Post by Benjamin Atreyu on Jan 12, 2014 17:51:05 GMT -5
This was the quiet time. The time before anyone felt it was appropriate to talk, because there had been no sign from on high to indulge our need for noise and we were all pretty sure that if we had spoken out of turn, we would have been struck down where we stood; so we stayed quiet. Quiet enough to bring out the fine details of nature in furious droves and give justice to how absolutely small we all were; the chirping of birds had never seemed so deafening before. A chorus of insects, wildlife, and winds howling against the side of houses played as the background music to the ever-so-oppressive atmosphere that strangled the words which had threatened to burst forth at a moment’s notice, but as time ticked on, we refused to disgrace the moment with even so much of a murmur of our discomfort. This was the quiet time, not because tradition had dictated it, but because none of us could think of a thing to say and we were worried that any wasted words would have come out as an insult to the one we were trying to honor on this morbid evening of icy gusts, snow covered streets, and subzero temperatures.
There was no arrangement or pattern to how we sat; the furniture was strewn across the room and we all took the weight off our feet wherever we felt it suited best, but then there were some of us who forewent the chairs and couches all together and just sat on the cold floor, obviously too taken back by the last few days to even bother with the usual idiosyncrasies of being in polite company, not that anyone objected; no one objected to much of anything. It was strange that, no matter how often such a catastrophic event took place, no particular individual was properly equipped with the mental resources to direct what the proper etiquette was to be, thus it seemed people reacted in whatever capacity they could, and that included spurts of unpredictable hysteria, but again, this was the quiet time.
My name is Charles Atreyu, uncle to well renowned performer and athlete, Benjamin Atreyu, though I’m nothing so special, I’m simply an accountant. Unfortunately, one week ago, I hadn’t been at home when the news reached me. Like every Wednesday night, I had been working late at the office trying to finish up some last minute paper work that would have put me in hot water if left unfinished. I sipped the water sitting next to me as my fingers tapped away at the keyboard, creating a rapid percussion of clicks and small thumps which seemed to create a sort of rhythm that usurped my senses and dove straight into my subconscious, in the sense that if it stopped, I felt odd and off time. I don’t happen to remember which particular report I had been working over at that moment, funny how such details escape you when they are over shadowed, but as I was just about to wrap it up, my phone began vibrating in my front left pocket. I was determined not to answer it, to simply ignore it until it went to voicemail so I could continue on my dutiful tasks, but I decided, out of pure curiosity, to pull it out just to see who was calling. I was struck with a faint sense of surprise when I saw that the caller ID read ‘Greg’, my cousin. The last time I had spoken to him was at the last family reunion when he discussed to what extent he was going to expand his local hardware store, and to have him call this late at night, the urge to ;et it keep ringing was overpowered by my incredible curiosity to find out why he was calling, I answered without further hesitation. That’s when I had been filled in on the tragic reason that we were all gathered in one place a week later.
The reason that the timing of this news was ever so unfortunate was, because at home, I could have easily broke down in the comfort of my privacy, but in a professional environment, I was not permitted such a luxury, and trust me, I had to fight hard to keep myself from blubbering openly in the middle of the office, even if it was only occupied by a few of my coworkers. By sheer will, I lifted myself from my chair and moved from my four sided cage and made my way across the office over to my boss’s personal office. Acknowledged upon knocking and granted the chance to enter, I shuffled from the door to a seat across from him and sat down in solemn silence for a moment or two. He gave me a queer look as I sat quietly before asking me if something was wrong, and that’s when I broke down. I explained the situation between loud harrowing breaths of sobbing. Not without any sense of sympathy, my boss simply nodded his head and let me finish before replying, telling me to not worry about the work. He advised that I head home and take a couple weeks off. Now, I know the question among many of you is a simple one; what news could be awful that it could cause bring forth such a distressing reaction. I’m sure most of you have been able to guess that it was a passing of an individual, but its who passed away that managed to draw such a reaction.
“Patricia Atreyu passes away at 58,” the headlines in the newspaper read. My sister-in-law; dead, gone, no more, lost eternally, placed upon the celestial shelf, a past tense. It had become national news a mere day later, you all probably had heard about it in one form or another. A figure such as that passing away doesn’t go unnoticed. Sure, she wasn’t famous for any particular thing, but being the wife of a famous philanthropist/businessman and the mother of a star in one of the biggest industries in the entertainment world, left very little in the way of obscurity and privacy. It was true that I hadn’t seen her for quite some time, her public appearances dissolved to next to nothing after the passing of my brother, but I still felt that she was less of an in-law and more of an actual sister, having helped me when I was scrapping at the bottom of the barrel so many years ago. So now, reading it in plain black ink over a picture taken of her before her rampant reclusiveness, it all felt so incredibly surreal and impossible, like as if seeing it printed made it less about a person and more about the image of a person passing on.
The planning for the funeral didn’t take long at all; it had been figured out years before my brother’s death, that’s always how he had been, setting of plans way ahead of time, because the idea doing anything close to last minute meant he his time and if there was anything he hated, it was wasting time. She was going to be cremated, simple as that; he had never believed in burying people and she really went along with whatever he did, I guess that’s why their marriage had worked out for as long as it did. The establishment for the procession had already been picked, all that was really left was to schedule a date and inform people when everything was happening, which set up for a couple days of very intense calls as it seemed not everyone had heard right away. Tears were shed, reshed, and no one seemed really eager to discuss it much other than the bear facts, including myself.
My trip from New York to Minnesota had been a flight personally paid for by the Atreyu estate; first class, the image of a powerful family who could afford to do such a thing would be important still, even if there wasn’t much of a family to be had. Not that we were in anyway estranged, we still got together for reunions and caught up like any other family. We just weren’t part of the Atreyu brand, as it were, we just simply carried the name, and those, such as Benjamin and Andrew, who were directly related to the ‘royal family’ so-to-speak, didn’t really cling to the image as of late. So, the plane trip was really more for the sake of the patriarch, my brother, whose company was still strong, even if no one related to him was truly a part of it anymore.
In fact, I wasn’t particularly fond of the individual in charge of the company. My brother had spoke of him sparsely, but from what I heard, he was a better businessman than a human being, something he respected, but I felt didn’t have to be mutual exclusive. I had met him once, years ago, and he came off as incredibly phony; his smile practiced, his suit so prim and perfect, his hand far too eager to be shook, and his greeting that more of a public speaker than that of an acquaintance. I spent very little time talking to him, excusing myself from whatever the conversation was about to sneak away to the bathroom, but from that one impression, I couldn’t say that I liked him. I had once tried to pry at Benjamin to find out why he had handed the company over to the southern gent, but for all my efforts, all I got in return was a sort of passive-aggressive glance of ‘none-of-your-business’ and the half-answer of ‘its not my empire’.
When I arrived at the airport, I was met by a driver who escorted me over to the limo which I would ride over to the Atreyu estate where I would be staying for the night before the procession the next day. It seemed strange to me that I would be treated with such immense luxury as it was never in the habits of Patricia or my brother to indulge their guests in such a way; not because they were cheap or anything, they just knew that it would be awkward to endure all the pomp and circumstance for a simple visit, though I guess it wasn’t a simple visit. When I arrived at the house - or what some would call a fortress, though it was no Xanadu – I could see someone waiting at the front steps, that strange southern gentlemen I was referring to earlier, and suddenly I realized why everything was so ridiculously set-up for show, he was trying to blow up his image, not that of my brother. He wasn’t family, but yet he felt it necessary to interject himself into the whole ordeal, trying to offer a false sort of hospitality that the newspapers would absolutely drool over. He was unfamiliar with the way this family did things, and I think that is what made him so off-putting for me. I stepped out of the limo and he greeted me with that same practiced smile, public speaking voice, and eager handshake that screamed the falseness of his sincerity, condolences for my loss and some bullshit about how ‘we all’ will miss her dearly. It took quite a bit of me to not spit in his eye and just smile.
It had been quite some time since I had stepped into the residence of my dearly departed sister and brother, but it hadn’t changed much, aside from feeling a tad emptier. I walked through the halls, fairly certain I was the first to arrive, and mapped out the location, seeing what I could remember. It turned out I wasn’t familiar with the lay-out anymore and I quickly found myself lost in the many corridors intersection and turning in this old house. Eventually, I found my way back to the main entrance, noticing several other people, all of which were family, walking in through the front doors. We greeted each other warmly, knowing that the circumstance could have been much better. We quickly catch up, shortly ignoring the elephant in the rather large room; where was Benjamin and Andrew?
The rest of the family had managed to make their way from one side of the country to another, but the two who actually lived in Minnesota seemed to be vacant tonight, but most of us wrote it off to their busy schedules or their lack of a need for housing in a state that they lived in. Andrew was a writer, albeit none of us ever read any of his work, and thus was always cooped up in his house, not even so much as answering the phone while working on his new book, and when he did answer, the conversations were brief and often uneventful with single ‘yes or no’ answers. Benjamin was a wrestler, though he preferred the term performer, since it seemed ‘the competition aspect had long since forgotten for the sake of the popularity contest’ as he often put it. He would travel the world, from stadium to stadium, without so much as a notice for us when he would be in our state. We all thought that maybe he didn’t like the idea of having family at the shows because it would be like having an uncle at the office, but some of us theorized he just didn’t care enough to let us know. Either way, we couldn’t even venture to guess what particular city he might have been at that night, and he would most likely make it tomorrow for the funeral.
We all began to roam around the house as I had earlier in an attempt to assign everyone their own room – something that didn’t seem entirely impossible since the place had so many to spare, it sort of reminded me of the mansion from ‘Sunset Boulevard’ in that respect, the last few years probably echoing the sentiment of the movie almost exactly – and it seem a few of my relatives remembered the layout far better than I had, making the venture far more successful than my first. Once everyone had their own room, we retired to the den where we started the fire place up and sat around its complete warmth in a house that seemed so incredibly cold. We weren’t sure if anyone besides Patricia had lived here to any sort of capacity as it seemed that it was devoid of any hints that the help had been around; cob webs in various corners, bottles of wine sitting in random spots around the room, and the dust pictures that sat over the fire place as if ashamed to show the faces that sat in the frames.
Despite the situation, it had been a comfortable night; we recollected on childhood stories, interrupting each other loudly when we felt someone was skewing the facts, thinking about places or things we hadn’t recalled in years. My personal favorite story was my cousin Angie’s story about how Gregg had snuck out of the house passed curfew to head over to some sort of house show in the middle of nowhere; he had driven all the way there through a blizzard, arrived at the house, and hung around listening to friends’ bands. It wasn’t until the house show was near over that he was informed that the person who was supposed to be hosting the show wasn’t there and the guy who had booked the show had found and open door to let everyone in. In his attempt to leave, he ran right into a police officer who was called out on a noise violation. Gregg, almost frozen stiff at the front door, listened as the officer explained why he was out there, not knowing that Gregg didn’t live there. When the officer was finished he told Gregg to keep it down and there wouldn’t be a problem, Gregg just nodded his head and waited at the front door until the officer drove us, allowing him to run over to his car and high tail it back home. Gregg than interrupted how he thought he had gotten off scott-free, but had been caught sneaking back into his house by his mother, who grounded him for three months. Though, he laughed, he couldn’t help but think that, considering the police officer and what could have happen, he was pretty lucky.
Eventually, one by one, we each realized we would have to be up early in the morning and we went off into our separate rooms. I’m not sure if anyone slept soundly, or even slept at all for that matter, but my night had been filled with tossing a turning, dozing off and jolting myself awake one way or another. When I finally did manage to get to sleep, I was assaulted by an awful dream of mourning and immense sadness which seemed to amplify the depressed state I had been living in for the last couple days since hearing the news. There were no images I could recall once awaking, but I remember the over-all feeling of the dream was completely overwhelming, as if being shoved down my throat, into my stomach, just to spread throughout my entire body. I awoke in a cold sweat, my head buzzing after emerging from the nightmare violent. For a moment or two, I was disoriented to the point of not recognizing where I was, but once my thoughts reassembled themselves I remembered where I was and why I was there, leaving me in a state of melancholy, assuring me I would not be sleeping for the rest of the night.
The next morning we all gathered in the main entrance, reassuring each other on the directions to get to the establishment which would be hold the funeral. We left the house as a group, dispersing as we each reached our cars, all parked in the long drive way, letting those in the back leave first until, one by one, we were all on the road, heading towards an obligation that I don’t think anyone has ever looked forward to. This was the only thing that was going to be comfortable to any sort of degree, the driving. There was a poem I once read, both the name of the poem and it’s author allude me, but the general idea of it was how the drive home from work was the most comfortable time of the time. There was no rush to get work done, no drama to deal with, no stress, no worry, just driving. That’s what that moment reminded me off, that poem, and I savored every moment of it.
Though, all good things must come to an end and eventually I arrived at our predetermined destination. I won’t lie, there was a moment were I was hesitant to leave the car. I thought about just turning around and driving off. It sounds awful, I know, but I don’t think there is a single one of us, both those in my family or those of you reading, who haven’t considered doing the same thing in a situation of this sort; where the grief is piling so high its threatening to pour out of your ears until your drowning in it. What are we supposed to think in a situation like that? Aren’t we allowed to have our doubts in those moments, if only in them? I’ve pushed through a fair share of my own tragedies and have come out mostly unscathed. I’ve looked into the face of failure with a plan for a final way out, and I have turned away from it; choosing to take the hard road and all it promised to inflict. So, does it truly make me a bad person if, for a moment, I considered running away and not face the undeniable agony and heartbreak that sat inside? I’m human, goddamn it, I’m entitled to my imperfections as much as anyone else and I’ve managed to go without judging anyone for theirs. If it ever came to pass, I would never hold it against someone for doing the very thing I only contemplated doing. After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped out of the car and made my way to the last time I would ever see my dear sister, even if it was inside an urn or in picture frame.
I peered around the room and spied two very curious things. One, that the southern gent who went as far as to greet me when I arrived at the house the day before had not bothered to show up to the funeral. Two, Benjamin had arrived, but was sitting incredibly distant from everyone else, giving a sort of look that he had no intention of interacting with anyone who was intending. I continued to scan the room, looking to see if maybe Andrew had showed up as well, but unfortunately my efforts born no such fruits. I excused his earlier absence as a testament to his busy schedule, but to not so much as show your face at a funeral for your own mother was fairly infuriating to me on a number of levels. Was his writing truly so important to him that he would lock himself away on such an important occasion as this? Or did he have no interest, not caring who’s name would be appearing on the tombstone? It troubled me deeply, not sure how to process such information without stomping around angrily, causing a ruckus where it truly wasn’t appropriate.
Instead, I took my seat, seeing who else had showed up, but I quickly realized the only ones who were going to show up had been those who had reached the house the night before, and they were all family. Had she no friends? Where were her compatriots? Surely she didn’t spend her remaining years alone in that house without so much as an individual friend to talk to, did she? How awful it would be to find yourself locked away in a prison of your own choice, living out your remaining years in complete solitude, choosing to connect with no one and nothing until the day your heart finally gave out and sent your flying into the great unknown. Might it have been a miracle that a downing of pills or a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head did not bring us here? I cannot speak for anyone else, but I am positive that a lifestyle that contained little-to-no interaction would drive me to my wit’s end and maybe even beyond into total oblivion. How dreadful, how awful, how completely horrifying.
Though, despite these many strange occurrences, the funeral was no different than any other; the priest, the in memorium, the stories, the final words, the whole nine yards. At one point I stepped up and said my piece, tearing up until they poured forth from my eyes down my cheeks, falling down into obscurity along with all the other tears that were most likely shed over the same spot for thousands of other lost souls. I spoke of how I remembered her, or more how I chose to remember her; the sweet women who always spoke with a sharp tongue, never left out of any social gathering, and who smiled with such immense politeness that she could brighten a room with a simple laugh. She had helped me when I had no one else to turn to and she asked for nothing in return. So much flooded back into me as I spoke, memories I hadn’t even given a moment for the last decade, some I didn’t expect to recall. Finally, I ran out of things to say and said the only thing I figured was worth saying, “Dear P-Patricia, we w-will all miss you so v-very very much.” It was almost impossible say, I didn’t want to say it, it came out a stuttering mess, but in the end I said it. It was my final good bye, but not just to her, but to my brother, who’s funeral I had been too sad to even speak at.
After the funeral, we all went to her grave site. Of course, being it winter and her being cremated, nothing was beneath the tombstone, but we felt it was still important to visit for the sake of respect. It read a simple message, “Patricia Atreyu, November 25th 1955 – January 1st 2014. Loving wife, caring mother, and helpful friend.” Of course, those words printed upon her tombstone wouldn’t give her justice, but it was the best anyone could and it would be enough to remember her in her entirety whenever we decided to visit to remember.
Finally, after all was said and done, it was the quiet time; all of us sitting in the den, sitting quietly. This time Benjamin had decided to join us, but like before, he kept his distance. I think from how the atmosphere spread through the room, at least some of us had been wondering if Andrew would make an appearance at all, but as the night waned, the chanced seemed less and less likely. I shook my head in disappointment at the idea, but I did not begrudge him, for as I mentioned early, despite my brief anger with him, I could not truly blame anyone for doing what I had thought about only minutes before the funeral took place.
“She was a good woman,” Gregg had spoken up, finally breaking the long-lasting, yet ever-so-fragile, silence and giving way to a slight murmur among the rest of us. All of our gazes shifted, but not over to Gregg, who had been brave enough to finally say something, but instead, over at Benjamin who simply peered out the window and looked on yonder into complete nothingness. He was one of her son’s, he had known her the best, and had visited her more in the last few years than the rest of us combined; his thoughts on the situation was highly sought after, even though none of us dared pursue our urges to question him. Slowly he turned around, taking his time as if thinking very carefully about the next words that were to come out of his mouth, but before he said anything, a smile broke onto his lips.
“Mind saying that again?” Benjamin asked. We were all surprised and some of us even confused by his response. He walked across the room in tediously slow steps, summoning every bit of attention on him and his currently conversation (confrontation?) with Gregg. We weren’t sure what to make of what was going on. Though the entire event, Benjamin remained quiet and refused to express so much as a single emotion through the whole thing, but now, after a simple five word utterance amidst an oppressive informal moment of silence, he had cracked a smile and gave a strange request in the most peculiar of fashions.
“She was a good woman,” Gregg repeated, this time faltering a bit. Benjamin stopped just a few feet short of Gregg, his hands placed carefully behind his back, as if observing some great piece of art, scrutinizing its every detail until there was no crack or nuance that had gone uninspected.
“Was she?” Benjamin replied, but it was quickly wrote off as a rhetorical question as he turned away from Gregg and continued speaking, “How many of you, since the passing of my great father, bothered to visit my mother more than once a year? Scratch that, how many of you even bothered to visit her at all? I know there have been some of you who did indeed converse with her not too long after my father was put six feet under, but not to long after that, your appearance in her life became incredibly scarce.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Cousin Fred, if you would indulge me for a moment, I assure you there is a point. I am not accusing you of anything, yet,” Benjamin peered over at the rest of the family, his eyes scanning over them with a sort of disgust that could not go unnoticed, “Do you know what my mother cherished over everything else in this world? Family. That’s right, my mother found that friends were temporary, business was simply business, but family was forever. Now, once you all decided to make yourselves transparent to her while she faced this newfound and crippling loneliness, she began to slowly find ways to replace the family she once believed she had. However, I didn’t disappear on her. I watched her descent into madness as every day seemed to be a deeper and deeper mess for her to push through. That smile that so many of you talked about, when she was a much stronger woman, faded over time, even began to crack in some ways. Her strong will was diminished greatly until she was a shadow of her former self. By the time twenty-thirteen hit, she was a pathetic mass of alcoholism and weakness.”
“How dare you talk about her like that!”
“Don’t you dare speak to me that way, you sniveling piece of shit,” Benjamin’s voice quickly rose in volume to drown out the others who tried to speak against him, the room quickly quieted down once more and Benjamin continued his lamenting tale about his mother, “There wasn’t a day that passed by where she wasn’t drunk. It was so hard to watch; I did my best to stop her, but all my attempts were in vein, since I was alone in my plight. Her house became a mess, she fired all the help, she lived alone, so utter alone, and there I was watching it all happen right before my very eyes. There would be moments in her constant drinking, were sobriety would peer through and remind me that some part of her former self was fighting to get out, but that made the moments of drinking and drunkenness all that much harder to watch. Could you imagine what that was like? No, I don’t image you could.”
“Treat your mother with some respect.”
“Oh shut up, Gloria,” Benjamin interjected again, “Respect? It’s funny how we think of respect only when they are no longer on this planet to receive it. Did any of you think about Andrew? Why wasn’t he here? Why he never leaves his house so much? It isn’t because of his writing career, his writing career came from his inability to leave. When my father died, my brother was merely twelve. Imagine what it was like for him to watch our mother slowly decay through her eyes. His vision of humanity fell to pieces, so he decided to do something as equally as destructive; he locked himself away so no part of humanity could reach him, and there he has stayed. Did you all hear about how she died?”
“Stop it,” I chimed in.
“Don’t you start with me, you were all too eager to accept her charity, but when she needed you, you were nowhere to be found,” Benjamin glanced over at me with a piercing gaze that made my heart skip a beat in the most horrible of ways, “She died in a very pathetic and humiliating way. Clutching for dear life to a bottle of Jack Daniels, her eyes wide open as if some incredibly pain had shot through her body right before she died. I had to pay a great deal of money to keep that fact out of the newspapers. Was she a good woman? Maybe, but I doubt any of you could be close to as such a status.”
With that, Benjamin turned towards the door and left as he had entered, in complete silence. We didn’t scream at him, we didn’t yell at him, we didn’t so much as curse under our breaths, he was right. We had done nothing to help her. We were all looking off in distance directions in an attempt to ignore the awkward situation of addressing her problem, because it would have tarnished our memory of her in such a way that we might not have been able to repair it, but now there was nothing that could be repaired. She was dead and nothing, no amount of pleading of last minute caring, was going to bring her back.
-.-.-
Okay, yeah, come sit over here. Jim, can you adjust these lights a little bit, there is a bit too much coming from behind. Yeah, there we go, shot looks great. Sarah, take your time on the make-up, we still have to get the microphone set up. Hey Jeff, can you bring me a coffee, one sugar, no cream. Anyone seen Brad today? I haven’t heard from him since last night and he was supposed to bring in the footage we did a few weeks ago for the promo for that commercial we’re supposed to have done next Monday. No? Fine, whatever; One thing at a time I guess. Are you comfortable, sir? Good. You done, Sarah? Great. Is sound ready? Awesome. Okay, ready. Three, two, one…aaaand we’re rolling Mister Atreyu.
“There aren’t a lot of things in this world that can really pierce me down to the bone; that can really drive me wild in such a way that I lose my cool, but when one of those particular things happen, it puts me in a state that no one really wants me to be in. See, this week a giant error was made on the part of management, one that I think should been corrected, but since I have no real power in this shit hole and the people running this federation doesn’t see fit to actually do their job with any half-way sense of decency, I’m stuck dealing with this error; the error being my match-up against Violent.
“See, I could go into how Violent doesn’t even deserve to face me, how she hasn’t earned the right to step into the same building as me, let alone the ring, but these clichés are all just dust in the wind, because I’ve realized something; she’s not being pushed up, I’m being pushed down. At first I was furious, but then eventually I admitted that I deserved it. I mean, look at the tape, my match last week should have been nothing, but I ended up nearly losing it to some half-pint bitch. My performance was awful, way below par, and as my punishment, they are trying to use me as a stepping stone for some lack-luster talent they think will be worth the money they pay her. Sure it’s a number one contenders match, but they are so sure that I will lose that the only one who can get that contendership is her.
“I’m a man of intelligence and culture, but excuse my bluntness and vulgarity when I say, what kind of fucking bullshit is that? See, Violent, I am in a very bad position. The people who had wronged me are people I can’t touch, but I can’t simply walk away. So, that means you are going to be on the wrong end of this whole fiasco. I would apologize, mention how unfortunate it is for both of us, but frankly, the bullshit you pulled. by calling me out on something as silly as twitter, has left me without any sympathy to give.
“See, for a while, I was hated you, but I couldn’t understand why. You’ve done nothing to wrong me, your shit talking is no better or worse than anyone else’s in this company, but I still hated you so passionately. I couldn’t understand why, but I know now. I know why I can’t stand the sight of you. You remind me of wonder woman. Strange, I know, but its true. Now, I’m no comic book geek, but Wonder Woman, to me anyways, always represented a sort of shallowness in the comic book world. A misogynistic and shallow take on what a female super hero was supposed to be, lacking depth and any true thought. You remind me of that, that shallowness, that sort of bullshit existence that does nothing but fill up space. You remind me more of a two dimensional fictional character than that of an actual human being, how’s that?
See, this is why you don’t deserve the title, because nothing worth mentioning will come from your title reign, it’ll just be the one of many cookie cutter reigns this company has seen in the past. So that’s why, at Slam, since I’m not getting a shot at the title, I’m taking away yours.
You don’t deserve it. There are stronger and smarter women who have been fighting for a lot longer to get that shot than you have, and if I let you get it, it will be an insult not only to women wrestler’s, but also to women around the world, both alive and dead. The fans can cheer for whoever they want, they can make whoever they want famous, but this is where I am drawing the line; you will not walk out of that arena with a shot at the US title, I swear it on my mother’s grave.”
There was no arrangement or pattern to how we sat; the furniture was strewn across the room and we all took the weight off our feet wherever we felt it suited best, but then there were some of us who forewent the chairs and couches all together and just sat on the cold floor, obviously too taken back by the last few days to even bother with the usual idiosyncrasies of being in polite company, not that anyone objected; no one objected to much of anything. It was strange that, no matter how often such a catastrophic event took place, no particular individual was properly equipped with the mental resources to direct what the proper etiquette was to be, thus it seemed people reacted in whatever capacity they could, and that included spurts of unpredictable hysteria, but again, this was the quiet time.
My name is Charles Atreyu, uncle to well renowned performer and athlete, Benjamin Atreyu, though I’m nothing so special, I’m simply an accountant. Unfortunately, one week ago, I hadn’t been at home when the news reached me. Like every Wednesday night, I had been working late at the office trying to finish up some last minute paper work that would have put me in hot water if left unfinished. I sipped the water sitting next to me as my fingers tapped away at the keyboard, creating a rapid percussion of clicks and small thumps which seemed to create a sort of rhythm that usurped my senses and dove straight into my subconscious, in the sense that if it stopped, I felt odd and off time. I don’t happen to remember which particular report I had been working over at that moment, funny how such details escape you when they are over shadowed, but as I was just about to wrap it up, my phone began vibrating in my front left pocket. I was determined not to answer it, to simply ignore it until it went to voicemail so I could continue on my dutiful tasks, but I decided, out of pure curiosity, to pull it out just to see who was calling. I was struck with a faint sense of surprise when I saw that the caller ID read ‘Greg’, my cousin. The last time I had spoken to him was at the last family reunion when he discussed to what extent he was going to expand his local hardware store, and to have him call this late at night, the urge to ;et it keep ringing was overpowered by my incredible curiosity to find out why he was calling, I answered without further hesitation. That’s when I had been filled in on the tragic reason that we were all gathered in one place a week later.
The reason that the timing of this news was ever so unfortunate was, because at home, I could have easily broke down in the comfort of my privacy, but in a professional environment, I was not permitted such a luxury, and trust me, I had to fight hard to keep myself from blubbering openly in the middle of the office, even if it was only occupied by a few of my coworkers. By sheer will, I lifted myself from my chair and moved from my four sided cage and made my way across the office over to my boss’s personal office. Acknowledged upon knocking and granted the chance to enter, I shuffled from the door to a seat across from him and sat down in solemn silence for a moment or two. He gave me a queer look as I sat quietly before asking me if something was wrong, and that’s when I broke down. I explained the situation between loud harrowing breaths of sobbing. Not without any sense of sympathy, my boss simply nodded his head and let me finish before replying, telling me to not worry about the work. He advised that I head home and take a couple weeks off. Now, I know the question among many of you is a simple one; what news could be awful that it could cause bring forth such a distressing reaction. I’m sure most of you have been able to guess that it was a passing of an individual, but its who passed away that managed to draw such a reaction.
“Patricia Atreyu passes away at 58,” the headlines in the newspaper read. My sister-in-law; dead, gone, no more, lost eternally, placed upon the celestial shelf, a past tense. It had become national news a mere day later, you all probably had heard about it in one form or another. A figure such as that passing away doesn’t go unnoticed. Sure, she wasn’t famous for any particular thing, but being the wife of a famous philanthropist/businessman and the mother of a star in one of the biggest industries in the entertainment world, left very little in the way of obscurity and privacy. It was true that I hadn’t seen her for quite some time, her public appearances dissolved to next to nothing after the passing of my brother, but I still felt that she was less of an in-law and more of an actual sister, having helped me when I was scrapping at the bottom of the barrel so many years ago. So now, reading it in plain black ink over a picture taken of her before her rampant reclusiveness, it all felt so incredibly surreal and impossible, like as if seeing it printed made it less about a person and more about the image of a person passing on.
The planning for the funeral didn’t take long at all; it had been figured out years before my brother’s death, that’s always how he had been, setting of plans way ahead of time, because the idea doing anything close to last minute meant he his time and if there was anything he hated, it was wasting time. She was going to be cremated, simple as that; he had never believed in burying people and she really went along with whatever he did, I guess that’s why their marriage had worked out for as long as it did. The establishment for the procession had already been picked, all that was really left was to schedule a date and inform people when everything was happening, which set up for a couple days of very intense calls as it seemed not everyone had heard right away. Tears were shed, reshed, and no one seemed really eager to discuss it much other than the bear facts, including myself.
My trip from New York to Minnesota had been a flight personally paid for by the Atreyu estate; first class, the image of a powerful family who could afford to do such a thing would be important still, even if there wasn’t much of a family to be had. Not that we were in anyway estranged, we still got together for reunions and caught up like any other family. We just weren’t part of the Atreyu brand, as it were, we just simply carried the name, and those, such as Benjamin and Andrew, who were directly related to the ‘royal family’ so-to-speak, didn’t really cling to the image as of late. So, the plane trip was really more for the sake of the patriarch, my brother, whose company was still strong, even if no one related to him was truly a part of it anymore.
In fact, I wasn’t particularly fond of the individual in charge of the company. My brother had spoke of him sparsely, but from what I heard, he was a better businessman than a human being, something he respected, but I felt didn’t have to be mutual exclusive. I had met him once, years ago, and he came off as incredibly phony; his smile practiced, his suit so prim and perfect, his hand far too eager to be shook, and his greeting that more of a public speaker than that of an acquaintance. I spent very little time talking to him, excusing myself from whatever the conversation was about to sneak away to the bathroom, but from that one impression, I couldn’t say that I liked him. I had once tried to pry at Benjamin to find out why he had handed the company over to the southern gent, but for all my efforts, all I got in return was a sort of passive-aggressive glance of ‘none-of-your-business’ and the half-answer of ‘its not my empire’.
When I arrived at the airport, I was met by a driver who escorted me over to the limo which I would ride over to the Atreyu estate where I would be staying for the night before the procession the next day. It seemed strange to me that I would be treated with such immense luxury as it was never in the habits of Patricia or my brother to indulge their guests in such a way; not because they were cheap or anything, they just knew that it would be awkward to endure all the pomp and circumstance for a simple visit, though I guess it wasn’t a simple visit. When I arrived at the house - or what some would call a fortress, though it was no Xanadu – I could see someone waiting at the front steps, that strange southern gentlemen I was referring to earlier, and suddenly I realized why everything was so ridiculously set-up for show, he was trying to blow up his image, not that of my brother. He wasn’t family, but yet he felt it necessary to interject himself into the whole ordeal, trying to offer a false sort of hospitality that the newspapers would absolutely drool over. He was unfamiliar with the way this family did things, and I think that is what made him so off-putting for me. I stepped out of the limo and he greeted me with that same practiced smile, public speaking voice, and eager handshake that screamed the falseness of his sincerity, condolences for my loss and some bullshit about how ‘we all’ will miss her dearly. It took quite a bit of me to not spit in his eye and just smile.
It had been quite some time since I had stepped into the residence of my dearly departed sister and brother, but it hadn’t changed much, aside from feeling a tad emptier. I walked through the halls, fairly certain I was the first to arrive, and mapped out the location, seeing what I could remember. It turned out I wasn’t familiar with the lay-out anymore and I quickly found myself lost in the many corridors intersection and turning in this old house. Eventually, I found my way back to the main entrance, noticing several other people, all of which were family, walking in through the front doors. We greeted each other warmly, knowing that the circumstance could have been much better. We quickly catch up, shortly ignoring the elephant in the rather large room; where was Benjamin and Andrew?
The rest of the family had managed to make their way from one side of the country to another, but the two who actually lived in Minnesota seemed to be vacant tonight, but most of us wrote it off to their busy schedules or their lack of a need for housing in a state that they lived in. Andrew was a writer, albeit none of us ever read any of his work, and thus was always cooped up in his house, not even so much as answering the phone while working on his new book, and when he did answer, the conversations were brief and often uneventful with single ‘yes or no’ answers. Benjamin was a wrestler, though he preferred the term performer, since it seemed ‘the competition aspect had long since forgotten for the sake of the popularity contest’ as he often put it. He would travel the world, from stadium to stadium, without so much as a notice for us when he would be in our state. We all thought that maybe he didn’t like the idea of having family at the shows because it would be like having an uncle at the office, but some of us theorized he just didn’t care enough to let us know. Either way, we couldn’t even venture to guess what particular city he might have been at that night, and he would most likely make it tomorrow for the funeral.
We all began to roam around the house as I had earlier in an attempt to assign everyone their own room – something that didn’t seem entirely impossible since the place had so many to spare, it sort of reminded me of the mansion from ‘Sunset Boulevard’ in that respect, the last few years probably echoing the sentiment of the movie almost exactly – and it seem a few of my relatives remembered the layout far better than I had, making the venture far more successful than my first. Once everyone had their own room, we retired to the den where we started the fire place up and sat around its complete warmth in a house that seemed so incredibly cold. We weren’t sure if anyone besides Patricia had lived here to any sort of capacity as it seemed that it was devoid of any hints that the help had been around; cob webs in various corners, bottles of wine sitting in random spots around the room, and the dust pictures that sat over the fire place as if ashamed to show the faces that sat in the frames.
Despite the situation, it had been a comfortable night; we recollected on childhood stories, interrupting each other loudly when we felt someone was skewing the facts, thinking about places or things we hadn’t recalled in years. My personal favorite story was my cousin Angie’s story about how Gregg had snuck out of the house passed curfew to head over to some sort of house show in the middle of nowhere; he had driven all the way there through a blizzard, arrived at the house, and hung around listening to friends’ bands. It wasn’t until the house show was near over that he was informed that the person who was supposed to be hosting the show wasn’t there and the guy who had booked the show had found and open door to let everyone in. In his attempt to leave, he ran right into a police officer who was called out on a noise violation. Gregg, almost frozen stiff at the front door, listened as the officer explained why he was out there, not knowing that Gregg didn’t live there. When the officer was finished he told Gregg to keep it down and there wouldn’t be a problem, Gregg just nodded his head and waited at the front door until the officer drove us, allowing him to run over to his car and high tail it back home. Gregg than interrupted how he thought he had gotten off scott-free, but had been caught sneaking back into his house by his mother, who grounded him for three months. Though, he laughed, he couldn’t help but think that, considering the police officer and what could have happen, he was pretty lucky.
Eventually, one by one, we each realized we would have to be up early in the morning and we went off into our separate rooms. I’m not sure if anyone slept soundly, or even slept at all for that matter, but my night had been filled with tossing a turning, dozing off and jolting myself awake one way or another. When I finally did manage to get to sleep, I was assaulted by an awful dream of mourning and immense sadness which seemed to amplify the depressed state I had been living in for the last couple days since hearing the news. There were no images I could recall once awaking, but I remember the over-all feeling of the dream was completely overwhelming, as if being shoved down my throat, into my stomach, just to spread throughout my entire body. I awoke in a cold sweat, my head buzzing after emerging from the nightmare violent. For a moment or two, I was disoriented to the point of not recognizing where I was, but once my thoughts reassembled themselves I remembered where I was and why I was there, leaving me in a state of melancholy, assuring me I would not be sleeping for the rest of the night.
The next morning we all gathered in the main entrance, reassuring each other on the directions to get to the establishment which would be hold the funeral. We left the house as a group, dispersing as we each reached our cars, all parked in the long drive way, letting those in the back leave first until, one by one, we were all on the road, heading towards an obligation that I don’t think anyone has ever looked forward to. This was the only thing that was going to be comfortable to any sort of degree, the driving. There was a poem I once read, both the name of the poem and it’s author allude me, but the general idea of it was how the drive home from work was the most comfortable time of the time. There was no rush to get work done, no drama to deal with, no stress, no worry, just driving. That’s what that moment reminded me off, that poem, and I savored every moment of it.
Though, all good things must come to an end and eventually I arrived at our predetermined destination. I won’t lie, there was a moment were I was hesitant to leave the car. I thought about just turning around and driving off. It sounds awful, I know, but I don’t think there is a single one of us, both those in my family or those of you reading, who haven’t considered doing the same thing in a situation of this sort; where the grief is piling so high its threatening to pour out of your ears until your drowning in it. What are we supposed to think in a situation like that? Aren’t we allowed to have our doubts in those moments, if only in them? I’ve pushed through a fair share of my own tragedies and have come out mostly unscathed. I’ve looked into the face of failure with a plan for a final way out, and I have turned away from it; choosing to take the hard road and all it promised to inflict. So, does it truly make me a bad person if, for a moment, I considered running away and not face the undeniable agony and heartbreak that sat inside? I’m human, goddamn it, I’m entitled to my imperfections as much as anyone else and I’ve managed to go without judging anyone for theirs. If it ever came to pass, I would never hold it against someone for doing the very thing I only contemplated doing. After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped out of the car and made my way to the last time I would ever see my dear sister, even if it was inside an urn or in picture frame.
I peered around the room and spied two very curious things. One, that the southern gent who went as far as to greet me when I arrived at the house the day before had not bothered to show up to the funeral. Two, Benjamin had arrived, but was sitting incredibly distant from everyone else, giving a sort of look that he had no intention of interacting with anyone who was intending. I continued to scan the room, looking to see if maybe Andrew had showed up as well, but unfortunately my efforts born no such fruits. I excused his earlier absence as a testament to his busy schedule, but to not so much as show your face at a funeral for your own mother was fairly infuriating to me on a number of levels. Was his writing truly so important to him that he would lock himself away on such an important occasion as this? Or did he have no interest, not caring who’s name would be appearing on the tombstone? It troubled me deeply, not sure how to process such information without stomping around angrily, causing a ruckus where it truly wasn’t appropriate.
Instead, I took my seat, seeing who else had showed up, but I quickly realized the only ones who were going to show up had been those who had reached the house the night before, and they were all family. Had she no friends? Where were her compatriots? Surely she didn’t spend her remaining years alone in that house without so much as an individual friend to talk to, did she? How awful it would be to find yourself locked away in a prison of your own choice, living out your remaining years in complete solitude, choosing to connect with no one and nothing until the day your heart finally gave out and sent your flying into the great unknown. Might it have been a miracle that a downing of pills or a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head did not bring us here? I cannot speak for anyone else, but I am positive that a lifestyle that contained little-to-no interaction would drive me to my wit’s end and maybe even beyond into total oblivion. How dreadful, how awful, how completely horrifying.
Though, despite these many strange occurrences, the funeral was no different than any other; the priest, the in memorium, the stories, the final words, the whole nine yards. At one point I stepped up and said my piece, tearing up until they poured forth from my eyes down my cheeks, falling down into obscurity along with all the other tears that were most likely shed over the same spot for thousands of other lost souls. I spoke of how I remembered her, or more how I chose to remember her; the sweet women who always spoke with a sharp tongue, never left out of any social gathering, and who smiled with such immense politeness that she could brighten a room with a simple laugh. She had helped me when I had no one else to turn to and she asked for nothing in return. So much flooded back into me as I spoke, memories I hadn’t even given a moment for the last decade, some I didn’t expect to recall. Finally, I ran out of things to say and said the only thing I figured was worth saying, “Dear P-Patricia, we w-will all miss you so v-very very much.” It was almost impossible say, I didn’t want to say it, it came out a stuttering mess, but in the end I said it. It was my final good bye, but not just to her, but to my brother, who’s funeral I had been too sad to even speak at.
After the funeral, we all went to her grave site. Of course, being it winter and her being cremated, nothing was beneath the tombstone, but we felt it was still important to visit for the sake of respect. It read a simple message, “Patricia Atreyu, November 25th 1955 – January 1st 2014. Loving wife, caring mother, and helpful friend.” Of course, those words printed upon her tombstone wouldn’t give her justice, but it was the best anyone could and it would be enough to remember her in her entirety whenever we decided to visit to remember.
Finally, after all was said and done, it was the quiet time; all of us sitting in the den, sitting quietly. This time Benjamin had decided to join us, but like before, he kept his distance. I think from how the atmosphere spread through the room, at least some of us had been wondering if Andrew would make an appearance at all, but as the night waned, the chanced seemed less and less likely. I shook my head in disappointment at the idea, but I did not begrudge him, for as I mentioned early, despite my brief anger with him, I could not truly blame anyone for doing what I had thought about only minutes before the funeral took place.
“She was a good woman,” Gregg had spoken up, finally breaking the long-lasting, yet ever-so-fragile, silence and giving way to a slight murmur among the rest of us. All of our gazes shifted, but not over to Gregg, who had been brave enough to finally say something, but instead, over at Benjamin who simply peered out the window and looked on yonder into complete nothingness. He was one of her son’s, he had known her the best, and had visited her more in the last few years than the rest of us combined; his thoughts on the situation was highly sought after, even though none of us dared pursue our urges to question him. Slowly he turned around, taking his time as if thinking very carefully about the next words that were to come out of his mouth, but before he said anything, a smile broke onto his lips.
“Mind saying that again?” Benjamin asked. We were all surprised and some of us even confused by his response. He walked across the room in tediously slow steps, summoning every bit of attention on him and his currently conversation (confrontation?) with Gregg. We weren’t sure what to make of what was going on. Though the entire event, Benjamin remained quiet and refused to express so much as a single emotion through the whole thing, but now, after a simple five word utterance amidst an oppressive informal moment of silence, he had cracked a smile and gave a strange request in the most peculiar of fashions.
“She was a good woman,” Gregg repeated, this time faltering a bit. Benjamin stopped just a few feet short of Gregg, his hands placed carefully behind his back, as if observing some great piece of art, scrutinizing its every detail until there was no crack or nuance that had gone uninspected.
“Was she?” Benjamin replied, but it was quickly wrote off as a rhetorical question as he turned away from Gregg and continued speaking, “How many of you, since the passing of my great father, bothered to visit my mother more than once a year? Scratch that, how many of you even bothered to visit her at all? I know there have been some of you who did indeed converse with her not too long after my father was put six feet under, but not to long after that, your appearance in her life became incredibly scarce.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Cousin Fred, if you would indulge me for a moment, I assure you there is a point. I am not accusing you of anything, yet,” Benjamin peered over at the rest of the family, his eyes scanning over them with a sort of disgust that could not go unnoticed, “Do you know what my mother cherished over everything else in this world? Family. That’s right, my mother found that friends were temporary, business was simply business, but family was forever. Now, once you all decided to make yourselves transparent to her while she faced this newfound and crippling loneliness, she began to slowly find ways to replace the family she once believed she had. However, I didn’t disappear on her. I watched her descent into madness as every day seemed to be a deeper and deeper mess for her to push through. That smile that so many of you talked about, when she was a much stronger woman, faded over time, even began to crack in some ways. Her strong will was diminished greatly until she was a shadow of her former self. By the time twenty-thirteen hit, she was a pathetic mass of alcoholism and weakness.”
“How dare you talk about her like that!”
“Don’t you dare speak to me that way, you sniveling piece of shit,” Benjamin’s voice quickly rose in volume to drown out the others who tried to speak against him, the room quickly quieted down once more and Benjamin continued his lamenting tale about his mother, “There wasn’t a day that passed by where she wasn’t drunk. It was so hard to watch; I did my best to stop her, but all my attempts were in vein, since I was alone in my plight. Her house became a mess, she fired all the help, she lived alone, so utter alone, and there I was watching it all happen right before my very eyes. There would be moments in her constant drinking, were sobriety would peer through and remind me that some part of her former self was fighting to get out, but that made the moments of drinking and drunkenness all that much harder to watch. Could you imagine what that was like? No, I don’t image you could.”
“Treat your mother with some respect.”
“Oh shut up, Gloria,” Benjamin interjected again, “Respect? It’s funny how we think of respect only when they are no longer on this planet to receive it. Did any of you think about Andrew? Why wasn’t he here? Why he never leaves his house so much? It isn’t because of his writing career, his writing career came from his inability to leave. When my father died, my brother was merely twelve. Imagine what it was like for him to watch our mother slowly decay through her eyes. His vision of humanity fell to pieces, so he decided to do something as equally as destructive; he locked himself away so no part of humanity could reach him, and there he has stayed. Did you all hear about how she died?”
“Stop it,” I chimed in.
“Don’t you start with me, you were all too eager to accept her charity, but when she needed you, you were nowhere to be found,” Benjamin glanced over at me with a piercing gaze that made my heart skip a beat in the most horrible of ways, “She died in a very pathetic and humiliating way. Clutching for dear life to a bottle of Jack Daniels, her eyes wide open as if some incredibly pain had shot through her body right before she died. I had to pay a great deal of money to keep that fact out of the newspapers. Was she a good woman? Maybe, but I doubt any of you could be close to as such a status.”
With that, Benjamin turned towards the door and left as he had entered, in complete silence. We didn’t scream at him, we didn’t yell at him, we didn’t so much as curse under our breaths, he was right. We had done nothing to help her. We were all looking off in distance directions in an attempt to ignore the awkward situation of addressing her problem, because it would have tarnished our memory of her in such a way that we might not have been able to repair it, but now there was nothing that could be repaired. She was dead and nothing, no amount of pleading of last minute caring, was going to bring her back.
-.-.-
Okay, yeah, come sit over here. Jim, can you adjust these lights a little bit, there is a bit too much coming from behind. Yeah, there we go, shot looks great. Sarah, take your time on the make-up, we still have to get the microphone set up. Hey Jeff, can you bring me a coffee, one sugar, no cream. Anyone seen Brad today? I haven’t heard from him since last night and he was supposed to bring in the footage we did a few weeks ago for the promo for that commercial we’re supposed to have done next Monday. No? Fine, whatever; One thing at a time I guess. Are you comfortable, sir? Good. You done, Sarah? Great. Is sound ready? Awesome. Okay, ready. Three, two, one…aaaand we’re rolling Mister Atreyu.
“There aren’t a lot of things in this world that can really pierce me down to the bone; that can really drive me wild in such a way that I lose my cool, but when one of those particular things happen, it puts me in a state that no one really wants me to be in. See, this week a giant error was made on the part of management, one that I think should been corrected, but since I have no real power in this shit hole and the people running this federation doesn’t see fit to actually do their job with any half-way sense of decency, I’m stuck dealing with this error; the error being my match-up against Violent.
“See, I could go into how Violent doesn’t even deserve to face me, how she hasn’t earned the right to step into the same building as me, let alone the ring, but these clichés are all just dust in the wind, because I’ve realized something; she’s not being pushed up, I’m being pushed down. At first I was furious, but then eventually I admitted that I deserved it. I mean, look at the tape, my match last week should have been nothing, but I ended up nearly losing it to some half-pint bitch. My performance was awful, way below par, and as my punishment, they are trying to use me as a stepping stone for some lack-luster talent they think will be worth the money they pay her. Sure it’s a number one contenders match, but they are so sure that I will lose that the only one who can get that contendership is her.
“I’m a man of intelligence and culture, but excuse my bluntness and vulgarity when I say, what kind of fucking bullshit is that? See, Violent, I am in a very bad position. The people who had wronged me are people I can’t touch, but I can’t simply walk away. So, that means you are going to be on the wrong end of this whole fiasco. I would apologize, mention how unfortunate it is for both of us, but frankly, the bullshit you pulled. by calling me out on something as silly as twitter, has left me without any sympathy to give.
“See, for a while, I was hated you, but I couldn’t understand why. You’ve done nothing to wrong me, your shit talking is no better or worse than anyone else’s in this company, but I still hated you so passionately. I couldn’t understand why, but I know now. I know why I can’t stand the sight of you. You remind me of wonder woman. Strange, I know, but its true. Now, I’m no comic book geek, but Wonder Woman, to me anyways, always represented a sort of shallowness in the comic book world. A misogynistic and shallow take on what a female super hero was supposed to be, lacking depth and any true thought. You remind me of that, that shallowness, that sort of bullshit existence that does nothing but fill up space. You remind me more of a two dimensional fictional character than that of an actual human being, how’s that?
See, this is why you don’t deserve the title, because nothing worth mentioning will come from your title reign, it’ll just be the one of many cookie cutter reigns this company has seen in the past. So that’s why, at Slam, since I’m not getting a shot at the title, I’m taking away yours.
You don’t deserve it. There are stronger and smarter women who have been fighting for a lot longer to get that shot than you have, and if I let you get it, it will be an insult not only to women wrestler’s, but also to women around the world, both alive and dead. The fans can cheer for whoever they want, they can make whoever they want famous, but this is where I am drawing the line; you will not walk out of that arena with a shot at the US title, I swear it on my mother’s grave.”
