Short Bus Hero (4 page)

4. Veritaphobia /
verˈ-i-ta fōˈ-bē-ə / fear of truth or reality

T
he serrations
of Stryker’s knife blade catch and tear at the gray fibers of his overdone Sydney Sirloin, sawing it into a frayed disaster.

“Sorry I couldn’t meet you any place nicer,” Stryker’s prospective agent, Alan Rush, says, across the narrow table. He sneaks a sidelong glance at the giggling two-year-old who keeps peeking at them over the faux oak partition. Where are that kid’s parents? “I mean, it was kind of short notice, you know, and, well, Ayers Rock Café used to be pretty cool, right?”

Yeah, maybe in the eighties, Stryker thinks. It has since become a family place, about three rungs below the Outback Steakhouse on the cool-restaurant-o-meter. Stryker could have thought of a better place to meet, especially to celebrate his lucrative new WWC contract. But, Rush sounded anxious on the phone, said he had some “bullshit” to talk with him about. Ayers Rock just happened to be the closest place, not counting the Burger Chain.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” Stryker mumbles around a lump of stringy flesh hanging out of his mouth as the eavesdropping two-year-old is snatched from his perch, belting out a piercing wail. He’s sorry to see the little guy go. He reminded him of someone, older now, a teenager, living with his mother and new father, somewhere on the outskirts of Boston. Or, at least, that’s where the kid had been the last he’d heard. Some obscured memory fought to surface in his conscious mind, like a drowning victim.

I can’t see through the murk. I wish I had been following Stryker from his beginning, but, alas, he wasn’t identified as “pertinent” until a few years ago. Dammit.

Stryker flips an internal switch and gets back to business, leaving the memory behind some mental iron curtain. “So, you gonna keep me in suspense all freaking day? Am I getting the six mil or what?”

Rush drains his nearly empty champagne flute, touches his napkin to the corners of his lips, and drops his eyes. He clears his throat several times and loosens his shiny necktie.

An agent in the world of professional wrestling is not the same as an agent in other fields. It is not an unbiased party, working to make the best deal for his client. In the biggest wrestling organizations, an “agent” is merely a mid-level manager, someone who acts as a liaison between the wrestlers and the higher-level executives, someone who works the storylines, keeps track of who’s hot and who’s not. Rush had been a wrestler who worked with Stryker back in the early days of the AWG. He had since defected to the much larger WWC and worked his way up to his current agent position. As an old friend, he was doing what he could to find Stryker a job. He thought he had, but after an early-morning meeting that day, he discovered he was wrong. The higher-ups said Stryker lacked personality, wasn’t hungry enough.

Rush pushes back from the table. “Excuse me, huh, donniker?” He drops his napkin on his seat as Stryker points him toward the platypus-adorned neon restroom sign. “Donniker” is a carny word for bathroom. Rush is an old-school crook.

Despite Rush’s nervous behavior and the trouble with the AWG, Stryker doesn’t get the sense that there is anything at all amiss. But, he is not the most attentive to subtle behaviors, which his ex-wife would be the first to corroborate, given the opportunity. He flags down the waitress and orders a Bud Select to wash down the bottle of champagne he’s already quaffed. Thick as he is, he did catch the quick lascivious wink she dropped his way. Too bad she’s a bit thick in the ankles for his taste. He picks at the remainder of his loaded baked potato and surveys the psychotropic dining room. It’s filled with over-the-top stereotypical-yet-bizarre Aussie décor: stuffed kangaroos dressed in disturbing costumes (one is a 1920s gangster, another wears a latex suit and a ball gag, a third is wrapped like a mummy), a series of surreal paintings featuring koalas wearing molten metal sunglasses, shrunken Aboriginal heads. It’s worse than Planet… oh, you know.

It isn’t until Rush returns with scarlet swooshes floating high on his pale cheeks and beads of sweat dotting his smooth forehead that Stryker begins to think something could be wrong.

“Okay,” the wrestler says, “so, how does this work?” Rush wedges himself into his chair, laying his napkin in his lap. Stryker leans over and peers under the table. “I don’t see no briefcase or anything. Shouldn’t we look at the contract? I would think they’d want that signed ASAP, right? Make everything official and whatever.”

Rush heaves a sigh that rustles the Splenda packets in their ceramic holder at the edge of the table. He stares at the rubble that is Stryker’s plate. He clears his throat again. “Um… Stryker...” Rush chews his lip, fingers his water glass, fidgets in his seat. “Um, see, it’s, uh… It’s not you, well, not exactly…”

Something is rotten.

Duh.

He should have known. It was absolutely ridiculous to think his old buddy could just waltz into his boss’s office and ask him to give his newly out-of-work pal a six million dollar job. Stryker curses himself for being such a complete idiot. A kernel of panic pops open somewhere inside his rib cage as he reviews his actual job skills in his head. His massive hand balls into a fist beside his plate. Rush’s lips move, but nothing comes out.

“What? What are you saying, because I can barely hear you.”

“I, um… Stryker, they’ve decided not to offer you a contract.” Rush squeezes his eyes shut and braces himself against a flying object: fist, bottle, latex-clad kangaroo. He holds his breath and waits almost a full minute. When his old buddy does not strike him, he first opens one eye, then the other, and relaxes his creased forehead. The wrestler stares at him, slack-jawed and wide-eyed.

“What?”

“They’ve decided not…”

“No, no, no, no, no—don’t say it again,” the wrestler spits, as if the mere act of repeating the statement will make it come true. It has to be a joke. Rush is like that, always playing jokes. Like the time they’d hit that buffet at the Indian casino after a match, and Rush pocketed a handful of shrimp and spent the rest of the night stuffing them underneath slot machines. A week later, they went back and the place reeked of rotten shrimp. Funny. “Goddamn. You gotta be yankin’ me.” Stryker runs an enormous hand through his black mop and grins. “Don’t you play me like that, you old sumbitch,” he says, pointing an index finger into Rush’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Rush whispers. He does not give the appearance of someone who is yanking anything. On the contrary, he looks disappointed and regretful, forcing the wrestler to once again think of himself as an idiot.

The news sinks in. The smile fades. An invisible icy fist twists Stryker’s innards. He curses himself again for being a fool. “Son. Of. A. Bitch,” Stryker whispers. What does this mean? What does he do now? He has no idea. He has no education, no marketable skills, no savings, no rich relatives. What he does have is an epic mortgage, unbelievable car payments, and an ocean of debt.

A cloud of confusion settles around his head like the rings of Saturn. He can’t see clearly. He can’t hear properly. Nothing exists beyond the asteroid belt of problems encircling his head and the doom ringing in his ears. He has to get out of there, out of the artificial Outback. He stands up, inadvertently tipping the table toward Rush, spilling his beer. He rips the napkin from his shirt collar, throws it on the table, and stumbles out of the restaurant, ignoring the gauntlet of fans calling his name all the way to the front door.

Stryker has been a good solid draw for almost six years. The AWG sold millions of t-shirts and posters adorned with his image. He was an A-Team wrestler, always figuring into the biggest storylines, always giving every performance everything he had. He limited his use of steroids, worked hard at keeping his body fit, and was always gracious to his many, many fans. He could not believe the WWC didn’t want him. They were taking Gemini, that freaking backstabbing old hack. No wonder he’d been so distant lately.
He
was getting the big deal that should have been Stryker’s.

Son of a bitch.

Stryker refuses to believe this is happening.

He somehow finds his black Navigator, fumbles with the door, and slams himself inside. The numbness he felt in the restaurant is burned away by a searing terror. Rage pilots his fist into the XM receiver lodged in the dash, cutting the knuckles of his right hand, eliciting a flood of explicit language from his mouth. His cell phone sounds a ringtone he assigned to Alan Rush. Pink Floyd’s “Money.” He drops the cell onto the floorboard and stomps on it with the heel of his motorcycle boot.

A tap on his window interrupts his brutish outburst.

Rush stands, phone to his ear, peering in at Stryker through the tinted glass.

Stryker slams the key into the ignition and peels out of the parking lot, leaving his “agent” standing there, still holding his phone.

***

Middle of the night.

Stryker staggers through a nine-paneled dark cherry door and falls to his knees in front of an ebony toilet. His mouth yawns and sticks, a deep belch forces its way up from the depths of his intestines. The sonic quake is followed by a fragrant torrent of sepia-toned fluid littered with mahogany clots and capillaries. Most of the spew cascades into the toilet bowl. Much, however, colors the plush white rug beneath Stryker’s knees, making it look like someone spilled a cup of strong tea.

Brilliant sparks and flashes of the night return to berate him as he stares at the valve behind the toilet, savoring the smooth marble reality, cold beneath his cheek. He remembers peeling out of the Ayers Rock parking lot, weaving his way down East Carson in a fury, flying through the door at Mario’s and ordering drinks for everyone.

“Bombs on me!” he recalls yelling to the youthful baseball-capped barkeep.

“Bombs” are the perpetual special at Mario’s, for some reason. Don’t ask me what they are.

The crowd cheered him at the bar, just as they did at the ring. He was everyone’s friend, everyone’s hero. It was impossible to think he is being forced out of wrestling—everyone loves him.

He yawns over the toilet again and expels a foul stream of hot chartreuse bile.

He stood at the bar, bathed in the green neon glow, and regaled the rapt twenty-somethings that surrounded him with a slurred tale of vanquishing Gemini in the AWG’s darkest hour. When he reached the story’s conclusion, fists and cheers lifted heavenward, taking his heart to the rafters and flooding his eyes with water. He bought them another round for listening so intently, for bolstering him even as his spirit fell, for being his friends, even if only for a little while.

The rest of the evening flew by in an unsteady blur.

The memory of his transport home would remain just beyond the periphery of his recall faculties, although there is a flash of stuffing a French fry laden sandwich into his mouth and yarfing it up on a city sidewalk soon after. He’d still had the taste of the greasy fries in his mouth when the yellow liquid started coming up, an ultra-nasty copper-flavored bile.

Of course, there was a girl as well, too young for Stryker, as you may well imagine. Mario’s is nothing if not a meat market for those young fools who do not fancy themselves young fools but who instead choose to think of themselves as cool and beautiful, indestructible gods and goddesses, out to celebrate their lack of innocence and their desire to leave their mark on something or someone. He doesn’t remember her name (their names are all the same to him,
Hon
) but, he does remember her harelip scar and her disappointment at his inability to perform out in the Navigator. He thinks he recalls a slap in the face and a retreating broken-heeled gait, but that memory could have bled through from any one of a thousand different nights.

Some hours later, his right eye cracks open, the sticky lashes admitting a blinding thread of sunlight as the digital alarm clock sets off an intracranial maelstrom somewhere northwest of his brow. A stainless steel ceiling fan hangs from the tray ceiling, twelve feet above. He wonders if the blades are strong or sharp enough for a quick decapitation. He had somehow made it to his bed. Like I said, he can’t recall how he got there, but he finds himself alone, no sign of the hare-lipped stranger.

The king-sized bed performs an expert carousel impression. It has such talent and it has never failed to disappoint on that front. With a painful lack of alacrity, Stryker rolls onto his shoulder and delivers a savage blow to the clock. Sweet silence. He sits up too fast and throws his legs over the edge of the mattress. He tastes the yellow, working its way up his esophagus, as he lurches past the oak dresser and stubs his toe on the marble threshold that separates bed from bath.

After ejecting the scant fluid from his stomach, he steps into the shower and lets the steaming water scald away the night’s humiliation. In thirty minutes’ time, he pulls the Navigator into the shopping mall parking lot.

Arthur Davis, from Stryker’s public relations firm, stands in front of the long table draped with a heavy black cloth, talking to the two wrestlers seated behind it. Gemini tips his chin and Arthur turns around to see Stryker approaching. Arthur’s mouth disappears in a grim line.

“Hey, sorry I’m late. Damned alarm clock.” Stryker grins at Arthur, gives his hand a quick pump, and rounds the table to take a seat. “Can someone please bring me a coffee? Black,” he says to the scowling mall employee who mans the velvet rope, keeping the throngs of wrestling fans at bay with his pointed boredom. Arthur grabs Stryker’s elbow as he is about to sit down.