This Version of Me

Jared

“Aright, you’re all cinched up.”

Ryan looked down at his waist, which had all but disappeared behind the massive gold plate of the Universal Championship. I watched him run his fingers along the front, tracing the letters etched into the nameplate.

My name.

His name.

The reality of it seemed to hit him at once, and he took a short stumbling step forward. The title will do that to you. It has its own gravity that extends beyond the laws of conventional physics.

“Whoa, you okay?” I put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder before the belt could take over.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m good. It’s heavier than I thought it would be.”

Buddy, you have no idea.

We called it the hardest championship to defend in PRIME, and for a few shining weeks it belonged to me.

That still feels weird to say. I’m not really sure that I’ll ever come to grips with it. Something about it just feels off, like for a moment I was living someone else’s life.

The same expression on Ryan’s face that night in Boston was the same one I wore for all six of those weeks, my mind dipping in and out as it tried to reconcile whether this was fantasy or reality.

For him, things were a bit more complicated. My sister despised professional wrestling, and with it the fact that I’d dedicated my life to it.

A year ago, she called me because Ry’ had seen Paxton Ray and I try to rip each other apart at Colossus. Of what the Love Convoy had done in the weeks prior. He thought that I was destined to die in the ring.

For a while there, he might have been right.

But now he was in Boston, because my sister had relented and decided that it was okay to bring the family across the country so they could be part of a hometown celebration in front of a few thousand friends and family. If only that night had ended the way it started, she might still be talking to me.

“Okay, here’s the plan. In a minute I’m going to head out into the arena, okay? Asher here is going to count you down, and then give you the all-clear.” From his station in the Argyle position - I swear, wrestlers give things the dumbest names - Asher flashed Ryan a thumbs-up. He was new to the company. Still learning his way around things, but dammit if he didn’t catch on quick. “Sound good?”

Ryan nodded. He looked like he was about to throw up, pass out, or maybe both. I know that feeling. After twenty-five years of this, I still feel the same way every time I’m waiting in this spot. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been here, there’s always that sense of anticipation waiting for the music to hit. And then there’s the fear of making a complete ass of myself. You’d think by now I’d at least be used to that part.

“He’s in your hands now, Ash’.”

“Don’t worry, man,” Asher said. “We got this.”

As I stepped through the curtain and onto the ramp I heard Asher offer his own encouragement.

“Alright, Ryan,” he said. “You ready to show your dusty-ass uncle how we really do this shit?”

I could hear Ryan’s laughter from the stage. Jesus Christ, Asher, don’t let his mother hear you swear or neither of us will ever hear the end of it.

After spending half my life behind the curtain it’s easy to forget just how goddamn loud the sound system can get, even when the person operating the board has been given specific instructions not to hatefuck my eardrums with metalcore. Only I’m allowed to do that. But that first note, that deep rumble of a guitar tuned down into the bass register - it hits regardless.

For the record, it’s goddamn surreal to watch someone else walk out to your theme song, even if they are your own flesh and blood. Ryan appeared at the top of the ramp, and in a blink all of the trepidation was replaced by exhilaration. He went to each side, playing to a crowd that didn’t exist, before starting a triumphant walk to the ring.

I tried to keep my own feelings in check. After all, not only was I recording this whole thing on my phone, but I’d managed to convince the camera crew to get me a proper professional cut of this. That one would be for Ryan. The one on my phone would be for me. Less slick. More raw.

More real.

“Yeah!” I heard myself shout. “Let’s fucking go!”

I’d have to see about editing that out of the final, just in case my sister ever decided to watch it. Can’t have this moment ruined forever because Uncle Jared just couldn’t help himself.

He slid into the ring and took the belt from around his waist in a motion that made me jealous for how fluid it was. Ryan, my guy, have you been practicing this?

By the time I joined him in the ring he’d already spent time at each corner, holding it high for fifteen thousand invisible people to celebrate.

“Holy shit,” he said, because he knows I don’t give a fuck if he curses around me. “This is incredible!”

“I’m glad you got to experience it, bud.”

“I can’t wait to do it for real one day.”

I didn’t answer, but I kept the smile on. He folded the title back up and offered it to me. I pushed it back towards him.

“Why don’t you hold on to it a little longer,” I said.

Because pretty soon, Ryan, I’m going to have to break your heart.

#

Ryan

A few thousand miles and a time difference of three hours separated Massachusetts and Vancouver, which meant that every time Ryan video-called his uncle it always seemed to catch Jared in an awkward spot. This one was no different, as the obvious sweat rings around Jared’s collar gave Ryan the impression that he’d just finished a morning workout.

The calls always started the same. There’d be a few minutes of small talk as both uncle and nephew caught up with each other. Then Jared would ask how school was going, and the conversation would pivot to sports for a while. Hockey in the winter, just like his uncle had done, and baseball in the spring. But it always came back to wrestling.

“He doesn’t really own tanks, does he?”

Jared wiped at his brow and laughed. “Why, are you worried I’m going to get cannon'ed during the match? Or howitzer'ed? What do they call those guns, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe I’ll have to outrun it.” On the other side of the continent, Jared leaned back in his char and spoke into the air. “Alexa, how fast can tanks drive?”

“According to an Amazon Alexa Contributor, most modern battle tanks can reach speeds of twenty-five miles per hour over flat terrain, and forty miles per hour over roads.”

Ryan watched Jared’s eyebrows slowly raise.

“Okay, well today we learned that I’m not faster than a tank. Maybe if I start zigging and zagging.” Jared waved his hand through the air in a side-to-side pattern. “Or better yet, maybe we just hope that Hesh’ can’t get a tank into France.”

“I don’t think he’s going to try and tank you into submission,” Ryan said. “I just think that’s super cool. Like, does everyone who works in PRIME have amazing stuff?”

“Hell yes.” Jared rolled his chair slightly out of frame and pointed to the shelf behind him. On it were about a dozen garden gnomes of different shapes and sizes, and each one came with the name of Earl. “Doesn’t get much cooler than this, bud.”

Ryan shook his head. “That’s not what I mean.”

“What? Really? You got something against gnomes?”

The stories that Ryan had read online blew his mind. Cancer Jiles had commandeered an entire aircraft carrier in Chicago, and then hijacked someone’s private plane. Ginny Van Lear had access to the kind of weapons locker you’d see in a Schwarzenegger movie. And if the stories were to be believed, there was that one referee - the weird one who never wore shoes and always painted his face, Tim something - that was trying to buy an Apache gunship. All things considered, Ryan was pretty confident that the PRIME roster could lay siege to a developing third-world nation if they pooled their resources.

As much as he hated to admit it, it made the lawn gnomes look ridiculous by comparison. Not that they weren’t ridiculous to begin with.

“It’s okay, guys. I still think you’re awesome,” Jared said over his shoulder. Then, to Ryan, he added, “Little gnomes. Big feelings.”

It earned a laugh, but Ryan’s expression fell. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, man. Anything.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Of Hesh’? I mean, we’ve already established he’s probably not getting a tank into Paris, so…”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know.”

“It’s just that he’s so big. Like Ivan-sized big.”

The memories of the Russian Bear throwing his uncle around like a toy still lingered in Ryan’s thoughts, an event only made worse by how close it fell to Jared’s in-person visit last year. The one where he promised that he was okay. That what happened with Paxton Ray wouldn’t occur again. And then it did.

“I know. And that nickname doesn’t help, does it? It makes sense that you’d want to avoid someone who calls themself the Murder Show. But it’s just intimidation, bud. That’s all it is. And if it helps, he and I were just in a cage together a month or so ago, and I’m still in one piece.”

Ryan nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“And if you’re worried about what happened with Daytona,” Jared continued, “the boss put new procedures in place to make sure that sort of thing never happens again.”

“Mom was pretty pissed about that.”

“Yeah. We had a conversation about it.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Ah.”

“We all heard it. It got really awkward in the hallway that night.”

“Oh. Great.”

“She got really, really mad.”

“Yeah, we…” Jared paused. Ryan sensed that he was choosing his next words carefully, so as not to make the situation worse. Lizzy might be Jared’s sister, but at the end of the day she was still Ryan’s mom, and that meant the hierarchy needed to be respected. “She and I have some stuff to work on. But I don’t want you to worry about this match, Ry’. I can’t promise it’s going to be easy, but Hesh’ doesn’t seem like the type to try and rip me in half just because it might be fun.”

“Okay.”

He watched as Jared leaned forward in his chair. Ryan instinctively felt himself tense. The move sent up a red flag, like the conversation was about to turn serious.

“That’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about.” And there it was, words that seemed to only exist to instill fear in the listener. “The worrying, I mean. I know how much you like to watch, and believe me when I tell you that I’ll never be able to express how much that means to me. You’ve been in my corner for years, even when I was sitting at home on the sidelines, and…”

Ryan felt his tension ease, only to be replaced by confusion. Usually when adults said they needed to talk, it meant bad news was coming, but there was none of that here. Not yet.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, Ry’. And I know you’re cool with keeping stuff like this a secret, but what I’m about to tell you hasn’t been announced anywhere yet, and honestly probably won’t be. At least, not if I get my way. It's privileged information.”

“Okay, sure. I’m kind of confused though.”

“The next pay-per-view, or supercard, or… whatever the word for it is… After Tropical Turmoil I’m not going to wrestle anymore.”

“What do you mean? Like, you’re going on vacation, or something? Are you taking a break? I know that you’re having a baby soon, so I figured you’d be off for a while.”

“It’s more than that.”

It felt to Ryan like his uncle was trying to make eye contact through a webcam.

“But you’re going back, right? You’re going back to PRIME afterwards, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“What?!”

“I’m sorry, Ryan. I really am. Please, just… This isn’t a decision I made lightly.

“But you have to. You have to! How will… Like, what does… How can you…”

“I know this sucks to hear, but I wanted to make sure you heard it from me and not-“

Ryan disconnected the call.

#

Justine

It was the first show of the ReVival era where Jared didn’t appear, even opting out of an interview with Matt Mills that was scheduled to run in the middle of the show. For that, Matt had been grateful, because interviews with Jared meant that Justine would be nearby, and there was still a debt to be settled over the nonsensical musings that had a habit of popping up in the bi-weekly rumor column bearing Mills’ name.

While Matt breathed a sigh of relief, it was Justine who felt uneasy at the cancellation. Her fiancé wasn’t one to actively seek the spotlight, but he knew the value in keeping his name fresh in the minds of the fans. As it was, Jared had been eerily quiet for most of the night. Even when the final bell rang and a new faction coalesced around Daytona Diamonds, Jared had little to offer. An event like that should have been a rallying call, a reason for him to take up his sword and find a new dragon to slay. Instead, he simply chuckled and said, “Well, that’s going to suck for somebody.”

He wandered off not long after the show went off the air, and it took her a while to realize where he was. She found him alone in the seats of the O2 Arena. Where once there had been an ocean of people, now there was just the one.

Jared didn’t look over as she slid into the seat next to him. He offered a faint smile, but otherwise stayed focused on the work happening around them. Her hand found his, and for a while they sat in silence as the crew set about the task of breaking everything down so it could be shipped off to France for the next leg of the tour.

“Feels like yesterday when we used to do this,” he said at last, nodding towards the swarm that busied itself in disassembling the ring. “But that was half a lifetime ago.”

“It’s still weird to me that I don’t have to help,” she said.

Justine had offered as much on her first night with the company, when after winning the main event of Great American Nightmare - and the PRIME tag team championships with it - she had offered to help the ring crew tear everything down after the show. She’d been politely rebuffed, but twenty years of toiling away on the indies created habits that were hard to break.

“If you had told that version of me just how many people go into putting on something like this, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Jared said. “Hundreds of people all working behind the scenes, so a few weirdos in colorful pants can beat each other up.”

There was a calmness in his voice, a sort of blissful serenity that made her uneasy.

“Hey,” she said. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure? Because you’ve been awfully quiet tonight, and history tells me that’s never a good thing.”

He was silent for a moment, which did little to quell her nerves.

“I picked a date,” he said at last.

“Oh. Really going to take my favorite wrestler away from me, huh?”

She said it hoping that he would respond with a joke, perhaps a remark about Coral Avalon still having a job. Jared had always found it funny that Justine had a small collection of autographed photos from Avalon’s early days, and now they were peers. More than that, friends.

Instead he said, “I’m sorry.”

The hole in her chest widened.

“When are you thinking?”

“Contract comes up this summer. Thinking I’ll just let it expire.” He dared a glance at her over his shoulder. “Figured we can bum around Europe for the spring. After that, I think Tropical Turmoil is the finish line.”

“You should talk to Troy. Maybe you can do it like Dusk, and…” She trailed off as Jared shook his head.

“Nah, it’s not going to be anything big like that. No announcements. No big send-offs. Nothing to let people know that things are going to be different. The final bell will ring that Saturday night. PRIME will announce the card for Rev Fifty-one. And hopefully no one notices that anything has changed. Business just goes on as normal.”

It was Justine’s turn to fall silent.

Jared had told her that he planned to walk away from the sport, that he wanted to be present for all of the moments to come in their new family, but the conversation never delved into specifics. Part of her hoped that he’d reconsider, because PRIME’s schedule meant that he would only be away a few days every month.

Another part, one that she was reluctant to admit even to herself, knew that him leaving professional wrestling also meant that the door was likely closed on her career as well. It had taken her twenty years to get this far, and now her tether to the big stage was about to be cut. After all, the only reason she made it to PRIME in the first place was because Jared had brought her into the fold.

"You're serious about this."

"Yeah."

"Why now? Why not after the baby? We're having a show in Vancouver in a few months. Could see Ryan again. Or even Colossus. We can figure it out for three months, and then..."

“You ever have a dog, Cal?”

“Where did that come from?”

“Just go with me on this.”

“Once, when I was little, but I don’t remember him much aside from pictures. He was an old English bulldog that my dad named Winston. Why?”

“I was talking to Mark a couple weeks after I came back. I told him about the Johnsons - how they used to have a chubby little basset hound. It used to just hang out around the house, but he’d perk up any time the dog walkers rolled up to take him to play with his friends. For a few minutes every day he remembered what it was like to be a dog, and just run around with other dogs. I forgot what that felt like - forgot how to run. That’s why I came back.” He turned his head, and their eyes met. “I could do this forever, you know? I really could. Like if I stayed relatively healthy, I could keep going. But I’m tired of running, Cal. Now… now I just want to find a nice spot in the shade and lay down in the grass.”

Justine turned her focus back to the ring. The crew had just finished removing the ropes and turnbuckles. Next would be the canvas, then the padding, and then the layer of boards across the steel frame. She’d seen this sequence performed more times than she could count, had done it herself in small venues across New England and Southern California. If she closed her eyes, she could tell where the crew was in the process just by the sounds it made.

“We’re never going to do this again, are we?” She wiped a tear from her cheek.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve always been told to never say never when it comes to this sport, but right now ‘never’ sounds kinda nice.”

“I guess I didn't really think about it until now, how much things are actually changing. I just assumed that we’d always have this to come back to.”

“After the baby, if this is still something that you want to do, I will one hundred percent support it. I'll take care of things at home. We can add onesies to your merch. No one will cheer louder for you than I will.”

“I know. But it won’t be the same.”

“No. I guess it won’t. But we’ll always have it. No one ever gets to take that away.”

She exhaled a long breath and squeezed his hand.

“I’m going to miss this version of us, Jared.”

“Yeah,” he said, the words coming out as a croak around the lump in his own throat. “Yeah, so am I.”