Architect

[The Ace]

Glasgow, Scotland

June 1989

It was a couple of months before perhaps the single greatest moment in all of cinema history would finally be here. 

The release of Batman should be what Star Wars had been to the previous generation - a phenomenon. Jake had been far too young to appreciate the true euphoria of A New Hope upon its original release and that was something he had been sorry to miss out on because it sounded amazing to hear about from the people who had been there.

If it was indeed true that given enough time history always repeated itself, then Jake hoped that this would be it, especially now that he was old enough to appreciate it all. Jake's biggest concern was whether Michael Keaton would do the role justice. He would be starting college after this summer was over and that's why he had been determined to make the most of this, the beginning of his last summer as a free man.

That was yesterday, today things were different. His concerns were bigger. He was ripped, torn, dragged kicking and screaming from the colours of his comic book fantasies to the darker, duller world. He sat there in the spare bedroom of her parent's home and sat with his copy of The Killing Joke and the words he struggled to read were blurred through his silently streaming tears. 

Joker was once an entertaining bit of escapist fiction for him, nothing more. Now however, he spoke to Jake, almost personally.

Memory's so treacherous.


One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights, with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon of puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss...the next it leads you somewhere you don't want to go.

Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp, ambiguous shapes of things you'd hope were forgotten.

Memories can be vile, repulsive little brutes. Like children I suppose. Haha.

But can we live without them?

Memory is what our reason is based upon. If we can't face them, we deny reason itself!

Although why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality!

There is no sanity clause!

So when you find yourself locked on an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past, remember there's always madness.


Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened.

You can lock them away...forever.

Joker's words were blurred but so too was the meaning behind them. Reading them silently over and over and over again did nothing to silence her screams - a deafening cacophony in his head.

Jake tossed the comic book aside and it hit the brick wall before it fell, abandoned. He reached across the nightstand to his personal walkman, a tape recording of various rock music lay unfinished inside the deck.

He slipped the headphones on and cranked up the volume as far as it would go and let Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) numb his senses to the rest of his broken world. He fell backwards onto his pillow and closed his eyes.

It did nothing. It was no use. His eyes shot open again and she was there, calling to him again. Moments passed before he knew she was real, she was here in his room, watching over him, and suddenly he felt ashamed. He sat up and tore the headphones from his ears.

Jake: Loo!

Her face was pale and freckled, her emerald eyes quivered as she faked a smile for his benefit. She sat down on his bed next to him.

Jake: Loo, listen I'm so sorry about what happened. I wish I had been there but they -

Louise: I know what they did Jake, tah both o' us. Yoo were there fer me, alwiz have been, Ace.

She smiled, it was her special nickname for him, a nickname he no longer felt he deserved, not after how he had failed to live up to it.

Jake: Are you sure you don't want to go to the police, to press charges, to get justice?

Louise: I've been through this already with Ma, please don't make me explain it to yoo too. If there wiz 'ne troo justice in this life Jake, none o' this wud've happened in the firs' place. It is said that everything happens fer a reason, I believe that. I hafta believe that. God has a plan tha' we jus' dunnae understan' yet. They will get wha' they deserve in time.

Jake: Are you serious? How can you say that? How can you even believe God still exists after what those bastards did to you?

Louise: Yoo dunnae?

Jake: No! Not anymore. How can I believe in divine justice after everything we've been through in the past twenty four hours?

Louise: I have to believe Jake, I have to believe there was a reason to all of this. My faith, an' yoo are the only things I have left to cling to, to get me through this, to help me come to terms with everything.

Jake: Faith isn't going to help us Louise! 

Louise: Neither is sittin' in some station, recallin' every dirty disgustin' detail over an' over. I've been humiliated enough, don't yoo think?

Jake: We can't just sit here, we need to do something.

Louise: What can we do about somethin' that's already been done? We can't go back, we can't change things. I survived. I will grow. I will adapt.

Jake: How in the blue hell can you adapt to being raped?

Louise: With yoo by my side, anythin's possible. 

Louise reached out for his hand, but Jake stood up.

Jake: I can't!

Jake made his way to the bedroom door.

Louise: Where are yoo goin'?

Jake: I need some air and time to think.

Louise: I'll come with you.

Jake: Alone.

Against her every instinct to fight, she conceded and she let him leave. Perhaps it was better this way, he didn't have to see her cry all over again.

~~~

Some people are never happy with their lot in life.

It's a sad truth, but what's even sadder is just how rarely it is accepted. 

Some people are always fighting, trying to rise above their station in life. Some people will never accept that there is a natural order to all things. They will bite, scratch and claw against it, not because they have cause but because they cannot come to terms with the single most important fact of their lives.

One simple, most inconvenient but universal truth.

The truth that it really doesn't matter where you find yourself in this life, there will always be someone, somewhere who has proven themselves to be your better. No matter how much you achieve, there is always someone better than you out there. 

People are not wired to accept that fact for what it is and thus they try and try and try again to be better, to be the best, and it is precisely because of this that the business works as well as it does. If there is one thing in this world that exploits the ego almost as much as appealing to it, it is professional wrestling.

I know the allure well, I was taken in by this business just as you were, Jack.

Once upon a time I was on a very different path in my life. I was a skinny little nerd who would very occasionally watch wrestling with my grandfather. He loved watching the sport, I saw it as a bit of mindless Saturday night entertainment for the most part. I never saw myself being here, doing this, not back then.

I wanted to be a biologist, I wanted to understand the nature of all things. I wanted to pick the world apart just to see how it all worked. I wanted to dissect the little miracles of evolution all around us. I wanted to explore the true beauty at the heart of everything in this universe.

I honestly don't know if it was destiny or just bad luck, but life completely derailed everything I had planned about my future. After that, things were never the same for me again. Suddenly professional wrestling wasn't just something to watch on the weekends, it was something to aspire to. It was an inspiration. It was full of heroes, men of almost mythical proportions. Men who would go out there and rise above every challenge, every beat down and come back next week even stronger. 

It was then that I finally understood. These muscular behemoths weren't just colourful characters, they were pinnacles of evolution, constantly changing and adapting to the ever changing ebb and flow in between a set of wrestling ropes. They weren't just role models to a skinny little blonde haired kid from Birmingham, they were what I needed to be at that point in my life.

I needed to be strong, I needed to be resilient, I needed to come back from everything that had happened, not just for my own sake, but for her.

The Ace takes a moment to reflect upon the Man of Steel Championship on his shoulder, a reflection of everything he was now and couldn't be then. Better late than never, some would say, those fools.

Watching professional wrestling got me through some of the darkest times in my life, I wasn't so much thrilled by it as compelled to become everything it represented to me. It was a beacon of hope, it gave me a new life goal, a 'healthy' way to channel all the hurt, rage and anger I felt. I spent years in the gym, getting myself bigger, faster, stronger, determined never to be beaten and helpless ever again.

Fate took that raw physicality I had dedicated myself to developing and introduced me to the most violent motherfucker on the planet I know, perhaps you have heard of him. His name is Michael Kane, a lot of people know that.

He saw the anger and when everybody else was telling me to suppress it and that it wasn't healthy, finally there was a son of a bitch out there who promised to help me embrace it, to accept it, to make it part of everything that I do inside that ring.

Spike Kane took my demons and exploited them. He lead me to places I never in my life thought I was capable of going to. Deep, dark places, the places we all have inside of us but never really talk about. The places the best of us grow out of, the worst of us grow into and the rest of us deny.

Why am I telling you this Jack? What has any of this got to do with one of us being the Man Of Steel after Sunday?

Everything.

You see Jack I want you to understand where I come from so that when I tell you that I finally understand where you come from, you'll know that I am being sincere. It isn't a mind game, Jack.

Being in the ring with you as often as I have been in these last two months, I've learned a hell of a lot about what you can really do inside that ring, and studying who you are outside of it, I have learned who you really are underneath all the brash bravado.

Most people are content to just look at your track record and the way you present yourself in front of a camera and write you off as just another loud mouth who seldom has what it takes to back it up in the ring. I could do that too, but that would be too easy.

If all you really were was just another arrogant asshole with an inferiority complex, you would have realised just how fruitless this whole anti-corporate agenda of yours really is.

After all, no logical and rational human being would dare to still think that the machine is to blame after all the opportunities you and your fiance have been given lately.

If the only thing on your agenda was the business of sticking it to me and my wife on a professional level, then you could have done that a couple of weeks ago by knocking off Alex Jones and becoming Imperial Champion.

Hell if you really wanted to stick it to our sense of professional pride, you and Fiona could have conquered the company together on the same night.

Since you both failed at that and you both still insist on blaming us for your inability to get anything done properly inside that ring, I have to figure that it's not a professional problem that the two of you have with us, but rather a personal one.

I have already proven that I can separate what is personal and what is business to me Jack. I proved that when I called your match straight down the middle this week.

I stood in the ring and was man enough to raise your hand and declare you the winner, and with that piece of business done, then it became a matter of defending my personal pride as the greatest technical wrestler in all of professional wrestling today.

You would have done the same Jack, I know you would have, because I know you, perhaps more intimately than I was willing to admit before. I know the demons you run from, because I've run from them myself. I know the nightmares that haunt you when you lay down at night and wished it had been you and not Hiroko who had paid the ultimate price for your failure to protect her.

I know all this because there was a time, long before I ever met Kathy, that I drank my regrets into submission, or at least tried. When I realised I couldn't, that it would never be that easy, I sought control over my life by taking the thing I valued more deeply than anything else and twisting and draining all the life and emotion out of it, just like what had happened to me in that summer of '89.

I stripped love of all its context, I ripped the heart out of all my feeling, and I used every empty woman I could find to fill the void. Some nights I even convinced myself that I loved them, but I knew deep down that I was lying to myself, fooled by their grateful screams.

I knew it wasn't the real thing, but it was the best I was going to get, especially being the emotional wreck that I was at the time.

You have a second chance here Jack, I have given you every tool to make the most of it, not because you deserve it, but because I don't want either of us to have any excuses after the dust settles and the curtain is drawn for another year at Night of the Immortals. 

The stage is set for you to do something spectacular this Sunday Jack, you have been given the keys to the kingdom.

You have the a choice this Sunday Jack, a choice that goes well beyond the simple almost trivial rules of our Championship match.

You can either take this opportunity to craft my ultimate demise or you can cement your own rise to prominence within this company. You cannot do both, no matter how much your arrogance deludes you into thinking that you can, because as you should know by now Jack, everything in this life has a price. Everything is a compromise.

It took me a decade in this business before I truly understood that fact. 

Looking at my own daughters and seeing just how fast they're growing, I know the youth learn their lessons a lot quicker these days, and if I had one hope to teach you anything from our next encounter, it would be the hope that  you finally realise just how wrong you have been up to this point in your life.

It's your choice Jack, it always has been.

You can either be honest with me and admit the real reason you have taken up your arms against me, or you can lie to Fiona and tell her that there is absolutely no part of you that sees her as a hollow replacement for the wife that was taken from you just last year.

Take it from somebody who has been down that road one too many times sunshine, an old love is never a replacement for a true one. 

I've been where you are now, chasing titles, all the while hoping that one of them, any of them would numb the sting of my failures. This business offers you euphoria in something as simple as a fourteen pound title belt, and as great as that high feels, it never lasts and the nights are still cold.

Colder if you have nothing else to come home to at night.

Men like us Jack, we cannot bear to be alone. We need someone to balance us because without it, we're hopeless idiots.

When Kathy came back into my life seven years ago and told me of my daughter, I jumped at the chance to fix everything in my life. I proposed to her on a whim and a prayer because I was so scared of being alone, of being every bit as empty as the bottles of scotch in my hotel room across the country. I was so gracious of my second chance that I leaped head first into a relationship that I had screwed up the first time around.

So I know what its like to anticipate that she may never take anything you say seriously.

That's why I'm telling you that if you can't be honest with me, at least be honest with her.

You owe her that much, she is your fiance and the mother of your son. She deserves to know what the man she is marrying really feels inside his heart about just how quickly things are changing around him, doesn't she? Or have I misjudged you Jack and you're happy to live out the cheap paper veil of a convenient romance just because Fiona happens to be standing where you still wish Hiroko was.

Hiroko was the whole reason you started doing this, wasn't it? Wrestling was in her blood, even if she wasn't seduced by the fame. Not like Fiona is, Fiona knew nothing of this business until she met you. Kathy was the same until she met me.

I know there are days when you Jack regret mixing her up in this crazy world of ours, I know I feel the same about my wife, but they're both stubborn little minxes aren't they?

They'll tell us that they can handle it, that they can take care of themselves.

Be thankful that I know where to draw the line in all of this. Fiona will never suffer because of me.

It is the only guarantee I will make to you Jack, everything else is in your hands. I don't really care if when you look at me and Kathy the two of you see everything you could be professionally, or even if the two of you see everything you and Hiroko should still be.

You have every right to hate me for living the very dreams that were once taken from you, I just want you to be honest about it.

If Kathy and I really were against you, do you think we would sit back and give you even the slightest chance to become IWF's newest silver couple, on the grandest stage of them all no less?

We don't want to hold you down Jack, we never did. All we want, all we've ever wanted is to test you.

We want to see what happens when we toss the both of you into the same fire that forged us. The lights will be at their brightest and the pressure will be at its highest this weekend Jack.

Try not to melt under the weight of all that steel you seek.