You’ve Got Spirit, Kid Dynamo (UGWC WrestleStock submission)

[Kid Dynamo]

You
You keep on screamin’ from the top of
Your lungs
Mr. Who-Gives-A-Shit?
Just Shut Up
Oh, the podium is all yours
Go right ahead
The plastic king...

With a turn of the ignition, the car radio goes silent. Brad Christopher opens the door and gets out of the car and walks towards the building.

Phoenix, Arizona. The building is large enough to demonstrate importance, or at least it did before bearing the dilapidation of years of being ignored, of being forgotten.

Brad knew what he would find here.

He walked up to the building that housed the OWF Hall of Fame, the placement therein the crowning achievement of Brad’s career.

...at least it would be, if he’d ever earned it.

On the door was a taped-on piece of paper, a notarized document stating that the building now belonged to the local government. The locked doors confirmed that there was no intention of a wrestler nor their fans ever entering this once-hallowed ground (or at least isn’t that what people always say about Halls of Fame?)

It was gone.

It was over.

Of the nineteen years Brad Christopher had devoted to a life as a professional wrestler, more time had been spent as an OWF faithful than all other places combined. Once he convinced himself that he was actually good enough to compete there, no other company would suffice his desire for relevance.

They knew him in OWF. He wasn’t just a reputation or a fact sheet on Wikipedia to them. To the rest of the world, he was a persona, “Kid Dynamo”. To the members of the Outsider Wrestling Federation, he was Brad Christopher, a fucked-up guy who tried to push his personal problems away by putting on a pair of spandex pants with “DYNAMO” always running down the right leg.

Maybe that’s why this hurt so much to see with his own eyes. There was no other collective of people that knew Kid Dynamo better than the collective of people represented by this building...

...and they didn’t care. They didn’t think he mattered. They didn’t consider his existence worth a moment of their memory.

So why would anyone else?

Dynamo got back into his car and started it back up.

I just accept I’ll be forgot,
Forgot

‘Cause when the rug gets pulled out from underneath
Just embrace the fall
Oh, you’ve got spirit, Kid
You’re number one
Go on living that farce

‘Cause nobody gives a FUCK who you are

Brad turned off the radio and drove in silence for awhile, his thoughts too loud to hear the purposeful poignance of the radio’s lyrics. He’d make it to New Orleans for WrestleStock, and by the time he was there, he’d put on his brave Jackass face and everyone would be convinced that he was so full of himself that every human being adored him.

But the truth was, right now, he was certain that if he died on the way to WrestleStock, and he stood there at the Pearly Gates of Heaven, that St. Peter would have to call his supervisor, because Jesus Christ himself couldn’t be bothered to remember who was Brad Christopher.

—————

I am an Outsider.

Don’t let this WCF Television Title fool you. They’re nice and all over there, but the second husband never gets their bride to change their name.

I am an Outsider, and Outsiders run this tournament.

Kenzi Grey-Lacklan...goodness, that’s a mouthful, can I just call you Sidney Jr. for short? Great. Anywho, Sid-2 - yeah, that’s a much better moniker, I’ll stick with that one - welcome to a spot in the parade of UGWC wrestlers who convinced themselves that there was some sort of “home-field advantage” and that they would heroically bring the WrestleStock Open Trophy right back to Chicago where it supposedly belongs.

It’s adorable, really. You guys have been at this for HOW LONG? I mean, I get it, “the best wrestlers from all over the world” and all that jazz - why do you think I’M here? - but STILL, you’re really starting to make the UGWC look bad. Step your game up.

And by “you”, Sid-2, I mean your wife, because she actually has a shot at advancing.

Let me tell you a story. It won’t take long. I don’t talk that much. You see, about a decade ago, some guys were gonna make a movie based on the “Krondor” trilogy by Raymond E. Feist. The whole thing is set in medieval times, but the producers wanted to give it a twist and take advantage of the popularity of combat sports by making the action scenes less swordfighting and more enzuigiris.

So of course, they called the best enzuigiri in the business to be their lead actor. And before you say a word, I STILL AM the best enzuigiri in the business! But I digress.

Do you know why you never heard about that movie? It ended up not getting made. It turns out that when you don’t fully dedicate yourself to something, the product is mediocre at best. That’s what happened when i tried to shift gears and suddenly try an acting career...

...and that’s the story of your damn life, Sid-2.

You have to focus, child, REALLY DEDICATE YOURSELF, to be any good at anything, ESPECIALLY in the cutthroat industry that has brought us together. There are ALWAYS gonna be people twice as naturally gifted as you and you have to figure out how you’re gonna overcome that hurdle and win despite EVOLUTION ITSELF telling you it’s not your time. So when Sid-2, the poster child for unfocusedness, makes the grand gesture of entering the WrestleStock Open under the false pretense of possible victory, I can’t help but laugh. You see, I was like you once. Wrestling was gonna be a hobby more than anything. A dalliance, though I’m sure I used a different word back then. And guess what? For awhile there, I got my ass kicked. Repeatedly. The guy in MVW whose reputation largely revolved around a top rope dive that he ALWAYS MISSES? Yeah, EVEN HE beat me. But unlike you, Sid-2, I learned something. I learned that, to quote John Travolta in Face/Off, “you have to kill yourself, or let it go”. You have to devote your entirety to success in something, or you need to just cut that facet out of your life.

That’s why I’m here. You don’t have a father figure in your life, so I’ll step in long enough to give you some tough love behind the woodshed so that maybe you’ll come out the other side as a better person, someone who KNOWS HER LIMITATIONS.

Congratulations, Sid-2. You’re about to be exactly as successful as every UGWC representative before you.



Good luck.

——————-

Brad finished the Croissant he had grabbed from catering. It had been drizzled with cherry syrup but if “Hardcore Croissant” was some kind of joke, he wasn’t in on it, and didn’t care.

Press conference day is usually the worst. As much as Brad enjoyed sermonizing, the disjointed nature of short answers followed by dartboard-random questions made him seethe. Delivering a promo required so much more nuance than that: connective tissue between well-researched talking points, crescendo and decrescendo so that the most memorable moments are heightened and placed directly in the lap of the audience, dramatic gesticulation improvised for an organic feel but yet always on-point because the natural gift for delivery that Kid Dynamo had always possessed.

If wrestling was just about who gave the best promo, Kid Dynamo would win every time.

In an effort to clear his head or something, he took a meandering walk through the unfamiliar fairgrounds, not really looking for anything and kinda hoping to find nobody.

His hopes were dashed at the turn of the corner.

His estranged daughter stood there silently, her face evidence of her following the Thumper protocol of “if you don’t have something nice to say...” It was a stark contrast from the FIRST time the met five years ago, when she had just as little nice things to say, but did not waste the opportunity to say them.

The first thing he noticed was how grown-up she looked. The last time they stood face-to-face, she was 18 years old, sure, but she was still every bit a starry-eyed child hanging close to her father amidst all the strange adults like the OWF was a never-ending “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day”. She looked stronger now, more resilient, less scared of her own shadow. It was all probably bullshit but the fact that she could fake it to any level of convincingness said something.

The second thing he noticed was how little HE had changed in the two years that had passed. In the summer of 2016, Kid Dynamo, far enough removed from his lone World Title run that it felt like a different life, had just taken his last swing for the fences at Quest for the Best, and with a quarterfinal elimination, had proven to the entire universe that his peak was behind him, and the only real path to glory left to him was endurance, to simply exist in the company long enough to be “gold watched” the Hall of Fame.

Two years later, OWF was closed, its legacy a memory, its impact on the history of the sport largely forgotten. And yet it remained the windmill that compelled Brad Christopher to keep putting on the spandex pants and keep enduring his Sisyphean existence.

The encounter only lasted seconds before Kem just shook her head and walked past him, but it gave Brad enough time for his entire career - the approximate length of Kem’s entire life - to flash before his eyes.

It was the most pathetic thing he could have ever imagined.

He turned to watch her walk away from him, and for a moment, his ego and paranoia thereabout subsided long enough for him to be happy for her, and relieved that she survived her time in his life unscathed, something Clara, Chris, Erin, James, Summer, Rebecca, Seth, Angel, Ellis, and Hestia were all collectively unable to say.

Hey.

She had stopped and looked over her shoulder towards him. In his moment of vulnerability, he braced himself for the worst, temporarily accepting the fact that whatever she would have said, he deserved.

Good luck.

With a condescending smirk, she turned her back in front of her and walked the rest of the way down the hall and around a corner.

If she’d looked back again, she might have caught the unexpected grin of a proud Papa Dynamo.