The Hole

A

Hey, Dad. It’s Kerry again.

Here to fill you in on how I’m handling the family wrestling legacy, and all that.

And you’d be pleased to know that big things are finally happening.

After two long years of pushing that boulder uphill, it would appear that the wrestling gods have finally come around to seeing your boy as once more being worthy enough to compete for a major championship.

As it turns out, hard work and personal sacrifice had nothing to do with it. All it took was being a complete and absolute fuckhead to another human being.

No, Dad, I’m not proud of it. Nor am I proud to tell you the fans cheered at the sight of your boy having a hotdog smashed in his face.

But these things apparently happen in the industry of today, where the only thing that sells is drama, and being good at your job is apparently seen as a show of arrogance.

Like Ioanna says: it’s a fucking carnival, and to fight here is to dance with clowns.

Seems fitting, then, that to win this championship -- to actually add something of my own to this legacy of ours -- I’ll need to fight the Queen Clown herself.

We all know she can dance.

But I’m only interested in hearing her sing.

B

“So as soon as he said that, I popped up off the chesterfield and I said, ‘Now hey there, Dad! It’s aboot time I put my foot down here, eh? I’m not wantin’ to be a mountie like you and Granddad! I’m pursuing my dream of owning my own bar overseas, and if’n you don’t like it, then you can take off!’”

Kerry Kuroyama could not remember asking to hear the man’s life story, but found himself enduring it just the same.

“Hm…”

Growing up close to the northern border, he had been around Canadians for enough of his life to develop the means to tune out the god-awful yodel of their accents. As it was, amid the tangential rambles about a tenuous father-son relationship, Kerry found himself getting lost in the row of brown, amber, and gold bottles set on a shelf overlooking the bar.

“So then right after I told him sworry for raising my voice to him, I packed my things, walked out of the hoose, caught the first flight I could get to London, and got myself right to work, I tell ya. A few years later, here we are, eh?”

“Here we are…” Kerry echoed wearily.

‘Here’, to be specific, was the homely establishment Majestic Moose. An ‘authentic’ Canadian bar, managed by a polite and portly proprietor that answered to the name of Gord Lundgaard.

Something reminiscent of an Irish pub over stateside, only replace the shamrocks with maple leafs, the dartboards with mooseheads, and the portraits of saints with photos of hockey players. As an added touch, a jukebox in the corner gave the air a flavor of traditional Canadian music in the form of BTO, Rush, and Barenaked Ladies. Naturally, everything reeked of maple.

“Real sworry if I’m being a bother, sir. Can I get you another drink? Something… a bit harder perhaps?”

Gord nodded to his patron’s glass, sitting empty on the small round table where he sat.

“Another cranberry juice…” muttered Kerry, sliding it his way.

“Yep, you got it, buddy!”

Taking the glass, Gord turned from the table and went back to the bar. As he did, the wind chimes hanging over the door rang as someone entered.

A moment later, Ioanna Drakos pulled out the seat next to Kerry’s, and took a seat.

“I see you received my message, koutávi,” she said in place of a greeting.

Kerry grunted uncomfortably.

“Interesting choice for a meeting place…” he grumbled ruefully. “First, you get me to agree to quit drinking. Now, you bring me to a bar?”

Drakos chuckled slightly as she shook her head.

“You are mistaken, koutávi. This is no bar. This is a mere restaurant… that happens to have a bar in it.”

She tilted her head in the direction of the lout behind the bar, pour OceanSpray into Kerry’s glass with painstaking precision

“Gord makes the best maple-seasoned elk steaks in all of London. And better pancakes than those fools you mistake for friends could possibly imagine. Take my word for it.”

Her voice, for once, was warm and pleasant. Kerry found it to be unusually disarming. The woman sitting next to him was hardly the fearsome To Minoikó who spent her days breaking and humbling prospective fighters in the back of her Wheat to Chaff Bakery he had come to know.

“So what are we doing here?” pushed Kerry. He was actively trying to keep his eyes from returning to the shelf of whiskey bottles.

By now, Ioanna was perusing a bifold menu bound together by acid-washed denim.

“You leave London this week, yes?”

“That’s right,” Kerry confirmed with a nod.

He had a ticket for a train to Lisbon that left in two days. The lease was paid, and the luggage was packed. The plan was to take care of business at the show and catch the first flight back to the states.

“Then let us treat ourselves to an evening of indulgence,” said Drakos with a wistful smile. “After putting up with me these past two months, I would say you have earned it.”

By now, Gord had returned from the bar with a fresh glass of cranberry juice.

“Here we are, sir,” he chirped merrily. “Real sworry about the wait, eh?”

Kuroyama glared ruefully into the glass of magenta liquid set before him.

“How about you, Madame Drakos?” said Gord, turning his attention to the other person at the table. “Will you be havin’ the usual?”

Nodding agreeably, Ioanna folded up the menu and set it aside.

“You know me too well, old friend,” she said. “Two elk steaks. One for myself, and one for my honored guest. This is his first time, after all.”

“Oh, I’ll be sure to put my elbows into it then! Wouldn’t want this mister thinkin’ I was some sort of hoser, eh?”

Sadly, it was far too late for Gord Lundgaard to avoid that.

“One other thing, Gord…” added Drakos as he turned to leave.

She leveled Aegean blue eyes on Kerry. A wry smile crossed her face. It was a look he had become all too familiar with in their many sparring sessions.

It was the look of a cat playing with its prey.

“A glass of your finest whiskey.”

It felt to Kuroyama in that instant that his liver was performing seppuku.

“Whoa, jeez!” Gord exclaimed, blinking in astonishment. “Didn’t know the Madame was interested in whettin’ her whistle! Well now, I’ve been saving a bottle of Rare Hare Lucky Bastard for special occasions, eh?”

Ioanna nodded with certainty. “Then that will do nicely. Thank you, Gord.”

Gord waddled his way back to the other side of the bar. As he reached for the bottles on the shelf, Kerry forced himself to look away

“What are we celebrating?” he asked his host.

Her smile only widened. “Your progress, koutávi.”

Kerry felt his eyes roll.

“‘Progress’, right…” he muttered indignantly. “You know, it’s been over five months since I’ve won a match in a PRIME ring without a bunch of assholes in masks kicking me while I was down, but sure. We’ll toast to my ‘progress’.”

Hearing his naked sarcasm, Drakos slowly shook her head in disappointment.

“It astounds me that you have yet to learn the purpose of our time together, koutávi,” she said. “There is nothing I can show you in my ring that will make you ‘better’ than what you are now.”

Kuroyama felt his anger and frustration well up within him. If two months of abuse from this woman wasn’t about getting better, then what the hell was the point of it all?

“I took you on to help you understand where you belong in this world,” she said, as if reading his mind.

Now, instead of rolling, his eyes skeptically narrowed.

“And where is it you think I belong?” he inquired.

Before she could answer, his senses were assaulted by notes of vanilla and honey upon Gord’s bumbling return to their table.

“Sworry again aboot the wait,” he apologized, as though it were instinct.

On the table between them sat the Lucky Bastard.

“I’ll get right on those steaks, eh?” said Gord before departing once more.

Her hand found the glass, and she raised it to him.

“You have earned it,” she said, her azure eyes continuing to study

Kerry stared longingly into the amber. He could feel his mouth salivate, as though his taste buds were being awakened from eons of dormancy.

Why the hell not? Damn right he’d earned it, after the shit she put him through. Two months of sobriety, and not a goddamn thing to show for it.

He didn’t have to dwell on it long before his hand came up.

“I’m good,” he said at last, pushing the glass away.

Her head tilted, as her expression shifted into curiosity.

“In the interest of ‘progress’, I think that’s the one area where I’ve actually made some,” he explained. “It would be a shame to quit now, after coming this far.”

A long moment passed where she continued to stare at him, only to break out in laughter.

“Good answer, koutávi.” said Drakos, rekindling the rigid tone of To Minoikó. “Hopefully, you remember those words down in Lisbon.”

She tipped the glass back, and woefully, Kerry watched the Lucky Bastard disappear down her gullet.

C

I already know RIA is going to bring me her best, Dad.

Everyone brings their best against me.

Jackson. Walker. Battaglia. Ellis.

The story is always the same. Any and all motherfuckers that step in the ring with me seem to know they have to bring it if they stand any chance.

But for the life of me, Dad… I can’t understand why.

The way the rest of that locker room sees me, you’d think I was someone of status. Like I was, I don’t know, a former Universal Champion, or something.

But what has Kerry Kuroyama really done in PRIME to be considered a wrestler with that kind of status? Feels like since I’ve come here, it’s been a nonstop struggle to keep my head above the waters of mediocrity.

Still, to beat me in that ring is taken as a point of pride.

I don’t get it, Dad.

I don’t get how I can’t see in myself what the rest of the locker room sees in me.

How from everything I’ve experienced, the feeling I get is that I’m just another face in that locker room. One that, for some reason, motivates people to bring their A-game.

I guess that’s the unfortunate burden of greatness. Spent half of my life since you died, all in pursuit of being the best wrestler I could be.

In the end, I’m just a rock for someone else to climb. A pro wrestling Goliath, waiting to be toppled by a David.

I don’t like to admit that it’s been hard to come to grips with, Dad.

And I don’t like to admit that there’s certain things I need in this world to rest easy with what I am. But I feel that I need to leave the arena with that Alias Championship, Dad.

I have to withstand everything RIA brings, because I need to feel like I’ve done something of use with this career. Something I know you can be proud of.

More importantly, though, I need something that helps me to see myself the way they see me.

Because if I can’t see myself that way… how can you?

D

“My dad.”

Ioanna Drakos, a good three fingers of Lucky Bastard into her self-proclaimed “evening of indulgence”, stirred herself awake.

“Did you say something, koutávi?”

Kerry stared into the taunting, irascible magenta of his cranberry juice. Sobriety was, somehow, becoming its own form of insanity.

“You asked me why I fight,” he said. “And I fight because of my dad. Because he was a wrestler. Because his father was a wrestler. So, naturally, I fell into the family line of work.”

She had been slouched in her chair for some time, digesting one of Gord’s famous elk steaks. Now she sat up, and listened to her student.

“Sometimes, I wonder what else I could have done with my life,” Kuroyama continued. “Could have gone to college. Become a lawyer, or doctor, or some shit. But then he suddenly died when I was sixteen, and I guess you could say that more or less accelerated the process.”

The citric torture of the juice continued to mock him. He drank the last of it, to be free of looking at it further.

“I don’t know… I guess some part of me was trying to come to grips with the grief of losing him, and I had this notion that I needed to carry on his legacy somehow. Like, to bring the Kuroyama name the acclaim it deserved, or something.”

She parked her elbows on the table and leaned in, resting her chin on her interlocked fingers while listening in earnest.

“But sometimes, I think back to what he said to me while he was lying there on his deathbed,” said Kerry. “He said, ‘Kerry, Whatever you do with your life, I just want you to be happy.’”

He shook his head. For years, a steady intake of whiskey had dulled these feelings of emotional destitution. But the sobriety had made the feelings fresh. Now they cut through him clean as a razor.

“But how the hell am I supposed to be happy living in a world without him?”

His fist pounded the table. From behind the bar, Gord instinctively spouted a “sworry” for doing nothing in particular.

“The day I came to you, you said I fought with anger,” he said. “But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I’ve been hanging onto this anger for half my life. Because the only person I ever wanted to see me succeed on this level isn’t around anymore. In his place is just a hole, and I’ve spent years trying to fill it with one opponent after the next. But lately, I’ve come to realize that nothing’s ever going to fill that hole… and that just makes me wonder what I’m really doing with my life. If I’m living it the way my father would’ve really wanted.”

He sighed, and looked skyward.

“Am I really happy with a life of fighting, or am I doing this because it’s the only thing I can do well in this world?”

Ioanna stared at him for a moment longer, then shut her eyes.

“I suppose I am not so different than you,” she said. “I also came to fight because of my father.”

Kerry sat up, immediately intrigued. In all their time together, he had known her to be something of an enigma.

Only now was she pulling the curtain aside, and giving him a glimpse into her past.

“Was he a fighter also?” he asked.

Her demeanor changed completely. Her gaze became distant.

“No…”

Old memories were resurfacing, and Kerry immediately regretted asking the question.

“The life of a warrior came to me by necessity. I needed to fight, to protect myself. And later, to protect others.”

Her hand came across the table, seizing his own.

“I know what it means, to live with a hole,” she said. “But we cannot change what was taken from us. All we can do is deny it from having power over our lives. So I do not fight to fill that hole; I fight to defy it. And in place of anger, I find joy, in knowing it does not control me. Knowing that I can still be my best self in spite of the pain it brings.”

Her cobalt blue eyes met his browns. For the first time in months, Kerry could feel he was seeing her.

“I only wish for you to find that same joy, koutávi,” she said. “But you are a fool to think you could ever find it in a carnival like your PRIME.”

Kerry sighed. Somehow, he knew it was coming to this ultimatum.

“You’re saying I should quit.”

Her grip on his hand intensified.

“They will never appreciate you for what you are, Kerry,” she said, with a curt and intoxicated shake of her head. “But BATTLEARTS needs someone like you.”

She leaned in, and whispered into his ear.

“And unlike them, we will appreciate you for the warrior you are.”

The legs of her chair scraped loudly against the (obviously maple) wood of the floor as she pushed her way to her feet and went for the door.

The chimes sounded, and she was gone.

Kerry now in silence, ruminating over their prior conversation.

Leave PRIME?

He’d be lying if the thought hadn’t crossed his mind before.

But as it were, his mind came back to the sweet, honey-like notes of the Lucky Bastard from earlier in the evening.

It would be a shame to quit now, after coming this far.

And if he left now, who would be there to keep the miserable bastards in that locker room bringing their best?

“Well hey there, guy! Will you be needing the check?

Gord was there. Kerry was immediately reminded of his hatred for everything Canadian.

As if he could read his face, Gord responded the only way a full-blooded Manitoban could respond.

“Sworry…”