Post by pixie on Jun 18, 2021 11:25:49 GMT -5
 When I was a kid, I watched wrestling. I escaped into the fantasy where people would throw chairs at each other and you could experience and live vicariously through the lives of these people who endured seemingly relentless comic-book level violence and then through the blood and broken glass, would dig deep and thrust their shoulder up from the canvas in a show of defiance that I only dreamt that I could manifest in my real life. Oh, how I’d have loved to grab a baseball bat, and to have carefully intertwined thick, razor-sharp barbed wire around the end of it, and to have used that to stop in its’ tracks the relentless actions of an abusive sickening pedofile that brazenly and proudly paraded over his kingdom. The kingdom of shit that is a high-rise in a ghettoised part of Los Angeles. King indeed. When I would watch the likes of Joe Montuori, or Chris Cage, or Johnny eXtreme on the screen, in XWS, tearing down the house night after night, death-defying heroic actions vanquishing their foes. It inspired me. Fantastical as it may have been, it lit something in my chest. And then came the wave of women that set a whole different path in motion. VooDoo, Alexis Austin, Miss Michelle, Blair Buchannan. Breanna Alvarez. Flip the channel and you have people like Karina Wolfenden, Valora Salinas. Women, strong women, carving a path that made it possible for me to have gotten to where I got to until this point. To be nineteen years old and a champion already. And in the contendership match for the biggest belt in one of the best organisations the world over. Without their work, would we even be here today? That was their legacy, and the generation that followed them, the likes of Vhodka Marie, Elena DeDraca, Anicka Swan, they only served to reiterate that the work done by the pioneers would leave a lasting, indelible mark on the world of professional wrestling. No longer are we the ones that would carry a card with a number around the ring in our underwear and leave the real fighting to the men. No longer would we roll around in mud, or cream coloured with food-dye whilst the beer-swillin’ cat-callin’ vocal members of the audience watched with intense scrutiny in the shallow hope of a nipple slipping out, or better. We were respected. It was believable, even though fantastical, the mental escape of professional wrestling. I had been watching Anicka Swan, back in 2015, when I decided that enough was enough and I would stand defiant in the face of my oppressor. When I decided that the next time he tried something, I’d do something back, that I’d use one of the million methods I’d conceived of to put a stop to what he was doing. The next time came, and went. I was a coward. I was a meek, quiet, deeply troubled child that internalised her anger, that turned it inwards and didn’t speak up, didn’t speak out, you’d have never known unless you knew. But in my heart, I was galvanised. And so I avoided the confrontation, but on the back of the courage I gained from people like that, I chose to leave. I chose to be brave, to make the difficult choice. So that’s why, when travelling through South America with the FALLOUT roster, he suddenly started showing up, my heart sank. There were amusing moments, like when Julius Fairweather called him a ‘roadhouse-looking motherfucker’, but the reality was that this was triggering for me, and it had me on a spiral. I was in some kinda way that I had begun questioning everything I’d accomplished to this point, because how could I be this impressive wrestling star if I was still pinned down and shackled by the power that this man held over me? “Pixie dust…” he smiled, as I walked out through the fire escape toward the Project Honor bus that would ferry us back to the hotel, the crisp evening catching me off-guard. It was unusual to be out in the open air of Brazil and not feel suffocated by the humidity. On this night, it was starting to cool, a little chill in the air. He pulled a zippo from his top pocket and flicked it open, the familiar distinct smell of the ethanol burning the wick wisped up into the night and it took me back to those years of vulnerability. His thumb was still resting on the flint wheel, and his lips curled around the thick cuban cigar into an arrogant smile. “You ain’t sending a man to do your dirty work for ya, are ya?” he laughed. “You thought that big fella with the shiny head was gonna intimidate me?” I was speechless. Literally. I looked at him, and I wanted to respond, but the words wouldn’t come. All of a sudden, I was in my bedroom again, and he was chastising me for daring to have a thought that was not on his pre-approved list of thoughts. He was, of course, referring to Julius Fairweather getting him de-credentialled from the Project Honor tour. “I thought I done taught ya better than that, pretty.” He pulled the cigar from his lips and through the thin slit in his lips, smoke slowly streamed out, mixing into the thick bristles of his moustache. “My pixie dust would know that the only way she gets respect is by standing up for herself.” He wasn’t talking about Julius anymore. He was talking directly to me, about me. About me leaving through a window, climbing down a fire escape. “What’d you do, when you left, pretty?” He spoke with disdain, eyes fixed on mine. I couldn’t match them. His intensity was intimidating. When I left my mom’s house, it was much the same. We were in the system, my sister and I. She was younger, cuter, less trouble. I lashed out, took the only morsel of control that I could in my life and ran with it. Whatever. I went from home to home, until it dawned on me that none of these people cared for me the way I cared for myself. So I would take matters into my own hands. I continued watching wrestling as my escape, my way out, because whilst things got better they certainly were a long way from being ‘good’ or ‘acceptable’. I continued to get inspiration from these people, people who had storied pasts, people who had been through the wringer and came out the other side and made a success of themselves. There are all sorts of cliches like pressure making diamonds and so forth, and they all suck, but they point to the fact that people who had to learn to fight at an early age have a competitive advantage. When I watched Elena and her alumna rise, it made me want to rise. To the man in front of me, I knew I owed nothing, but as he continued to stare at me, to speak to me, as he had me cornered in the narrow alley behind the arena, I felt smaller and smaller, as though I was shrinking into obscurity right before him. I felt like I was searching for some shred or semblance of integrity, to stand up for myself, but it wasn't there. I wanted to scream in his face, or claw it off. “Look what success we done made of ya. Guess we done good, after all, pixie dust?” He knew what he was doing, he revelled in it. Watching me squirm, frozen. “I just wanted to come by, say how proud’m I for ya success.” He reached out to me, to my face. I flinched. The skin on his thumb was calloused and hard and it felt abrasive against my cheek. I stood there, withdrawn into the child that would just freeze up and disassociate until the ordeal was over. The cigar smoke filtered out through his yellowed teeth and I looked away as I saw his lips twist in that familiar way, the way I knew and feared. “Shoulda never left us, pretty. Always said you’d make somethin’ of yourself. You could’ve done it all by now, if ya just stayed with us. With me.” Didn’t he get it? I didn’t get where I got because of him. It wasn’t because of him that I managed to lift myself from the gutter and be somebody. I rose in spite of him. TO SPITE HIM. To show him, and all of those that think it's okay to just put women in their box when they aren’t performing an act for them. To show the ones that dismiss us and worry about real ‘man shit’ instead. “If it ain’t broke, it don’t need fixin’” I could feel his hand moving down my body now, gripping my collarbone tightly. I force myself to look at him, in the face, to confront him. To show him the strength that I’ve grown in his absence. I remain still, I am silent, but I can feel my resolve hardening. Adrenaline is bubbling within me, I can feel it starting to make my body shake. And I’m wondering why and how he has this power over me. I have beaten people of all shapes and sizes and held my own with the best in the world in the wrestling ring. I know how to fight and how to defend myself, why does this man command so much power over me? I want to rip his hands from my body, and then from his. I want to flay his skin from his bone and I want to embalm him. I want so much to dig deep within and summon every atom of rage and channel it into ending him. But I can’t. His voice is echoing in my mind. If it ain’t broke, it don’t need fixin’. My head’s a mess, I can hear him calling me ‘pixie dust’ again, that nickname that he had for me because of my pointed ears when I was a kid. The same nickname that I used when I came up with a wrestling moniker, because I’m a moth to the flame of trauma. I am attracted to it, drawn to it, addicted to the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Pixie dust.. Pixie! Pixie.. Pixie? Are you okay??” His raspy, sickly sweet voice started to distort and become softer, higher pitched, feminine. And it is here we find Pixie, curled up on the concrete floor. Her Chuck Taylors pulled up under her bottom, arms tightly wrapped and clenched together, as she continued to hyperventilate. The light is minimal, and the only sound is the sound of Pixie’s deep inhalations and exhalations. The voice was coming from Savannah Sunshine, who is crouched next to Pixie, her arm wrapped over her shoulder delicately. It takes a moment or two of reassurance from Savannah before Pixie rocks back onto her bottom and stretches her legs out in front of her. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” Savannah whispers, pushing her fingers through the dark blue mohican that has been pushed to the side of Pixie Sloane’s head. —— Carefully, I push open the sliding door of my hotel room. Careful not to wake my guest, and I push through a narrow gap and onto the balcony. My feet press up against the cold concrete, as my fingers grip tight to the railing. “We are alike, you and I.” I speak softly, looking out onto the city below. Caracas is a beautiful city. Set against a mountain range which sits between it and the ocean, it is a modern urban city with bright lights and fast moving traffic, skyscrapers leap and penetrate into the clouds, and the noise of the city is alive. During the daytime, Caracas cuts a different character to the one that I see from my balcony. The nightlife is intense and vibrant, but the daytime is very quiet. The city is a city of humble people, who have spent their life under the rule of a socialist government that seeks to keep them hungry. The daytime, the skyscrapers that jut into the skyline seem more meek when you realise that they are half-finished, abandoned white elephants that have been seized on by the poor as shelter. The legacy of the current era in Venezuelan politics is poverty. It is grief, starvation and injustice. The inflation is so grave that they’ve reissued their currency entirely on two separate occasions, cutting two zeros from the end of the value. 100 bolivares becomes 1. It is visible in the lines in the tired-looking faces of the people who still go to work every day, who still do everything they can to stay on top of things, despite knowing that by the time they are eventually paid for the work they did today, it will not buy them anything more than a tomato. The pollution that is not visible in the night, is stark in the day. It overshadows the tropical weather, a dark cloud of burning oil that plumes from many factories that are interspersed between the commercial centres. The empty commercial centres, void of business since the ones that didn’t go out of business as a result of the mass inflation were simply told to leave because Venezuela did not need foreign organisations coming into their country to extract their wealth. There is a sadness that hangs over the city, a destitute depression that reminds me of when I lived on Skid Row, where the days seem to pass and blur into one mess of survival. You can feel that the soul of the city is bleeding and wounded. “You have a storied past, and so do I. Yours might be more well documented than mine, it’s true. And mine might be in the beginning of the second act whilst yours is well and truly in the apex of the main stanza… but we share a bond that not many people do without having experienced it together. The reality is that I’ve idolised you. And I continue to do so, and the moment when my idol became my rival came at me faster than I had ever expected.” My ebony nails, delicately filed to a point, tap on the chrome cylindrical handrail that tops the balcony boundary. “Maybe it is too soon. Maybe. But maybe it’s time for the passing of the baton.” I feel a little nervous. I’m not sure why. Behind me is a small stool, and I perch myself onto it, this time looking back into the room. “No matter how this turns out, the rise of women will continue, and whether it’s my time to take the mantle or simply my time to push you to the next level in order to continue an illustrious career, it matters not. We rise together. We climb together. And if that’s the case, I’m big enough to take my licks and learn from them.” “We women spend our whole lives tearing each other down in order to cling to any shred of relevancy that the patriarchy offers to us, but I’m not going to do that. I am not going to sit here and tell you all of the reasons that I think I am a better person than you, I won’t do it. You are living the life we all dream of as aspiring wrestlers, so what could I possibly do to tear you down?” “So no, I’m going to celebrate you.” In the room, Savannah lays in the bed, passed out. I appreciate that girl more than she’ll ever know, because she has really taken the extra step to check in on me since that asshole cornered me prior to my match with Kayla. Ever since the last episode of Fallout, she’s made sure to check in with me regularly and met up with me as soon as I touched down in Maiquetia Airport. I don’t know if her boy is salty, but she was just hanging out and watching movies here and fell asleep. I’m not going to wake her. I know she has her own travel schedule to meet that doesn’t involve being here, but she’s here regardless. I wonder about going back inside, but I’m thinking about where I’m going to sleep. The weird thing is that Savannah is my opponent, the number one contender to the Noble Championship, and I know that as soon as we head to Peru, we are against each other. But for me, that’s what this is always about and should always have been about. We don’t have to claw each other’s throats out to compete. It is competition. Not war. I mean, sometimes it is war. But it doesn’t have to be. We can showcase each other, further both of our careers. Be respectful. Why manufacture conflict? “You’re the standard-bearer for the rest of us to look up to. The inaugural Legacy Champion, the one that drives the path that we can follow in the year 2021. You’re the apex, the pinnacle, the one that we all should aspire to emulate. I don’t have any deep-seated beef with you. I want to be like you. I want to be you. You are where I want to be. The mere existence of Elena DeDraca made the existence of Pixie Sloane possible. You might think this sounds defeatist. And maybe to some, it would seem that way. People who are scared paint themselves as a big intimidating presence. People who have nothing to fear have nothing to hide from and have no reason to try to win the battle through intimidation. What is the point of me saying that I’m bigger, badder, scarier than my opponent and that I consider them to pose me no threat? Does this serve a greater purpose? No, it is deflection. I’m not a defeatist, I am simply incredibly aware that I am facing somebody that nobody expects me to beat. Nobody expects me to compete with.” “And that’s really the crux of it, for me. I acknowledge the journey, I acknowledge the process, I have my eyes open. Alert to what is coming.” Sometimes it felt like conflict was necessary, like blood is necessary, like war is necessary. It isn’t. I want everyone to succeed. There is a myth that you have to step on your competition to get ahead, but I absolutely disagree with that notion. I want everyone to climb together because if you beat them, it is so much more meaningful. I can tell you that I think Elena sucks, or that I’m better than Savannah, but then that makes my match a foregone conclusion and worthless. The sound of crickets was echoing through the night. I must have been thirty floors from the ground but it was still loud enough to be disruptive. “When I watched Disputed Territory, it didn’t feel like you had your eyes open, Elena. Shawn Warstein had been coming like a freight train, plain for all to see, since the moment he became the Tyrant, he had his gun in the air, sights set on only one target. If you didn’t see him coming, then you don’t pay attention. And if you saw him coming, then you were arrogant enough that you didn’t consider him a threat. You were not your best against Warstein. That isn’t to put an asterisk next to the achievement of Shawn Warstein, far from it. We can all trade in hypotheticals and imagine a different outcome, but that man is on a roll and hasn't been beaten by a better man for as long as can be remembered.” “The Ozymandias thing? Blah. A twist of fate. The man who ended the match was not the man who was declared the victor. Nevertheless. I digress.” Savannah was starting to move around, I stood up in my pyjamas and started to pace back and forth, collecting my thoughts, my fingers tapping my thigh now. It was hard to focus because I wasn’t sure if she was listening to me. I’m not saying anything, but I am self-conscious, you know? “It was lamentable, Elena. It’s unfortunate to see somebody so clearly talented, falling into the same routine week after week, lacking the desire or wherewithal to do anything creative. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Recycle. Keep recycling. Save the planet. Say the same boring things to me as you did to Warstein. It’s all about you, everyone else is a footnote in your story. Irrelevant. Unable to impede or impact the overarching story. Keep coasting. Existing. Following the same flowchart that everything else she ever did followed. I don’t know if she thinks the formula works and she’s one of these people that repeats the mantra “if it ain’t broke, it don’t need fixin’”, but I have a better mantra. Always iterate, always improve, always work, never stay stagnant, never be satisfied with yourself. Because when you’re as good as Elena DeDraca, you are influencing a whole generation that are coming through behind you and they’re working as hard or harder, with the benefit of the lessons you’ve already learned on the big screen. Already embedded in us, we are younger, hungrier, and at least as talented and we will catch you up, chew you up, and leave you behind.” “When I become the Legacy Champion, I won’t close my eyes. I won’t believe my own hype. I won’t take myself for granted. It feels like you’ve just gotten to the point where you expect to win, and when Warstein turned up, you were shell shocked. I will learn from your mistake, that much I promise.” I look at the Noble Championship, through the glass door, set against the dresser mirror. Savannah is looking at it too, but she can’t see that I see her. “And when Warstein took his ball and went home, there were rumors that the match between Elena and I would be bumped up from a contendership match to the outright title decider. And you can speculate on the reasons that this was ultimately not borne into fruition, but the reality is that there is no way Rock Johnson or any of those men would allow their championship to be decided by two women. They might throw around excuses such as there should be a Proving Ground representative in the match for the vacant Legacy belt, and they might seem like they have a point, but when you have the absolute top two athletes on the roster, the number one and number two - according to Project Honor’s own journalists - face to face live on Pay Per View, it makes no sense whatsoever to keep it as a contendership match for the championship. Let Proving Ground build a contender up to challenge the winner of Elena and myself, because the way you’re doing it right now you’re just setting somebody up to fail. And fail hard. And we all know the real reason why, it's because they want to figure out a way to get someone like Lil Petey in the title picture. Warstein’s prophecy comes to life, in full color. And this is why, in my match with Elena DeDraca, I will not go the tried and tested route of picking her apart at the seam and piece by piece reducing each and every aspect of her character to hyperbole. No. Because that’s what they want. They want us to tear each other to shreds, and leave us so broken and destroyed that they can pick the bones. But rest assured, when all is said and done, no matter the outcome, the one who stands victorious at Hell On Earth will become the Project Honor Legacy Champion, and the Matriarchy will begin in earnest.” “I will say this, when I think about Elena DeDraca, and I think about the word ‘legacy’, I think about what ‘legacy’ means to her. What it could mean to her.” “What does it mean to you, Elena? A few championships here and there? Proving a few doubters wrong? But what do you stand for?” “You have a legacy, that is clear. Win or lose, people will remember who you are. But how will they remember you?” “What will they remember you for?” “Being good?” “Being great?” “Both. You are, truly.” “But just being good, or even great, only has limited significance. There are a lot of good and great people in the world. When I am done, I want people to know who I am for what I did for other people. What did you do to improve the lives of people around you?” “I watched you. I idolised you. I grew because of your legacy. But you did it for yourself, for selfish reasons. The fact that you inspired a generation of people to come behind you was a side product, and sometimes I wonder if it's one that you wouldn’t wish away if given the chance. You didn’t seek out the opportunity to raise people up, you didn’t stop to help anyone on the way. You cut people down in your greedy pursuit.” “My legacy - the legacy that I will start with this victory against you, and the victory that will follow against whoever they put in front of me at Gold, Guts & Glory - will be all about building up women in this industry. Building up all the people in this industry that deserve it and get overlooked because they don’t fit the stereotype. Because no matter what, no matter how or where you come from, we are all the future and I want to be the one that pioneers the rise of the ones that everyone said wouldn’t ever be enough. I will break glass ceilings wherever they present themselves, I will change perspectives of anyone who will give me the opportunity of paying attention. When my time is over, they’ll say that I was a great champion, a great athlete, and could push the envelope.” Savannah catches my attention, she’s waving at me through the glass, her things are packed up and she’s letting me know, I assume, that she is going to head out. I wasn’t sure if she was going to hang around for Hell On Earth, or whether she would head straight to Peru in preparation for Fallout, so I’d need to go and see her off. I lifted up a hand, hesitantly, signalling to her to give me a moment, and then I turned back to the balcony, lowering my tone, now aware that she is paying attention to what I am saying. “They will also know that I stood up, and I made sure we were counted. We weren’t overlooked. I made sure that I put one nail in the coffin of the patriarchy, piece by piece, until there was nothing left of it. For me, it’s not just about me, it’s not just about the Legacy championship, it isn’t just about Project Honor. It is about everyone. It is about the future. For all of us. The overlooked ones especially. This is the first piece of the puzzle. The rest will fall into place.” I slide open the sliding door, walk through and place my hands on the Noble Championship. Then I look up at Savannah, then back to the iPhone on the tripod back on the balcony, and this time I’m focused on one person. “It is time to #StartTheMatriarchy.” Fade. |
