When a man trains to be a wrestling referee he learns three things: how to call a match, how to help on the hustle, and how to sell like death. The latter doesn't take up much of the curriculum, but it's the single most important thing they learn in their part of the illusion, nay the most essential aspect of the entire business.
With this knowledge ringing round his belfry, you can bet Sign Schumacher's boots were housing a fault line his first night. He was only reffing one match on the card, he tried hard to remind himself on the walk down the ramp, where, for a moment, he looked down to make sure someone hadn't replaced the ramp with a treadmill. He was reffing the top of the card, the main event, Michiro Endo, The Radioactive Samurai from Outer Space vs Bo Wilson, The Olympian, God among men. This was the first time Bo Wilson had wrestled since the Philadelphia Incident. The signs held up by the angry throng outside the arena matched the bloodlust of those held within. Five years was evidently not enough time for the scars to heal.
Hype for this match had been brewing since Endo arrived, smoke still rising from his glowing green body, his pupils permanently burned away, leaving only the bare whites where his eyes once were. If there ever was such a thing as luck, Endo had enough of the bad to go around twice. He technically wasn't a samurai, though he was plucked from a battlefield. Endo was just a farmer that was given a spear and a bamboo breastplate and thrust into the fray of Sekigahara to die for his Shogun. He would have done too, but someone up there had other plans. That someone was captain of a scouting and research vessel hailing from another corner of the universe.
"What the FUCK is he doing?"
Augustus' voice rang to the ring from the Gorilla position. The ropes shuddered. Bo and Endo were staring at Sign, who was dead in the headlights. Endo had been thrown into Sign, who stumbled back and maintained footing. He forgot the vital role of a ref. He forgot to sell like death.
"Sign, God love you, you can't bump for shit."
Glenn's growl haunted Sign through four years of hard training in the Southern side of Philadelphia. Glenn Drex, a former champion in his heyday, now ran a school for aspiring demigods of the squared circle, where he spent every day of those years as a vulture on Sign's shoulder. Nothing Sign did was good enough for Glenn, and he was quick to scoop up the carrion Sign left in the ring every night.
The second week of training Glenn pulled Sign aside as the others began to stagger out of the arena, every nerve sending frantic messages for their brains to ignore for a few hours more, just until they could get home, pop a couple brews, and sink into that buzz that always understood, always forgave, perpetuating a cycle that would lead some to glory and others to early graves.
"The fuck are you still doing here, Schu?" Glenn said. Glenn wasn't a mean person by nature. He'd been brought up to always follow rules of tact and politeness, he just decided they weren't worth his time. In the profession of bashing heads for millions to see those qualities don't get you far, unless your destination is the ER.
"I want to be a wrestler, sir." Sign said.
"Why do you want that?" Glenn said.
Sign traveled back in time to the first broadcast of Augustus G Prune's Outer World Wrestling. He was lying on his belly in front of the TV, masturbating furiously. On the screen two large men were pummeling the living daylights out of a pair of rather unfortunate looking jobbers.
A jobber is another person whose curriculum includes selling like death.
Sign flew ahead twenty years and saw the tired face of Glenn Drex shaking back and forth. He raised his eyes to Sign's.
"Don't get me wrong, I'll take your money for as long as you want," Glenn said. "I just don't think you've got what it takes."
Sign flew ahead forty years. He'd gained a belly and a drug habit, lost hair, mobility, and self-respect. He did something he knew he should have done forty years ago when Glenn said those words to him: he painted the walls with his brains.
"You still there Schumacher?" Glenn said.
"Wh...what do I need to do?" Sign said. He'd never felt this heavy, this hollow.
The worst time in your life is always now.
Glenn shook his head and sighed hard. He clapped Sign on the shoulder and motioned for him to join him in the ring.
"Clothesline." Glenn said and came at Sign like a locomotive, arm poised lateral.
WHAM!
Sign didn't know what hit him, but he was base over apex, the ground outside the ring rapidly approaching him, the sting of Endo's radioactive arm still pulsing through the nerve endings in his chest. As Sign's feet struggled to reunite with their beloved Earth, his eyes saw a whirlwind blur of screaming fans, of the steel barricade, of the concrete fl-oh shit.
Black. No hum, no hue, just the all-encompassing Black.
The crowd noise, now a whisper, faded in from the Black, the red-orange hue of Sign's eyelids washed over him, pushing the Black away. Something was hitting Sign's arm.
That something was a size 11 shoe. The shoe covered the foot of Tim Fitzgibbons, who stood with one eye on Sign and one eye on the viewfinder of his video camera. A little tinny voice rang through Tim's ears, vibrating like daggers from his studio headphones. "On the fucking RING" it said. Tim swung his focus back to his camera. Sign closed his eyes and let the Black wash over him again.
"Hold still. This is the last one."
Sign clenched his jaw tight as Allie plucked a shard of glass from his back. Sign had opened Glenn's graduation show and left with bits of several fluorescent light tubes in his back, with blood soaking into his jeans. The bus conductor refused to take chances with his clientele's health, so Sign walked home, limping all the way, a thumbtack pressing into his foot with every step.
Allie's apartment had once been a three-story house, long ago converted to serve multiple persons as a homey block of flats. Her room was the smallest of the three, crammed full of wardrobe, desk, and enormous black bed, upon which she and Sign had sunk into many a night, staying til the night hours of the next day. The bed had an absorbing quality, a smooth sponge, a shammy made of down and love in a room with blacked out windows and two lamps. On this night clothes were strewn about the room; Allie had kicked a sweater under the bed when Sign came to her door. Appearances. Allie was in the third year of a college program, her goal to gain the license of a Registered Nurse. This had not always been her chosen direction. She had gone to school to study poetry and English fiction, unaware of how little she could do with the knowledge she gained. She graduated knowing full well she wouldn't be a teacher and hopped about for a couple years before the medical profession dropped a life worth living into her lap.
Two years later, in her South Philly apartment, that life would be eradicated, along with the entire city.
It was an enormous risk, both physically and politically, to let Bo Wilson back in the ring after what happened in Philadelphia, but a talent, a physical specimen like Bo could not be put to waste. Bo was a legend in every right, there has to date never been a more universally recognized and adored figure in the world of professional wrestling. It was inexcusable, in the mind of Augustus G Prune, to allow such a draw to waste away while his lesser talents tried in vain to fill his thunderous boots. So, two years after Philadelphia was wiped clean off the slate of the Earth, Bo Wilson was lacing up to face what was perhaps his greatest challenge to date: The Radioactive Samurai from Outer Space.
At least that's what Prune's hype machine tried to make clear.
Allie knew little about Bo Wilson. On the night of the match between Bo and Killer Caligari Allie was sitting on her bed, studying for a test, a hard, heavy book splayed open before her. She, like many others, never knew what hit her. The front wall of her apartment, traveling through space faster than the sound of its crumbling, tearing from its foundation, squashed her against the back wall, which then gave way and slammed into the house behind her. This happened to every house in Philadelphia, all at once, all without warning. The sound of the impact that caused the destruction was heard after the damage had been done.
When the dust cleared, all that remained was the Arena. It sat like a boil among rubble. At its center stood Killer Caligari, Bo Wilson at his feet. The city around them had been reduced to driftwood, to its basic components. No one could see the blood soaking the streets, but those streets flooded.
The night Philly died Sign was in a hotel in Japan, taping his wrists in preparation for a night in hell. His arms already posessed their share of scar tissue, on this night he was to gain his biggest yet. This was the last night of his career. If he'd known that, chances are he'd have stayed in Philly and died in Allie's bed, but such choices are not ours to make.
Now Sign lies unconscious beside the ring. Inside the ring Bo and Endo have locked up, Bo overpowers Endo and hurls him to the corner. In the gorilla position Augustus Prune sits with his neck craned and his ass clenched. This is the most nervous he has been in as long as he can remember. Many lives are at stake tonight, but to him only one matters. One could curse Prune for his short-sightedness, but it seems to be the self-centered that accomplish great things, and Prune had indeed done that. He wasn't saving lives, creating cures for debilitating diseases, or teaching each new generation, he was serving another purpose: distraction. He was very good at this.
Back in Allie's room, Sign winces as she pours hydrogen peroxide on his back, wiping the caking blood from his back. Two years later, a large piece of glass would plunge into Sign's back, tearing spinal tissue, splaying nerve endings, ending both his match and his career prematurely. Sign would spend two months in Japan recovering from this injury before returning to the States, by which time Allie and Philly had long been burned and mourned. With no other option before him, he became a referee.
Now blood is staining the white stripes of his uniform, drooling from his cracked cranium. He'll live. The only question seems to be this: is that a blessing or a curse?
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