Osaka

[Guest J*ingus]

My first try at (sort of) wrestling-related fiction. Feedback is appreciated.

 

 

 

Osaka

by Jingus

 

 

The middle-aged professional wrestler lived in a trailer, in a park behind a drinking establishment entitled The First And Last Chance Saloon, which it really was. It was a hot day, and it was raining. Unfortunately, the combination of the two only served to transform the trailer park into a sauna, and made the skin on the wrestler’s back stick to his leather chair. The skin was deeply and artificially tanned, and starting to lose its elasticity. The wrestler’s hair was dyed blonde, and receding above the crosswork quilt of scars on his forehead. He was thirty-six years old, not going anywhere in particular, and not terribly upset with that fact.

 

On that day, he was sitting and watching television, contemplating whether his aching muscles were up to a day at the gym, when he heard the kid’s car pull up. He knew it was this particular kid from the sound it made; he was always slow, cautious, afraid to park recklessly. A kid who demanded symmetry. He had to park just so, or he would pull out and try again. This day he did not try again. He must’ve gotten it right the first time.

 

The kid’s car alarm beeped, and the wrestler heard the kid trudge up the stairs to the trailer. As he opened the door, the wrestler said “Hey, how you doin’?” but his words trailed off. The kid (as the wrestler thought of him, he was actually in his mid twenties) was obviously not doing very well at all. His skin was pale, his eyes were red. His belly and shoulders, which usually looked somewhat rounded, were today in a state of definite sag. Despite the heat and humidity, he wore a thick jacket, and made no move to take it off. Without a word, he carefully closed the screen door behind him and lowered himself onto the couch.

 

The wrestler’s blue eyes narrowed slightly. “What’s the matter, kid?” The kid made no reply, sat still, stared straight ahead at a point on the wall approximately two feet above the floor. One of the wrestler’s kitty cats jumped up next to him, and he reached down to stroke it, in a robotic fashion. The wrestler started to become worried. There were other things about the kid which were bothering him, and the fact that he wasn’t sure what those things were bothered him even more.

 

The wrestler waited for what was either an eternity or sixty seconds, he wasn’t sure which, and was about to ask again when the kid abruptly spoke. “Tell me about Japan,” he said.

 

The wrestler stared at him for another short moment, before asking “Are you gonna tell me what happened?”

 

The kid exhaled, the merest hint of a sigh. He turned very slowly, in no hurry at all, and his red eyes locked onto the wrestler’s face. “Please tell me about Japan. Tell me about the time you went there.”

 

The mix of raw, hungry desire and resigned despair on the kid’s face shocked the wrestler. He’d never seen him like this before, and thus decided to go along with it, at least for now. “Well, it’s been a while, nine years ago. I got a call from Tracey, he told me that this little company he’d been working with over there was looking for gaijin talent that could work and wasn’t afraid to get a little color. Joe had been working there too and liked it, so I knew they were probably okay, and I went.”

 

The kid’s eyes briefly flicked to the wrestler’s forehead, before settling back down. “You worked for Pogo.” It was not a question but a statement, the kid already knew this story, but for some reason the wrestler couldn’t fathom, he wanted to hear it again.

 

“Yeah, that fat fuck. You think I got marks on me, you shoulda seen him up close. He had things on his head and back as big around as my fingers. Course he was twenty years older than me, no knees anymore, but he was still doin’ it. Lotta heart on that guy. Lotta fat too, but hell, he deserved a good meal or two after everything he’d done to himself.”

 

The kid nodded, his eyes briefly comparing the wrestler’s sculpted abs with his own bulging stomach. “And the match you had with him?”

 

The wrestler was getting seriously worried now, as the kid looked like he was having a breakdown, but he continued. “It wasn’t a match, it was a fight. It was brutal. I used to watch this guy on TV when I was a kid, and now he’s chasing me around with a baseball bat. With barbed wire on it. I was so fucked up on Percocets that night, I don’t remember much anyway. I did get a few keepers to remind me though,” by which he meant scars. “It took days to wash it all out of my hair, especially in their crappy showers over there.”

 

“Did the crowd like the match?”

 

“Yeah, on the video, they popped for everything. They bought me.”

 

The kid was quiet for a moment, then started moving his mouth, forcing something, and when the words came it was as if he was speaking through water. “Why?”

 

The wrestler was confused. “Why what?”

 

“Why did they like the match? It was two human beings hitting each other with a fucking spiky baseball bat and bleeding, for Christ’s sake. Why?” The kid started crying then, with slow thin trickles.

 

The wrestler was at a loss for words. “Well,” he finally stammered, “that kind of match was unusual back then. It’s not like today, matches with light bulbs and shit like they do over here. That company was the only one doing it back then.”

 

The kid continued to cry silently, sitting motionless otherwise. “Why did it get started? Why did the first crowds like it?”

 

The wrestler shifted in his chair, listing in his mind all the possible things that might be wrong with his friend, while also trying to answer the questions. “It’s different in Japan. Their society is completely different from ours. They don’t have any crime,” at which point the kid sobbed audibly, and the wrestler hurried on, “and they all live really boring lives with high-pressure jobs in crowded cities and not much money. They always had more extreme recreation than we did. Their wrestling is very violent, their cartoons are X-rated, even their gameshows are some sick shit.”

 

The kid nodded, taking it all in. “They have criminals over there, right? The Yakuza?”

 

The wrestler nodded. “Some nights, the office would tell us not to fight into the crowds. That’s how we knew which nights the Yaks were there. But it’s still not like over here. They don’t have all the machine guns and crap that the gangs here do, it’s all knives. A pistol over there is like a bazooka in the States.”

 

The kid lowered his head, staring at the floor, and said nothing. The wrestler didn’t speak either, the kid’s mood was infectious and he barely even felt like breathing now. It was several cloying minutes before the kid finally spoke again. “Did you ever visit Osaka?”

 

The wrestler frowned; this was new. “No, we never went there.”

 

“I’ve heard about Osaka,” the kid said, confidence mingled with hope creeping into his voice. “It’s their second-biggest city. Millions of people. But there’s still no crime. People feel safe. They say that the people are friendly to foreigners there. There are lots of restaraunts. It’s supposed to be like L.A. without the guns.” His voice broke slightly on the last word.

 

The wrestler shook his head. “I’ve never been there.”

 

Silence reigned inside the hot room for a few minutes more. The cat finally became bored with the kid, who’d stopped rubbing it a while ago, and it left the room. A fly buzzed somewhere. Voices shouting in Spanish were heard from far away outside.

 

The kid’s voice broke the quiet like a rock through a window. “Tell me about the girl,” he said. “Tell me about Kudo.”

 

“Okay,” the wrestler said slowly. He’d never told the kid this story, where’d he hear about it? “Before I went out for the match with Pogo that night, they had a women’s match and they’d used a fireball in it, a big kerosene one. “Well, the girl blowing it was too close to the other one, and it caught her tights on fire. The referee jumped on her to put it out, but it had already melted the spandex to her skin. They took her past me on a stretcher, and she was still screaming.” The wrestler paused. “That’s when I took the pills that night. I wanted to get through the match without quitting, no matter what. I found out later that girl was Kudo, the one who got famous a few years later on for doing all the barbed wire chick matches.”

 

The kid nodded, and the wrestler knew that, somehow, none of this was news to the kid. He noticed, with a growing sense of alarm, that the kid wasn’t wearing his wedding ring. The kid spoke, reverently: “She was beautiful.”

 

“Yeah. She was a little hottie.”

 

“I heard that she was from Osaka. That she went back to live there after she retired.”

 

The wrestler sat in the chair, crushed downwards by the feeling that something very serious was very wrong with his very good friend. “Listen, kid, is there something you want to talk about?”

 

The kid looked up, his eyes shining faintly through the tears. “No. You already told me what I needed to hear. Thank you.”

 

He stood up, walked over and hugged the wrestler, which was a bit of a shock, as the kid was usually pretty homophobic. Then he walked toward the screen door, opened it, stepped out, and carefully shut it behind him so that the cat wouldn’t get out. As he walked down the stairs, the wrestler felt something snap within him, and he finally wrenched himself out of his seat and out the door, just in time to catch the kid before he left. “Hey,” he yelled, “brother, are you gonna be okay in the near future?”

 

The kid looked up, faintly surprised. “Of course,” he said. “I haven’t seen Osaka.”

 

Then he got in the car and drove away, and the wrestler never saw him again.

 

 

 

The details came out soon enough, and they were similar to what the wrestler had feared. A burglar with a gun. The kid’s young wife, alone at home. The kind of story you’ve heard a thousand goddamned times, with a new twist: the husband vanished afterwards.

 

Months later, when they found what they said was the kid’s body, the wrestler didn’t listen. Suicide schmuicide. He knew the kid was in a good place now. That evening as the shadows lengthened, he filled his shot glass, sat outside on the steps, faced the setting sun, and toasted his friend. “Kampai,” he said, before stepping back inside to go pet the cat.

[Guest J*ingus]

daddy said BUMP~!

 

::cries over being ignored and excluded, just like in high school::