- Event: Chaos 036
[Phone ringing]
CLICK
Sektor: [Incoherent sounds]
Lee: You there dickhead?
Sektor:..Yeah, sorry. I’m here..
Lee: Jeesh, you sound like I feel! I take it you had fun last night?
Sektor: I’ll let you know when I remember..
Lee: Thataboy! Listen, I know you’re feeling like hammered shit right now but I don’t have a lot of time. How do you feel about being booked this week?
Sektor: ..Huh?
Lee: A match, num-nuts!
Sektor: Yeah, I know what you meant. I just thought..
Lee: Yeah-yeah I know what I said. But I’d hate for you to get to 97Red and show up against that fat-fuck Townsend rusty. It’ll be a nice easy tune up, I promise. Tag Team match.
Sektor: Okay..
Lee: Yeah? You up for it?
Sektor:Of course..
Lee: Fuckin’ A! Alright, what nerds we got here… Ah, perfect, the lonesome loser himself and the guy who just ate a knee from my son.
Sektor: Townsend?
Lee: Unfortunately, no! Hollywood! Should be a nice easy stroll for you to shake off any rust.
Sektor: Alright. Who’s my partner?
Lee: The Son!
Sektor: …
Lee: Hello?
Sektor: Yeah, I’m here, sorry..
Lee: Everything…okay?
Sektor: Everything’s perfect boss. Me and Mike vs Stevens and Hollywood. No problem.
Lee: What I like to hear, amigo! Alright man, I’ll book you a private jet a couple of days before and fly you down to Rio. Big party town so don’t get tempted!
Sektor: Don’t worry.
Lee: I’m not. Alright, I’ll send you the deet’s for your flight and accommodation, I got you covered. Have a day man!
Sektor: Thanks, boss. Adios..
[End of call.]
———————————————————
Sektor woke up with a hangover that wasn’t too bad, a mouth that tasted like a flip flop that had walked through an arid desert, and a feeling that he was somewhere he shouldn’t be. The bed was a single, but there were two pillows on it. He could smell frying bacon. He sat up, looked out of the windows at a grey and gloomy morning in Miami, realising it must be nearing lunch and that he had missed the sun.
His first thought was that he’d done something truly awful in Vice city overnight. The fear, they called it. The post party paranoia. Then last night began coming back and he realised he was looking at a different part of town, the rough part. He was in a second floor apartment, looking down at a slum as though it mirrored how he felt internally.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and found a crumpled pack of marlboros with one crazy cigarette left in it. That was the first regret of many he was about to experience. He’d promised himself to keep his body as clean as possible, sticking to drinking and cigar’s as his only vices, even wearing a rubber when he was sleeping with women. The problem is that strong liquor lowers your inhibitions, and cigarettes and alcohol go hand in hand. Also, he was fairly certain he hadn’t packed any rubbers. What’s one more? He thought, lighting it with a plastic bic lighter. It tasted like dead horseshit. Out in the kitchen the sound of frying went on and one, like radio static.
Her name was Francine and she had said she was a…what? Oral hygienist, was that it? Sektor didn’t know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral. He vaguely remembered being gobbled like a Perdue drumstick. If his memory was correct, Francine hadn’t wasted much time. She had been a little overwhelmed to discover he was THAT John Sektor. Every once in a while his borderline celebrity status came in handy.
He groaned very softly and tried to retrace yesterday from its innocuous beginnings to its frantic, gobbling finale. He remembered arriving at the night club and shooting a video for Rhys Townsend half cooked. The rest was a complete blur. So he gave up trying to remember and began to think about the phone call he had just had with Lee.
Shit began to get real. He’d enjoyed the past few weeks, dicking around on Lee’s dime and rubbing Townsend’s nose in it. Now he was booked to compete and the pressure was already beginning to build inside. It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do, you take enough time away from it and you’re back to being as nervous as the time before your debut. This had even more pressure. Sure, Lee down played it and made it sound like a shoe-in. Sektor believed that his boss had utter faith in him, but that didn’t help. He was re-signed to one very specific job:
Take out Rhys Townsend.
Sektor knew Lee was right. No matter how much they put Townsend through his paces between now and the pay per view, it would be foolish to head into that match rusty. Lee saw this as a warm up match. Sektor saw it as something else entirely. He could try and take confidence from the fact that his partner was Mike Best, an active competitor and the most successful wrestler in High Octane history. But partnering with the boss’s son and a former enemy brought its own problems. He and Mike had been fairly close at one time in their careers. Aside from batting for the same team, at this exact moment in time Sektor wasn’t sure where the two of them stood with one another.
He would have to get match-ready as quickly as possible, he decided. He’d kept himself in good shape whilst he had been in semi-retirement. His body fat ratio remained low and his cardio and strength were pretty good. None of that mattered once you get bumped on the canvas, and even the best in the world get rusty when it comes to quick transitions, reversals and counters.
The oral hygienist came in, wearing a pink nylon half-slip and nothing else, wielding a metal spatula in her hand.
“Hi John” she said.
She was short, pretty in a vague Sandra Dee sort of way, and her breasts pointed at him perkily without a sign of sag. What was the old joke? That’s right, Loot – she had a pair of .38’s and a real gun. Haha very funny. He had come three hundred miles to spend the night being eaten alive by Sandra Dee.
“Hi,” he said, and got up. He was naked but his clothes were at the foot of the bed. He began to put them on.
“I’ve got a robe you can wear if you want to. We’re having kippers and bacon.”
Kippers and bacon? His stomach began to shrivel and fold in on itself.
“No, honey, I’ve got to run. Someone I’ve got to see.”
“Oh hey, you can’t just run out on me like that–”
“Really, it’s important.”
“Well, I’m important too!” She was becoming strident. It hurt Sektor’s head. He pinched the bridge of his nose and felt his chest tighten with stress.
“Have a little self respect, mama,” he growled.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She planted her hands on her hips, the greasy spatula sticking out of one closed fist like a steel flower. Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Sektor wasn’t fletched. He stepped into his pants and buttoned them.
“Listen, sweetheart,” he sighed, wishing he could just teleport away and not have to go through this uncomfortable moment. “The person I need to go and see is my mother. I was supposed to see her today. She will be worrying,” he lied, his mother had been dead for over ten years and wouldn’t have given two shits about him no showing a potential visit.
“I just bet it’s your mother,” she said sullenly.
He walked back to the bed and stuck his feet in his white loafers. “It is. Really.”
“I bet you aren’t the John Sektor who’s in the wrestling Hall of Fame, either.”
Sektor cocked his head to the side, raising an eyebrow in disbelief. “Bitch, how many hijo-de-putas you know with a moustache as good as this? Huh. Only John Sektor!”
She folded her arms and scoffed, so he just let out a deflated sigh.
“You believe what you want. I have to run.”
“You cheap prick!” she flashed at him. “What am I supposed to do with all the stuff I cooked?”
“Throw it out the window?” he suggested.
She uttered a high squawk of anger and hurled the spatula at him. On any other day of his life it would have missed. One of the first laws of physics was, to wit, a spatula will not fly a straight trajectory if hurled by an angry oral hygienist. Only this was the exception that proved the rule, flip-flop, up and over, smash, right into Sektor’s forehead. It didn’t hurt much. Then he saw two drops of blood fall onto the throw-rug as he bent over to pick the spatula up.
He advanced two steps with the spatula in his hand. “I ought to paddle you with this!” he shouted at her.
“Sure,” she said, cringing back and starting to cry. “Why not? Big star. Fuck and run. I thought you were a nice guy. You aint no nice guy.” Several tears ran down her cheeks, dropped from her jaw, and plopped onto her upper chest. Fascinated, he watched one of them roll down her right breast and perch on the nipple. It had a magnifying effect. He could see pores, and one black hair sprouting from the inner edge of the aureole. Jesus Christ. I’m going crazy, he thought wonderingly.
“You’re a really poor judge of character, sweetheart. Now, I have to run.” His white jacket was on the foot of the bed. He picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.
“You’re a dirtbag!” she cried at him as he went into the living room. “I only hooked up with you because I thought you were a nice guy!”
The sight of the living room made him feel like groaning. On the couch where he dimly remembered being gobbled were at least two dozen wrestling magazines from way back. Three more were on the table next to her Alexa. On the far wall was a huge poster of Mike Best. That made him feel a little weird.
She stood in the bedroom doorway, still crying, pathetic in her half-slip. He could see a nick on one of her shins where she had cut herself shaving.
“Listen, give me a call,” she said. “I aint mad.”
He should have said, ‘Sure,’ and that would have been the end of it. Instead he heard his mouth utter a crazy laugh and then, “Your kippers are burning.”
She screamed at him and started across the room, only to trip over a throw-pillow on the floor and go sprawling. One of her arms knocked over a half-empty bottle of milk and rocked the empty bottle of Scotch standing next to it. Holy God, Sektor thought, were we mixing those?
He got out and quickly pounded down the stairs. As he went down the last six steps to the front door, he heard her in the upstairs hall yelling down. More of the same, ‘you’re not a nice guy! You’re a loser, a monster etc, etc, etc.’
He slammed the door behind him and humid warms washed over him and the midday showers began to spawn, carrying the aroma of trees and automobile exhaust. It was perfume after the smell of frying grease and stale cigarette smoke. He still had the crazy cigarette, now burned down to the filter, and he threw it into the gutter and took a deep breath of the fresh air. Wonderful to be out of that craziness.
Above and behind him a window went up with a rattling bang and he knew what was coming next.
“I hope you rot!” she screamed down at him. The complete fishwife. “I hope you fall in front of some fuckin truck! You aint no champion! You’re shitty in bed! You louse! Pound this up your ass! Take this to ya mother, you loser!”
The milk bottle came zipping down from her second-floor bedroom window. Sektor ducked. It went off in the gutter like a bomb, spraying the street with glass fragments. The Scotch bottle came next, twirling end over end, to crash nearly at his feet. Whatever else she was, her aim was terrifying. He broke into a run, holding one arm over his head. This madness was never going to end.
From behind him came a final long braying cry, triumphant with juicy intonation. “KISS MY ASS, YOU CHEAP BASTARD!” Then he was around the corner and on the expressway overpass, leaning over, laughing with a shaky intensity that was nearly hysteria, watching the cars pass below.
“Couldn’t you have handled that better?” he said, totally unaware he was speaking out loud. He then realised and another burst of laughter escaped him. He suddenly felt a dizzy, spinning nausea in his stomach and squeezed his eyes tightly closed. A memory circuit in his brain clicked open and he heard the sound of his mouther:
“Something inside you just aint right!”
He had treated the girl like an old whore on the morning after the frat-house gangbang. He had a brief moment in his younger years when he respected women, right up until the time he caught his wife cheating and since then had been on a rampage to be as cruel as humanly possible.
He opened his eyes and turned away from the overpass, spotting a cab strolling towards him so he flagged it. It seemed to hesitate for a moment before pulling up to the curb, and Sektor remembered the blood on his forehead. He opened the back door and climbed in before the guy could change his mind.
“Miami beach,” he said.
The cab pulled out into traffic. “You got a cut on your forehead, guy.” the cabbie said.
“A girl threw a spatula at me,” Sektor said absently.
The cabbie offered him a strange false smile of commiseration and drove on, leaving Sektor with his own thoughts and staring at the blood spatter on his head. What a mess, he thought.
It was at that moment he realised that the party was over. He had less than a week to get his shit together and get the ring ready or else risk embarrassing himself in front of his peers and Mike. He considered letting Mike do the heavy lifting. He wouldn’t mind. He knew Mike was in a bad mood after the shit that went down with his boy over at Prime. He was sure Mike would be all to happy taking the lead on this match and taking out some pent up aggression on Hollywood and Stevens.
But what good would that serve. This was an opportunity for Sektor to reassess how far he is from his own standards. The Gold standard. Townsend may have been in the same boat as him at one point, but he’d had four matches in a row. Four matches to shake off the rust and really get some momentum under his belt. The grand plan was to wear him down and empty his fuel tank until he was running on nothing but fumes, ready for Sektor to pick his bones clean and snap his wishbone at the big pay per view.
Lesson learned..
Sektor knew Townsend. He knew that he wasn’t the type to learn those sort of lessons. He didn’t care and likely wouldn’t care even if he did lose to Sektor. But Sektor was being paid and treated like a fucking king so that he could make Townsend look foolish and make an example out of him. Something he had done to countless people on countless occasions only this time it was in a submissions match against the only man on the plan who could potentially match him.
And he already had more matches under his belt.
No, fuck that plan, he thought. He and Mike would work 50/50 and he would make sure he got enough time in the ring with Stevens and Hollywood. He didn’t know where he stood with Mike, but he knew he would do whatever he needed to do to make it work. Who knows, maybe it will be the beginning of the best tag team that never was? Maybe he and Mike could push for the PWA Tag titles in the future and go on a rampage.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s focus on what’s in front of us.
Hollywood and Stevens.
Two men with nothing left to lose and everything to gain from knocking off two S-Class wrestlers like Mike and Sektor. He knew Mike would be underselling their chances next week, because Mike was still at the top of his game and full of that wonderful confidence not even he was ever able to beat out of him.
Sektor saw it differently. Lee booked these kinds of matches as an ‘easy win.’ A good way to record a win and get a little confidence booster before heading into a ‘real’ match. Even if you did the unimaginable and lost, it’s a tag match, so the responsibility is shared and you don’t come out of it with an overly hurt image.
There’s no such thing as an easy match. Especially not in HOW. All Sektor could think about was the nasty habit he always had of inspiring his opponents to elevate their game and suddenly decide to go all out, leave everything in the ring and pull out all the stops to try and get the win over his name. Add Mike Best to that equation and the inspiration doubles, maybe even more because he carries the name of Best, and that always has added kudos when you beat a Best.
No, he wouldn’t be sleeping on Hollywood or Stevens. Both men at one time or another had reached the top of the mountain. Now they weren’t even at the summit. Fuck, they weren’t even next to the mountain, just on a boat in the middle of the ocean going nowhere. But they’d sure as shit have a crack at beating him and Mike.
And imagine the look on Townsend’s face if that happened? Imagine the ammo he would have to fire at Sektor when he lands on his face in his first outing, after mocking him from a sun lounger on a beach, shooting ridiculous Miami Vice videos, and flaunting the perks of being a member of the Final Alliance. He would look pretty stupid and Townsend prayed on such weakness.
He would have to look good, and by good he would have to get a win and a convincing one at that. So now he would be competing against Mike too, to make sure the winning pin and submission was from Sektor and not the Son of God.
As he thought about all that he could feel a change sweeping over him, like when you break a fever. He’d been so busy enjoying his life that he’d forgotten the burning desire of wanting to win and be the best. He thought he would just come back and do the odd job for Lee, earn his coin and reap the benefits of a fruitful life as the boss’ hitman. He’d cemented his legacy. When he lost the LSD championship after a, then, record breaking reign..he thought that was the right time to walk away. End on a high, he told himself. Leave the fans with the lasting memory that John Sektor was a winner and a helluva champion.
But he was back and could feel the hook sinking into his skin. He was already dreaming of more. The heart of a champion doesn’t stop beating until it stops beating. His was ticking over just fine and after a long break he felt like he still had more to give. How far off the pace, he didn’t know, but Hollywood and Steven’s could help him figure that out.
Sektor sighed, realising what all of this meant. He was back. He’d been away for long enough to escape the hooks of the business and was almost in the clear, but Lee had pulled him back in. Now he had a match. A match he must win and win well.
For Sektor? The party was over!
Time to go to work!