Post by Nick Knight on Dec 3, 2023 6:09:07 GMT
It’s a picture perfect winter day in Southern California, and Nick Knight is sitting on his deck staring out over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. This was his favorite place in the world to come when the house was empty, and just enjoy the peace and quiet. JC was at school and would be for a couple more hours, Penny was in Mexico scouting locations for her first legitimate film, and Cin was in Las Vegas working on opening her first new spa in Sin City.
The phone sitting on the table rings and brings him back to reality. Quickly he answers the video call to see Cin looking right back at him, and before he can even say hello she yells, “You’re a fucking asshole, you know that?”
“I’ve been told that a time or two, but what did I do this time.”
“You promised us that you would talk to us before making any financial decisions, and you went and pulled this bullshit. You sold everything that you own just to pay the rent on a space for one year. One fucking year!”
“I did promise you that,” he says, with a sigh. “Which is why I let my financial advisor make the decision.”
“Don’t you even try to throw Saul under the bus, Nicky. You fucked up big time, and you just need to own up to it.”
“I did let Saul make the final decision, Cin. I called him up and told him what I was thinking about and had him crunch some numbers and get back to me. Had he told me that it was too big of a risk, I never would’ve done it, but it thought it was a good investment.”
“You don’t think that I can do it on my own,” she asks, hurt obvious in her voice.
“Quite the opposite, my love.” Nick climbs out of his chair and begins to walk laps around the in-ground pool. “Saul figured that you had the money to safely open an outpost in Vegas, but the location would make it hard for it to be anywhere close to as successful as the other locations. My investment puts you in a prime location on The Strip that will almost guarantee that the location will be more successful than all the others combined.”
“That money was supposed to be your retirement, Nicky.”
“It still is, Cin.” Nick’s phone beeps and shows that he has a call coming in from Penny. “Hold on a second, Penny is calling me.”
Nick flips over the other call, and before he can get a word out, Penny begins to scream at him. “Where the fuck did the money in my movie account come from, Nicky?”
“I put it there,” he answers.
“No shit, but where the fuck did you get that much money from that fast?”
“I have Cin on the other line, let me go ahead and make this a three-way call so you can scream at me together.” Nick hits a button on the face as both of the women come on the screen. “Now, to answer your question, I moved around some investments.”
“What do you mean moved around some investments,” Penny asks.
“He had Saul sell off everything,” Cin answers.
“You did what!”
“Saul ran the numbers, and he thinks that we’ll make more money from me making these investments than we will from everything else that he had in my portfolio combined,” Nick explains.
“Why didn’t you talk to us about this,” Penny asks.
“There wasn’t time."
“We were together all of Thanksgiving weekend, you couldn’t have said something then?”
“No. Saul didn’t get back to me with the numbers until the next Monday, when you were needing to finalize the budget for the movie. He also said that we needed to move on that space, or we would lose it.”
“So, what are we supposed to do for money if something happens to you,” Cin asks.
“Is that all you see me as, a piggy bank,” Nick asks, faking outrage.
“This is serious.” Penny tries to hold back laughter. “You’re not getting any younger, and we don’t know how many more years you have in the ring.”
“Trust me, I’m reminded of that every day when I get out of bed.” Just to prove his point, he turns his head and every bone in his neck pops. “I should be getting a nice bonus for SOTF from the numbers that I’ve seen, I’ll be getting a very nice automatic raise when I win the Invictus Championship, and I’ll get another raise after NOTI.”
“How’s that going to help us now,” Cin asks.
“I will have made enough money in the next six months to more than buy back all the businesses I sold. Plus, we’ll have all the extra money that the two of you are going to be making by then.”
“That’s a lot of ifs, Nicky,” Penny says. "This movie could absolutely flop. I mean, Hollywood hasn't ever been too kind to former porn stars."
“It's not a lot of ifs Penny. Your movie is going to be great, and people are going to fucking love it. Cin is going to have the best athletic training and spa company in two different cities, and make more money than both of us combined. I am going to beat Alexandra Tuesday night, which means I have to be given that raise. I am not going anywhere between now and the end of my contract, so they will have to pay me more after NOTI. Oh, and I forgot all about the bonus for every one of my successful title defenses.”
“Nicky I believe in both of you, you know that I do, but that’s a lot of risk to be taking if we seriously are going to be growing our family. Can we afford another mouth to feed if it all goes to shit,” Cin asks.
“The one thing that I learned when we had JC, and I think Penny will agree with me, is that you learn to get really good at figuring out a way to get things done. There are nights you might not sleep because you’re trying to figure it out, but you’re going to.”
“I hate to agree with him, but he’s right,” Penny says. “When JC was born, we had just moved into the house, and we barely had any furniture besides a crib and a mattress on the floor. It took a lot of work, but we got to buy and built a damn good lives for ourselves and our son.”
“I guess I’m just nervous.”
“That’s normal.” Nick sits back down, both of his knees popping. “Right now, both of you go kick ass at your jobs, and I’m going to pick up The Boy. I’ll see both of you on Wednesday with ten pounds of gold around my waist and a smile on my face.”
___________________________________________________________________________
{Nick Knight sits in a folding chair somewhere deep in the bowels of the Moda Center. He is dressed for action in black trousers with a thin gray stripe, his knee brace pulled over the top, and a black dress shirt. Laying on the chair next to him is a leather trench coat, wide brimmed hat, and a black plague doctor’s mask trimmed in brass.}
Lately, I’ve spent a lot of my time worrying about the cancer that is slowly killing professional wrestling. I look around, and I see this sport growing a lot of big personalities that are going to see this business die because they care way more about stroking their fucking egos than they do growing this business. I’ve come to realize that I’m never going to like this about people like Angel Blake, but maybe there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it because the world has just turned into a selfish fucking place.
The past few months, I have thought of Alexandra Callaway as just being one more selfish asshole in a business where that has become the status quo. I lumped her in with people like Wraith, Tara Fenix, and Matt Knox who love to go from company to company collecting belts until hey’re swimming in them like Scrooge fucking McDuck, but she’s something completely different. She isn’t just one more person slowly choking the life out of professional wrestling. No, she’s a fucking virus doing everything that she can to kill off companies one by one.
I’ll be honest, I could probably tolerate that just fine if she had started with taking out the kind of companies that run their shows in bingo halls and high school gyms. Those places are a fucking dime a dozen, and if one closes, two more will open. Young wrestlers just getting their start in the business are always going to have a place to work, so Alexandra could have put those places out of business until her little heart was content. Where she fucked up is she came to my company and tried to pull that bullshit, and Nicky don’t play that shit.
{Knight begins to bounce his leg up and down, clearly agitated.}
You should have figured that out by now, Alexandra, but you still you sometimes show up and pretend to be Invictus Champion. You come to the ring wearing the belt around your waist, and you get introduced as the champ, but we all know that it’s bullshit. That’s why I’ve given you so many opportunities to make shit right, but you keep dodging me like a fucking coward. You should have lost that belt back in Toronto, but you used some stupid fucking excuse about being booked somewhere else so you wouldn’t have to face me. Hell, the only reason that belt isn’t over my shoulder after I pinned out at Survival of the Fittest is a fucking technicality.
Tuesday night your luck finally will finally run out, Alexandra because you have nowhere to run. You can’t use a booking with another company as a bullshit excuse to just not show up for a match. Your championship isn’t going to be protected by the rules of some clusterfuck of a match. The only choice that you have left is to climb inside the ring with a pissed off ‘Hollywood Butcher,’ and leave Portland covered in your own blood.
Every ounce of frustration that I’ve felt these past two months is going to get taken out on you, Alexandra. I am going to chop you until your chest is covered in welts, the flesh torn open and bleeding, I am going to suplex you until you can’t even remember your own fucking name, and then I’m going to drive you skull first into the canvas over and over until Blue Shoes has no choice but to call for the bell.
Tuesday night will be the end of this so-called rivalry, when I make damn sure that you’re leaving that arena in the back of an ambulance. Hell, if I had my way you’d be leaving in the back of a hearse, but death is too fucking good for you. No, I am going to hurt you so bad that you will remember this match every morning when you need help just getting out of bed. The beating that I give you is going to make damn sure that you never have the guts to ever step back inside an IWF ring,
{Nick picks up the plague doctor’s mask and slowly pulls it on.}
The doctor is in and Tuesday night I will cure IWF of the disease that is Alexandra Callaway once and for all.
{The scene fades to black.}
Well howdy there pardner.