Post by Tapioca Joe on Jan 17, 2018 22:40:58 GMT -8
The scene opens to a truck stop coffee shop in Canada. It’s the dead of night and Tapioca Joe looks as if he has been through a hundred wars. He is simply sitting in a booth, drinking coffee. The clock on the wall reads 3 AM.
Global Wrestling Division’s self-proclaimed defender lays a twenty dollar bill on the table when the waitress comes by with the coffee pot again. Her “why don’t you get the hell out of here look” turns to a smile when she sees her tip.
”Is there anything else I can get for you?”
”No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
”You sure have been here an awful long time. Is something troubling you, hon?”
Tap looks out the window at the howling snow, everything that’s on his minds flashes through his consciousness. He pauses for a second and takes a deep breath.
”There are a lot of things troubling me right now… but that’s not why I’m here… I’m kinda at a crossroads in my life right now… and I’m waiting here for someone…
”Woman problems?”
The veteran wrestler laughs and for the first time he cracks a smile.
”No, I’m happily married believe it or not.”
”That’s good, how long ya been married?”
The waitress takes this opportunity to sit down across from Tap; the place is dead and she finally has someone to talk to other than the fry cook.
”Two years come October.”
”Well, congratulations… So I don’t get it… what’s the trouble, you look like you're in great shape, you’re a married man, and I saw the truck you pulled up in…”
”Yeah, I’ve kind of turned things around for myself recently. I’ve recently went back to my old line of work, but I’m starting to wonder why I’m doing all of things I’m doing'… wondering if there’s any reason to put out effort. I thought that getting' headed in the right direction would provide me with some motivation, but all it has really done is make me complacent… I get too comfortable too easily, I suppose.”
”I see, you don’t have any desire.”
”No, it’s not that, whenever I’m doing something, I give one hundred and ten percent. I pour myself into everything' I do… It’s just that I don’t know if any of it is worth anything”.
The waitress looks at him with a serious countenance. For the first time, her eyes are noticeable. Despite the haggard appearance of her face, she has sparkling, radiant, steel gray eyes. She looks at Tap and begins to speak.
”I’m going to give you some advice… Stop worrying about the big picture, and what you should be doing, stop trying to find meaning… life is what you make of it, there’s no greater meaning, and if there is a God, I can only imagine that he wants one thing from us, for us to be happy…”
“A long time ago, when I was barely a woman, I met a man… he was charming, intelligent, handsome, ambitious…He was the best man I ever knew… We fell in love, but we couldn’t let it be known in our town, He was Black… and in 1965 in Wytheville, Virginia White girls didn’t date Black men…”
The waitress pauses and sniffles. Tap hands her a napkin.
”Thank you… Well, anyway, we didn’t care about what other people wanted, and what people thought… We were in love, He got into Howard University and we were going to run away.”
”What happened?”
”Well, my momma got real sick… Pa had died in Korea, and both of my brothers felt it was their patriotic duty to go serve in Vietnam… My oldest brother Bill had gotten killed in action, so they were gonna send Junior home… It worked out real nice, Junior was due home two days before me and Vince were going to go to Washington… I felt real bad about leaving her, but Junior would be there to take care of her, and I could go and live my dream… Vince even said that he could help me get into college.”
“Then it all fell apart, Junior didn’t come home the day he was supposed, I was worried something awful… The next day a soldier showed up at our house, a real somber lookin’ fella, He told me that there had been a fire aboard the airplane that was bringin Junior home, It landed okay, but there was one man aboard who was killed, trying to fight the blaze, My brother Junior… I cried all night, I went to see Vince… He was devastated, too… He asked me if I was going to stay and take care of my mother… I told him that I didn’t know… He said he’d understand if I didn’t leave her, seeing as I was all she had left… He said that I could come visit him, and maybe move up to DC as soon as I could… I cried, Lord did I cry…”
“I decided that it was my responsibility to stay home with Momma, that maybe the good Lord had something different planned for me, I figured Momma didn’t have much longer anyway… and soon I could go and be with Vince…”
”What happened?”
The waitress stares out the window at the snow, as if she’s lost in a moment somewhere far away. She turns back to the new one contender to the GWD American Justice Championship and her eyes seem just a bit less bright.
Well, we wrote, and he’d come visit me a couple times a month. He was becoming such a great man, he was learning so much, and he was starting to really get motivated by the civil rights movement… But Momma held on… she seemed constantly sick, but Momma was a fighter… as time went by, Vince graduated, and was offered a big job with the NAACP, but he was going to be in San Francisco… I told him he had to go, we both cried for hours… it was so hard to watch him go, I even went with him to the train station to see him off, we talked on the phone… and wrote to each other more and more infrequently… Vince got his masters and got some job with the government as some kind of ambassador to Senegal… We talked and I told him that I understood that I just hadn’t been able to become the part of his life that we both wanted me to be… I felt so far away from him, a small town girl, with no education… taking care of her mother… Vince stopped in Wytheville one last time… we made love, and held each other all night. In the morning he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and see the world… it was 1975, 10 years had gone by since we’d first fell in love, and at that moment in time it was as strong as ever… then I thought about my mother, blind in one eye, and being slowly killed by cancer, I couldn’t leave the woman who had sacrificed so much for me, I had a responsibility bigger than myself… So I stayed, and I saw Vince away at the bus station this time, he had to go to Washington to catch his plane… I told him that he was free of me, and that I just wanted him to live his life… I said I’d cherish every moment that I was able to be with him, he kissed me, said I love you, and got on the bus… that was the last I ever saw of him… He wrote a couple letters, but I never wrote back…”
”Whatever happened to your mother?”
”Well, she died in 1977, but the point of this whole story, mister, is what she said to me just before she died. She told me not to be sad anymore, ‘cause she was goin to be with the Lord… She said she didn’t want to see me suffer anymore on account of her sickness… I told her that wasn’t the only reason I’d been so sad all these years… I told her that I had been in love with a man, and that I gave up my chance to be with him to take care of her… The old woman’s wrinkled lips curled up in an evil smile… She said that she had been doin pretty well in 1967, she got over her cancer some, but that she knew that I was ’taken with some dirty nigger.’ She told me that she had kept on acting sicker than she was so that her only daughter wouldn’t run off with some jungle ape… Her very last words drove her point home, ’And don’t think you’re getting a damned thing from me, you nigger loving whore, every cent I have is getting left to the Mountain Baptist Church!’”
“That old bitter bitch died with a sick smile on her face, I was devastated… I gave up everything I ever wanted, thinking it was the right thing to do, only to find out that I should have followed my heart… I found Momma’s stash of ‘mad money’ and packed it in my things, I called the ambulance, and the county coroner who was Ma’s doctor… I left that house with some of my clothes and a thousand dollars, thirty years old and I’d never been on my own before… and here I am now decades later… all because I felt that it was my duty to take care of my mother… Mister, don’t look for meaning in anything, just do what will make you happy… the worst regrets are the ones that affect your life… To thine own self, be true.”
The waitress gets up from the table and Tap stares back down into a half-empty cup of coffee. The sound of the cowbell on the door draws Tap’s attention. Through the swinging glass door, out of the cold, appears a bearded massively muscular man decked out in biker gear looking to be in his mid-thirties. Spotting Tap, the man removes his gloves as he makes his way over and slides into the booth across from Tap. In the background the waitress can be seen eyeing the enormous size of of the man.
”Deacon, glad you’re here. I thought maybe you were trying to pull one over on me, in the middle of night, in the middle of nowhere?!”
”Nope, I was serious… I was starting to think that you wouldn’t show, did you read the book I gave you?”
“Yeah, Deacon… I think that there is something in what you say, and in what that book has to offer.”
“You’re damned right there is, Joey… I know that for a long time, you have tried to stand as a pillar in wrestling, and I know that there are always people coming at you from all sides. It’s only going to be a matter of time before it starts…. Joey, I think that you need to examine the way you operate.”
“What do you mean by that, Deacon?”
“Well, I like the fact that you’re standing up for yourself, getting angry, pointing out the faults of others but Joey, you need to learn something...even at your age. You need to realize that sometimes life isn’t always black and white.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well big brother, I’m sure you know what is meant when they say ’chose between the lesser of two evils.’ That’s what I’m talking about… like for instance when Harry Truman made the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. He did it to save hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of American soldiers… was it right? That’s debatable, but the results are not… we won World War II , that is what was important… sometimes to defeat something that’s wrong, you must commit a minor act of wrong yourself.”
“I think I know what you’re getting at, Deacon, but fairness is important to me.”
“Fairness? Do you think fairness is important to people like Mark Storm? Or what about people like Tony Savage and Chris Compact who pay lip service to fairness, but would cheat if they absolutely had to or were cheated against first? Tap, what is important is whether or not you achieve your goals, especially if they are right… You have to stand up for yourself, if everyone else is working the rules and you uphold them, it doesn’t make you honorable, it makes you weak…”
“I don’t feel that I need to stoop to the level.”
“Are you even listening? I’m not telling you to rape and pillage at every turn. I’m just telling you that when the moment comes, you have to make it yours, otherwise you are setting yourself up for defeat. Everything in life is a sham, death is the only sincerity… Honor, courage, cowardice, fairness, these are all names we attach to broad classes of shams that men hide their actions behind, rather than taking responsibility for what they do… Joey, you’re far too intelligent to allow others to outmaneuver you, GWD is going to become a warzone, have I not prepared you to fight this war?”
“I understand that it indeed will be war and there is nothing I want more than to gain what I’ve never had… maybe I have been cheated… but that’s not the issue, the issue for me is getting past Mark Storm.”
“’As water has no constant form, there is no constant form in battle,’ sound familiar?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Then if you are predictable in your actions, are you then without form--- No, you’re not… Joey, I want you to go and think about what you should do, consider my words, and you will never fail again.”
The apparent younger brother of Tap gets up to leave the truck stop, looking as if there is a fire raging just below his surface, yet he is oddly calm. Deacon nods and heads out the door.
Tap stares down into his coffee again, thinking about the challenge that he faces. He knows that he will be tested and pushed to his limits in the coming days. He stands up and puts on his old leather jacket, and lays another twenty down on the table.
As he is walking out, he whispers something to the waitress. She smiles and hugs him tightly. Tap walks out the door, looking confident and determined.
Deacon Michaels
Global Wrestling Division’s self-proclaimed defender lays a twenty dollar bill on the table when the waitress comes by with the coffee pot again. Her “why don’t you get the hell out of here look” turns to a smile when she sees her tip.
”Is there anything else I can get for you?”
”No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
”You sure have been here an awful long time. Is something troubling you, hon?”
Tap looks out the window at the howling snow, everything that’s on his minds flashes through his consciousness. He pauses for a second and takes a deep breath.
”There are a lot of things troubling me right now… but that’s not why I’m here… I’m kinda at a crossroads in my life right now… and I’m waiting here for someone…
”Woman problems?”
The veteran wrestler laughs and for the first time he cracks a smile.
”No, I’m happily married believe it or not.”
”That’s good, how long ya been married?”
The waitress takes this opportunity to sit down across from Tap; the place is dead and she finally has someone to talk to other than the fry cook.
”Two years come October.”
”Well, congratulations… So I don’t get it… what’s the trouble, you look like you're in great shape, you’re a married man, and I saw the truck you pulled up in…”
”Yeah, I’ve kind of turned things around for myself recently. I’ve recently went back to my old line of work, but I’m starting to wonder why I’m doing all of things I’m doing'… wondering if there’s any reason to put out effort. I thought that getting' headed in the right direction would provide me with some motivation, but all it has really done is make me complacent… I get too comfortable too easily, I suppose.”
”I see, you don’t have any desire.”
”No, it’s not that, whenever I’m doing something, I give one hundred and ten percent. I pour myself into everything' I do… It’s just that I don’t know if any of it is worth anything”.
The waitress looks at him with a serious countenance. For the first time, her eyes are noticeable. Despite the haggard appearance of her face, she has sparkling, radiant, steel gray eyes. She looks at Tap and begins to speak.
”I’m going to give you some advice… Stop worrying about the big picture, and what you should be doing, stop trying to find meaning… life is what you make of it, there’s no greater meaning, and if there is a God, I can only imagine that he wants one thing from us, for us to be happy…”
“A long time ago, when I was barely a woman, I met a man… he was charming, intelligent, handsome, ambitious…He was the best man I ever knew… We fell in love, but we couldn’t let it be known in our town, He was Black… and in 1965 in Wytheville, Virginia White girls didn’t date Black men…”
The waitress pauses and sniffles. Tap hands her a napkin.
”Thank you… Well, anyway, we didn’t care about what other people wanted, and what people thought… We were in love, He got into Howard University and we were going to run away.”
”What happened?”
”Well, my momma got real sick… Pa had died in Korea, and both of my brothers felt it was their patriotic duty to go serve in Vietnam… My oldest brother Bill had gotten killed in action, so they were gonna send Junior home… It worked out real nice, Junior was due home two days before me and Vince were going to go to Washington… I felt real bad about leaving her, but Junior would be there to take care of her, and I could go and live my dream… Vince even said that he could help me get into college.”
“Then it all fell apart, Junior didn’t come home the day he was supposed, I was worried something awful… The next day a soldier showed up at our house, a real somber lookin’ fella, He told me that there had been a fire aboard the airplane that was bringin Junior home, It landed okay, but there was one man aboard who was killed, trying to fight the blaze, My brother Junior… I cried all night, I went to see Vince… He was devastated, too… He asked me if I was going to stay and take care of my mother… I told him that I didn’t know… He said he’d understand if I didn’t leave her, seeing as I was all she had left… He said that I could come visit him, and maybe move up to DC as soon as I could… I cried, Lord did I cry…”
“I decided that it was my responsibility to stay home with Momma, that maybe the good Lord had something different planned for me, I figured Momma didn’t have much longer anyway… and soon I could go and be with Vince…”
”What happened?”
The waitress stares out the window at the snow, as if she’s lost in a moment somewhere far away. She turns back to the new one contender to the GWD American Justice Championship and her eyes seem just a bit less bright.
Well, we wrote, and he’d come visit me a couple times a month. He was becoming such a great man, he was learning so much, and he was starting to really get motivated by the civil rights movement… But Momma held on… she seemed constantly sick, but Momma was a fighter… as time went by, Vince graduated, and was offered a big job with the NAACP, but he was going to be in San Francisco… I told him he had to go, we both cried for hours… it was so hard to watch him go, I even went with him to the train station to see him off, we talked on the phone… and wrote to each other more and more infrequently… Vince got his masters and got some job with the government as some kind of ambassador to Senegal… We talked and I told him that I understood that I just hadn’t been able to become the part of his life that we both wanted me to be… I felt so far away from him, a small town girl, with no education… taking care of her mother… Vince stopped in Wytheville one last time… we made love, and held each other all night. In the morning he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and see the world… it was 1975, 10 years had gone by since we’d first fell in love, and at that moment in time it was as strong as ever… then I thought about my mother, blind in one eye, and being slowly killed by cancer, I couldn’t leave the woman who had sacrificed so much for me, I had a responsibility bigger than myself… So I stayed, and I saw Vince away at the bus station this time, he had to go to Washington to catch his plane… I told him that he was free of me, and that I just wanted him to live his life… I said I’d cherish every moment that I was able to be with him, he kissed me, said I love you, and got on the bus… that was the last I ever saw of him… He wrote a couple letters, but I never wrote back…”
”Whatever happened to your mother?”
”Well, she died in 1977, but the point of this whole story, mister, is what she said to me just before she died. She told me not to be sad anymore, ‘cause she was goin to be with the Lord… She said she didn’t want to see me suffer anymore on account of her sickness… I told her that wasn’t the only reason I’d been so sad all these years… I told her that I had been in love with a man, and that I gave up my chance to be with him to take care of her… The old woman’s wrinkled lips curled up in an evil smile… She said that she had been doin pretty well in 1967, she got over her cancer some, but that she knew that I was ’taken with some dirty nigger.’ She told me that she had kept on acting sicker than she was so that her only daughter wouldn’t run off with some jungle ape… Her very last words drove her point home, ’And don’t think you’re getting a damned thing from me, you nigger loving whore, every cent I have is getting left to the Mountain Baptist Church!’”
“That old bitter bitch died with a sick smile on her face, I was devastated… I gave up everything I ever wanted, thinking it was the right thing to do, only to find out that I should have followed my heart… I found Momma’s stash of ‘mad money’ and packed it in my things, I called the ambulance, and the county coroner who was Ma’s doctor… I left that house with some of my clothes and a thousand dollars, thirty years old and I’d never been on my own before… and here I am now decades later… all because I felt that it was my duty to take care of my mother… Mister, don’t look for meaning in anything, just do what will make you happy… the worst regrets are the ones that affect your life… To thine own self, be true.”
The waitress gets up from the table and Tap stares back down into a half-empty cup of coffee. The sound of the cowbell on the door draws Tap’s attention. Through the swinging glass door, out of the cold, appears a bearded massively muscular man decked out in biker gear looking to be in his mid-thirties. Spotting Tap, the man removes his gloves as he makes his way over and slides into the booth across from Tap. In the background the waitress can be seen eyeing the enormous size of of the man.
”Deacon, glad you’re here. I thought maybe you were trying to pull one over on me, in the middle of night, in the middle of nowhere?!”
”Nope, I was serious… I was starting to think that you wouldn’t show, did you read the book I gave you?”
“Yeah, Deacon… I think that there is something in what you say, and in what that book has to offer.”
“You’re damned right there is, Joey… I know that for a long time, you have tried to stand as a pillar in wrestling, and I know that there are always people coming at you from all sides. It’s only going to be a matter of time before it starts…. Joey, I think that you need to examine the way you operate.”
“What do you mean by that, Deacon?”
“Well, I like the fact that you’re standing up for yourself, getting angry, pointing out the faults of others but Joey, you need to learn something...even at your age. You need to realize that sometimes life isn’t always black and white.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well big brother, I’m sure you know what is meant when they say ’chose between the lesser of two evils.’ That’s what I’m talking about… like for instance when Harry Truman made the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. He did it to save hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of American soldiers… was it right? That’s debatable, but the results are not… we won World War II , that is what was important… sometimes to defeat something that’s wrong, you must commit a minor act of wrong yourself.”
“I think I know what you’re getting at, Deacon, but fairness is important to me.”
“Fairness? Do you think fairness is important to people like Mark Storm? Or what about people like Tony Savage and Chris Compact who pay lip service to fairness, but would cheat if they absolutely had to or were cheated against first? Tap, what is important is whether or not you achieve your goals, especially if they are right… You have to stand up for yourself, if everyone else is working the rules and you uphold them, it doesn’t make you honorable, it makes you weak…”
“I don’t feel that I need to stoop to the level.”
“Are you even listening? I’m not telling you to rape and pillage at every turn. I’m just telling you that when the moment comes, you have to make it yours, otherwise you are setting yourself up for defeat. Everything in life is a sham, death is the only sincerity… Honor, courage, cowardice, fairness, these are all names we attach to broad classes of shams that men hide their actions behind, rather than taking responsibility for what they do… Joey, you’re far too intelligent to allow others to outmaneuver you, GWD is going to become a warzone, have I not prepared you to fight this war?”
“I understand that it indeed will be war and there is nothing I want more than to gain what I’ve never had… maybe I have been cheated… but that’s not the issue, the issue for me is getting past Mark Storm.”
“’As water has no constant form, there is no constant form in battle,’ sound familiar?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Then if you are predictable in your actions, are you then without form--- No, you’re not… Joey, I want you to go and think about what you should do, consider my words, and you will never fail again.”
The apparent younger brother of Tap gets up to leave the truck stop, looking as if there is a fire raging just below his surface, yet he is oddly calm. Deacon nods and heads out the door.
Tap stares down into his coffee again, thinking about the challenge that he faces. He knows that he will be tested and pushed to his limits in the coming days. He stands up and puts on his old leather jacket, and lays another twenty down on the table.
As he is walking out, he whispers something to the waitress. She smiles and hugs him tightly. Tap walks out the door, looking confident and determined.
Deacon Michaels
