Latest Roleplays
Nothing.
If I were doing a press junket right now to hype up “War Games” and some reporter wearing the tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a little press cap, and a wrinkled short because he doesn’t know how to operate an iron (I am looking at you Jimmy Milliecent from the Long Island Daily Express) were to ask me how I was feeling going into the biggest match of the year, I would have to give an honest answer.
I feel nothing.
I should feel something.
But I don’t.
I think they call it “emotionally numb”.
When the TSA took my unopened bottle of Coca-Cola in security, a Coca Cola that cost two dollars and twenty-five cents, about fifty cents more than the local WalMart, I felt nothing.
When I received a call for a “Simone Spewack” to discuss an extended warranty, normally I would play along, use a funny voice or an accent (my favorite being Australian, I think it’s because they call everybody “mate” or maybe it’s just the Hugh Jackman effect), I just pushed the button on the phone, disconnecting the call. It was almost as if I was on autopilot.
When the portly gentleman with the slicked back black hair, which only exposed his clearly receding hairline, sitting across the aisle from me wearing a red t-shirt with a golden Liverpool FC logo, khaki shorts, and black socks and sandals burped in my face, the noxious odor of gastrointestinal hot dogs wafting invading my nostrils like an Old Testament plague, I felt nothing.
The fact that I am sitting in coach in the aisle seat in this plane crammed with people like sardines in a can, two yammering teenagers sitting next to me speaking some foreign language – it could be German or it could be Dothraki, he would not have been able to tell. And maybe a week ago, I might have been curious to what they had to say, perhaps they would have been getting up the courage to ask me for my autograph. “Of course” I would say before obliging and giving them my John Hancock on whatever was readily available, a barf bag perhaps (although I had not noticed any on this flight as of yet). But in this moment? I couldn’t give a shit. They could be calling me an “old ninnyhammer clod that tongues donkey balls” for all I care. It doesn’t matter.
In about three hours, I will be arriving in Bucharest. I have never been to Romania before. I will be staying in a luxury hotel, eating Romanian delicacies, and Romania is the home to Dracula’s castle. This should be giving me some sort of reaction, butterflies in the stomach or something. But there is nothing.
In a few days, I will be taking a train to Kyev. A country that’s being invaded by Russia. Missile strikes, people are fleeing from their homes, becoming refugees, people are dying, families are broken apart, the Russians have taken control of fifteen or twenty percent of the country. I want to feel something for these people, anything. Empathy. Sorrow. Pity. I desperately want to care about these people and their plight, but I don’t.
Just five short days ago, I was at the Best Arena with Darin Zion, who looked douchier than every James Spader character in the eighties. I was feeling it. I was amped up, the blood was boiling, I could feel the churning in my stomach, pissed off at the hubris of Lee Best and his Board of Directums. I was ready to Smack Sparrow that hobo’s beard off his Cryptkeeper face. I hyped for it. It’s what I would imagine roid rage to feel like minus the injecting of poison into my body and my testicle shriveling up to the size of a raisin.
I found myself obsessively slingshotting geriatric pee filled balloons at the Best Arena, hoping one would bust through the window of Mike Best’s office. What was the purpose? The desperate act of war against the tyrant with whom I have spent the last twenty years trying to appease? Or one last rebellious act against a man who tossed me aside like a wet, snotty tissue after cold season?
Did I unleash all of my rage and anger in that one act and now, I have none left to give?
Did I empty the tank of fury that I had been building up on water balloons?
Or maybe it is the fact that I have not been able to sleep for more than two hours every day this week.
Maybe it’s just mental fatigue.
I’ve been perpetually exhausted lately, my eyes are so purple and baggy you’d think I just went ten rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard in his prime. It’s that kind of fatigue where your eyelids feel like they have weights attached and you struggle to keep them open. It’s the type of exhaustion where you struggle to maintain focus otherwise you begin seeing double. It’s the kind of exhaustion when every muscle hurts. The lingering pain in your neck from a betrayal a year prior begins to intensify and radiates to the back of your head until you are left with a throbbing, pounding headache that never seems to go away…but eventually does.
It’s not like I don’t try. I close my eyes but then, if it’s not the pain in my neck…..
It’s my fucking, asshole brain.
It’s the thoughts that run through my mind causing insomnia.
It started simple enough. Joyous and happy thoughts of making Stronk tap out from the Jattaclysm. Eliminating Scottywood with the Falling Star. Shredding Jace’s lying, pretty boy face against the steel cage. Sodomizing Tyler Best’s eye with a rusty old fountain pen, disfiguring the young lad so that every time he looks at himself in the mirror, he would be reminded of the Rembrandt of Wrestling.
But then, those thoughts began to get replaced with scenarios and strategies. What happens if Bobbinette Carey wins the LSD Championship? What happens if Steve Harrison retains? What if I draw night one as opposed to night two and vice versa? When does Clay show up? What if I am left in the ring by myself against Christopher America, Stronk, and Jace Parker Davidson? What if it’s me, Bobbinette Carey, Clay Byrd, and Darin Zion left against Tyler Best? The scenarios continue on and on and on….it must be what “Survivor” contestants go through each night as they try to figure out their own strategies to win.
And then that turned into memories….
Well, one memory, in particular….
Tokyo, Japan.
“War Games” 2021.
I remember being so optimistic going into that match. StarrSek Industries were going to walk out of the Tokyo Dome as the HOW Tag Team Champions. I was so focused on that. I manifested it in my head. We would eliminate Dan Ryan and Conor Fuse, we get our hands raised and then it was supposed to be every man for himself. I visualized it in my head that the Ruler of Jattlantis would be one of the Final Five. The night before, I was so excited. I could barely sleep, like a kid about to go to Disney World for the very first time.
That excitement I felt then, I don’t feel it now.
Because the reality of what happened was far more tragic than I could have ever predicted.
Even just take the injury out of the equation.
I not only dreamt that I would be a Tag Team Champion, but I would be one of the Final Five.
I lasted about three to four minutes.
Conor and I, we were going blow to blow for a bit before…..
Pow……
I get hit in the head with some brass knuckles, Dan Ryan powerbombs me out of the ring onto the cold, unforgiving concrete floor. Then he puts my head in a chair and proceeds to mock Sektor. And, well, everyone knows the rest….
When I think of that night, it’s not the injury that keeps me up. It’s fucking “War Games”. Injuries will be inevitable. Blood will spill, bones may be broken, someone will inevitably fall off the top of the cage.
It’s getting brutalized, no, obliterated within a couple of minutes of entering the match. Basically, at the beginning of the match, mind you.
It’s getting bitched out of the match without making any sort of an impact on the outcome.
At least, that’s what the perception was at the time. I read the internet. After I got out of the hospital, I saw the comments from the trolls hiding in their basements underneath the nearest tree.
“They could have teamed Sektor with a castrated monkey and it would have lasted longer than Jatt Starr.” That one stood out among the hatred and the bile.
I can’t say they’re wrong either.
To be honest, some days I just feel like I am going through the motions. Kind of like the sad clown. He has to put on his makeup and dance around, make balloon animals for some bratty suburban kid’s birthday party, and juggle some bowling pins while he feels like he is dying just a little on the inside. For me, it’s just being what the public expects me to be when I just want to go home and watch “King of Queens” reruns.
The opportunities are becoming few and far between. On one hand, you could make the most of the opportunities. But on the other? Hope and excitement will only lead to disappointment. Maybe the reason why the apathy has been so strong is because I know my days are numbered.
I feel the end drawing near and I look at Conor Fuse. He is the future of the HOW. He is young, competitive, and, arguably, the best wrestler in the HOW since the early days of Max Kael….only without the intense fear of elves. I look at him and I see it…..
The fire in his eyes grow dimmer. He is burning out. His whole life is competing. Whether it is the HOW or MarioKart or Double Dragon, he’s always playing his game. And he is doing so at a high level. But it is not sustainable. He will crash and burn.
And if a young, athletic marvel like Conor Fuse can burn out, then someone like me, who has given, more or less, eighteen years to the HOW….
…..someone like me will just fade away.
Did you know that I had just one moment of excitement in the past four days? It was when Heidi called me and asked if I thought her ass was too big. Of course it is not, but she lost an acting job, I believe it was some anti-depressant commercial or was it antiperspirant? Anyway, she lost the gig to, as she put it, a “talentless, anorexic bitch who did one swimsuit layout ten years ago”. I don’t know why I felt, I dunno, not happy but maybe content. Maybe there was a part of me that felt she needed me in that moment and I was able to provide her with some form of comfort. Then, after I talked her down from an eleven to a six, she hung up to call her agent, I rode that high for five minutes and the reality of my professional life, the inevitability of my descent into obscurity as the fates curse me with yet another disappointing War Games performance plagued my mind as I stood near Gate A9 at the airport, watching a 747 begin their taxi to the runway.
Maybe I had seen what happened with David Noble’s assault on Sektor for what it is: A sign.
Sektor is a Hall of Famer, a legend and he goes out like that. A chump.
Maybe it is time to hang up the proverbial boots.
Maybe it is time to call it a career.
Maybe I have realized that I have nothing left to prove.
Maybe, by now, Linda will notice the one-point-five million dollars I have wired to her account to help with Gilda’s care – half of my endorsement deal with Lemmon’s Soup and from the sale of my Havre, Montana home. I try to sit next to her bed one day a week and read to her. I wonder, is one night a week too much or not enough? Am I just better off not seeing like that? What if the next time I see her and I just…feel like I do now? Indifferent. Maybe I should quit. The possibility that the day I leave the HOW is the day she awakens from her coma has crossed my mind.
I would love for her to meet Heidi.
Maybe Darin Zion, the 4Z Network, using the lessons in Sparrowdynamics that I have taught him, will propel him into megastardom.
Maybe I will take that ramen noodle endorsement in Japan. I’ve never had a Spicy Crab flavored noodle cup before, but it sounds interesting and the pay is pretty good. I don’t know how Heidi would feel about that, though.
And maybe this pen in the breast pocket of my suit won’t get used at “War Games”.
Maybe “War Games” will be the final match of my long, storied career.
Maybe after the match, I slip out, grab a taxi and head to the airport and shoot ol’ Lee “Mortherfucking” Best a little text that says “Lee. Suck my nut. I quit.” I can see myself feel an enormous weight get lifted off my shoulders that I would suddenly start giggling like a schoolgirl with a crush, much to the confusion of the taxi driver who would probably think I was insane.
I would likely get eliminated, escape the cage without any further bodily harm and give a big fat “Fuck You” to Lee in the process.
But then again…..
Maybe walking out to a sold out arena, the lights flashing, the crowd cheering…..maybe something will awaken inside. Maybe it will be just a need to give these fans who have been going through so much tragedy the best damn version of Simon Sparrow that I can.
Or maybe, I look at the other team and think to myself, there is no one on Team Board worthy enough of pinning me. Stronk Goodbar, a dimwitted cheater. Tyler, a prick who is the son of an even bigger prick and grandson of a blasphemous twat. Christopher America, xenophobic hasbeen who, admittedly has won twice before, ask him, he will tell you while waving the American flag and feeding his eagle the hearts of communist donkeys. Scottywood, who didn’t even have an official qualifying match, he was just given his spot. Jace is a backstabbing douche. Giving any of them the bragging rights of pinning me in my final match, I could see that sickening me. If I cared right now, I would probably vomit.
Or maybe still, something as simple as seeing Stronk and/or Tyler Best causes all that pent up rage to bubble back up until it erupts into an explosion of violence and I slap “stans” out of Tyler Best’s vocabulary then take my rusty pen and go Norman Bates on his stupid face and send him back to begging for likes on the Tik Tok.
And maybe, when it comes time for “War Games”, nothing changes, my music will hit, I will walk down that ramp on autopilot, I enter the cage and hope that, by the end of it, I don’t embarrass myself.
Whatever happens….
…..I don’t give a fuck.