Relativity

Modern physics is wild, man. All one’s life, they’re told they need to stand out, be an individual, not care about what others are doing, saying, thinking and put your own personal stamp on life. All the while, Albert Einstein, one of the two or three smartest humans ever to exist, said that nothing exists without relation to something else. Yes, it’s a gross simplification of his vast life’s work, but if one thinks about it, like, really thinks about it, that hypothesis turned theory turned to pretty much scientific law turns the entire macho, egocentric order of human society at present on its head.

Yet as the hard physical sciences and the emotional and volatile arts clash, this notion of relativity as the foundation of life causes cognitive dissonance in the human brain. To wit, Einstein’s theories have been around longer than most of the world has been alive, and people still think iconoclasm is a real thing. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. The phrase “there’s nothing new under the Sun” has been around for MILLENNIA. But the quest for individuality, a definition free of others, it survives in the DNA of human beings, and when the crushing reality that one lives for the relativity around them sets in, it can still cause depression.

Like the kind found in Thomas Francis Xavier Battaglia, aided and abetted by all the CTE he’s accrued over two separate multiyear stints of balls-to-the-wall pro wrestling in his lifetime.

-

He stood 180 cm tall and not a single micron more, and he had barely enough meat on his bones to flavor a bone broth. The die was cast for him the moment he decided he wanted to be a wrestler. The die suited him, to be honest. Jumping off bridges into rivers, emulating Jackass stunts with his friends, even if their grasp of English was tenuous at best, watching in awe the men and women who contorted their bodies into different shapes during the gymnastics routine in the Olympics.

Nobuo Hasegawa was always headed down the deadliest road he could find.

-

“You’ve had it rough this year, babe.”

“So has everyone, I mean…”

“Yeah, I know, but in this family, look at the rest of us. I got a huge raise at work and I got to kick Edwards in the shins without any repercussions. Zo made starting point guard for one of the best high school teams in the country, and Vinny got a journalism internship.”

When Tam was right, she was right.

“And before you start talking about Snow or the Tag Titles, none of us had nearly as much bullshit to wade through as you did. If you want to go to Japan before this tour kicks off, do it.”

“Yeah, but then I’m back over there for tour and…”

She put her finger over his lips as if to shush him.

“Look, I understand you want to be with your family, and Lord knows there are a lot of other men out there who could stand to have a sliver of your dedication, especially the you from 2022 that somehow body-snatched my husband and did drugs in the Nevada desert.”

Tom snickered with unsurety and regret.

“But I feel like this past year has just been you defining yourself as a person that was a part of someone else’s story. Even that whole thing where you said you were going to revolutionize wrestling got sidetracked when Zapp showed up.”

He sighed again.

“Go do this for yourself. Try to find a thread inside you that you can define yourself as you and not just as my husband or the kids’ dad or Zapp’s tag partner or even the object of your bitch mother’s wrath.”

“You know, I can call her a bitch because she’s my mom…”

Tam furrowed her eyebrows and released an icy death stare that would have killed even the fieriest of Balrogs.

“…and you know what, you can to, to have and to hold, til death do us part, that sorta thing.”

She laughed as broke her deathglare. The decision was made. Tom pulled his phone out and texted Inoue Doi back to say yes, he would be at Clash of Aces 2025.

-

School should have come easy for Nobuo. While his dexterity and body control allowed him to perform moves that the old junior-heavyweight masters could only dream of executing. But his lack of progression in fundamentals kept him enrolled for six months longer than the average time to graduation. His problem wasn’t grasping them, to be fair. He grew bored with rope-running and armdrag drills. He could do all those things in his sleep, but he had to drill while he was awake, when he’d rather be corkscrewing his body in dizzying rotations.

What was worse, he who should have been the hottest new wrestler on the scene found employment a tall task. Nobuo lived life on the fringes, tap-dancing on the edge of knives sharper than those found in Michelin-starred kitchens. Promoters loved this about him, but they kept wanting to festoon him in bright colors, wrap his face in masks, create caricatures upon his person.

Nobuo was who he was, and he would never allow anyone, not his parents, not his friends, certainly not promoters, change that about him.

He was a man true to himself. His hair was mop from a Beatles album cover in 1963. He couldn’t grow a full moustache, but damn you if he wouldn’t try. He chainsmoked and chugged coffee. If you didn’t know he was a wrestler afforded the opportunity to keep paying tuition while he moped around basic training because his father was in the upper tier of salarymen, you’d think he was homeless. Promoters didn’t want homeless high flying babyfaces.

Most didn’t.

Then he met Kaori, an electric ball of punk rock, libido, and all the same vices he shared. Within six months, they were both arrested for public indecency for, well, you can only imagine. Within a year, they were married, eloping at dive bar in Roppongi with an Elvis impersonator whose sideburns were poorly colored in on his face with Sharpie presiding. If you’re thinking Kaori’s father hated Nobuo, you’d be wrong. Aoki Uematsu wasn’t a stereotype. He took Kaori to get her first tattoo. He drank with her on her birthdays and held her hair while she vomited if none of her friends were around. And he was only disappointed in her when she did not wish to follow in the family business.

You see, Aoki Uematsu was known better in life by another name.

The Shogun.

-

Pom Academy looked the same as it did the last time Tom flew out to Japan, that time on an impulse in advance of Great American Nightmare ’22. That fact wouldn’t have surprised him if not for its proprietor having lived life on the lam in her war against the birdmen and his ersatz nephew for the better part of the last year. Truth be told, since her reentry into active wrestling, Pom Shinjoku left a lot of the operations of the school to trusted friends and peers. Shoko Nabigata, her ex-wife, took over as head trainer with some former students of hers who didn’t quite make it in the rigors of joshi pro wrestling coming back as lieutenants. There were other people handling other tasks Pom either couldn’t or wouldn’t too, and they kept the ship running right with the captain out hunting birds.

And then there was the lead marketer, whose daughters were the last two wrestlers Pom trained directly before she signed her Bang! contract. Kaori Uematsu didn’t have the MBA or even education past the junior high school level, but she had charisma about her, an alluring, almost cloying pull on young girls who had sights on professional wrestling. She never wanted to step in the ring, but it was embedded in her family in all directions. And Pom’s school was the only place in Japan that philosophically lined up with her ideas about radical liberation.

She and her daughters occupied the building most of the time, as they were at present the only ones who lived in the dormitories. Kaori eschewed the inheritance her father left and instead let Pom have it, all of it, to transform her academy to compete with places like the IPN Dojo or Tiger’s Den. And that’s precisely who greeted Tom as he walked through the foyer.

“Kaori! It’s been too long,” he said, advancing to hug her.

“It has. And you still haven’t learned Japanese enough to speak it, have you?” she replied with a smile as she embraced her friend.

“Hey, I have my reasons,” he replied with a chuckle. “Besides, your English is stellar. Almost as good as Pom’s.”

She slapped him across the chest playfully but hard enough for him to recoil.

“So, are we still on? You kept raving about this omurice place, and I gotta say, I’m intrigued.”

“I would love to, Tom, you know I would. But we’re trying to snatch a big recruit to come here, and no matter how many times they meet with Shoko, her family is, well, they’re worried.”

“About Pom and the birdmen?”

Kaori nodded.

“They want stability. It doesn’t matter that we’ve assembled the finest staff anywhere in the world for young female wrestlers. They want assurances that Pom isn’t a liability, and I can’t exactly lie to them, especially since she won’t answer her phone.”

Tom chuckled.

“You know she popped up at my house for Thanksgiving?”

“That bi…”

Tom interrupted.

“I get it though, but there’s part of me that thinks the Kaori I met years ago would just say ‘fuck it’ and let her go to whatever school she’s using as leverage against you.”

“Yeah, well, Kaori grew up, and I’m just worried. You know how it is out there for any student these days, how impressionable they are, and how some of these schools out there take advantage, especially women and non-binary and queer students.”

Tom nodded.

“Even if you teach them, things can happen.”

“Yeah, I saw what happened in Arena Mexico. How the hell did you get Farthington to agree to do that anyway?”

“Long story. So you’re just gonna stand me up? Want me to keep you company at least? Check in at the hotel isn’t for another three hours.”

“Unfortunately, this is going to take a lot of massaging, plus I have several other applicants I need to wade through. However, there are two people here who’d love to catch up with an uncle they have barely know.”

The noise from the first dormitory door was odd. It sounded like a song from a children’s show. Tom couldn’t tell anyone the first thing about children’s programming from the last ten years that wasn’t Mega Job and the Ten True Fruits, but only because, well, no one in PRIME was escaping that shit. He knocked.

No answer.

“Is she even in there?” Tom muttered to himself. He knocked again, this time louder.

“COME IN!” a pained voice shouted over the din in Japanese.

Tom opened the door to find a stocky young woman, her hair in a glorious dyed-blond mullet, dressed in a tank top and sweatpants with fuzzy pig slippers holding a bag of yuzu and chili Lays chips. On the television, Peppa Pig. At least that’s what Tom surmised it to be. The animation was terrible, and all the characters were swine who spoke Britishly.

“Hey Chiyo.”

Chiyo Hasegawa, the literal hammer made flesh, a woman feared by more people than her current win-loss record would ever let on, sat on the floor of her dorm room, enthralled by BBC children’s programming.

“Who are you?” she asked in stilted English.

“I’m Tom Battaglia. I’m a friend of Pom’s. And your mom. And… especially your father.”

“Oh,” she replied, her look softening. “Well, nice to meet you!”

Tom looked around the room and noticed that the entirety of her wallspace was covered with Peppa Pig posters.

“Same. Pom says a lot of nice things about you. Sorry I couldn’t talk to you and your sister in Mexico, I was held up in…”

“Can we talk after this episode? Sorry.”

Tom sighed.

“I’ll be back.”

As he walked up to the second dorm door, he couldn’t hear the noises emanating from behind them as much as he felt them. Thumping bass shook the walls, leaching through the gypsum and wood and attacking Tom with vibrational force of two black holes colliding, warping spacetime itself. In that moment, he thought knocking would be futile, but then he realized walking in on a young girl unannounced would be trouble. So he knocked.

No answer.

Again.

No answer.

Finally, he clenched his fist as hard as he humanly could, but before it landed on the door, the vibrations lessened in intensity and a voice called out.

“I’m decent. Come in.”

Tom entered, and the contrast between this room and the last one couldn’t be starker. There he noticed on a beanbag chair a slight-framed young woman, dressed in a Strong Antonio t-shirt and black leggings, sitting legs crossed with her arms outstretched and elbows bent. The deep trance music, though now lowered in volume, reverberated in Tom’s soul through the darkness of the room, lit only by two fluorescent green lava lamps straddling her on endtables on either of her sides.

Before Tom could say anything, the young woman spoke up.

“You’re Tom, Dad’s friend. Hi.”

“Hey Ayame. Sorry I couldn’t speak to you in Mexico, but…”

“Yes, I know. Things you are legally not allowed to talk about. Pom told me everything. It’s okay.”

She switched off the lava lamps and tapped a button on her smartphone to turn the main lights on and the music off. The room was smart, but the lava lamps, as they should have been, were strictly powered the dumb way.

“I have wanted to meet you for the longest time. Can I call you Oji?”

Tom looked around the room and found only a few posters, many with writing he had trouble translating in his head. Kaori wasn’t lying; his Japanese was rusty. But he noticed one thing on her wall that gave him even more pause. It was a picture with four people: her father, her mother, Pom, and an unmasked Tom Battaglia. A tear began to form in his left eye, but the question from Ayame shook him to attention.

“Yes. I would like that.”

“Good! So, are you going to be here for awhile?”

“Yeah, I wanted to eat with your mom, but she’s busy. But I would love to catch up with you and your sister.”

Ayame smirked as she moved her slight frame around the room. Her build, coupled with rainbow colored shoulder-length hair and decidedly (and intentionally) more femininity around her overall build, made it difficult to tell that she and Chiyo were twins unless you got a good look at their faces if they stood shoulder to shoulder.

“I would too, but we have to wait. If Chiyo doesn’t watch enough Peppa Pig, she will be incredibly moody.”

-

Nobuo was a perfect fit for Aoki’s island of misfit toys. Bloody Japan Grappling Arts didn’t have production values or prestige levied from journalists or even a consistent standard of hygiene. What it did have was the cultivation of violence that spoke to the bloodlust of the average wrestling fan, first in Japan and then, when the tapes started getting enough circulation, around the world. The violence brought in the eyes, but the resistance to societal norms molded the ones who stayed into hardcore fanatics. It wasn’t just that Dragon Matsumoto breathed literal fire but that he looked like your unathletic uncle doing so. There were women who rejected femininity, men who embraced queerness without playing it up for boos, and no one put on a persona they weren’t uncomfortable portraying.

And the undoubted star of the show was the homeless-looking man who wasn’t afraid to jump without looking, even as he held flaming clubs or chairs wrapped in barbed wire doing it. Aoki had many breakout stars in his fold. Pom Shinjoku pushed the boundaries of psychosis in the ring, with the governors Aoki had to put on her. She wanted to wield a sword, but Aoki didn’t want to make his deathmatches, well, literal. The Kaiju Twins wowed even the most discerning workrate marks with their feats of strength, primarily with how far into crowds they could throw smaller wrestlers. Shoko Nabigata, Dragon Matsumoto, a scraggly gaijin named The Anglo Luchador, all of them were the parts that summed up incomprehensibly to a whole greater than they were individually.

But Nobuo was special.

Perhaps Nobuo and Aoki both bought into it too much. After Pom lost her eye and retired and TAL signed with the American company A1E full-time, business for BJGA started to decline. Nobuo received offers from bigger companies, ones that spurned him before, but it was Aoki who gave him his chance. He knew Aoki wouldn’t ever dilute him the way he feared others would. And Aoki ran out of new ideas the moment most of his stars left him. He ran feuds into the ground, recycled gimmick matches. None of his wrestlers had the same spark as the ones who came before, who left. Even as he became afflicted with cancer, he insisted on running shows the way he had when he was healthy. They both tried, they really did, but the circumstances took tolls on them. For Aoki, the cancer was ruthless.

For Nobuo, the costs were less physical and more emotional. The flame he stoked with Kaori dwindled to embers, and no matter how many tearful nights she spent, he barely noticed.

Hell, the night Kaori told him she was pregnant, he was asleep before she could reveal it to him.

-

The three of them sat in the back of a taxi Tom had directed towards the omurice place Kaori had told him about.

“What’s omurice again?” Chiyo asked. Before Tom could answer, her sister interjected.

“Come on, Chi, you know. It’s fried rice with a runny omelet on top sometimes even with gravy.”

“Wait, runny omelet? Gross! I like my eggs hard, like how I punch!”

Chiyo tried to chop her sister, but Tom, seated betwixt them, swatted it away.

“Girls, please, no fighting.”

“Sorry, Oji.”

Ayame stared daggers at her sister.

“Apologize to Oji! You started it!”

“No! He’s not my uncle anyway. I barely know him!”

“Ayame, it’s alright. We don’t have to go have omurice. I’m going to be here for a few days anyway. What do you girls like?”

“Ooh, how about ramen?” asked Ayame excitedly.

“Ewww no, you know I don’t eat pork, Aya! Why would you suggest that?”

“Because Mom and Oba Pom never get ramen with me anymore either! Besides, they make ramen without pork in it, you weirdo.”

“Yeah, but that vegan crap tastes awful! And all the places you like only make tonkatsu broth!”

Tom furrowed his brow and sighed when he realized that Chiyo didn’t eat pork not because she was keeping kosher or halal.

“You know, that show, uh, I’m sure the pigs on that show wouldn’t mind it if you ate pork once in awhile.”

Chiyo’s eyes grew wide, and her nose scrunched up in anger like a pig in real life.

“YOU TAKE THAT BACK YOU MONSTER!” she shouted before laying in an enormous chop on Tom’s chest.

Tom’s eyes took their turn to widen as he involuntarily jumped out of his seat, the only thing keeping him from launching out of the top of the taxi being his seatbelt, which wrenched his midsection with enough force somehow to make it feel as if someone just launched a nuclear missile into his groin. Ayame tried stifling her laughter at first, but her Oji’s reaction to being chopped set her into a fit of laughter uproarious enough that the taxi driver turned his head back to see if everything was alright.

“I thought he was your Oji!” Chiyo remarked sarcastically.

“He is, but that was funny! I’m sorry, Oji, I’m sorry!”

“No, Ayame,” Tom said as he gingerly settled himself back into place in his middle cab seat. “Your sister is right. It was objectively funny.”

Chiyo finally let her guard down, and the mood in the cab settled from comically violent to unsure with tension over where the three would go and eat.

“Hey, how about Denki Gai? You girls like steak.”

“I do,” Chiyo started before it was Ayame’s turn to object.

“NO! I mean, Oji, I like steak too, but we can’t go to Denki Gai! That’s only for people who made it in wrestling!”

“No, I’m pretty sure we can all eat there as regular customers, I won’t wear my mask and they won’t recognize…”

Ayame went “HMPH!”, crossed her arms, and pouted.

“That’s not the point! I want my first trip there to be after we win our first big title!”

“Come on, Aya. You’re being dramatic. It’s just steak!”

“NO IT’S NOT!”

Ayame turtled up into her corner of the cab while Chiyo stuck her tongue out in mockery. The scene transported Tom across an ocean and a continent, back to his old home in Malvern, at the constant arguments between Zo and Vinny over where they wanted to go for dinner. The thought didn’t linger long enough to play out in the theater of his mind’s eye, but that arrow found a bullseye right into a realization.

No matter where he went or who he kept company with, he would always be someone’s father, permanently or for a night.

-

The conflict in Nobuo’s heart was short-lived. As much as he fell out of love with Kaori, there was no doubt in his mind that he would not be a deadbeat father. What would Aoki say, even as he grew less and less lucid with the cancer taking him? He did what he wanted, always, sure, but those who earned his loyalty kept it in perpetuity. Some would call it strange. Nobuo never had a problem living with the dissonance, even as the arguments with his pregnant wife grew louder and more intense.

Still, life took its toll on him. All the weight in his brain, between Aoki’s cancer, the fights with Kaori, and the new dread pressing its hand on the scale of whether he’d even be a passable father to his unborn child, broke him, just as it did that one fateful night. Eight months pregnant, Kaori decided to needle Nobuo about something that she’d admit afterwards was pointless. He sat in silence, hoping that the strain of her carriage would tire her out, but she felt divine inspiration to claw at him that night, as the rain fell on their windows and the thunder clapped in the distance.

Finally, he broke. He jerked from his seat on the couch, grabbed his leather jacket and helmet, and left the house, slamming the door behind him. He did what he’d always done in his life to cope.

What he wanted.

In that moment, he wanted to ride far away from everything. He straddled his Suzuki GSX-R 600 and zipped out of the garage down slick roads to nowhere in particular. As good a rider as he was though, the speed he rode at, the water killing the friction on the road below him, and his harried state of mind all combined to fail him on a hairpin turn. He spun out. Lost control.

A month before doctors delivered two identical, beautiful, healthy baby girls to Kaori Uematsu-Hasegawa, their father died on a wet mountain road in grisly enough fashion that the casket for his funeral remained closed.

-

The cab pulled up to Pom Academy roughly three hours after its predecessor took the three away from it. All three passengers filed out with contented looks on their faces.

“Man, they’re all right,” Tom said. “The egg salad at 7-11 over here is better than anything we have at home, even at Wawa.”

“Duh, Oji,” chimed in Ayame. “I thought you’d know that with how much you came over here before.”

“Yeah, but I never thought to go get egg salad at Sev until now. I’m glad we couldn’t decide where to go for dinner.”

“Me too,” chirped Chiyo, “But can I go back upstairs now? I need to watch more Peppa Pig.”

Tom sighed as he nodded. Chiyo bolted off towards the doors.

“Oji, do you want to go have some tea? Mom has some delightful blends.”

“In a little bit, Aya. I have to go pay someone a visit.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll be in the commissary. I want to catch up, Oji.”

Ayame turned and zipped into the building herself. Tom turned around and looked at an old sugi cedar tree adjacent to the academy building. His gaze went to two headstones sitting underneath of it. He ambled over to them, each with a name written in kanji characters.

“長谷川宣夫 ``1977年8月21日 - 2003年11月30日”

“植松 青樹

1958年1月2日 - 2004年3月12日”

Tom’s Japanese was rusty, but he remembered enough to tell the names of Nobuo Hasegawa from Aoki Uematsu apart. He ambled over to the younger one’s plot.

“Hey Nob.”

Silence. For a man who’s had conversations with dead luchadores and Aztec gods, he was almost shocked that the headstone didn’t answer him back.

“Finally got to meet your daughters today. You’d love both of them. Aya’s got your mentality in the ring, and Chi inherited your gift of aesthetic. It’s poetic, man.”

The weight of Tom’s sadness started to concentrate in his brain again.

“You know, I’m still looking for it, what you had. How the fuck did you do it? How did you stay…”

Tom interrupted himself and knelt before his late friend’s headstone.

“…yourself. How did you keep your head? Not define yourself against anyone but yourself?”

In one motion, he turned around and flopped his back against Nobuo’s headstone in an upright fetal position. He wrapped his arms around his knees and started crying.

“They needed you man. They need you. I need…”

Water began to fall on the back of his neck. He wasn’t the only one shedding tears in that moment. The skies started to open up over Kanagawa. Tom looked up, and the arrow of thought found the bullseye once again.

“No. I don’t need you. Well, not in that way,” he said, sniffling. “Maybe I have it wrong. I need you, as a friend, someone I loved, still do love.”

He got up and brushed the grass from his pants.

“But the girls, man, they still needed you. And I think you needed them. If you’d just have waited one more month, man. One more month.”

Tom turned to face his friend’s headstone one more time.

“You’d still be here.”

Tom turned away to walk back into the building but stopped. He turned around one more time and looked at the other headstone.

“Shogun, I didn’t forget you, man. I just hope I’m making you proud.”

-

In the aftermath, Kaori intentionally purged all memories of the end of her marriage and loudly proclaimed how much she loved Nobuo. Lies, of course, but they were lies everyone wanted to hear. Three months later, her father would pass. She needed an anchor, especially with two little girls she had to raise on her own, at least so she thought. Thankfully, Pom and Shoko stepped in and helped, and in return, Kaori started to work at Pom’s new school, doing whatever she could. But no matter how much her husband and father struggled at the end, their loss still loomed large over everyone in that corner of wrestling in Japan.

It still does.

-

“You know what,” Tom said on his phone to a call recipient an ocean and a continent away, “I think I’m okay if people just want to remember me as Zo’s and Vinny’s dad, or the trophy husband of a big successful medical executive.”

“Don’t say that out loud,” Tam replied, “I mean, I’m already putting out resumes. I mean, my company isn’t in insurance, thank fuck, but…”

“Your company makes medical devices. You’re actually doing something.”

There was a pause.

“But you shouldn’t just be okay being known as someone else’s supporting character, even though that’s totally false, Mr. Two-Time Pro Wrestling World Champion.”

“It’s a lot deeper than that, babe, trust me. But you have to play a role in people’s lives. We don’t just live on islands, I say as I am temporarily living on an archipelago of various islands.”

He could hear Tam face-palming from half-a-world away.

“I’ll figure out who I am eventually, even if right now, it’s, well, a little rough.”

-

Modern physics is wild, man. Einstein said we all exist relative to something else, but he didn’t just say that’s all we were. The man came up with theories of gravity. To exert gravity, a thing has to have mass. One needs an identity in order to mean something relatively, right?

And if one’s lucky enough, they’ll become big enough that their gravity will be the center of relativity for a lot of people, hopefully most of them with a beneficial role to play in their lives.