Post by Admin on Sept 26, 2016 21:19:24 GMT -5
Tunica, Mississippi || Friday, September 2, 2016, 10:45 PM (OFF CAMERA)
Her ears were still ringing. Even with the knee-pads and her taped-up wrists, she'd felt the vibration of that tooth-rattling impact from her hair to the soles of her feet. The former was soaking wet. The latter were in a bucket of ice water and she knew eventually Vinny Jarrett was going to come back and join her. She'd made sure he had an all-access pass before parting ways with him just moments before her match and now she was trying to replay those last few moments in her mind.
Had she missed something?
She'd been sure Recoba was down.
She'd been sure she had the time and now she could hear Ak's voice in the back of her mind, that stern reprimand he'd given her in that Boston gym: "all I hear are excuses but excuses aren't welcome. Here we don't give reasons for our failures. Instead, we work with our shortcomings and we forge weakness into strength. Do you understand me?"
Part of her wanted to pick that apart because to forge something you needed heat. You needed to hammer on it relentlessly when it was soft to get the metal just right. And maybe that metaphor was apt. Maybe she was soft. Maybe she'd burned so much that she was bending every way, like every blow, every last impact was warping her into something unrecognizable. He'd told her as much. Told her that she was all talk and maybe it had been a little dig to light her fire, to get her to come at him with everything she had but it still had a ring of truth.
"You talk tough...but underneath it all, you're soft. You're innocent and weak."
Weak. Absolutely and without a doubt. Heart on her sleeve. No off switch for her mouth. She wanted so bad to be like Larry Gowan, like Lex Collins - all heart and passion, as fierce as they come but nobody had ever taken her seriously when she tried her best to emulate them both. She'd tried to be like Ak, to be cold and scary and unyielding. She'd tried to be honest and had it thrown back at her by Recoba, mocked as though she was some gormless rookie fresh off the turnip truck.
"I can't do this," she closed her eyes against the burn of tears, putting her head in her hands, "what the hell am I even doing here?"
Biting her lip, she fell silent just as a soft knock came on the door. She looked up to see Vinny standing there with a smile on his handsome face. Waving him over, she didn't say a word, not trusting herself to keep the bitterness and poison from lashing out at him. He didn't deserve that. She bowed her head, exhaling slowly and then he was sitting next to her, his fingers rubbing her neck.
"Soon as my feet are ready, we'll get outta here," her voice came out soft, the tone forcefully cheery, "and find..."
"An all-night ice cream place?" He supplied as though he completely understood what she needed.
"Yeah." She couldn't help the smile at the warmth in his voice, at that compassion she felt in the gentle pressure of his hand, "that's exactly what I was thinking." One more match, she thought, nodding as best she could when he was still working the kinks from her tense muscles. One more. And if that was a failure too?
Maybe she'd pull a page from Ak's book and just disappear too.
[REC.]
"Well...so that was a thing." The screen was pitch black, the only thing remarkable was the huge amount of bitter scorn in the voice of Summer. "Lost another match. Yeppers, sure did. And you know, if you were expecting me to make a bunch of stupid excuses about it? I could. I could piss and moan and say the floors in the place Ak found for us," her voice cracked, faltered and she cleared her throat, "are gross and slippery and threw off my game. I could say that someone stealing my best sports bra kinda ruined my lucky gear. I could say a lot..."
She made a disgusted sound.
"Shit. Okay. No. No, no, no... this is not going to happen again."
She sighed and then the unmistakable sound of the striker wheel on a lighter filled the silence. A spark turned into a flame and for a moment Kasey was visible. Leaning forward, she brought the flame to a few scrunched up pieces of newspaper, watching as they caught, in turn igniting a pile of sticks. "Okay, does anyone even remember this show? Are You Afraid Of The Dark, it was called and I think Robot Chicken referenced it last season. Am I getting too old, or do people still remember that hokey shit? Those kids around the campfire - the Midnight Society - telling their spoopy tales?"
She paused, pushing her glasses up.
"Yeah. I said SPOOPY. It's a thing, too and I know what you're thinking. Of course I do because I've been here a hundred times before and every one was an 'enry - not Mac, not Buddy or Sam!"
Reaching down, she picked up a large index card, showing the words written on it to the camera.
CAUTION: HERE THERE BE NON SEQUITURS.
"Truthfully? I'm barely treading water. I know that. And maybe I should have stayed gone. Maybe I should have taken the hint and just stayed on the sidelines because it's painfully obvious to me right now that the only thing I get when I'm in this business are aches. Pains and yeah I'm not just talking about wiping out or testing laws of physics or whatever. Like, I mean I'm just seriously... catastrophically jerked around in ways you couldn't even begin to imagine. Lemme bring you up to speed, okay? So, I already had ties in SCW because of working there briefly in the past. I already had this in or whatever at The Luxor and they were running this new developmental academy so I was like 'hey, this is a no-brainer. Go there, shake off the rust, make sure you're good to get back in the ring' and then my very first match this guy was all 'people from Arizona are making Mexicans take all our jobs' and I was like 'what the actual fuck'?"
Frowning, she shrugged.
"So while all this is going on, I've got CWF - have you heard of that place? Well anyhow, I've got them trying to sue me for some breach of contract when I never really signed anything there and then they're all 'well we own your likeness and your signature moves so we're gonna have this tax lawyer chick pretend to be you' and then she's all stealing my display picture on Twitter and junk. So you know... that was another thing and I went to Boston to see about training with Akragth because Twitter said I should follow him and I did and he seemed really nice and then... well... then I'm signing with BFW. So that was nice. I mean, I had two matches and I won them both. And Ak asked me to move in with him. And we went on holiday in the UK - we saw the Tower Bridge and Big Ben and the Queen's Palace and those guards who aren't allowed to smile or fart or anything and then when we got back it was like the whole world went nuts. BFW closed. And... and..."
She tried to catch her breath, holding up another sign: OKAY SO HERE COMES THE PURGE.
"I'm all over the place still, training wheels off and I'm wobbling down the road but hey you know the cool thing about riding a bike? You never really forget how. I mean, sure, you wipe out. You weeble and wobble and maybe you fall down but maybe you don't and you're trying to remember how you used to do it with no hands and now you're hitting the ditch with a death grip on both handlebars - is that what it means to grow up? Like, is that what Peter Pan was so afraid of? Because HOLY SHIT, I do not want to grow up - so like, here I am, in this place I only came to because they were gonna give him a job and I was just like coat-tail riding like crazy. IS that surprising? I mean, come on. Exodus Pro it was Bryan Axel. RMP it was Ryan Mackenzie. FFW it was this manager and interim CEO guy named Kyle Kilmeade and then after a particularly messy breakup because he thought I was boffing my trainer Christian Kincaid-"
A breath.
"I was, but that's another story for another day... can't slut shame me when I'm not ashamed of having a healthy libido... so then after that, it was this awesome guy named Richard Specter... the brother of Adrien Specter - he's a legend. Adrien, I mean. Richard was just his interpreter because Adrien used sign language... long story there. So... then it gets a little muddled. I had a thing with this guy named Jason - his sister was the one CWF used to impersonate me the first time back in 2011."
Another sign: OVER-SHARING IS CARING!
"And then there was this guy named Hunter and then he left and for a while it was just me and the big black hole and my PT at all the hours logged trying to get back on the fucking horse that tried to kill me and I had people talking about me in whispers, asking if I was okay. Asking if I was sure I wanted to try again like I was made of glass... like I was some dainty little fucking dolly on a high shelf and I'm like... what's the point in living if you're not out there doing what makes sense? I mean, what's the point in anything so I pushed and I pushed and I was so freakin' stupid because I thought for a minute that anything I was doing mattered."
Breathing hard, she stopped, staring at the camera for a few seconds before biting her lip.
"Okay. We clear now? I, Kasey Dawn Summers, am an absolutely ginormous idiot. I suck at life choices and this has been your super fun Fall Fair Bi-polar Bear Plunge - that would be a great Kool-Aid flavor, right? Holy shit that was a tangent, wasn't it? Got hugely off track from the meme about some typoed Dollar Store sign and now I'm vying for the next viral trainwreck of the week!"
She shook her head.
"Viral... there's something you never wanna be. Exploding online for all the wrong reasons. Or gross and contagious. Either one, not really the best, right? Because Lord knows we all are one huge botch away from the weekly fail list - my spectacular Icarus crash and burn on the friggin' concrete notwithstanding. And you know, head injuries aren't funny. They really aren't."
Sighing, she shook her head. "Honestly, they're a pretty huge hazard - you know when Mike Ditka is all 'I would never let my kid play football' that it's a big deal and it's weird how cavalier some people are about their health in this business."
She nodded sagely, sounding like a public service message, "and at least five-thirds of professional wrestlers suffer from the debilitating after-effects for weeks... even fortnights afterwards!" Shaking her head slowly, she quickly amended that, "I mean three-fifths. Three out of five wrestlers could be suffering from this very horrible and very real condition. They could be changing a bathroom light bulb, clipping their toenails, recording promotional videos or even," she gasped, "rubbing shoulders with you in the locker room. The horror is that some of these people don't even know there's anything wrong with them. They carry on conversations, have brunch, train and even wrestle without knowing the danger. Are you one of these poor statistics? I feel like I'm legitimately on the brink of it so I've kinda made a little checklist. To help. In case you are and you don't know it."
Summer cocked her head, and pulled out a folded piece of paper, studying it intently.
"Do you suffer from any of the following symptoms: overblown ego? Delusions of grandeur? Desires for world domination? Memory problems? Time-space continuum paradoxes? If you've been experiencing any of these problems, maybe you should seek some professional help. Get an X-ray or a CAT scan. Or, y'know... have someone help you out of your misery. Do it for the rest of us. The people who care about the wrestling business. Ask your doctor if a lobotomy is right for you. Some side effects may include: uncontrollable verbal diarrhea, drooling, losing to Cross Recoba..." she frowned, trailing off before she quickly interrupted her previous track, "although I couldn't imagine that... ugh. Okay. I can't do this. I can't be funny and witty and... I just want to win a damn match. Kelsey Spencer couldn't get it done against Annabel Lee."
She coughed, the clearing of her throat sounding like she was saying, 'Poe sucks' over and over.
"She sucks; I'm going to win, and there really isn't much more to be said about that."
Summer laughed, rolling her eyes, "I mean, you know what subtext is, right? You know what a metaphor is, that much is clear, but you missed the mark. See, I'm not sure if you know what day it is today, but summer ends on September 22nd - like friggin' ten days from now. So no. Summer IS NOT over and really, I was expecting something intelligent from you. I was. Instead I got the dumbest retread I've ever heard in my life."
She giggled, smirking, "so at this point I'm assuming wherever you learned your chops in this business was completely populated with the lowest common denominator mouth-breathers of this business because that was the best you had? It's Kelsey Time? Yeah. Okay. And that's what time exactly? Half past 'dumbfuck' and quarter to 'circling the drain'? I have to assume that's what you're accustomed to dealing with, or it's impossible to understand why you would go out of your way to insult my intelligence with that RIDICULOUS junk you were spouting. I'm starting to think that maybe there really is something wrong with you. And that's... kinda sad. Well, either that or you're auditioning to be the next big draw at Uncle Shecky's Chuckle Barn. Either way, it's still borderline pathetic."
Summer laughed.
"I ate concrete against Cross Recoba. Sure did. And somehow this is worse. Oh, man... this week takes the cake. This week I got you, and you're so far out in left field you're ready to catch Babe Ruth's best pop fly. A trial by fire is what they usually call these things, isn't it? A gauntlet or something..." she frowned, "I can't remember what my uncle used to say. He used to tell me that the bigger the challenge, the more faith they have in you. So this, this probably means that I am a SUPERSTAR! I'd better get up on the roof and start crowing like a psycho, telling everyone that I'm the best around."
Despite the words she seemed outwardly calm, even that spark in her eyes seemed dimmed as she cocked her head to the side as though thinking about what she'd just said. She shrugged finally, and resumed speaking.
"Or not. That's not really my thing. I'll leave the lamesauce bragging to someone like you. So..."
She hesitated, staring into the crackling flames.
"For your approval, I submit my story: The Tale of The Arizona Firebird. You know what that means, right? You know that's a play on phoenix, right? You know what they do when they crash and burn?"
She paused, cocking her head to consider her question before nodding to herself.
"They get back up. They spread their wings and they fly again."
She let that hang for a few beats before smiling.
"Caw-caw... bitch."
With that, she grabbed a bucket of sand, dousing the fire with an air of finality as the image winked out along with the flames.
