September 10, 2016
"The interesting thing about psychiatric medication is realizing you will probably be on it for the rest of your life."
Joseph Davis Lee, better known as JC and formerly known as Joe Cool, sat in the dining room of his house tumbling a small tan bottle between his fingers. The pills inside rattled as he absentmindedly spun their container over and over. His wife, Stacy, was on the other side of their table, typing away at her laptop. It was early morning and the two woke up earlier than they wanted to get their affairs in order. She glanced up and blew strands of her now-longer blonde hair out of her eyes.
"Did you say something?"
"I'm just thinking. Lithium and olanzapine, every day, rain or shine, for the rest of my life. It's a pretty big commitment."
"Well, if that's the only way..."
"Yes, I know. I have to keep my symptoms under control. I'm not saying I'm not going to do it, I was just thinking about how big of a commitment it is and I'm only a month in."
"Have you been hearing it?"
"Hearing what? The voice? Not really. It feels weird. I'd grown so used to it I was able to ignore it most of the time, then I guess everything that happened over the past six months just...well, you know."
Stacy had witnessed her husband at his absolute worst and stood by him, and now they were stronger than ever. Even then, the dark cloud of his bipolar disorder and his psychotic behavior hung over them. At times, Joe wondered if it would ever dissipate.
JC's condition went undiagnosed for much of his life until his recent return to the OWF. He always just assumed the voice he heard was a part of him, not a symptom of mental illness. Times of stress made it worse and his return to wrestling added enough stress to make it the worst it had ever been. He was almost feral at times and finally decided to save himself after nearly obliterating his best friend in front of a worldwide audience. He ended relationships, destroyed people and enjoyed most of it until he finally got the treatment he needed.
Now he was plotting his second return of the year and wasn't sure if it would pan out. That began at OWF's next event, which he was set to catch a flight for in a matter of hours.
"We're past that now. That's why I decided to tour with you from now on. If you want to keep wrestling, you get to take me along with you. I'll keep an eye on you."
"I've heard it's a full-time job."
Stacy smiled and closed the laptop on the table. She slid out the chair, her bare feet landing on the cold tile floor. She walked over and behind Joe, before putting her arms around his massive shoulders and planting a kiss on his cheek.
"Yeah, but I think I can handle it."
"You're loving this, aren't you?"
"Well, I don't really want to leave Michael in charge of the gym, but this is important. We need to watch each other."
"That's not true at all. You're clean."
"I was clean the other three times too. We're both pretty fucked up and we need to keep each other stable. This is the best way."
He grabbed a hand and kissed it before finally popping off the lid to his pill bottle. He wanted to down the pills quickly before the bitter taste lingered on his tongue. He took a swig of water and then catapulted the medication into his mouth before swallowing it all in one fluid motion. With that necessary chore out of the way, he looked back at his wife and took a moment to appreciate her. It was something he liked to do several times a day, more so now that she helped bring him back from the brink.
"So what's on the agenda today?"
"Well, I've got a surprise for you, but it's not here yet."
"A surprise? I don't know if I can handle a surprise right now."
"Trust me, you'll like this one."
"Just tell..."
Before he could finish, they both noticed JC's phone buzzing on the table. All it takes is one look at who it is for JC's relatively good mood to vanish.
"Just answer it."
"You know I can't."
The name "TRENT STEEL" flashed vibrantly on the phone's screen. As far as JC was concerned, it was the situation with his brother all over again. Both situations were very similar. Both men were trying to save JC from himself and he responded by beating them within an inch of their lives. He booted his brother in the face and allowed him to be burned with a fireball. With Trent, he dropped him on his spine from a good eight or nine feet in the air.
The truth was that JC was ashamed. He was ashamed that he listened to a voice in his head, brought on manic episodes from his bipolar disorder. He was ashamed that he refused to take his medicine and was adamant on destroying every relationship he ever had. In the end, it was JC that had to save himself. He had to pull up from delivering that final boot that may have ended Trent's career.
What made him feel more ashamed than anything else was the fact that he wanted desperately to make contact. He wanted to kick Trent's face right off of his skull for daring to think anything was wrong with him. It was what JC felt he deserved. As much as he tried to tell himself that it was his condition making him feel that way, he still felt it several times before and during the match. For that, he would always hate himself a little.
Stacy, as kind and patient as any one woman could ever be, decided to ignore his feelings of guilt and tried to correct something else in his life. She plucked the phone from next to JC and meant to swipe answer. Unfortunately for her, the phone's buzzing and flashing ceased.
"Guess I wasn't meant to take that call."
She simply struck him on the shoulder and muttered something about him under her breath. Married life wasn't all loving gazes and kisses on the hand, after all. Sometimes she had to call him on his mistakes. She pressed a button and held it up to her ear. JC turned towards her and began to get out of his seat to grab his phone, but she held up a hand.
"Relax, I'm calling your voicemail."
"How do you even know my passcode?"
"Because it's our wedding date. You use it for everything, dumbass."
She had him there. He sat down and let himself smirk a little at her feisty attitude today. He may have conflicted emotions about his best friend, but he felt his love for his wife would never fade. She was having absolutely none of his attempts to beat himself up, something that had become a daily occurrence since he really began to recover. Once again, he thought that while marriage was about equality, she was better than him in every way.
She listened to the voicemail for a moment and then hit JC again, before holding the phone up to his ear.
"Listen to this. Your best friend is worried about you. After all that happened, he's worried about you. Call him back."
"Stace, I can't face him. This isn't just a matter of breaking something valuable or having a minor argument. I beat that man within an inch of his life. I tried to end his career. I might have cost him the world title."
"And after all of that he still wants you in his life."
"No one ever accused Trent of doing what was best for him."
She bent down and wrapped her arms around JC's head, before kissing him. It was like he was coming down from an addiction and couldn't stop obsessing over the people he hurt. JC thought he didn't deserve to have friends like Trent or a wonderful wife like Stacy. She thought differently.
"Trent knows who you are, Joe. He knows just like I knew. It's why neither one of us gave up on you. Your own brother gave up..."
JC winced at that. It was another failure in a long string of them.
"...but we didn't. We knew the real Joe was in there and we just had to bring you back. He knows that maniac at Blood Bath wasn't you."
Joe pushed himself up at the table and gave a long, pained stare to the one woman who chose him and stayed with him, regardless of everything he had done and said. He may have been a different person now, but he was still aware of what he was doing. Whatever excuses others were willing to ascribe to his situation, he was not willing to give himself the benefit of the doubt. He knew who he was better than anyone else, and he hated himself for destroying relationships, people and his legacy as a professional wrestler.
"That's the problem, Stace. I think there was too much of me out there."
He left the room to be alone with his thoughts, suddenly very aware of the silence in his head.
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Some time later, he sat on the porch of his modest Jersey City home and absentmindedly tumbled a twig between his fingers.
He used to smoke, but gave that up at the behest of his first wife and the fact that his conditioning suffered in the ring. He hadn't craved a cigarette in a decade, shortly after his neck surgery, but now he felt like he could use one. He wondered if his old carton was still snug in the hiding place he kept it in his old East Rutherford home. He wondered what his brother ever did with that home now that he had the rights to the property.
He didn't want the cigarette for the nicotine, the tobacco or the smoke. He didn't want it because he was bored. He just wanted, something, anything, to take his mind off of this crushing guilt he felt. Depressive states were kept in check with his medication, but medication can only do so much when you're clear-headed and able to think about all the wrong you've done in the world.
Instead of partaking in his desired distraction, he opted to snap the twig between his index and middle finger before dismissively tossing it to the grass below.
"Exciting activity you have going on out here."
He glanced behind him and saw Stacy standing at the door, holding papers in her hand.
"What's that?"
"Your surprise. But if you're too gloom and doom to bother, I'll come back later."
She had no patience for his dour mood today, and he couldn't blame her. If anything, competing in the OWF again would do them both a world of good, even if it meant having his fellow wrestlers judging and hating him for his past mistakes. He seemed to recall a certain platinum blonde giving a soliloquy on the subject of karma and agreed with it. He deserved what was coming his way in the OWF and planned to take it on the chin. He didn't, however, expect he would enjoy any of it.
He could only hope that he would eventually win everyone over with who his wife said he really was.
"I'm fine. Come sit next to me and let's see what you've got."
She had a pep in her step that she strolled the wooden porch to sit next to him. As she sat down, she handed him a stack of papers and then rested her head on his shoulder to watch him look them over.
"Hooray, my surprise is reading. You could have just given me a library card for that, hon."
She hit him in the arm again, this time a little harder to prove her point. However they were both smiling now, as there was obviously no malice behind it.
"Shut up and look at it. I think you'll like this. As soon as they were faxed over I brought them out."
"We have a fax machine?"
"You really need to pay attention to where our money goes."
He laughed a little and held the papers in front of him. The more pages he flipped over, the more and more this stack of papers looked like...
"Hey! This is a contract!"
"Nothing gets past you, dear."
He shot her a glance before continuing to look over the papers.
"Did you re-negotiate my OWF contract or something?"
"I did some negotiating, but it wasn't with Chase Johnson. Between you and me, I can't stand that man."
"Join the club."
He moved away from the contract's preliminary pages when a orange and black logo caught his eye. No, this wasn't an OWF contract at all.
"Carnage Wrestling? You got me a contact with Carnage Wrestling?"
"I called up Kyra Mohr as soon as you started to get better. I've had this idea for a while."
"Stacy, what have you been up to?"
"You want to win over the crowds, right? You want to convince everyone you're a changed man? You can probably do that in front of the larger audiences, but I think you need to go back to the beginning. Carnage is regional, located right here on the east coast. Just like a certain other fed you used to go on and on about."
"ICW..."
"Exactly."
He set the contract down behind him, then grabbed his wife by the face and kissed her. She returned the favor, both trying to do it through their smiles.
"I swear I don't deserve you."
"Don't start that again."
"No, I mean it. This is perfect. This is the kind of place I need to re-establish myself. It'll be like coming home and starting over. I'm still popular over here, I think."
"Well, it's not exactly Jersey, but Maryland's close enough."
"Have I told you that I loved you lately?"
"Not in the last hour, so you're about due."
He kissed her again to provide a nonverbal confirmation of the fact.
"Wrestling is your life. I tried to keep you in retirement and that was wrong, regardless of your issues. I'm not going to do that again. We're going to do this the right way, as a team."
"You've got it, boss."
"Don't call me that!"
He laughed and continued to look at the contract in amazement. He didn't know what went into Stacy's talks with the CW President or what was discussed, but he didn't care. He felt like he would do something like this for free. It was absolutely perfect.
He got to the back page, which revealed his start date. September 19 in Baltimore. Three hours away. He could fly to China, do what he planned to do at Rise or Fall, then come back here and train for his in-ring return. He was a lot leaner now than he used to be, after shedding ten pounds. What he lacked in brute force he would gain in speed. He would go back to basics in every sense of the word and let his technical wrestling do the work for him.
Carnage Wrestling was as close to home as it got. It was an opportunity to really test himself. The wrestlers in the promotion were young and hungry. They were scratching and clawing to make names for themselves. He remembered what that was like, and he remembered that made them tougher than any of the Greg Jacksons or Moxie Roxies of the world.
He suddenly felt very excited that he could count himself among them.
It was perfect.
He realized that while his road to recovery would have many, many bumps along the way, it was moments like this that made it worth it. He would prove that he was a good man. He would prove even his harshest critics, including himself, wrong. He wasn't defined by his past. He was defined by his future and all the good he would do in it.
It was time to show the world what JC was really made of.
As his best friend liked to say so often, he hoped he was made of sterner stuff.
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I could say you don't know me, but I know that's not true.
I'm JC and I'm very popular on the east coast. At least more so than I am in the rest of the world. I used to run many of the same venues that Carnage currently runs when I was getting my old fed ICW off the ground. I used to compete in many of the same cities when I was just starting out.
I'm a Jersey boy. Always have been. I grew up just three hours away from CW's home base. East Rutherford, born and raised. I currently live in Jersey City, because as it turns out you can't take the man out of Jersey any more than you can take the Jersey out of the man. Enough of the history lesson. Why am I here?
I'm not a good person. At least, I wasn't a good person. I won't bore you with the details because they're all on the OWF Network. I was responsible for hurting a lot of people and until recently I didn't regret a single moment. I want to change that. I want to be a better person. I want to show that I'm not defined by my past.
This a way for me to regain something I've lost in my career. I became very bitter over the years and I want to remind myself what it is about this business that I love so much. It's a notion that seems easy to grasp for most of you, but it's something I think I lost in the middle of the violent acts and the messianic agendas.
Regardless of what I've done in the past, I'm a wrestler. I'm a damn good wrestler. Always have been, always will be. You don't last sixteen years in this business and win eighteen different titles without being good at what you do.
Now that my head is clearer, I think it's time to look to the future. It's time to re-establish my legacy as one of the best wrestlers on this planet. Carnage Wrestling is how I do that. I need to get back in touch with my roots. I need to recapture the energy and passion that I felt before I let that darkness take over. I don't have a mission. I'm just here to wrestle.
The first step on my journey isn't an easy one, because I've got Sabiru. Honestly, I know very little about this guy and I've been watching the Carnage archives for research. I, like everyone else, only know what I've seen. Here's the conclusion that I've come to: Sabiru is tough, but he doesn't win when it counts.
He showed up for Pool of Blood in the OWF and he lost. He was in the Wargames match at We Are Relentless and he was eliminated. Not to mention he was on "Team Carnage". I'm sure I'll interact with more of them in the coming weeks. Whether or not you agreed with their motives is irrelevant. You represented a team that at best would rather cause violence and blood loss instead of relying on whatever ability they may have. If I had to guess, I would say they like violence because they have no ability.
In a way, you're the perfect first test for me. You're cold. You're ruthless. You're like a mirror image of who I used to be, except I would never launch someone off a cage and ruin my chances of becoming champion. Then you eliminate the champ in the biggest match in CW history and you lose focus as a result. That's shortsighted and stupid. It's not something a champion or even someone that's good at this would do.
You know, I don't really care what your thing is with Melody Lennox. This isn't the place for your dime-store Fifty Shades of Grey S&M fantasies. This is a wrestling ring. While you may have the tools to physically get it done, you don't have it upstairs. You don't have focus. You don't have drive, at least not the drive a normal person would have. I have the drive to be the best, and that means I'm going to run right through you to prove it. Come to the ring at Chaos 25 and let me properly introduce myself.
I have no problem with you, Sabiru. I don't really know you. There are things about you I don't like, but as far as I'm concerned you're just a body. You're the first opponent in my true comeback as I prove that not only do I still have it, but I can be the best and not try to cripple my opponents. It's a fine line to walk, but if I hope to truly shed myself of who I used to be, then I'll walk it with sharpshooter precision.
You're actually about to have an interesting distinction in your career. You'll become the answer to a trivia question when people look at my career and see where I turned things around. Sure, it's not a great legacy to have, but at least you'll be remembered. Judging from your past, you weren't really heading in that direction before now.
As for me? I want to leave behind a legacy that doesn't make my wrestling prowess take a back seat to my history of violence. My legacy is recovery, and you are the first step.
And for that I thank you.
