Post by Kyle Shane on Jun 2, 2024 12:44:41 GMT -5
"Happy Pride, you two!" beamed the smiling elderly gay, and Hiro accepts her cheek smooches with the grace and charm he's always exhibited; Schmoozing and charismatic, it's small wonder the former "Overlord" was once pegged as the Michaels-breakout star hand-holding his Jannetty.
This seems an odd place to start, but I've always been an odd fit, especially in these spaces.
"Gibz welcomes all genders to the party, and thanks for your generous donations," Hiro said with a smile, launching into a sales pitch for the new app start-up he's invested in. Hiro's game has evolved sideways in the intervening nine years since we mutually left college; wealthy failson of Japanese tech magnates (microchips? I've never understood) he's always got his fingers in some shell-game of investments in tech; Startups, buy-ins, purchasing point five percent in some media firm and living his life like Roman Roy.
I say this, because, as I watch him work his way around this party, feeling like a hollowed-out void inside of a fancy suit, I feel at once cynical and yet amused watching him work.
This isn't that different from me canvassing a frat party back at MIT, and slipping a palm-ful of coke into the hands of a football player.
This is the new normal I've adjusted to, this is the Game Boy grown up.
And yet...
Black tie affairs and trays of drinks served as Hiro and his team talk to investors doesn't beat in my chest the way it does his, and this party feels cannibalistic and also dead.
I watch him chatting with some other people in cocktail dresses, laughing, and I can't help that they just want to be in the room and capitalistically suction off the clout of hip, young investors to make their stuffy tech companies appeal to the GenZ's, and with a small, irritable glance Hiro doesn't see, I make my way over to the balcony; a glass sheet, overlooking a twinkling citylit plaza and a pool down below.
This isn't my world. I'm once again, where I left myself three weeks before, an empty shell; but the phantom-limb pain remembers clearer now, it's like a stump that was freshly cauterized; I remember clearer now what I've been missing.
The swelling inside of my chest when they hit my music cue, and a crowd not conditioned to hearing the strains of "Degausser" registered shock, then... an explosion of elated emotion as the God of Game returned.
Havoc was... it was sacred to me, it was a return to form.
And yet, I lost.
Hubristic, brash, screaming in Teo's face "I didn't come all this way to lose", and then after a spirited, electric battle, it ended with us dumping over the ropes, but with me letting go. I did, in fact, come all this way, to lose.
Draining a martini, I rest my elbows, looking across the plaza from up high, so far above the rest of the city, not connected to anything down there... and yet, not feeling connected, to the corporate, synergistic arrogance that is tonight's meeting with prospective clients.
Hiro's companies are leveraging Pride Month as a way to buy affection, but I'm still nowhere near as comfortable in our "out" situation as Hiro pretends to be.
I huff a sigh, it's all a mess... one I'm damned if I can actually talk to Hiro about.
I've been routinely castigated for my promos because they're emotionally honest, "Whiny emo" it's been called.
I don't even care to think of the names of the people hurling that as an insult at me anymore, it's the words they said against me just speaking my mind that fucking suck.
Because, it's, somehow, a bad thing, to be emotionally honest.
I can be an honest man with wrestling, but forever the double-sided coin of finding it exponentially harder to be emotionally honest with the ones I love.
"Penny for em', handsome", Hiro says, jovially, coming over to kiss me on the cheek. I wonder if he feels how cold I am. Then he notices the pensive set of my brows.
"You're thinking about wrestling," he says, flatly, still not wholly on board or even understanding it; for Hiro, wrestling was something he'd gotten out of his system long ago; the funny little irony of the presumed singles star of the Game Boyz having gotten his fill and leaving it behind. Now it was just that weird shit we used to film on Youtube as kids.
"I'm thinking about returning to form," I muse, evading the implications of what that really means.
"This is a return to form for you, isn't it? Freshly out of a main event match, and the first thing they do is book you against someone on the level of the Sentinel or Terry Borden, that's Chronic Chris Page booking 101."
"Hey, put some respect for "Hot Shot" Wayne Austin, man, that's a former SCW World and Hardcore Champion, the toughest SOB in... minor league softball, if I had to guess,"
Hiro sidles up to me, grinning despite himself, as the wind from way up here stirs in our hair; "What does an SCW World and Hardcore Champion do on his days off when there's no toilets to unclog at the arena?"
"I mean, you laugh now, but Wayne Austin threw three people out in Havoc, including Jaice Wilds, it'd be remiss to laugh him off completely."
"Sara Pettis also eliminated three people in Havoc, Kyle, difference is I'm not here wondering where Sara Pettis was on January 6th..."
I laugh, ice broken a little bit. In the moment, it's just like old times with he and I, the lightspeed back and forth riffing and ripping some fucking goof down to the last atom.
But then Hiro's eyes narrow, as his jokey mood fades. He looks back at the party full of wealthy people he's trying to wheedle money out of to finance his latest app. And it's taking him away. Almost hurriedly, he takes my hand, as if to make up for needing to get back to the party.
"Listen, I told you... I don't understand this, Kyle... why you really needed to jump back in to wrestling after four years..."
You wouldn't, I think, you found it easier to walk away once and you never looked back. When I walked away, I left a part of me with it. A part I... just wanted back.
A part that came home to me when I stepped out onto the stage. There was a hole here..., my old PCW banner used to read...
It's gone now.
(Popping the all of three people that remember Silent Hill 2)
And yet as I stand here, alone in a crowded room, I pull that out and examine it. Really examine it. Haven't I always prided myself on being in another class, elite, in a world of my own, and therefore alone in a crowded room? Seems to me now, fairly obviously, that what I consider that haunts me in one context is my greatest strength when I apply it to what I'm good at. And I am good at this.
Hiro meets my eyes, taking my hand, allowing me the grace. "But I see what it does for you." And I think, even if we aren't connected like that, there's still not many people that understand what I need better.
So Hiro pats my hand, picks up a martini glass and proffers it into the hand of some white-haired boardroom VP of sales or something from a major media company, and is all smiles as he returns to his world, his new normal.
And I turn, back to look out over the city, mind whirling nonstop as I think of mine, not able to wait to get back to it. Happy Pride, and all. Pride... what it all comes down to.
These thoughts come to me, alone in a crowded room, and thinking of proving, yet again, why it always happens that I separate myself from the rest, for better or worse... and I realize, with a start, that I've probably gone over my allotted caps and spent entirely too many words vivisecting "Hot Shot" Wayne Austin.
Vintage Kyle Shane, man, vintage Kyle Shane.