by Chris Eaton
He did.
When they greeted him at JFK, they all realized their miscommunication. The AWA’s head writer, a rake-thin man who had once wrestled under the names Chase and Nitro and who had been hired by the Association’s new owners to save the franchise, had no intention of making Hornet Cisa his new hero. No, they already had someone in mind for that: a young unknown by the name of Sean Hicort. Cisa’s role was to help them create a scenario whereby Hicort’s introduction would be more believable and embraced, as though his arrival in the AWA, and perhaps the entire world of professional wrestling, were to come as some sort of deliverance; an emancipation, if you will. Capitalizing on the incident with Killer Karlson and his broken arm, as well as Cisa’s several years in prison, they wanted to turn him into the biggest heel the world had ever seen, named Inert Chaos because he was unpredictable and, due to his size, nearly impossible to move. They would make him unbeatable. He and his minions, dubbed The Antihero Corps, would take control of every aspect of the AWA, from owning every belt to the intimidation of Association management. Inert Chaos would be the one who decided who fought whom. Inert Chaos would be the one to impose penalties and sanctions – or more importantly not impose them – on dirty play. In short, they would make Inert Chaos the most feared and hated man in the world. So when Hicort did finally defeat him, overcoming all odds and restoring order to the world, they could ride the wave of his popularity for years.
As he had done so many times in the past, Shirley Cisa did as he was told. Both characters were introduced in St. Petersburg, Florida. They played up Cisa’s release from jail, tugging him to the ring in chains, like a reluctant King Kong. A countdown was started. A bell went off. His chains fell to the mat. And he stood motionless in the centre of the ring as the unknown Hicort tried to haul him down. Cisa didn’t even fight back, just stood there, suddenly wondering what he’d gotten himself into. Even at the point when he was supposed to pin Hicort, setting up this ultimate rivalry for its ultimate ending six months later, he remained still. Sean Hicort, immature, full of testosterone and frustrated, decided to break with the plan and try pinning Cisa instead, and when that didn’t work he walked around the big Brit yelling at him. The crowd, having been prepped for explosive violence, began to boo. The referee looked to the sidelines for guidance only to receive a shrug. People started throwing popcorn at them, then programs, then drinks. And just as the referee was about to call it, a muscle finally rippled in Inert Chaos’s back, and he broke Hicort’s nose so violently that several people in the front row went home with the trophy of fresh blood. Breaking the referee’s nose, too, Cisa then left the ring.
Over the next six months, as heels of every foreign nationality joined The Antihero Corps, Cisa’s new legend continued to grow. In Cincinnati, people claimed he forced Louden Swain, The King of Pain, to submit, and then snapped Swain’s pinky finger just for fun. At a draw in Salinas, California, Cisa dislocated Randy Robinson’s shoulder with a splash off the top ropes while he was still lying facedown on the concrete. According to rumour, Inert Chaos left a trail of broken bodies behind him. And rather than dispel any of this, because it was definitely all good for press, the AWA had various wrestlers play with splints on their hands, or with complicated wraps, faking injuries to play it all up. Leon “The Lion” Leone, a very popular face at the time, was even removed from a bill in Pittsburgh at the last moment with an announcement that Chaos had smashed into his dressing room before the match and broken three of his ribs.
Then, at a marquee event at Madison Square Gardens, Hicort returned, his nose totally healed, and declared himself the Association’s new sheriff. He was taking the law into his own hands. He renamed himself The Supreme Hicort and became a constant presence at all matches, often thundering into one at midpoint to rescue a belt for Good. It worked. Crowds continued to grow. By the next spring, Hicort had managed to defeat – not in any sanctioned matches, of course, because Inert Chaos would not allow him to fight, so he had to supposedly sneak past security at each arena, sometimes tearing his disguise from himself as he sprang from a wheelchair in the audience – every member of The Antihero Corps, until not even Inert Chaos could refuse the call of Hicort’s challenges. The match was set for April 9, 1986.
***
Many times between that day and the fight, Shirley Cisa thought about calling it off. He thought about the freedom. He thought about waking up without cuts and bruises all over his body. He thought about losing some weight and maybe even becoming attractive to the opposite sex again, instead of just being feared. He thought about maybe entering a bar and having the staff know what he wanted, not because he was a celebrity but because he was a regular. He was their friend. Shirley Cisa thought about the money. He thought about, or tried to think about, things in his life, as a child, that he had wanted more than anything: toys, to live in a castle, a sibling to boss around, a pet. Then Shirley Cisa thought about his parents, how he had already disappointed them. He thought about Chevston-Darra and he thought about his fans.
Alone in his apartment, surely overlooking something spectacular, Shirley Cisa thought about a writing assignment he’d been given in the fifth grade. He’d been a handful to say the least, always acting out, telling jokes, talking back. And then his teacher had asked his entire class to write a story. Write a story about something strange that happened on the way home from school, she said. Write about whatever you want. And no one had ever read it. He thought about the aptitude tests they’d taken in grade seven that said he might be best suited as an astronaut or a waiter and he thought about how it might have been nice to have been either.
Hornet Cisa thought long and he thought hard, over breakfast and lunch, and midday snacks and then dinner, about his life. He thought about how he’d never made a real decision, not one real decision in his life. And he thought about how he’d never been happy. Happy for other people, sure, but never happy for himself. And finally he decided, when the day came, that he would not fight. There were contracts that could ruin him financially, but he didn’t care. He would not fight. He could not win. Because even if he won he did not win. He and Sean Hicort were not enemies. They were the same. The exact same person. Even their names were just anagrams of one another. He was just wrestling his own inner demons. He decided he would walk away and never wrestle again. He decided he would no longer allow others to make decisions for him. And he decided, from that day forward, that he would be the one to shape his own life. It would be like his birthday. He felt like an entirely new person.
Meanwhile, outside his apartment with the spectacular view, the excitement and expectation of the fight continued to build. Ads ran on every network and huge billboards with his face were erected overlooking New York and Los Angeles. He refused to give any more interviews and no one cared because they’d essentially invented him anyway. He was a legend now and could thus be written about without facts or concern over contradictions. The arena sold out a month before the date and people slept with their tickets beneath their pillows, dreaming.
Then the day came. The lead-off matches of that evening were booed from start to finish. The crowd in Los Angeles was there for the main attraction. For blood. Outside the stadium, hawkers had sold fake vials of it, along with mock casts and slings commemorating some of Inert Chaos’s more famous fights. Inside, the AWA had hired actors to dress as paramedics, making violence seem more likely, and had provided the front row seats with sheets of plastic to put across their laps. The audience was also filled with countless cowboy hats and deputy sheriff badges, not to mention thousands of Supreme Hicort-branded gavels: what proved to be an unfortunate promotion device given to the first fans to arrive. The first was launched at the ring during the second bout between a young Terry Bollea and The Cuban Assassin, and by the fourth match-up, a full-blown riot forced the promoters to shut off the lights and call in the police. The rest of the bill, including Cisa’s fight with Hicort, was cancelled. In the chaos, someone ran off with the money from the bo
x office. And months later, once everything had settled, the courts ordered the promoters to pay everyone back. The AWA declared bankruptcy, and without a supreme enemy to defeat, Hicort’s own coltish legend faltered in the gates. When everyone eventually jumped ship to the WWF, the Supreme Hicort was not made an offer, and he disappeared from the wrestling radar entirely.
***
After that day:
•Sean Hicort (whose real name wasn’t even Hicort but Smith) made several attempts at acting, insisting that his agent only seek out serious roles but only landing two credited parts as Thug #1 and Goon at Bar with Bat.
•The man formally known as Nitro disappeared, and was not heard of again until police tracked him down to his hometown of East Chariston, Kentucky, where he incorrectly surmised no one would rat him out for his sudden financial good luck. The final showdown with police resulted in two deaths, one of which was his own.
•When the Berlin Wall fell in late-1989, T. C. Herosian saw the opportunity of a free Armenia and returned to his home an hour south of Yerevan to enlist in the New Armenian Army. He was killed no more than a year later, one of only five Armenian casualties in a bloody shootout with Soviet Internal Security Forces at the Yerevan train station.
•After retiring from wrestling management, Ian Chevston-Darra left the UK and moved to Canada, where he began recruiting for the men’s national soccer team and helped them qualify for the 1986 World Cup. He then settled in Alaska, where he took up dogsledding, until he fell asleep in the middle of the Iditarod, and the sub-zero temperatures froze the glass of his goggles to one of his eyes, partially blinding himself on one side when they were hastily torn away. It was perhaps the greatest testament to his skills as an agent that he was then able to turn this feat of ineptitude into a sponsorship from a rifle sights company called Aarhos & de Vart Inc., based in Odense, Denmark, with the campaign slogan En øje nemlig en øje.
•Shirley Cisa retired from wrestling for good, suffered a stroke in 1993 and died several years later. A full obituary was run in the December 6th issue of The London Times.
His dreams had become even more troubled. He dreamed about failure and death. He dreamed about war. He dreamed that every relationship was measured by the finite number of times a couple can willingly have sex, and when that odometer finally clicked over, someone snapped out of it. And he didn’t want it to happen this time. Everything was so perfect. He wanted everything to stay the same.
He dreamed that he was able to make time stand still. And the stillness was so beautiful that he didn’t notice how it was affecting her.
He dreamed they took on the care of a farmstead in Cape Rosier, near North Hadvat, a museum of sorts, dedicated to living without electricity or running water or leisure. And he dreamed of a grey fog that settled over their pastoral home like a force shield, until not even the passing of time could enter. It was a fortress, sealed off entirely from the outside world, impermeable and impenetrable, save for a tiny undetectable hole that let the remaining time leak out. And it leaked out slowly, with a hiss, and they were drawn further and further from the present reality.
He dreamed their love was perfect, and so was unaware, as they both were of the time hole, of how miserable she was, untouched for so long, feeling unwanted and unwantable, rolling over at night to cuddle him and being greeted by a gritty tension, his simmering fear that she would want to make love to him again and the perfection would be over. He was unaware of how he was treating her unfairly, simply because he was tired, or hungry, or sought ridiculous things, and he dreamed that the farm took on her blossoming state of depression. Their crops failed. Their animals faltered. There were rumors of bandits. One night, he was sure he heard someone out rustling in the garden. He’d found a small squadron of foil plates in a drawer in the kitchen, and rather than tossing them out in disgust, he strung them up around the garden’s periphery. He wasn’t entirely clear if this went against the rules, but he was pretty sure that tossing them in a landfill would be worse. He kept his gun close to the bed and lay awake holding his breath so he might hear the sound again.
Other times he would dream about the accident, about his collapsed lung, the fractured facial bones, his shoulder, how most of his ribs were broken at least once, the doctors inserting a tracheotomy tube to help his lungs heal, and various other tubes for feeding, draining, inspecting, other things, immersing him in a huge tube of thick liquid to control the swelling, which the doctors seemed quite happy with despite it taking four days for the swelling to go down so they could actually operate, fusing his spinal chord with metal bars, a bone graft at the point of injury, a twenty pound halo attached to his skull in the hopes that the first two vertebrae might recover, and still, even after being confined to his bed for over a month, he was the only patient in the ward who could feed himself, bathe himself, dress himself and wipe his own ass.
He dreamed about being able to walk, of more operations, with more tubes that weren’t inserted into his regular orifices but jabbed directly into his legs; when he rolled over in his sleep, they would catch on the side railing and be torn out. He dreamed of being able to feel again.
And Chris Eaton thought about his life, and the goals that he had set for himself as a teenager, the goals he had told his friends about, including the names he planned to give his children, so there was no way he could back down from them, even after the crash. He dreamed of the crash. He dreamed he was dead. And the rest of his life was just dreams. And the dreams had dreams. And the dreams of his dreams also had dreams. And still he was unable to attain those goals. All of his time was spent chasing those goals. And if he managed to hook one and reel it in, it was just replaced by another, so that he was never happy, never even hopeful. It wouldn’t even have mattered if his goals had been different, because then only the specifics would be changed, and the seeking would still sit haughtily at his side, like a jealous friend or even worse, on his chest, until he could no longer breathe. Like he was drowning.
He came across another Chris Eaton in the newspaper. In the morning. After his run and before breakfast. Still sweating despite the shower and five minutes of aiming his pits at the air conditioner, despite the fact that the temperature rarely got above twenty-four degrees centigrade in this place, despite walking most of the way today because of the clicking in his left knee. The Financial Times featured an article on Multimedia Messaging on mobile phones. The Wall Street Journal, with its new colour look, was covering the investigation and guilty plea of Arthur Andersen’s David Duncan, the top accountant overseeing the Enron fiasco, none of which could be good for anyone in his line of business. He had to read those for work. But he also got The Examiner, The Courier, The Manx Independent – the locals. It was his way of integrating. The more he knew about the place, the more he could contribute to the coffee talk at work and the sooner he’d be accepted. But there he was reading a story about a young boy from Amherst, New Hampshire. In America. His brother had been killed recently in Fallujah while escorting private contractors to a demolished power plant. Iraqi citizens had dragged his body through the streets and strung him up from a bridge rail over the Euphrates. Just as the first grenade had ripped his brother’s feet to shreds beneath their SUV, this American boy – the one the article was really about (news is never news without hope, particularly during a war) – had kicked a record fifth field goal against his school’s cross-town rivals at Pelham. In the type of ceremony one would only see in America (they had symbolism down to a science over there, had practically replaced truth with it), they had buried the game ball the next week in the end zone.
The American boy was also named Chris Eaton. He smiled at the coincidence. What was it like to be a child? He could barely remember. They seemed so hideous and menacing when he saw them on the street, throwing tantrums in grocery stores, at the beach, their chests immeasurably frail and emaciated, and their arms projecting forward like the wings of bats. Arms that whipped around like they were full of bees. Fingers you
could practically see through. Always crouching, hugging themselves. They could barely stop touching themselves, these kids. Even his days studying law at Birmingham, where he likewise couldn’t stop touching himself, seemed so far away. Or the several years he spent working in London and Gibraltar before moving here to the Isle of Man in 1991 to set up an office responsible for the offshore tax operations for businesses in London, Dublin, Lisbon and the Virgin Islands. Thirteen years and the locals still considered him a comeover. From across. He and his wife. It was the nature of small communities. There were some bloodlines, like the Callows and Kerruishes, that went back centuries. His own children would probably still be considered outsiders, if he even still planned to have them. His wife. He could barely even remember what had made him fall in love with her in the first place. But being a stranger to his co-workers and his wife was nowhere near as unsettling as being a stranger to himself. And if he couldn’t remember why he ever loved her, how could he ever hope to remember the person he apparently used to be, the one who might have made that decision to marry her in the first place? They say that the cells of the body are constantly regenerating, and that we are a completely new person every seven to nine years. If that were true, was there really anything that connected him to those past versions of himself any more than to this adolescent child in an Associated Press leftover from across the pond?
