash with delusional pretensions of being a vampiric, homicidal bloodletter.
And he had assembled a crew imaginatively named The Cavity as a means to combat my team of mercenaries;
More than that, weeks of relentless backstage attacks escalated our feud from beef over a title to something akin to a gang rumble, so when I was challenged to a parking lot brawl, I figured, why not play to type and emerge into the arena with a crowbar in my hand?
That night was the first night I felt the shock run into my hands and up my arm as rolled steel collided with someone's teeth... Boca's seven-foot "monster" THE fell to two shots from the crowbar, and I gazed into my hand in wonderment;
I had just unleashed a destructive power with my own two hands that brought down a giant... the crowbar a vessel to let out every perturbed feeling I'd ever had and crush someone's cheekbone with it.
It felt giddy, empowered.
"So y'see here, pumpkin," Harold would tell me, gingerly, "This spring here is to its proper setting and then released. When it has it's right setting, the energy released from the spring pushes this train forward, and sets the gears in motion."
When I was twenty-five, the world continued to change around us, and I changed with it. I freely used the crowbar as a crutch, as I used everyone around me. None of them were exempt, because any method of staying in power as the rising-star, year-end award-winning future World champion, I had to make sure that I kept my Inner Circle in line.
To that end, when Sicko the Clown and Jason lose the IEW Tag Titles due to a miscommunication, I take the overly-medicated mental patient in the shower room and beat him into submission, chest rising and heaving, snarling venom at him for disgracing us, and lashing him over and over again with the crowbar.
The morality of my actions is slipping away.
Harold would explain, "The problem is, it's a precise set of timing that makes the gears move. Too tightly, and the hands don't turn. Too lose, and a gear gets off track... So you remove them, piece by piece..."
When I left the IEW, I was alone for the first time... and try as I might, a crowbar was not enough. I needed to BE a weapon, not to wield one.
I did join new federations and have to scrap hard to prove myself to entirely new rosters...
Chip firmly on my shoulder and arrogance in place, I had to prove myself alone, and so the crowbar went in the closet.
I was hiding a piece of myself, putting away the part of me that was determined to stay in power... because I had no power to defend anymore.
Long, lean years passed, and I finally landed somewhere that I begin to try at.
It's as if, after years of rock bottom, I'd finally planted my feet and began to ascend... and as the weeks passed by of my new era, I began to see a change. Many changes, in fact.
I clashed with a rival. He became my brother. I fought my hardest. I was rewarded.
And yet, the entire time, it felt like I was holding back, withholding the part of myself that did what needed to be done...
Even the times where I stood atop a mountain as a champion, when I fell short, it felt as if it was because I dropped a ball because I was blocking it.
Because there was something in the way of my gears running at peak efficiency.
"See here," he says, holding out a little gear, so small that it's barely the size of a button, "This one has a little glob of grease buildup here..." and he begins to wipe it with a solvent-covered rag.
"Isn't it amazing that something so small can stop the whole machine from working?"
This summer, I pick up the crowbar for the first time in... a long time...
I beat Johnny Bacchus over the head with it, concussing him severely. The shudder traveling through my hands is a joyous song in my head.
He doesn't back down from me, he challenges me to one final match.
I hit him again, ending his career.
The gears in the machine, cleared of their blockage, turn smoothly now, in beautifully synchronized time.
I'm watching it now, still there with grandad, and, satisfied, he closes the back of the clock, as it ticks seconds away.
My hand, thoughtfully, reaches out to my bedside, and caresses the battered steel, the same tool I picked up at 24 that, for reasons so hard for me to name I've carried with me longer than I've known any lover or companion.
It's heft, as I lift it, floods me with memories of the past, and the screams of anguish as I brought them down on Sicko's limbs, to the future, when this bar smashes Easton Alexander's teeth and turns them into jagged spikes.
It's all there, past, present, future.
I wonder, from the first time I lifted this in my hand, if I knew what I was setting in motion... if I knew that this would come to be my legacy, my Excalibur that I am compelled, time and again, to return to when I fully commit to being who I was made to be.
Who made me this way?
Who assembled my gears in this order, who wound me to this tensile strength so that my gears are only turned, oiled by the blood this crowbar spilt?
Was my hand always meant to reach for this crowbar?
All I can say for certain is that it carries the same weight now as it did the first time I patted it in my palm... comforting, cold, and final.
Like the last winding tick of a clock before it strikes midnight.
“The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.” ― Albert Einstein.
Easton Alexander... Someone just plain doesn't like you.
Not surprisingly, you've contributed nothing to this company (or in truth, to this business) and you don't exactly fulfill a niche that isn't already filled... The Heritage already staked claim, badly on Canadian nationalism;
Tatiana Jolee, herself, already has the shingle of being an unsuccessful, forty-year-old journeyman without much success to hang a hat on... even your skillset, rudimentary as it is, isn't anything I can't do a dozenfold better.
On top of that, you've wasted a paycheck by being signed for all two shows with zero victories to show for it.
You're expected to go from there, to taking on Downfall, in a crowbars-only-legal match, and... what?
You're going to shock the world this week?
No, Easton.
They're sending you out there to die, whether you speak up for yourself or not...
Please, tell me, why the fuck I should fear facing you?
You know what you get on a weekly basis when you sign up with me.
Every single person who has to be in the ring with me has to instantly step up their game to PPV-quality levels or else they get crushed.
I bring consistency, passion, determination. You bring...
Nothing.
The point is, I see you for only what you are... a wasted arrow, who's most likely only going to last about as long as it takes me to elicit a scream from your wormy lips until you're wheeled back to the pay window and have your check placed on your chest as they pass the stretcher by.
But you look at me, "Canadian Dragon", and you see a beast more terrifying and more apt to turn you to stone than any basilisk there could ever be.
You could have chosen another path, Easton. You could have been something in another company, another time, another-where. But right now, you're just in my way.
And it's too late.
Always was. Always will be.
I remember watching, eyes rapt with fascination, a tow-headed waif at his beefy elbow, as hands with calloused, sausage fingers and yellowed-horn nails delicately manipulated tweezers, extracting gears from a mechanism a bit at a time...
It was giving my brain a concept I didn't know how to name.
How Harold would open up the back of a carved, ornate Swiss timepiece, gingerly point to it and tell me, "From here, we remove each piece and give it a thorough cleaning, so we can find what's gumming the gears and slowing the hands down."
I was 24 the first time I picked up a crowbar as a weapon.
My rival for the IEW Extreme Title was an idiot named Boca Del Inferno, garden-variety Juggalo trailer trash with delusional pretensions of being a vampiric, homicidal bloodletter.
And he had assembled a crew imaginatively named The Cavity as a means to combat my team of mercenaries;
More than that, weeks of relentless backstage attacks escalated our feud from beef over a title to something akin to a gang rumble, so when I was challenged to a parking lot brawl, I figured, why not play to type and emerge into the arena with a crowbar in my hand?
That night was the first night I felt the shock run into my hands and up my arm as rolled steel collided with someone's teeth... Boca's seven-foot "monster" THE fell to two shots from the crowbar, and I gazed into my hand in wonderment;
I had just unleashed a destructive power with my own two hands that brought down a giant... the crowbar a vessel to let out every perturbed feeling I'd ever had and crush someone's cheekbone with it.
It felt giddy, empowered.
"So y'see here, pumpkin," Harold would tell me, gingerly, "This spring here is to its proper setting and then released. When it has it's right setting, the energy released from the spring pushes this train forward, and sets the gears in motion."
When I was twenty-five, the world continued to change around us, and I changed with it. I freely used the crowbar as a crutch, as I used everyone around me. None of them were exempt, because any method of staying in power as the rising-star, year-end award-winning future World champion, I had to make sure that I kept my Inner Circle in line.
To that end, when Sicko the Clown and Jason lose the IEW Tag Titles due to a miscommunication, I take the overly-medicated mental patient in the shower room and beat him into submission, chest rising and heaving, snarling venom at him for disgracing us, and lashing him over and over again with the crowbar.
The morality of my actions is slipping away.
Harold would explain, "The problem is, it's a precise set of timing that makes the gears move. Too tightly, and the hands don't turn. Too lose, and a gear gets off track... So you remove them, piece by piece..."
When I left the IEW, I was alone for the first time... and try as I might, a crowbar was not enough. I needed to BE a weapon, not to wield one.
I did join new federations and have to scrap hard to prove myself to entirely new rosters...
Chip firmly on my shoulder and arrogance in place, I had to prove myself alone, and so the crowbar went in the closet.
I was hiding a piece of myself, putting away the part of me that was determined to stay in power... because I had no power to defend anymore.
Long, lean years passed, and I finally landed somewhere that I begin to try at.
It's as if, after years of rock bottom, I'd finally planted my feet and began to ascend... and as the weeks passed by of my new era, I began to see a change. Many changes, in fact.
I clashed with a rival. He became my brother. I fought my hardest. I was rewarded.
And yet, the entire time, it felt like I was holding back, withholding the part of myself that did what needed to be done...
Even the times where I stood atop a mountain as a champion, when I fell short, it felt as if it was because I dropped a ball because I was blocking it.
Because there was something in the way of my gears running at peak efficiency.
"See here," he says, holding out a little gear, so small that it's barely the size of a button, "This one has a little glob of grease buildup here..." and he begins to wipe it with a solvent-covered rag.
"Isn't it amazing that something so small can stop the whole machine from working?"
This summer, I pick up the crowbar for the first time in... a long time...
I beat Johnny Bacchus over the head with it, concussing him severely. The shudder traveling through my hands is a joyous song in my head.
He doesn't back down from me, he challenges me to one final match.
I hit him again, ending his career.
The gears in the machine, cleared of their blockage, turn smoothly now, in beautifully synchronized time.
I'm watching it now, still there with grandad, and, satisfied, he closes the back of the clock, as it ticks seconds away.
My hand, thoughtfully, reaches out to my bedside, and caresses the battered steel, the same tool I picked up at 24 that, for reasons so hard for me to name I've carried with me longer than I've known any lover or companion.
It's heft, as I lift it, floods me with memories of the past, and the screams of anguish as I brought them down on Sicko's limbs, to the future, when this bar smashes Easton Alexander's teeth and turns them into jagged spikes.
It's all there, past, present, future.
I wonder, from the first time I lifted this in my hand, if I knew what I was setting in motion... if I knew that this would come to be my legacy, my Excalibur that I am compelled, time and again, to return to when I fully commit to being who I was made to be.
Who made me this way?
Who assembled my gears in this order, who wound me to this tensile strength so that my gears are only turned, oiled by the blood this crowbar spilt?
Was my hand always meant to reach for this crowbar?
All I can say for certain is that it carries the same weight now as it did the first time I patted it in my palm... comforting, cold, and final.
Like the last winding tick of a clock before it strikes midnight.
“The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.” ― Albert Einstein.
Easton Alexander... Someone just plain doesn't like you.
Not surprisingly, you've contributed nothing to this company (or in truth, to this business) and you don't exactly fulfill a niche that isn't already filled... The Heritage already staked claim, badly on Canadian nationalism;
Tatiana Jolee, herself, already has the shingle of being an unsuccessful, forty-year-old journeyman without much success to hang a hat on... even your skillset, rudimentary as it is, isn't anything I can't do a dozenfold better.
On top of that, you've wasted a paycheck by being signed for all two shows with zero victories to show for it.
You're expected to go from there, to taking on Downfall, in a crowbars-only-legal match, and... what?
You're going to shock the world this week?
No, Easton.
They're sending you out there to die, whether you speak up for yourself or not...
Please, tell me, why the fuck I should fear facing you?
You know what you get on a weekly basis when you sign up with me.
Every single person who has to be in the ring with me has to instantly step up their game to PPV-quality levels or else they get crushed.
I bring consistency, passion, determination. You bring...
Nothing.
The point is, I see you for only what you are... a wasted arrow, who's most likely only going to last about as long as it takes me to elicit a scream from your wormy lips until you're wheeled back to the pay window and have your check placed on your chest as they pass the stretcher by.
But you look at me, "Canadian Dragon", and you see a beast more terrifying and more apt to turn you to stone than any basilisk there could ever be.
You could have chosen another path, Easton. You could have been something in another company, another time, another-where. But right now, you're just in my way.
And it's too late.
Always was. Always will be.
