Glasnost

“I can’t believe this shit. I won the tournament, and they’re advertising Farnsworth as the big challenger.”

Tom looked furious as he pressed rewind on the tape machine to rewatch the local ads to be sent out to all the affiliates for A1E television the next week. Not even a match, but a contract signing between Housefly and Richard Farnsworth for a title match between pay-per-view events. Tom, the winner of the recent tournament to crown a number one contender to that World Championship, nowhere to be seen.

“I mean, just beat whoever wins that match at the pay-per-view, babe,” Tam replied. “Easy enough.”

Tom shook his head.

“I mean, yeah, but I had my dad’s lawyer read over my contract over and over. Card position doesn’t guarantee progressions in pay. The only thing I can do to try and get more is sell merch, and they still haven’t approved the last three designs I sent them.”

He stood up and threw the sweaty mask he was holding down on the bench in the locker room.

“The Highland Park Social Club has more designs than I do, each of the members too. And they’re fuckin’ heels. How am I gonna get enough money so we can finally buy a house? Pay for a marriage?”

“My dad said he’d pay for the marriage. He’s traditional like that, you know it.”

“I don’t want to burden him more than I already have. He’s way too good a man. I don’t want to take advantage of him. I’m a nationally-televised wrestler. I should be able to afford these things, and yet…”

His voice trailed off. He locked eyes with his fiancée and sighed.

“I don’t know what else to do.”

“Have you tried talking to the office about it? You have pretty much done everything both in the ring and out of it to bring the issue up. I don’t think they’re taking the hints from the promos. You just need to go talk to them directly.”

“Ugh, I know how it’s going to go already.”

“Do you? If my dad told you to do it, would you?”

Tom groaned and rolled his eyes.

“Even if your dad, or your mom, or my mom, or my dad, or anyone else, I would have the same hesitation.”

“That’s the problem. You’re a hard-headed Italian man. Maybe you should be less stubborn and listen to people who might know a thing or two.”

Tom shut his eyes and turned away slightly. Mainly because he knew she was right.

🍕

The AirBNB in Detroit was a little less cluttered without Steve Lemieux bumbling about. It was a bit colder as well. For as much of a spectacle as he was, Steve provided a buffer between the tensions embedded on Team Avalon thanks to the longstanding rivalry between The Anglo Luchador and Ivan Stanislav. His dismissal meant there would be one person fewer to keep the heads from butting.

Tom at least had one friend in the house. Nathan Lake was different in name only from the time he’d spent with him at Rancho Mundo. He lost a title and a moniker, but he was still someone to talk to in the house.

And talk they did, this time, over a Detroit-style pizza. The food choice was strategic. While Nathan did offer Ivan a slice, the Bear refused on the grounds of it being the height of capitalistic decadence, remarking that that particular style of pizza had so much oil on the surface that he wouldn’t be surprised if the US Army showed up to attempt regime change. Tom guessed that would be the response, which is why he selected it in the first place.

“We really botched it at the Crag,” remarked Nathan with a piece of cup-char pepperoni hanging out the corner of his mouth.

“Maybe,” Tom replied after wiping some grease from his lip with a paper towel. “But it was to be expected. Team Snow is a well-oiled machine despite the embedded three-way tensions inside of it. I might trust Rob, Tony, and Keyes to better put their differences aside than any team containing that egg-obsessed prick.”

“Shocked to hear you speak so highly of Gamble after he hounded you for the better part of a month trying to get you to retire.”

“Nate, I’m an ethical hater. Tony’s a lot of things, but dumb isn’t one of them. Gotta call it like I see it.”

“So then do you think we’re dumb?” Nate asked with a mouthful of pizza.

Tom shook his head and sighed.

“Quite the opposite. Even when Steve was here, I didn’t think we were collectively stupid. Steve’s got a reputation, sure, but he’s just an ordinary guy in a world where ordinary gets you killed. I just think we’re, um, what’s the word…”

He trailed off as he grabbed another square slice of the best pizza in America.

“Stubborn?” Nathan finished his thought as if he were married to Tom and not Tamara.

Tom chuckled through a full mouth, almost spilling some masticated pizza from lips he struggled to keep closed. He swallowed hastily.

“Yeah, that’s the word. I guess the way to get through it is for one of us to be the bigger man.”

“Well, Ivan is the biggest man here, but I know that’s not what you meant.”

Tom laughed again.

“And really, you already talk to him. It would be unfair for me to ask the man who got immunity for himself on the mountain to any more for our team than what he’s already done.”

Tom sighed again as soon as he finished talking as if he knew the implication.

“Tom, don’t be too worried. I mean, just think of it like the end of Rocky IV. You and Ivan beat the hell out of each other, but you can still find a way to try to make peace.”

Tom laughed again. He went to grab his slice of pizza again but, before putting it to his mouth, shot Nate a nasty look.

“If you ever compare me to a Sylvester Stallone character again, I will personally walk off the pitch at Medieval Times and leave you to fend for yourself with the big oaf.”

Nathan shot a wry look back at his partner.

“Oh c’mon. It’s Rocky! And he’s from Philly just like you.”

🍕

Quarter-hour ratings breakdowns, CHECK.

Booth visitor numbers from the latest A1E Fanfest, CHECK.

T-shirt sales per design, CHECK.

Tournament trophy, surprisingly not destroyed like most wrestling trophies, CHECK.

Tom was ready to storm into the office and present his case for a better paycheck, more bonuses, a better financial standing in the company he’d now spent three years to date working in. He could see it so clearly in his head. The need to take bookings midweek in Mexico for shady lucha promotions dissipating in the air. A big house in the Philadelphia suburbs that he could actually spend time in instead of that cramped apartment on South Street that he and Tam barely haunted with their presence. He had the evidence. The numbers, crunched. The charts, popped off the page.

Maybe after this meeting, everything would click, and Tom could have the life commensurate with the booty won from scouring the ring night after night.

Finally, the door to the office creaked open with the production assistants filing out one-by-one. He leaped into action with his cache of papers until an unseen elbow caught him in the gut as he went for the door.

Marcus Westcott.

“Wait your turn.”

“I was here the whole time waiting for the PA meeting to finish. You just sauntered in out of nowhere.”

“I still got to the door first. And I have merch designs to get approved.”

“Oh fuck off, I will choke you with all 48 of your other shit-ass t-shirt designs before you horn in on this.”

The man known in the ring as The Beast snorted as he turned around.

“We’re gonna do this now?”

“NO YOU’RE NOT!” shouted a voice from inside. “Any fights start and at least one of you is getting fired. Battaglia, you wait your turn. Come on in, Marc.”

The door slammed behind him as Tom slumped, his stack of papers dangerously close to falling in chaos onto the floor below.

🍕

One thing about his son’s relentless obsession over cryptids that may or may not be real is that Tom learned how to make a killer red-string conspiracy corkboard. His setup was pristine, photos of each of the remaining competitors in Survivor neatly arranged with strings tying them to each other, to other entities, all of the connections leading to a picture of the minotaur in the center. Nathan was impressed. Vinny had some harshly worded but ultimately constructive criticisms looking at it over FaceTime.

Now the test was showing it to Ivan.

Tom had rivals before. It mattered not whether the disrespect between them in and out of the ring was palpable, or if their mutual admiration for each other’s talents kept driving them towards their inevitable clashes. He felt interminably awkward, weird even, approaching them outside of the ring if the compendium of the chapters of their rivalry remained unwritten. Hell, he even felt awkward talking to Sean Stevens decades after they wrestled their last match.

The most perplexing part of the problem was figuring out if Ivan was more Westcott than Stevens. Tom remembered wanting so hard to impress Ivan when he heard he was signing with PRIME. And how could he forget the moment in Argyle when Ivan told him that he actually respected him? Was it a mindgame? The end result would have been the same, but at least knowing how to categorize it would give him a better read on how to engage.

At least with the team holed up in the AirBNB for two weeks before the show, there would be multiple opportunities…

🍕

“Alright, what do you want? You got 15 minutes.”

Roger barely looked up from the papers on his desk as Tom walked into the office with his stack of statistical evidence backing up why he should be able to renegotiate his contract to include better riders and more incentives. A1E’s head booker and promoter was a man who looked older than the 42 his birth certificate showed. He was a veteran of the old upper Midwest territory, a straitlaced throwback to a simpler time. He didn’t hire Tom. Rather, he inherited the contract from Dmitri, the little-known first booker of the territory. Roger took them national.

He had little patience for this “Anglo Luchador” even if he kept re-signing him because the kids loved him.

“Okay, I ran some numbers,” Tom gasped as he slammed the papers on the desk. “And I think…”

“Numbers? Really? You come into my office with shit I’ve probably already seen?”

Tom looked at him with a puzzled expression as the interruption stopped him dead in his tracks.

“What, are you going to tell me that your circus freak bullshit actually means you deserve something other than the bone I’m allowing to be thrown to you?”

“Allowing?” Tom said with substantially more bass in his voice than he had a few seconds ago. “I went out and won that tournament fair and fucking square. And if you’ve seen these numbers already, you know that the ticket-buyers and people with Neilsen boxes in their houses love it when I go out there and outwrestle the other stiffs you have on this roster.”

“You want to know why? It’s because long-term, funny doesn’t equal money.”

Tom’s befuddlement turned to anger. The rage welling up in his gut kept him from finding words he could use that wouldn’t get him fired on the spot.

“What does my company look like if the best wrestler in it is some clown that doesn’t take this wrestling shit seriously? You think MBE deals with that?”

“Dude, Professor Tremendous is a two-time MBE Champion, and he’s goofier than I am.”

“I don’t care about MBE. I care about my company.”

The tonal dissonance of Roger saying he cared about A1E’s closest rival, MBE, before saying he didn’t left Tom speechless for the moment, enough for the promoter to keep his rant going.

“You might win matches and get results while you’re in the ring, but that doesn’t mean I have to advertise you as one of the stars I want my fans to come and see. Even if you beat Housefly or Farnsworth, what makes you think the people are going to pay for tickets just to see you clown around as Champion? This isn’t just a sport. It’s a business, and I refuse to have my business have the same image as some of these other clowncar companies out there.”

“So I’m good enough to keep kids watching, but not good enough to pay for keeping the next generation of fans hooked?”

Roger finally looked up from the papers on his desk.

“Correlation doesn’t equal causation. For all I know, they’re watching for Beast. Or Fly. Or Euclid. Not you.”

Tom’s shoulders slumped.

“You got any other bullshit you wanna sell me?”

No response.

“Then get out.”

🍕

Two days is a long time to mull over showing someone a corkboard with red string on it. Tom vacillated between feeling silly about his hesitance and feeling strong revulsion to being the one to break the ice. He remembered back to the first time the two teamed, before they ever shared a ring, before they became rivals. It was Ivan and his notoriously absent lapdog Alexei making the first overtures.

He thought back to what that partnership brought him. At first, the thoughts drifted towards the veiled threats, the attack in Brooklyn, the losses in the ring. But that night at the homeless shelter with the hand-turkeys, that one meeting led to a victory in the ring, teamwork that was as surprising to Tom as it was to the people watching in the arena and at home. Neither Gamble nor Mort knew what hit them that night.

And at the end of the match, the grandest spectacle of them all, perhaps in the entire history of the ReVival.

Hurrican-Russia.

Was it a textbook-perfect hurricanrana? Oh God no, not even close.

But Ivan incapacitated Gamble with that move. And it was the spectacle that was born of a partnership between the two.

Tom and Ivan could create great things together. It was possible.

Maybe if there was a spectacle more than just Ivan catching Steve from the superhuman thrust of Coltrane’s massive arms, the whole team would be intact going into Survivor Round Two.

Tom took responsibility for the failing.

He wouldn’t take responsibility for a second time.

He grabbed the corkboard and charged into the dining room, where Ivan sat with a t-bone, clean of any meat, on a brown-streaked otherwise empty plate in front of him, newspaper with Cyrillic typeface splayed out directly below his line of sight.

“Alright,” he stated assertively. “This cold war has gone on long enough. We need to get on the same page.”

Ivan looked up from his newspaper and laughed, seeming almost dismissive.

“Ivan,” Tom continued, “I’ve come to offer glasnost.”

🍕

Tom slammed the door to the hotel room behind him shut.

“I take it the meeting with Roger didn’t go so well,” remarked Tam from the bed.

“I was right,” he said exasperatedly. “They don’t respect me. Didn’t even hear out my proposal before talking about ‘funny don’t equal money.’”

Tam sat up on the bed to face her fiancé.

“Well, before you assumed that they didn’t appreciate you. Now? You know.”

Tom sat down next to her on the bed.

“You can’t go through life assuming things,” she continued. “You kinda have to be direct. Otherwise, you’re just going to drive yourself nuts.”

“How do you know these things? We’re the same age. It’s not like you’re a sugar momma with years more experience in life than me.”

“Eh, you know what they say. Girls mature faster.”

Tom let out a belabored laugh before collapsing on the bed.

“Besides, I might have a better option for you instead of continuing to let these clowns call you the clown.”

“Is it MBE? Because if I quit A1E, there’s a rider in my contract that says I can’t sign with them for two years after.”

“No, no, no, remember Dan Ryan?”

Tom sat back up at the mention of the Ego Buster.

“How can anyone forget that guy? He makes Tim Duncan look small.”

“Well, I was talking to Lindz on the phone before you got back, she wanted to know all the deets of your meeting, but she didn’t know what time it was happening.”

Tom gave the “get on with it” gesture with his hands, to which Tam groaned and rolled her eyes.

“ANYWAY, she said he’s started a new company. Bad news is Marcus the furball is working for them too, double duty. But the good news is that he’s been asking about you. Like, I don’t want to give all the details but sounds like he’s really interested in having you aboard. And the A1E stuff isn’t a problem if you think you want to do both. Y’know, in case one of them doesn’t work out, you have a fallback without burning a bridge.”

“Interesting,” Tom replied, stroking his chin.

The possibilities started unfolding in front of him in his mind’s eye in that hotel room in the suburbs of Minneapolis.

🍕

“Glasnost, eh? I respect use of one of our words.”

Ivan looked up from his newspaper almost immediately to look Tom in his face.

“We are teammates, after all.”

“Yeah,” Tom replied. “And I think our lack of teammateyness on the Aggro-Crag cost us a man going forward.”

“Eh, it was just buffoon anyway. Hardly a teammate.”

Tom shook his head.

“Ivan, that’s where you’re wrong. Even if what Steve brought to the table was negligible, having him still here with the rest of us would mean that any one of the members of Team Snow wouldn’t be here. Do you think they’re less dangerous with a full house than they would be if we even sent Hunter home?”

Ivan furrowed his brow.

“Fair point.”

He closed the newspaper and started to rise from the table, grabbing his dish to bring towards the trashcan to dispose of the bone.

“The way I see it,” Tom continued, “If we work together, we can make sure that come Ascension, it’s all three members of Team Avalon in that triple threat. I know you don’t like me, but if you look at this way, if we get to the final, you’ll be in the ring with two guys against whom you’re undefeated.”

Ivan dropped the bone into the trashcan, and turned towards the sink.

“You misunderstand me, Tom,” Ivan replied. “Of course, I do not like you. There are few Americans I can even pretend to like long enough to be in same room as them.”

He placed the dish down in the sink with gingerness few people have ever seen from the Russian Bear.

“The idea of you as person causes my blood to curdle.”

Tom felt the antipathy welling up inside of him, a source he’d not felt spring this hard in over twenty years.

“However,” Ivan continued, “I was not lying all those months ago when I told you backstage that I respect you as opponent. I am many things, but a liar, my dear mother would curse me from beyond grave if I ever failed to tell the truth.”

He turned to face Tom head on.

“I hope you feel the same about me.”

Tom nodded.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t be trying to make this work if I didn’t respect you on some level.”

Ivan smiled.

“Good. Now, you said you have something to show me?”

Tom nodded.

“Of course. I made all the connections, and I think one of the big mistakes we made, and all the teams made to be quite honest, was not accounting for that damn minotaur.”

Ivan laughed as he turned his gaze towards the red-stringed corkboard.