Sisyphus and '70s Music DJs: Both Bringing You That Same Classic Rock Every Single Night

“Aye, you know I’ve never been to a wrestling show before?”

Tom looked off in the distance at the shot from tee he had just sliced into the woods as his father-in-law waxed on about his invitation to Ultraviolence.

“Eileen, lord, she’s been to too many to count, but for all the people in my life who love it…”

Tom put the driver back into his bag and loaded it onto the cart.

“I think it’ll be a good time for all of you. Rare that Philly gets a big show like this, and even rarer that I’m wrestling on it.”

Angus grabbed his driver, but he hesitated to grab a ball out of the sleeve.

“Aye, I’m looking forward to it, but Eileen is still mad we’re in a suite and not down in the front row.”

Tom chuckled. His mother-in-law being the most rabid wrestling fan in his family and his most ardent supporter was always weirdly ironic but sweet given the relationship he had with his own parents.

“She’ll get over it. I’m gonna try to get Vae Victis to agree to a meet-and-greet with her before the show.”

“I have no feckin’ idea who that is or what that means.”

Tom and Angus heartily both shared a laugh for a moment. The smile then left Angus’ face as he finally grabbed his ball.

“You know, lad, Tamara has been telling me about your recent doctor’s visits. It’s not my place to tell another man what he should do, but as your father-in-law, I have some offers for you at least.”

Tom cocked his head as he looked at Angus. He raised his eyebrow, telling him to elaborate without saying the word out loud.

“What d’ye think of getting into sales, my lad?”

Tom chuckled.

“Really? I think I’d rather keep getting hit in the head.”

Angus shook his head.

“No, no, it’s not like that at all. You’re an affable lad, and that’s half the game. The other half is getting contacts, and I’d have you work directly with me. You’d be inheriting my rolodex when you’re comfortable and I’m ready to retire.”

“Y’know what, Angus, you’re a real son of a bitch to drop that on me when we’re so close to the 19th hole. I can’t think about important things like that while I’m drinking my lagers.”

Now it was Angus’ turn to laugh uproariously.

“Aye, I get it, I get it. You don’t have to think about it now, but it’s somethin’ to consider fer when yer fightin’ days are through.”

“Maybe. But I think our fighting days together are going to start if we don’t get through his hole. The guys playing behind us look like they’ve been drinking the whole week.”

Angus laughed as he dropped the ball on the pin. He arched back and swung, mightily cracking the ball off the tee into the wild blue yonder towards the green. 🪨 “So, Father’s Day is this Sunday, and you still haven’t told me what you wanted to do.”

Tom sat on his recliner with a glass of scotch on the endtable and melted look on his face. The air conditioning was working fine, but he’d been spending extra hours at the sweatbox in North Philly with his old teacher Pedro perfecting his ground game. Slipping up against Hanlon was to be expected. Former Universal Champion, good enough to be allowed to be in the Glueminati. Tony Gamble was different, not that he was a lesser threat, but because there was so much pride riding on the match.

The Grin spent the last three months insulting everything about him. Honestly, the insults weren’t the worst part. Old dogs spam old tricks until the owners euthanize them, and no one in the decades that he’d been slinking around wrestling rings had the combination of dexterity and lethality to keep him down for good. A man can sit back and ignore the words with stoic persistence, but after the droning repeats with the regularity of a trigonometric function over a long enough string of x-values, new and fresh means of annoyance start to give rise.

Gamble had become so persistent that his insults felt bold, brash. Things he’d said hundreds of times before stung harder than they should ever have, because what kind of man has the same gall to say something that got him knocked five-and-a-half feet into the goddamn dirt again, now with fifty percent more bass in his voice?

The motherfucking nerve of that imp.

And what’s worse was Angus’ offer. Not that it was an insult. Far from it. There are mega jackpot winners who didn’t hit lotteries that came close to the one with which he’d struck gold on his in-laws, especially his father-in-law. It’s just that the offer sounded good. Too good. He knew Angus wouldn’t attach any strings, but his mind always raced towards implications that may or may  not have been there.

Namely, taking an offer, leaving wrestling for good. At this time? When his entire raison d’etre for battle going into the next pay-per-view was how he still had a lot left in the tank?

What if Gamble was right?

What if that little fucking shit was telling the goddamn truth, as uncomfortable as it was?

Just thinking about the entire situation sagged the skin under Tom’s eyes even further, revealing crow’s feet that starlets like Katherine Hepburn only saw in their goddamn nightmares.

And he didn’t even hear his wife.

“HELLO, Earth to Battaglia.”

He jolted alert.

“Sorry, rough day at the grapple factory.”

Tam sat down on the couch in the nearest seat to her husband.

“You’ve been grinding yourself into dust, babe. It’s Father’s Day Sunday. Think about how you want to unwind, especially if that unwinding requires me to make a phone call to a restaurant with limited reservations left on the docket.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, we could always just do the steakhouse again. Or not, dunno, maybe keep it a little more casual this year? Barbecue?”

“Whatever you want. It’s your day.”

He paused briefly, not to change the subject so abruptly, especially with a topic so unimportant and fun against his usual wave of angst.

“You know, your dad brought up a pretty interesting proposition.”

Tam groaned.

“Don’t tell me he offered you a job as his heir apparent.”

“He said you were telling him about my medical stuff. I didn’t think he ran the job offer by you first.”

“My family talks about everything. I know you don’t know much about that because of all the secrets your parents and at least one of your brothers liked to keep, but we have always discussed everything from Sheryl’s transition all the way down to what clothes we were all going to wear to a fuckin’ block party.”

Tom knew everything she said, about his family at least, was 100 percent correct.

“So how long did it take for you to say no?”

Tom’s general amusement turned to slinking eyes and difficulty to find words.

“The thing is… I didn’t.”

“What? You…”

“I didn’t say yes; I said I’d think about it.”

Tam shook her head.

“As long as I’ve known you, even when you weren’t active, wrestling has been in your blood. Even if you weren’t wrestling, what about the behind-the-scenes stuff in PRIME? Or that thing you and me have been talking about, where you just open a shitty little lucha indie and book that once a month?”

Tom pulled the lever and leaned back on his recliner.

“I said I’d think about it, not that I’d do it. And besides, sometimes a change can do you good.”

He turned his head to face his wife, even as her face was at an ever-so-awkward angle in his recline position.

“You know better than anyone how much of a vampire wrestling can be. Maybe it’d be good for me to be in the production trucks or the booking rooms. But maybe it’d be good to get away from the people like Gamble or Farthington. The thorns in my side and the mountains I could never climb.”

She got up from her seat and looked at her husband with freshly rolled eyes.

“You say that, but I know you. Just like you couldn’t stop watching ReVolution when you were out, you won’t be able to stay away from that company or any company when you’re in my dad’s building, huffing farts from shitbag clients and cheap vendors, begging to trade their financial violence for the physical kind that you’re best at.”

She walked out of the room with purpose, not angry, but carrying the kind of shock when something completely knocks you off your horse for a moment. She climbed the steps, but soon after she completely left the downstairs scene, she yelled from the second floor.

“And pick a damn place to eat on Sunday!” 🪨 Tom always thought the guys who said they “accomplished everything they could” in the business were full of the stinkiest shit possible. No matter how many titles you won, there was always a guy who was hungry enough to win one more than you did. If the time felt right and you ended up short of your peers, that was one thing. If fear was the mindkiller, greed shredded the body in ways gom jabbar could only dream of. But treating the business like there were finite accomplishments? Like you could just walk away? The only people for whom Tom had less respect were the out-and-out shitbags like Marcus Westcott.

Yet here he was, sitting in his living room, a glass of scotch he’d not drunk out of in hours, time lurching monotonously forward, considering walking away. Saying to himself that he’d accomplished everything he could. Did his body ache? Yeah, but bodies in their mid-40s tended to feel each creak with the same drama reserved for men half his age crawling out of car crashes. He could still get out of bed in the morning. Jog to Sarcone Bakery for a couple of loaves of the good stuff. Trade holds in a musty, sweaty gym with luchadores with half the tread on their tires he had.

Did he think mastering the “grumpy old man” style of grappling and mat wrestling would come easy to him? Did he think Hayes Hanlon was Felix Mullen or Quinn Fleetwood? Were the accomplishments he’d written on a list five years ago when he signed his contract that far off in the horizon that he’d consider walking away now? Like many a Greek tragic hero, Tom set the snare for his own undoing when he mentioned Farthington, but the Champion wasn’t the only one. There were far too many peaks he’d not been able to crest, and even though therapy had helped him not dump these grand insecurities on anyone who’d lend an ear, it did not mean that failing to conquer Youngblood and FLAMBERGE and even monsters from his past like Sean Stevens didn’t continue to gnaw at him from the inside.

It could only be a matter of time before he got that ever-elusive win over one of them, if not all of them. Just as it might only be a matter of time before Tony Gamble caught up with him and turned everything he’d ever said derogatory about The Anglo Luchador from slander into prophecy. And what would Tom get out of beating Gamble one more time? What was the satisfaction? He pondered that question on more than one occasion, mainly because of the reasons that The Grin continued to bother him even after planting his flag on his diminutive chest several times in the past.

The fuckin’ audacity.

The next time, the only time, Tony Gamble would stay down would be when he died. In 2003, maybe Tom could have wrestled a match that made that a possibility. Now, the only way he’d sleep The Grin is if he brought a gun into the ring. Where would the satisfaction be? He thought about that intensely instead of writing it off like he might have before, but the mental gymnastics going back and forth on both sides of the argument made him more tired than he was after intense training.

That thought-train was derailed, as his phone started buzzing wildly in his pocket. He fumbled for it, even though he knew that there was more of a chance that it was a scammer looking to offer him a loan than it was a real person. He had a feeling though.

That feeling was right.

The caller ID read the words “Mr. C.” 🪨 “Hello?”

“Tom! Jake Colton. How are you?”

“I’ve been better, but I’ve been worse. What’s going on?”

“Listen, remember when I asked you on Jabber to take Tony Gamble out for five bucks?”

Tom chuckled.

“Yeah, and then I offered to do it for free.”

“I was serious. I only just got my daughter back, and he had to start his bullshit again. I’m sick of it, and I could use the laugh that comes with seeing him get loaded into an ambulance.”

Tom scratched his chin at the serendipitous topic of conversation. How can a man who never stops running his mouth ever be humbled? The maelstrom in his head raged, sped up by how auspicious the timing of Jake’s call was, but not short enough that Mr. Colton didn’t notice the silence.

“Hello, Tom, can you hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah, just…”

He paused again, but not for as long this time.

“Mr. C, can I ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“You know that no matter how bad Gamble loses in any match, he’s going to get back up and keep yapping, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So, what is the motivation? Like, if I can’t shut up him up, if Nate can’t, or Youngblood, Ivan, Dusk, really anyone in the history of this company, then what is the motivation?”

Jake paused for a moment.

“Besides the feeling of a crisp five-dollar bill in your hand?”

Tom chuckled a little before Jake continued.

“‘Cause even if he don’t learn a lesson, makin’ a smart-mouth punk pay feels good. I’ve figured out that some people change. Others won’t, and you can’t make ‘em…but you can still make an example out of ‘em.”

Tom scratched his chin again as Jake continued.

“One of my students, and don’t ask me how we got to talking about these things, once told me about this French guy who wrote about gettin’ satisfaction out of a life that doesn’t have meaning. Somethin’ to do with Sisyphus. I don’t know if I agree that life doesn’t have greater meaning, but the rest of it made some bit of sense.”

“Sisyphus? Is he the guy who looked back at his girlfriend and turned her to stone or the one who pushed the rock up the hill?”

Jake laughed.

“The rock guy. Question was whether or not he could be happy rollin’ it up a hill every day forever. Punishment from the gods and all that…maybe too far, but that’s the Greek gods for you. Anyway. The kid said, if you imagine that he could be happy doin’ that, whether it was the workout, time filling his day, whatever…then you can imagine that for anything you have to do.”

Tom squinted his eyes.

“So it’s your choice. Is putting Tony in the hospital gonna change anything? Probably not. But you can still look forward to it. You can feel the joy it brings, and then you can take even more joy in the idea of doing it to him again, the next time he talks shit and needs to get slapped down.”

“You know what, Mr. C? I think I get it. Thanks.”

“Hey, don’t mention it. And if you want that five bucks after you beat him, swing by the Clubhouse if you’re ever in the area.”

“Thanks, but no thanks on that. Like I said on Jabber. I’m happy to do it for free.”

“Okay, then how about this? I’ll buy you a drink the next time you’re out here.”

Tom chuckled.

“Deal.” 🪨 “Oh, I love barbecue,” Angus said as the whole family, Tom, Tam, the kids, Eileen, and Sheryl, sat down for dinner. “What’s good here? Of all the places I’ve been in the city…”

“The brisket goes crazy!” shouted Vinny from across the table.

“Yeah, I have to agree with my son here. Also, you gotta get the mac ‘n cheese.”

“Well, that’s a resounding recommendation! Hopefully it’s as good a use of that cut as it is for corned beef and cabbage.”

Eileen rolled her eyes at her husband’s insistence on acting like a born-and-bred Irishman and not an American who just happened to go there a lot on business.

“Honestly, I love the pickles,” said Tam. “We came here when I was pregnant with Vinny, and I don’t think I ate anything but the pickles.”

“Cheapest date ever.”

Tam playfully hit Tom with the roll of paper towels on the table that acted as the napkin dispenser, and everyone had a good laugh.

The table ordered, and everyone was engaged in small talk as the dads opened their gifts for the day. Conversation stopped as everyone dug into their platters. Eileen left a pile of rib bones on her plate that stretched halfway up to the ceiling. Sheryl and Vinny kept eating off each other’s plates, while Zo ate slowly between text messages in his group chat. Tam made little tea sandwiches using the pickle chips as “bread” with her pork. And true to form, Angus had the biggest smile on his sauce-encrusted face as he ate the most tender brisket he’d ever tried.

After everyone finished, Angus leaned over the table to speak to his son-in-law.

“Aye lad, you give any thought to what I offered you last weekend?”

Tom nodded.

“I thought about it. And I wanna thank you for that offer, but I don’t think my heart would be happy if I left wrestling.”

Angus furrowed his brow, smiled slightly, and nodded.

“Are ya sure, lad?”

“Yeah. I think even if it comes to the point where I can’t fight anymore, I would miss being around the business too much. Going to the arena, working on producing shows, training the next era, making the matches. I have to be involved somehow. I’m more than a father and a husband.”

He grabbed a paper towel and wiped off the corner of his mouth before he continued.

“I’m a wrestler.”

Angus chuckled.

“Aye, that’s one thing I always admired about ya, Tommy, my boy. You’re always honest about how ya feel. Part of the reason why I think you and my daughter lasted all this time, if I’m to be honest myself.”

They both shared a laugh.

“And you know what? Maybe Ultraviolence doesn’t have to be your last show.”

“Aye, lad, maybe not. I guess if you’re going to be in it for the long haul, I might as well see what the ladies of the family are so interested in.”