The Stallion And The Donkey

Pristine white lab coats encircle the stocky behemoth like a football huddle.

They poke and prod with their bony index fingers and cool metal apparatuses. The light above is concentrated and pale, shining painfully into his eyes. The big man shields his peepers with the back of his abnormally large hand.

“Let’s go over this one more time, Mr. Godson:” the head doctor says, “you walked off into the Atlantic Ocean back in September, and… fill in the blanks. Every detail is important.”

“YES. STRONK WALKED INTO THE BIG WET AND STRONK WALKED AND WALKED AND WALKED AND WALKED AND WALKED—”

The hour hand of the clock hung on the wall of the examination room comically spins round and round and round again, signifying the passage of time (or it is just one really fucked-up timepiece).

The doctors, five-o’clock-shadowed (the men, at least, but some of the women, too), smelly, strung out on stale drip coffee and Zyns, lean against whatever’s sturdy in a drained state of semi-consciousness, zombified.

STRONK Godson sits repeating in monotone “AND WALKED AND WALKED” over and over, again.

Finally, he stops.

Close to a day later he stops.

An expectant silence descends upon the room.

Plans, commitments, birthdays, births, first dates, a son’s little league game, graduations, all disrupted by the excruciatingly thorough and redundant recounting of events by the subject of their many philosophical curiosities and medical inquiries.

“AND THEN STRONK WAS NO LONGER WALKING IN THE BIG WET AND STRONK WAS CHOKING NOT-DAN RYAN IN A STRANGE PLACE STRONK HAD NEVER BEEN BEFORE.”

“… Aight, makes sense… case closed..., but what’s with that there backpack skeleton, huh?”

The lab coats turn and find a shaggy-haired janitor pitching about on a freshly dipped mop, sloppily cleaning the dated linoleum floor, possibly (certainly) drunk. The janitor takes the opportunity to address a caliber of person that typically ignores his presence:

“And also… why you scientists shit so BIG? Is it a brainiac-diet thing? Y’all shit big. Girls, too. Girls, especially. Goddamn. Makin’ my job harder than it need be...”

—

A head lifts from his lap, marking the end of yet another unfulfilled encounter.

It’s a woman’s head, her features telling tales of hard years long lived—etched irreparably by an abusive relationship with brown liquor, wobbly confrontations in dimly lit bars, and the fleeting ephemeral highs of whippets. She mechanically wipes her mouth, a gesture devoid of purpose, for it’s already dry.

“It went soft a half hour ago. Caput for the night, m’kay?” Lowell Dot Com says, his annoyance palpable. There’s no embarrassment or shame in his voice, not a wee bit, only irritation that she hadn’t noticed the obvious. She never does.

He leans back in the chair, brushing back his fried mod cut, visibly thinning at the crown but concealed (poorly) by a comically ludicrous amount of Topik hair fibers.

The woman, undeterred by his tone, fixes him with a steady, no-nonsense glare. “I want my fifty bucks, Low. I want my show money. My getting paid ain’t contingent on you not being impotent.”

“I toldja, you’ll get it when I get it! I’m not exactly L~I~Q~U~I~D right now, sweet baby gurl. But rest assured, I got things in the slow cooker. Cookin’ us up a heady stew. And she simmerin’. Oh, she simmerin’!” He smiles confidently, then sticks his hands out and above his head, gesturing around as though he’s painting a vivid picture for them. “Imagine, just imagine, I cop us a place out in the country? Maybe a log cabin. Couple schnauzers. Buckets of Bud Light. Mountains of yay. And we just slowly… un-alive ourselves with excess.”

She looks at him incredulously, a bemused smirk shining through a pockmarked, week-old makeup-caked facade. “You been saying that for ten years…”

“Because these things…” he says, pointing to the busted Rolex on his bony wrist, a reminder of the success and affluence he once enjoyed. “…they take time, dollface. A chess grandmaster knows to play the looong game… thinks three, four, fucking eleven steps ahead of his adversary—”

He mimes moving pieces around a chessboard. Manically.

“Who’s your adversary in all this? You got the paranoid thoughts again, Low? … You’re supposed to talk about ‘em when they come on, you know. Why am I just hearin’ about this?”

“We’ve been through this!” he barks, as if taken aback by her need for him to reiterate what should be common knowledge by this point. “Cruel fate. The world. God, if there is such a thing—that’s my arch nemesis. She’s been a real motherlicking cunt to me the past twenty years, kept me pressed down beneath her shit-smeared boot heel. … But I’m gonna rise up, retake the small modicum of fame and fortune I once had, and enact spiteful revenge on all who did me wrong!”

At one point in and around the early-aughts, Lowell was a promising career mid-carder with a reputed golden tongue and mediocre in-ring ability, allowing him to land a coveted entry-level contract with the world famous Fans Wrestling Organization.

Then came the stuff with The Man in that strange incarnation of the famed Asylum promotion that didn’t even have a legit-legit PPV distribution deal: just fights recorded on shitty VHS in back alleys and other such squalid environs, later sold from unmarked vans by shady individuals with rap sheets a mile long.

And the immediate follow-on to that…  the whole ‘ran a full-blown Colombian heroin plantation at The Man’s gun-drawn behest’ fever dream he hardly even remembers.

Just try explaining ‘the slavery and torture of hundreds of impoverished South Americans’ under the Skills section of your CV to a Director of IT when you rotate back to the world and want to get an office job and leave the sordid wrastlin’ biz behind.

It’s a tough one to spin!

Not impossible, but tough.

That damn dope operation, ah yeah… and the eventual revolt and destruction and immeasurable lives lost; the smell of celebratory barbecued swine cooked over the burning husk of management’s (that is, his) office shanty, and of spent machine gun smoke floating in the dewey tropical air.

And later, the homelessness and, of course… the drugs.

The sad kind.

Thirty pounds of muscle gone, he was weak, frail, beaten down, clinically depressed. HIV inconclusive. Getting orally serviced by a toothless crackwhore in a trailer park in… Texas? Utah? Idaho? Who can keep track anymore?

Lowell looks at his, uhhh, ‘girlfriend’ with a look of contempt.

He imagines that sweet, sweet spiteful revenge, so satisfying and necessary and long overdue. Sugary sweet. Rightfully his and his alone. Dumb bitch had been sneaking fivers out his sock drawer for six months now. Thought he didn’t know—but he did. (He actually spent them on scratch tickets while tequila drunk.) Oh yeah, he did. And he wanted to punish her greatly for it, but IRL physicality ain’t, like, his bag no mo’, baby, and he did not (yet) have the financial resources with which to crush her beneath a tidal wave of bad press and social media gossip fueled by hundreds of thousands of Pakistani bots (Karachi, probs—they got the goods in Karachi).

One day he would, … soon … , but not now. Not yet.

His phone buzzes. He turns it over, sees that he has a Google alert (a very specific, long anticipated one), and jumps to his feet as if a bolt of electricity has shot through his scrawny, cigarette ash-peppered body.

He reaches over and snatches a gun from the end table beside the chair.

Checks that it’s loaded—and no doubt, it is.

Because it always is.

Just in case, y’know… the dark times get so dark no sun can shine through… and the chirping of the hell birds to come home gets too loud, too much for one to stomach...

For those times.

The not-so-fun times. The hard times, daddeh.

Oblivion.

“Payday’s come, sloot.”

He checks the slide and gazes coolly off into the distance (of his shabby, rented, piled-with-trash, flophouse of a single-wide trailer).

A hand swats him powerfully across the face, teethed with two-inch bedazzled press-on nails, sending him toppling over into a basket of dirty laundry and makeshift Pepsi can crackpipes. (He used to fraudulently claim to be sponsored by Pepsi, so, y’know, gotta stay loyal to the brand.) He bleeds from his nose and lip, as he stares up at woman scorn, his eyes welling up with tears.

“What did I say? Don’t you EVER disrespect me like that! Got it?” she growls, voice hoarse, as she retrieves and lights up an American Spirit.

“… Yeah, yeah, shit, damn, of course?” He wipes his bloody nose with one of his soiled blue thongs. “… I love you…? And your deflated titty ain’t even that much of a big deal to me…?”

“Don’t be surprised when I kill you while you sleep, Low.”

—

Off squirreled away in the corner of the examination room, a balding middle-aged man sits hugging his knees to his chest like a child’s safety blanket. He rocks back and forth, muttering something that sounds like:

“You know ‘cuz, like, it doesn’t make any damn sEnSe~? The physiology, I mean. The mild verticality and the sheer massITY, not to mention the vEloCiTY 0f 1t. And the motherfucking DURABILITY. It shouldn’t be real. He shouldn’t be real. HE AIN’T! HEAR ME! YOU AIN’T REAL MOTHERFUCKER!”

STRONK Daddy looks over at him with a David Puddy-esque gawk.

“DEADLIFT THE IMPOSSIBLE.”

Dr. David Forsythe, MD, PhD, the lead researcher and medical examiner charged with assessing STRONK’s physical fitness, surveys the room.

Days had followed since his last journal entry, since Mr. Godson had mentally bludgeoned them with more than a day’s worth of repeating “AND WALKED AND WALKED,” and since his team of experts had begun to unravel mentally. His steely resolve was also tested, but seeing as he’s consistently zooted on a combination of self-prescribed Adderall and Xanax, his tolerance for such behavior is strong. The repetitious mundanity didn’t bother him, but the enigma of his test subject had pulled at a loose thread within him, making him question all that he had learned and studied about the human body over the last twenty years.

Though Steve, the broken man huddled in the corner, was now a rambling, twitchy shell of himself, he wasn’t inherently wrong. The words he used may have made, well, very little sense, but the conclusion he’d reached was sound:

It didn’t make any sense.

STRONK didn’t make any sense.

Knowing they’ve collectively hit a wall to which there was no clear way around or over, he quietly recedes to his private office, where a laptop sits on a desk, glowing in the darkness.

He sits down and drafts a quick email.

The subject line?

STRONK Godson deemed medically fit to return to active competition

He hits SEND.

Then sighs, grabs a bottle of expensive bourbon from a drawer, and thinks long and hard about going back to school to become an electrician.

—

As STRONK exits the building where he’s spent the better part of two weeks being questioned and examined, the car sent by PRIME Wrestling to pick him up sits parked across the street.

From the shadows of an adjacent alley, Lowell Dot Com emerges like a rabid predator, his piss-stained slacks and wrinkled dress shirt hanging off his emaciated torso.

He leans in through the passenger’s side window of the car, brandishing a gun, startling the driver.

“Hey buddy,” he says, wagging the point of the firearm at the driver, “change of plans: you’re no longer needed here.”

“What?” the driver says, trying to move his head out of harm’s way. “Who are you?”

“The man with the plan,” Lowell spits. “Now, begone! Get outta here! You think I won’t go back to prison? You think I give a fuck about jail? I’ve been injecting Chinese TRT into my dick for six months now, and boy is that shit looking ROUGH. I’ll make someone a very good prison wife when the shit falls off and I’ll get all the ramen and tasty cakes I can stomach. So, one more time before my twitchy fingey renders you Ichabod Crane, get the fuck outta my face!”

The driver stomps on the gas pedal and the car peels off down the street. Lowell stands up straight, tucking the gun into the back of his pants, smiling.

He darts across the busy street, narrowly avoiding being hit by several vehicles, and jogs up to STRONK standing on the sidewalk.

“STRONK Godson?” he says.

STRONK looks him up and down. “YES.”

“Oh good! I’m here to pick you up! Lee called me from prison, and said, Lowell, I need you to look after my boy STRONK while I’m Shanghai’d in the clink; I need you to do what my stupid brother and your stupid cousin could not do. I know you’re the man for the job, and I cherish our weekly phone calls; they get me through the tough times here in the Alcatrickle Correctional Facility for the Sexually Repugnant. Look after my boy, and tell him… and this is when he started to sob uncontrollably because I think his B-hole was getting aggressively but consensually tongue-punched by a dude named Filmore… tell him… do everything you, Lowell Dot friggin’ Con—er, …Com says. Tell him that is my one and only wish. And tell him to forget about ever seeing Papa Best again: the only way I’m leaving this place is in a body bag. … And Lowell… my good friend, my trusted confidant, the man I’ve always admired… I’m thinkin’ about leavin’ this place real soon.”

“PAPA BEST IS IN JAIL? WHY?”

“He took a big ol’ steamy dump on some chick’s head that he hired for a clerical role within the company, and, I guess—and this is just what I’ve read, not saying I believe a word of it, but believe all victims, y’know?—he pimped her out to the entire HOW roster. Carey, too, I guess. There was a whole thing where he and his son were double-teaming her and, yeah, apparently he dropped a meaty poop on her forehead or something. And then kept on fuckin’ her for, like, another hour and a half. Kinda icky-gross, if I’m being honest—and I’m no prude! It’s all in the court docs and leaked texts.”

“WHY? THE POOP GOES IN THE TOILET. PAPA BEST KNOWS THIS—PAPA BEST TAUGHT STRONK THIS.”

“I know, I know,” Lowell responds, nodding, “it’s a tough one to reconcile, the monster he evidently is… was, perhaps very soon… yes, very, very soon… but right now, you and I, we’re gonna love the person we love, be their friend. ‘I love you, you have a hill to climb.’ That’s it. That’s all we can do.”

STRONK’s sadness is immeasurable, weighing heavy on his steroid-enlarged heart. That is, until, like Homer Simpson spotting a BLUE CAR~!, he’s distracted moments later by something immaterial—an object that he thinks would be challenging but fulfilling to lift over his head and then hurl into the sun.

None of what Lowell is saying is true, of course. He’s like the Banksy of untruths and deception. Or rather, he’s like a junky graffiti artist sprinting about town poorly and indiscriminately tagging any surface he finds. But STRONK is naive and doesn’t question any of it.

“Now, you should never speak a word of any of this to anyone. Henceforth, you’re not to talk about or even think about Papa Best, the Best Family, or High Octane Wrestling. That’s all in the past, and STRONK Daddy… we’re all about the future from now on.”

STRONK nods. Being as easily manipulated as he tends to be, he does as he’s told: he deletes the memories of him and Papa Best riding horse and bull on golden plains, of his dog DOG, of his championship run in HOW, and settles into a state of vacancy, staring dead-eyed at nothing in particular, looking past Lowell.

Lowell steps forward and gazes into the big man’s eyes, all the stupidity and innocence of the world contained within them. “Look at us, STRONK: a couple of dangerously ambitious men on the come-up. Our whole lives ahead of us. You, the King Stallion. Fierce and unrelenting and powerful. Me, the Lord Donkey. Now, hold up—y’probably thinkin’, Damn, Lowell, you’re awfully self-deprecating. Donkeys are stupid and morose.” He scoffs, hand-waving that thought. “Wrong. The donkey is a resilient creature; the most resilient, I do say. Fucker just keeps _moving forward_ under the most extreme conditions imaginable. Someone asks me what animal I am or would want to be? I’m a donkey all day, bitch.”

STRONK blinks: he’s completely and utterly lost. Lowell speaks too frenetically and uses too many unfamiliar words for him to keep pace.

The Shillin’ Villain laughs, and addresses… the world? “You can ruin my life, even make me despise my own existence… but you ain’t killin’ the Shillin’ Villain. Nawwwww… I’ll crawl outta the gutter a decade later, put on a disguise—a babuska and a bow tie and a fake fuckin’ nose—and sell you gas station boner pills that explode your heart. In the end, I win. I survive. Always.”

And to Lowell’s diatribe, the Beast of the Deep so eloquently concludes:

“OKAY.”

—

Having negotiated and signed STRONK’s contract on his behalf at the last PRIME show, Lowell and the STRONKEST Man Alive are holed up in a swanky hotel in Paris, a few days out from ReVival 47.

Lowell sits on the couch, while STRONK does never-ending squats.

“You gotta start BEEF with somebody pronto!” Lowell says.

“OKAY.”

“I was thinkin’ Kenny Freeman. You fucked him up at Culture Shock. Should be an easy win. Heard he has the heart and ring IQ of Xander Azula, whom, I might add, you thoroughly crushed in your past life.”

“SHIT.”

“Yes, I know. So that’s why I was thinkin’ the Russian you choked after you crawled out of the ocean.”

“NOT-DAN RYAN.”

“Correct.

“But he’s busy… So then I was thinkin’ maybe Youngblood, but… he’s bald.”

“PAPA BEST WAS BALD.”

“And old.”

“PAPA BEST WAS OLD.”

“Exactly. Too much for you to reconcile given the strange psychological hold he had over you… And again, just a reminder, you’re not to speak his name ever again. I told you that when I met you,” Lowell says.

“OKAY.”

“But we don’t have to worry about that right now. Our immediate focus should be on Apollo Douglas. Second generation wrestler but a relative unknown. You and him are debuting against one another. He doesn’t have your accolades, or your size, or your strength, or anything really that concerns me, but we can’t overlook him.”

“APOLLO DOUGLAS WILL BE DESTROYED. APOLLO DOUGLAS WILL BE CRUSHED. STRONK WILL DO HORRIBLE THINGS TO APOLLO DOUGLAS AND MAKE APOLLO DOUGLAS SAD THAT APOLLO DOUGLAS EVER STEPPED ONTO THE SQUISH PAD. STRONK WILL PUT THE HEAD OF APOLLO DOUGLAS BETWEEN STRONK’S HANDS AND MAKE IT A MEAT PATTY OF CRUNCHY BONE AND STINKY OOZE.”

“…Right… that’s… yeah… I guess, like, do that? You think you can actually, like, crush his skull between your hands? Because, look, I’m all for maiming a motherfucker, but we’re new here in PRIME and I don’t want you coppin’ a charge right off the jump. I’ll look into the rulebook, see if intentionally mutilating your opponent is prohibited or not, and get back to you. For now, though, how ‘bout we just do some cool slams and choke him out?”

“YES. APOLLO DOUGLAS WILL THIRST FOR AIR AND THEN APOLLO DOUGLAS WILL SLEEP AND SLEEP BADLY AND STRONK WILL STEP ON APOLLO DOUGLAS AND THEN GO EAT STEAK AND BE AROUND STRONK’S BEST FRIENDS. YES. THE IMPOVERISHED PROSTITUTESHUMANS.”

“Been meaning to talk to you about that… so you go and link up with those guys, and I wasn’t consulted, and I’m not mad about that, but I would’ve liked to vet them first, and…”

“YES. VET THE IMPOVERISHED PROSTITUTESHUMANS. A VET DOES SCIENCE TO ANIMALS—”

“Yeah—wait, what?” Lowell does a double take. “No, not what I meant, I—”

“AND THE IMPOVERISHED PROSTITUTESHUMANS ARE STRONK’S DAWGS AND MUST REMAIN HEALTHY AND FIT AND STRONG AND POWERFUL AND STRONK’S BEST FRIENDS FOREVER AND ALWAYS UNTIL DEATH OR THE RUINATION OF ALL THINGS. YES.”

“I’ll… sure, I’ll get a ‘vet’ to give them all physicals. Leave that with me. Let’s just get you back in the gym lifting heavy and often! We’ve gotta obliterate this fucker! The Burning Swan? You ever dosed a duck with gasoline and lit it on fire just to watch it melt before your eyes, just to feel something? Well, we’re gonna do that!”

He looks at STRONK, who’s stopped squatting and looks to be processing his words, albeit slowly and laboriously.

“…I don’t mean we actually burn the guy alive. Just… pin or submit him, okay?”

“YES.”