I have died many times in my life and on the seventh of February, in an arena filled with people who I've never met and likely never will, I will die again. Don't be sad about it, it’s not all that bad. Most people live their days out in blissful ignorance never knowing when death will be waiting at the doorway to greet them, it comes to them under the guise of a pleasant face or the daily routine that they’ve taken for granted. It’s a surprise to these people that their number has finally been called, but it will not be a surprise to me. I will have the unique experience of greeting death not as something to be fearful of but as if it were an old friend coming to walk me home at the end of a long day.
Though I will die in the middle of the ring Damian Ayla will not be the architect of my demise much to his disappointment. Something that started off as me proving a point to myself has turned from the biggest match of my career to a pivotal turning point in my life. All the eggs are in this basket, so to speak. It would be kind to tell the insecure and fragile ego’d Ayla that any of this is about him but it’s not, not really. The fact of the matter is that this is my story and Damian Ayla is nothing more than the supporting character who has the opportunity to watch me as wildflowers start to grow through the cracked asphalt of my body.
That isn’t to say that Ayla is entirely unimportant, his role is important, sure. But truthfully, it could be anyone standing across from me in the ring when the bell sounds. It’s just fate that allows it to be a man who offends me more than the insinuation that pineapple belongs on pizza. When I came to this company, I had never heard the name Damian Ayla and I’d wager a bet that I’m not alone in this. As I surveyed the landscape and started the work of learning about the man who I knew that I would eventually stand across from, it was a shock to me just what a small champion Ayla is.
Where I come from, our world champions carry themselves with a certain importance. They know that the task of representing their individual companies lays heavy on their shoulders and they take this responsibility seriously and with a certain reverence. World champions do not merely show up when they are booked and fight the opponents who are placed in front of them. That’s the bare minimum expected out of any Joe Schmo on the card and to be the meanest dog in the fight requires much more than just the bare minimum. This is who Damian Ayla is, he’s a bare minimum champion coasting on doing just enough to keep that belt in his possession.
I’m not sure if that is because he doesn’t take his position seriously or if perhaps his ego has grown so large that he feels above the responsibilities of the position. I guess it doesn’t really matter. A few very short weeks ago we all witnessed as Ayla raged about Pinkston with regards to his popularity and twitter followers as if the fact that LC Pinkston has excelled at marketing himself, and by extension, this company was something offensive to be sneered at and not as something that any true leader should have applauded and leveraged for his own use.
The landscape of this business is in a period of evolution. There is more collaboration, more cross pollination. It’s a good thing, in my opinion. It’s the reason why you see Vhodka Black on the Tara Fenix Charity Cruise, The Denzel Porter Invitational, The Roth 3, appearing in SPLAT! Television shows. The fact of the matter is that when I appear at these events it’s not for my own benefit. It’s for the benefit of all of us, all of Pro Wrestling Excellence. The more eyes that are on me in the special events means more eyes on this product and as we all know more eyes on the product means more money into the pockets of the talent on this roster. That isn’t even to speak of the professional connections which will drive more new talent to the door of our company giving us a stronger product that is constantly changing to offer something new and exciting in this rapidly evolving landscape.
Now ask yourselves this: What has Damian Ayla done for this company? When you turn off PWE programming do you forget all about the existence of Ayla until the next show? Do you see him doing media? Promoting the product on his social media platforms? Engaging with his contemporaries at events outside of those put on by PWE? Or do you see a paper champion continuing to do the bare minimum effort required of him?
You see, that’s what I mean about a world champion having a certain level of responsibility on their shoulders. Being a world champion is not about the man, it’s about the people. The very people that Ayla looks down his nose on week after week from his self-appointed pedestal. He sneers at people like myself and LC Pinkston for doing the work he should be doing all while self-flagellating himself on what a great Excellence champion he is. All hail the king, baby.
In my time here I’ve noticed that Ayla has this habit for imitating his opponents. For the rat queen ALiCE, he traipsed through sewers holding shit covered rodents all while fashioning himself a King. On the last pay-per-view when he was set to face Nathaniel Cartwright, he became a hunter regaling everyone with boyhood stories of his love of the kill. A few weeks ago, when he found himself opposite LC Pinkston suddenly the word “bro” made its way into his vocabulary.
And now I have to wonder, how will Damian Ayla fashion himself after me? Will he fly his private jet down to Bent Fork and spend an hour walking around in a trailer park where he will find that he is somewhat envious of the simplicity of its occupants? It's a low hanging fruit. Easy. Lazy.
Had he been paying attention he’d realize that it all comes down to curveballs. My philosophy for my career comes down to the exact same reason I never use a blinker while driving: never let these hoes know what’s coming next.
I was fifteen years old the first time that I died. It was and remains, the scariest day of my entire life. It might be hard to imagine but when I was growing up, I had a hard time fitting in. The world often felt like a pair of shoes that didn’t quite fit the way that they were supposed to. When I walked, the left one would rub blisters on the back of my ankle and the right one had the tendency to make this noise that sounded at best like stepping on a duck and at worst like a wet fart. Yet I smiled and continued to walk, doing my best not to give away to the people I passed by that my toes were sweating and the skin had long worn away from my little toe. I wanted so desperately to be as comfortable and relaxed in my shoes as those people around me that I disguised all the discomfort as merely needing to break them in.
When I reached the age of development, I found myself thrust into a world that I was not prepared for. The other girls, the ones who wore their mother's pink satin pumps and seemed to float above the ground instead of merely walking on it, started to do things that I was unsure of. Things that I did not feel old enough to do. But I so desperately wanted to fit in, so badly I wanted to be just... normal. And so, when that first boy took an interest in me, I was not so unlike Damian Ayla. I mimicked what I saw the others doing and quickly found that even if it didn’t feel quite right, it worked. Suddenly, I found myself invited, included, and wanted. For the first time in my life, I was not the girl left watching from the sidelines – I was invited to be right in the center of things. It was all I had ever wanted in the world.
But then one day my period did not come and that feeling of belonging was yanked away from me as surely as my innocence had been. Suddenly, I wasn’t one of the group anymore. I was the butt of a joke that fit me as poorly as the shoes. She deserved it, the other kids said. She was easy, they laughed. When you grow up in a place like Bent Fork getting knocked up at a young age isn’t exactly uncommon even if it is frowned upon. Though my parents were unhappy at first they quickly accepted the inevitable and set about helping prepare myself and the father to be the best parents that we could be to our child given the circumstances.
The months wore on and things went as uneventfully as you would hope that they would in this sort of situation. My father got the boy a job at the plant, and my mother threw me a baby shower where the ladies in town provided me with all of the hand-me-down items that one would need to welcome a baby into the world. For the most part people were kind but small towns always have those whispers. Those whispers led to my father loading us up in his truck one day and driving to the Pastor’s house where we stood on his front porch while he read a passage from the bible before declaring us husband and wife in the eyes of God so that our child would not be born out of wedlock. I was sixteen.
A week before my due date I delivered a stillborn. For months I had grown this tiny thing in my body, loved it, nurtured it, named it. And then in one afternoon it was suddenly gone. No reason. No explanation beyond “sometimes these things happen, dear.” The doctor told me that I would likely go on to have perfectly normal pregnancies in the future, that this had been an anomaly. And then he patted my hand and asked me if I would like to hold him before they took him away. Before I could speak, this tiny blanket wrapped form was placed in my hands and he left me there alone to cradle the child that I would never raise.
They had wrapped him in a blanket that had little footprints printed all over it in pastels. And it struck me as odd because the footprints on the blanket were so much larger than his feet had been when I uncovered him. His feet weren’t that big at all, they were tiny. And then I realized that his feet would never grow to be as large as the feet prints on that stupid blanket. That moment. That realization. That was the first time I died.
I wonder, has Damian Ayla ever died? Or does he find such things to be as offensive as LCP’s follower count? It doesn’t embarrass me to sit here and tell you the most intimate details of the lowest points of my life. On the contrary, I want to share these things if only so that you can better understand who I am and how I have gotten to the place where we find ourselves now. If I had to guess, I imagine that Ayla would find such vulnerability a weakness.
Ayla would have you believe that he is unflawed, that he is this god that no one, least of all me, has any hope of overthrowing. When you listen to him talk, he speaks of his absolute strength, carefully point by point dissecting the weaknesses of those who would oppose him. Let me tell you a secret about this business, those of us who are unflawed unbeatable godlike creatures will never be the ones that are remembered.
The fans watching at home don’t want to see some superior infallible godlike deity looking down on those of us who haven’t been afforded the ability of walking through life in shoes that fit just right. The new blood that will come in and sustain this business long after the rest of us are gone don’t look at these men and see themselves in their faces. What the fans and those who will come after us want, what they really truly hope to see when they turn on the television to watch this show, is a chance.
They want to know that it could be them up there. That someone as fucked up and flawed and out of place as they are could reach new heights and become something more than what life has afforded them. I know this because I was one of them once.
I won’t bore you with the details of my second death. If you’ve turned on the television at any point in the last year you already know all the details of how Vincent and I came to be where we are today. It’s the third one that is important.
The bed shifted underneath my body as my leg involuntarily jiggled in some vain attempt for the energy in my body to find a place to go. Vincent was a statue, so very still beside me, having turned his face away the moment that the words had left my lips. When he spoke again, he did not do me the courtesy of looking me in the eyes. Instead, he stood and moved a few short steps to his bag, keeping his back turned as he began to gather his personal items together.
“Get rid of it.”
The words were bland, matter of fact. He could have been talking about anything in that moment – a chair with a broken leg, an unwanted pest that had found its way into the house looking for warmth or food in the dead of winter – but this was not a broken piece of furniture or some unwanted vermin. It was our daughter.
Get rid of it. The words echoed in my head like a ping pong ball thrown into a blender. I could feel my throat closing up, choking off any words that I might have said in that moment to excuse the tears threatening to bubble up out of my eyes. I tried to breathe, to take a breath, but I couldn’t. I could only swallow around the lump in my throat and eek out one single word.
“Okay.”
The drive to the clinic seemed as if it took a lifetime but that was fine by me. The temperature was struggling to climb out of the single digits that morning and stung my face as it poured into the broken driver’s side window but that was fine by me too. I deserved this.
They don’t tell you how utterly ordinary these clinics look and maybe that’s intentional. You expect them to be busy, for a line of picketers to line the street ready to pelt you with truths that you’ve no doubt already spent weeks self-inflicting upon yourself every time you look in the mirror, which coincidentally, is less often these days. You don’t expect them to be so quiet or for your car to be one of four in the parking lot. You don’t expect these places to appear as desolate as it feels to live in your skin.
I sat in that parking lot for a long time watching the minutes click by on the second-hand digital watch on my wrist. Every time that a car drove by on the main thoroughfare, I held my breath and prayed that they would turn into this parking lot and park beside me. I begged God to let another young woman, maybe one that looked a little like me, to exit that car and walk into the clinic. I bargained for it silently and aloud. Just someone, anyone, who I could follow into this building. Someone braver than me. Someone surer than me. But each car merely passed by continuing along their day as if I only carried as much importance to their lives as the child growing in my womb did to her father.
I know that I must have died in that parking lot as the minutes progressed to hours. The car became a morgue, the snot leaking from my nose freezing to my skin as it touched the air. I watched as the overhead lights of the parking lot flicked on when the winter sun set early in the afternoon and then as the clinic staff emerged and locked the door behind them, I rolled over the engine of the car and drove away.
The fact of the matter is, the person who would have taken Ayla’s words to heart died a long time ago. His attempts to cut me down, to demean me, have no effect on the woman that stands before you today.
He can scream until he’s out of breath that I’m a feeble-minded attention whore being propped up by a support system as weak as I am. He can sit in the position of armchair psychologist and muse about self-image issues. He can hold up a mirror and do his best to shame me for everything that he thinks I am. But Damian said it very best himself – he only scanned what was before him, he never stopped to really look at it.
Had he been a little less careless perhaps instead of scanning who I am as a person and the words that I have been saying these short few weeks maybe he would have been able to read between the lines. The fact of the matter is, I am not subtle. Ever since my very first appearance in PWE I’ve been telling Damian what was coming next. Go back. Rewatch it all. Every tool Damian Ayla ever needed to beat me was given to him ahead of time but the Godslaying Beast was too self-involved and egotistical to realize what was being presented to him on a silver platter. What does the bible say?
Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
He may have accelerated this opportunity by opening up the path for me but make no mistake, we would have ended up here one way or another, the only difference possibly being a few short weeks. The gag is, he made it so very easy for me. Eat a loss to Tara on the first show, an easy win against some sort of alien girl on the second and then just when everyone was preparing themselves for the battle of six people in a ring all vying for the same opportunity – I took the path less traveled. While they focused on beating each other all I had to do was wait for the right moment to swoop in and steal it right out from underneath their noses. The goal is always to work smarter, not harder.
Ayla can gnash his teeth at the fact I haven’t proven myself worthy of this opportunity but it wasn’t about proving myself worthy, it wasn’t about being a threat to Damian Ayla’s championship reign. This was never about Ayla’s attention. It was never about impressing him. Quite the contrary, actually. It was about keeping him unimpressed. Underwhelming him as much as I possibly could. An impressed champion who feels the breath of their challenger breathing down their neck is dangerous but a champion who perceives he has nothing to fear gets sloppy and complacent. It was never my intention to face Damian Ayla when he was at the top of his game and fully prepared.
It was simply about beating him.
I’ve exploited his weaknesses and used them for my own benefit. I took his ego and played my hand directly into it in the short term to benefit myself in the long term. That's the thing about an ego, it can be used against you by someone smarter if they choose to do so.
At the end of the day, Damian Ayla is not so different from those people I’ve spent my career with. He’s reached the point in his career where he’s stopped learning from those around him because he feels that they’re all beneath him. Maybe if he’d had a good teacher, he would be able to walk out of Magnificence as Excellence Champion.
Or maybe not.
Nine months after I drove out of the parking lot of that clinic I found myself standing on the side of a bridge. It seemed a very simple plan in my head, after all, all I had to do was take a step toward and this whole rotten experiment would finally be done with.
It took me some time but I finally figured it out. It was never about the deaths themselves but only about the resurrection and rebirth that followed. Each moment I was granted the opportunity to be reborn into a better version of myself and I know now that at Magnificence I am once again standing on the precipice of one of these moments.
No matter if I win or if I lose, the outcome will remain the same: I will be reborn into something new. Something a little more ruthless, something a little bit harder to kill. It’s already happening, as you can probably tell. After all, I didn’t start out this way. I was taught.
Damian can continue doing the same things he’s always done, cutting the same droll cooking promos from the last pay-per-view, spouting off the same boring condescending bullshit that he always does week after week. But until he is willing to close his mouth and open his mind, he’ll never die. And if he never dies, he’ll never be resurrected into something new.
What becomes of Ayla is of no concern to me, only that I pull this company into its rebirth like a child being thrust from its mother’s womb into the world with the shrill battle cry of life ringing out to announce its arrival. Damian cannot give this company life due to his very nature: cold, calculating, dispassionate. Life requires energy, it requires gentle words to coax it forward and delicate hands to tend the soil. Just as a man cannot bring a child into this world nor can Damian or any other man pull this company back into the ley lines of what has always been a vibrant business pulsating with heat and energy. Damian was right. This was the worst possible outcome for him.
Ripely had considered what I told her, sitting in silence as she digested the words. Our story was not pretty but it was real and it was the truth. The truth that she had deserved to hear a long time ago. Telling my daughter of the darkest moments in my life, some that her very existence had contributed to, was quite possibly the scariest thing I had ever done in my life up until this point. Likely, anything that came after this moment whether it was failure or calamity would never live up to the fear of this task.
“You have to remember; we were very young. Your father had spent most of his life up to that point being abused and was terrified of the kind of father that he himself might turn out to be. None of what happened was because you were not wanted. You were so fucking wanted, Ripley. We just weren’t good people. So, I did what I thought was the best for all of us by handing you over to Alexis.”
Her stillness reminded me of Vincent’s the day that I told him that I was pregnant. So very still, as if maybe if she did not move she would not be in this place hearing these things.
“I understand if you hate us. What we’ve put on your shoulders in the last year is far too much for any kid to have to deal with. Maybe I’m still fucking it up by treating you like an adult but I know that you deserve the truth as I know it if we ever have any hope of making a better future.”
For the first time in my life, I wished for death. Not for the physical act of it but for the relationship that Vincent and I had with Ripley to let out a death rattle and cease in its existence if only so that it could be reborn into something new. Something better.
My daughter lifted her head then, her hazel eyes meeting my own. “Thank you.”
Her voice was firm but not entirely avoiding some sort of emotion I could not exactly place my finger on. My mouth opened in response but the words caught in my throat as Pastor Steve stuck his head through the door and looked us over.
“We’re ready to begin the service now, Fran.” He maintained eye contact with me for the briefest of moments, seeming to sense that he had interrupted something serious. Ripley stood, turning to look up at the cross and away from the two of us as if she needed a moment to gather herself.
“Go on ahead of us, we know the way.” My voice sounded normal enough, bully for me. Pastor Steve nodded, quietly closing the door behind him leaving us alone once again.
“For what it’s worth, if we could go back... we’d do it differently.” I said.
“But you can’t, can you?” Ripley asked, turning to look at me finally. My breath came out in a sigh as I stood up and smoothed the white gown back into place as I looked at the product of how much Vincent and I loved one another glowing in the sunlight pouring through the church windows.
“I’m afraid not.” I paused. “But I do have this friend Betsy and she had this time machine and maybe if I asked her...” Ripley snorted, her smile dancing across her face like the sun breaking out through storm clouds.
“I know that stuff is just made up for T.V.” She was incredulous, stepping down off the stage and starting for the door beside me. “Besides. I don’t want you to change it. I just wanted to know.”
The walk through the wooded area was brief and lightened the tension between us somewhat as we both tried not to slide down this heel ass over tea kettle which was somewhat harder than we’d expected it to be. As we broke the tree line to find the edge of the creek I was taken aback by just how many people lined the edge of the water, people who had come here not because of their own faith but because of mine. Because they loved me.
The service was simple and though I know I should have been listening to Pastor Steve’s words instead I spent much of it with my eyes scanning the faces of my assembled loved ones who had come to stand sentinel over my death. Pastor Steve had been right, my life was very full.
When he called for me, I did not hesitate to follow him. The water was cold and I shuddered to think what might be lurking beneath the waist high murkiness but those things were easily put out of my mind as I took in a deep breath just before the pastor dipped me back to submerge my body in the water.
I was reborn.
