A Man's Got to Have a Code

“What happened to your more grounded wrestling style?”

Bag of ice on his neck. Business casual outfit thrown on hastily, polo shirt unbuttoned, shoes untied.

“Mom, you know more than anyone how Gamblini gets under people’s skins. He made me stupid. Reckless.”

Of the people in the group waiting for their Lyft outside Lincoln Financial Field, only two would go inside baseball with Tom over his wrestling. His wife was one of them, preoccupied with her younger son accosting strangers with questions about cryptids.

Eileen had no such responsibilities.

“You’re lucky he didn’t catch you in your recklessness. I know all the smart marks on the web talk about how little success he’s had, but he’s not a PRIME Hall of Famer for nothing, you know.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

Tom looked out at the sea of people in the late night, thousands of his compatriots and visitors alike converging upon the Linc. For a man who was tucked in the middle of a show, the only match of the night without stipulation, a large percentage of those fans wore his colors. Vintage shirts. New shirts. The sheer number of shirts, masks, headbands, foam fingers with his stage name on them, the sight humbled him.

“Well, at least you have somewhat of a respite from fighting, dear.”

Her highbrow tone shook Tom out of his wondrous gaze of the people.

“Yeah. Survivor. Who would’ve guessed?”

A large van pulled up slowly, dispersing the fans who wished not to be roadkill on their way out of the show of the summer.

“Oh good, our ride is here. I know you will want to have a nice dinner. You earned it, my boy. But that leaves the ride to the restaurant for me to ask questions about the elephant in the room.”

Tom nodded slowly, almost as if he was begrudgingly accepting a fate he feared would be worse than death.

“Or the bear, more accurately.”

-

“It’s only cheating if you get caught.”

Tom was never raised to be anything but an honorable young lad. He saw the successes the heels had against his father and other “good guys” in his various territories, knaves like the King Shadow Master and “Nature Boy” Barry Quick. Despite seeing how successful his classmates could be using crib sheets or codes to relay answers to hapless teachers, he thought that if he was going to fail, he’d do it earning it all the way down. He didn’t need help from the torpedo of dishonor.

“I don’t want to get detention though, Rod,” his voice not projecting the confidence needed to get the knave off his back. If anything else, Tom thought, Rod would have a great future in sales.

“Pfft, what’s detention? We served it all last week for that prank we pulled on Father Gleason, remember?”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t for stealing or anything bad. In fact, that’s like an accomplishment we made on our own.”

“You can be such a square sometimes. Besides, ain’t your dad on your ass for not doing well in school?”

Tom rolled his eyes.

“I’m serious. Last thing we need is for you to miss parties because you wouldn’t cheat on a test.”

“We? I’m the one who gets invited.”

“Yeah, and I need you to get me into them. So what’s it gonna be?”

Tom shook his head as the two boys got to the subway station.

-

“Survivor? At least you get to take it easy the next few months, mijo.”

Pedro smiled as he trawled ringside in the musty sweatbox he called a gym. Tom put the brakes on as his back hit the steel cables, wrapping his arms around them to complete the braking process.

“Easy? Maestro, for one, they just announced that we’re doing the Aggro-Crag as our first challenge.”

“Aggro what? Did they dig Powermaster out of mothballs or something?”

“No, no, Aggro-Crag. It’s a Nickelodeon thing from when I was a kid at least. Nothing to do with the crackhead who married Lady Freedom. It’s this wall that I have to scale.”

“I’m sure it’s more than just a wall.”

“You’re damn right it is. Pull it up on YouTube when you get home.”

Pedro chuckled to himself, leaning one arm on his cane and the other on the ring apron.

“But you know the physical challenge, eh, she’s only half the game? Maybe even less?”

“I mean, yeah, I’ve gotta spend a whole week with my mortal enemy and the sandwich doofus. Nathan, I already bunked with him. He’s a good guy.”

“Not even talking about that, mijo. I take it you’re not a reality television kind of hombre, huh.”

Tom curled his lip and squinted.

“What better reality television is there than professional wrestling? I mean, they have cameras in our faces non-fucking-stop. I’m pretty sure you could bring up guys on RICO charges just by using the ACE Network archives as evidence.”

“Oh, there’s a whole art to it. Deception. Alliances behind people’s backs. Real nasty stuff. It actually makes all the heel turns and stable-building look like child’s play.”

“What are you actually saying, maestro?”

“I’m saying, it might take more than just your guile and physical condition to win out here.”

“Pedro, I’m a tecnico, remember?”

Pedro shook his head.

“I’m just saying, chico, weren’t you telling me when you got here this is the last chance you think you have at the Universal Championship?”

The weight of his own admission brought him to one knee.

“Yeah, but if I sacrifice everything I built this run on, it doesn’t make me better than any of the shitbags I’ve ragged on since I started coming back here. Not Gamble, not Hoyt, especially not that furry bag of shit up in Canada. A man’s gotta have a code.”

“Do you think Nathan has the same code? I don’t care who’s on your team, they’re always going to be plotting against you. Especially Ivan. You know, as far as I’ve heard around the business, Ivan’s done a pretty good job alienating himself from people. You could get rid of him pretty easy if you get the other two guys in your apartment to conspire against him.”

The temptation hit him like a jolt from his morning coffee. He shook it off and popped back to his feet.

“You know what, I still have about 20 more rope runs to do before I can quit this drill in good faith.”

Pedro rolled his eyes and laughed as Tom went back to running the ropes.

-

US History wouldn’t have been so bad for Tom if the teacher wasn’t Mr. Dulles, a decrepit old fossil with a limp and a dreadful monotone that made war teem with tedium instead of blood and guts like the movies made it out to be. His chalkboard writing was borderline illegible, and half the time, Tom fell asleep and missed crucial details. The D average he was carrying that semester was nothing short of miraculous. No matter how many times he’d tell his parents that “D equaled diploma,” they increased the pressure with each dismal test score he’d bring home.

While his parents didn’t make specific threats to him about his poor grades, he knew what extremes to which they’d go if he continued to underwhelm them. Not too much time had passed since they’d grounded Guido and threw all his pogs away after he’d been caught torturing squirrels for the third time. He didn’t want to risk not being able to go to parties. After all, going to an all-boys high school limited his chances for romance during school hours. He needed to get to where the girls were when classes were out of session.

So he made the decision.

Antwaan al-Saddiq was able to snag one of the test sheets when he saw them peeking out of Dulles’ tote, fresh from the photocopier. He made the crib sheet. Rod swore to him it’d be the best 20 bucks he’d ever spend.

So he did.

The bell sounding the beginning of second period pierced his eardrum in a way that it had never done before. Dulles ambled up each row, handing out tests one by one as he listed towards each student. He seemed to linger there interminably long when he got to Tom’s desk, his awful halitosis breath invading Tom’s nostrils. He was certain that his cheating would be discovered before he could even take the test. However, the teacher hobbled along to the desk in front of Tom’s to deposit another test.

The longest 45 minutes of Tom’s life to that point began. At first, he couldn’t bear to look at the sheet he’d purchased out of fear that a watchful eye might catch him the first time.

He had to be subtle.

He had to make sure that he wasn’t drawing attention to himself.

Luckily for him, and for every one of Antwaan’s other clients, Dulles didn’t earn the nickname “Dull-ass” for nothing. Tom looked down at his sheet the first time, and bam, there were the first two answers for the test. As he wrote them down, he felt a gnawing sense of guilt inside of him.

I knew the answers to those questions he thought to himself. Could he have passed this test without spending his hard-earned allowance money or selling his soul?

No. Question three, it was like he’d seen those words in that order for the first time in his entire life. The next few questions on the test showed that his cheatsheet was a rock solid investment.

But the gnawing at his insides didn’t go away.

He could have finished the test with haste, but he didn’t want to look suspicious. Eddie Grosbeak was on track to be ranked number one in the class, so him finishing the test early wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.

Dumbass Tom Battaglia finishing first would have set off all the alarms.

Grosbeak was the first to finish, as expected. Then Antwaan, then Zach Flores, then with regularity, the other boys in his class started putting their pencils down and going to hand their papers into Dulles. Tom used this confusion to his advantage to race through the rest of the test and head up to the teacher with his paper. He wiped his brow and turned to walk away before that gravelly monotone struck.

“BATTAGLIA!”

Fuck.

He thought for sure that he got caught. He turned around, sweat visibly beading on his forehead.

“You forgot to put your name on the test.”

He exhaled deep enough that to anyone but the dimmest teacher in the school, it would’ve been a dead giveaway. Instead, he just put his name at the top of the paper and scurried back to his desk.

He got away with it.

But why didn’t he feel good about it?

-

All he could think about on the long drive south on Broad Street home from Pedro’s was the metagame of Survivor. The challenges were the challenges, but the real game consisted of machinations behind the scenes. His thoughts took wildly differing paths throughout his head, but they landed at the same destination.

Get Ivan Stanislav out of Survivor as soon as you can.

The whiplash was strong, for sure. The Squad Goals house was full of camaraderie, sharing feelings, and holistic herbal supplements of dubious providence for one’s health. To go from that to a lair of enmity in such short time with only the liminal space of having to deal with the unpleasant Tony Gamble, maybe that did its part to get Tom thinking about his old days as a rudo in feds long lost to history.

But the converse was always going to be dealing with Ivan fair and square. What had that gotten him before? ReVival 35. Culture Shock ’24. ReVival 83. Yes, his team beat Ivan’s in Squad Goals, which was a start. He was long eliminated when Lindsay Troy scored the decisive fall. He was still the ultimate roadblock in his mind to getting that one last chance to climb the mountain and attain immortality.

With each rationalization, Tom was able to convince himself more and more that he’d have to play dirty to get the Russian Bear trapped and sent off to a zoo in Siberia? Zoo? Gulag?

Zoolag?

He laughed to himself as he suddenly realized he was about to rear-end the guy in front of him. He slammed on his brakes and shook himself out of his stupor.

The years of changing his ethos and working towards being the beacon of fairplay that he’d at least striven towards left him bereft of ideas on how he could not only find a more elegant way of sabotaging Ivan other than blatantly tripping him with the cameras rolling. He needed a better plan. Furthermore, he needed coaching on how to build blocs and build the kind of fragile trust with scoundrels who might also be plotting to stick the knife in your back when the alliance has served its purpose.

He needed Rod Seger.

AKA Roderick McRatrick.

-

“Wow, an A+,” beamed Lorenzo Battaglia looking at his son’s history test. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Neither did I,” replied Tom sheepishly.

The rare praise his father heaped on him was inaudible over his own inner monologue, screaming at him while simultaneously shredding his insides with razor-sharp talons, urging him to admit it was a product of cheating. He believed in his head that his father was about to ask him if he cheated anyway. Get ahead of it. Maybe you’ll get a better sentence the same way pleading guilty in court didn’t net nearly as many years in jail as going to trial with a not guilty plea.

“Well, I’m glad all my talks have finally broken through that thick skull of yours. Maybe if you keep it up, you won’t have to break your body on the road like me the way you talk about wanting to do? Maybe you could even escape the kind of fate your uncle has with being up on roofs on hot days?”

“Maybe,” he replied again, low of tone, not the way someone who’d earned high marks on a test honestly would have. “Let me go. If you want me to keep it up, I gotta get started on my homework.”

Lorenzo smiled and nodded as his oldest son scurried up the stairs. Instead of heading to the bedroom he shared with two of his younger brothers, he jumped into the bathroom and slammed the door behind him.

So he could vomit in peace.

-

“Babe, remember when I gave you a phone number and told you only to give it back to me when I asked you for it, when I really needed it?”

Tam looked up from her book on the couch at her husband flying in the door like he was Cosmo Kramer into Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment.

“You mean you need to help our son dispose of the body of the Center City Mothman?”

“I’m serious!”

She shook her head in surprise as she could see her husband was by the look on his face dead serious.

“No. What could you possibly need his phone number for? After all the times you changed your number to get away from him? After Australia? After everything he’s done to you?”

“He’s the only one who can help me play the game.”

She threw her book down and shook her head even harder.

“How the hell is Rod going to help you climb a wall?”

He exhaled with the kind of exasperation one has throwing a last ditch effort to the bank to give them an extension on a loan.

“It’s not about the wall. It’s about the Bear.”

She widened her eyes and approached her husband.

“I’ve known you for most of both of our lives. Ivan’s not the first white whale you’ve obsessed over, and he won’t be the last…”

“He is the last,” Tom interrupted.

“What do you mean?” Tam replied with a quizzical look in her eyes. “You told me you were going to double down on the grappling and work a style that didn’t wreck your body…”

“I did, but do you really think me working as a grumpy old man is going to cut it in a fed where the Champion drinks bourbon for breakfast and chases it with cocaine? Where the guy he beat can wrestle for 90 minutes and barely break a sweat? Where Brandon Youngblood just got retired? I have to win this Survivor and I need to make sure everyone who’s a danger to me is out before the playing field is level.”

Tam blinked slowly then looked dead in her husband’s eyes.

“Okay, look, I get it. You’re a man approaching a midlife crisis, and I think I’d prefer you doing what it is you’re asking me to facilitate than go buy a sportscar.”

Tom started to smile until his wife started in again.

“BUT, you need to realize letting him back into your life and sacrificing everything that you built in the last four-and-a-half years of your career is a huge decision. So no, I’m not giving you that number yet. Go get one of the cigars Youngblood gave you for your birthday. Pour yourself a stiff drink. And think long and hard if this is what you want to do before you go and open the door to Pandemonium. Okay?”

Tom closed his eyes, sighed, and nodded.

“Okay.”

-

“Did your dad find out you cheated?”

Tom and Rod walked out of the subway station towards school like they always did on the following Monday.

“No, I, I just didn’t feel that great.”

“Didn’t feel great? Oh Jesus, you fuckin pu…”

“I know what you’re about to call me, and I can still stuff you in a trashcan, right?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t get to go to any parties this weekend. I was stuck having to listen to my dad bitch at me because I wasn’t bringing home enough.”

Tom looked at him and shook his head.

“Look, you got your ways of dealing with school, and I’ve got mine, alright? Just, let me be. If my dad grounds me when I fail the next test, I’ll just sneak out.”

Rod rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“Or maybe I’ll just commit to studying,” Tom added.

“Yeah, right, and we have a better chance of Jesus Christ himself substitute teaching for Father Gleason.”

The boys laughed as they walked into school.

-

The nicotine from the cigar hit him with a shockwave that cleared his head of any thoughts for the moment. Youngblood always knew where to get the best stogies. The emptiness of his mind allowed him to reach a flowstate he hadn’t been to since the last time he smoked one of those cigars.

It had been too long. Good thing for the humidor that El Guapo Grande gifted him for allowing him one last run in the sun in LUCHA ESPECIAL. It still was as smooth as it would’ve been the first day out of the rolling house.

The first thought that crept into his head wasn’t sinister. It had nothing to do with wrestling at all. How could every cigar out of that company be so pristine, so perfect? They had to have rigorous quality standards. Had to. If not, they’d come out uneven. Lord knows Tom had several cigars from companies whose quality would stagger.

And then it hit him with the next drag. He found himself talking about fidelity and honor so much because that’s what kept his engine running for what, going on five years now? He couldn’t have done it with shortcuts. He wasn’t as amoral as Max Kael or as clever as Cancer Jiles. He was stupid ol’ Thomas Francis Xavier Battaglia. The Anglo Luchador. A man who knew how to do two things – wrestle and be a dad.

Both of them for a man of his makeup required only one thing.

His wife was right. He needed the drink and the smoke. He knew what he had to do.

Forget Roderick.

Climb the Aggro-Crag.

Do it all the right way, the only way he could.

After all, a man’s got to have a code, right?