Promo history - volume 37.
"At the Drive-In" (August 8th, 2020).
Michelle von Horrowitz def. Ty Jordan (FWA: Division's Rules).
"At the Drive-In" (August 8th, 2020).
Michelle von Horrowitz def. Ty Jordan (FWA: Division's Rules).
[VOLUME THIRTY-SEVEN]
MICHELLE von HORROWITZ
in
”AT THE DRIVE-IN.”
The Pleasant Plains Drive-In Theatre.
Somewhere south-west of New Brunswick, NJ.
Thursday August 14th, 2020.
She sat on the hood of the battered old Buick, a half-drunk bottle of Jamie’s to her left and a half-smoked pack of Camels to her right. The film was projected onto a screen bigger than any she had ever seen, stretching across a huge wall that had been erected across one entire side of the glorified parking lot. Beyond it, the plains dominated the horizon, running off towards a dark, gloomy lake in the north and a wall of trees in the west. It was approaching midnight, this day turning into the next as passively as it always did. The theatre was re-running an old 1940s British film, one that Michelle had seen when she was a small girl in the Netherlands, and it was doing an inconsistent job at holding the attention of the rather varied audience. Some of them were students, having driven the short distance from Princeton to the south-east. Others were locals, down from Blackwood Mills or one of the townships, some of them on date night and others alone, yawning or staring off into the distance or, very occasionally, half-watching the events playing out in black and white. A handful of small trucks were dotted around the theatre: transients driving through on route to their destination, some other destination. An old Indian man in a pick-up slept away happily, directly in front of the screen, occasionally waking himself up with a particularly loud snore. Ten meters or so to her right, under the branches of a poplar tree, a truck driver was getting a hand job from a Hispanic boy half his age, his eyes closed and his head thrown back as he built towards his ecstasy. She wondered if this scene really matched what David Lean would’ve wanted. She supposed it didn’t really matter, now that he was dead.
”I wish I could trust you,” Celia Johnson was saying whilst staring at the camera - straight past the camera. A melodramatic gauze smothered her close-up. “I wish you were a wise, old friend...”
Three days ago, she had been in Philadelphia, and things had been good. She was silly to think it would last. As Celia had said in the film: ”This can’t last. This misery can’t last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts, really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.” Michelle had smirked to herself at the line. It was as true as it was contrived. But it had brought about a period of uncomfortable reflection. In Philadelphia, her overriding thoughts were concerning her most recent victory – their most recent victory – over Kevin Cromwell and Nova Diamond. These Charming Men had imploded after the match, but constant loss will do that to even the best of friends, and those boys were far from that. A week earlier, after forcing down her first taste of defeat since joining the company, she had been staring humiliation – born from potential back-to-back losses and a hypothetical first round exit - in the face. In the midst of the relief that victory brought, she had almost allowed herself to believe… to believe that the search for her assailant was coming to its end, and that the Goddess and the Prodigy had acted as unlikely Samaritans. But this belief didn’t last. ”Nothing lasts, really.”
Gerald had left for Brooklyn a couple of nights after their win, and that afternoon there had been a knock on her door. It was a runner from Fight Night, but the messenger had forgotten most of the message (naturally). Fortunately, he had had the foresight to write it down, and told her to contact the building security manager at the Richmond Coliseum. It had been over a month now since the attack, and still the arena in Virginia was yet to release the relevant CCTV footage to her. They didn’t have to at all, the building security manager had continually told her, despite the fact that she was, you know, the victim. The implication was that she should be grateful at being told to wait, her somewhat limp investigation growing staler with each passing day. Every time she’d called the odious little man, he’d tell her that the tapes were still with the detectives. Why the FWA felt the need to involve the police at all was beyond her.
When she’d dismissed the runner, she quickly found a payphone and called the number that he gave her. His name was Ron and he stank, almost to the point where she could smell the old smoke and sweat through the telephone line. He was as unreasonable and stubborn as ever: he gave her three days, and then they’d be re-using the tapes. Consulting the calendar and finding she had a touch-and-go three days until Division’s Rules, she jumped on the first Greyhound going South. She’d arrived at the Coliseum around fourteen hours later, the bus having taken an alternate route to steer well clear of the protests in Baltimore. It had stopped at Hagerstown instead on the way through to DC, before following southwards along the Potomac River and striking towards Richmond.
The Coliseum obviously hadn’t changed much in the six weeks since she’d last been there, but she got the overwhelming impression that it hadn’t changed a huge deal in the forty-nine years since it had been built. Right down to the Head of Security: an unexpectedly sullen (but predictably sweaty) man who kept his centre of gravity close to the ground and sort of waddled down the corridors. He had met her at reception and took her to his voyeur's grotto: a palace of screens and speakers and labelled buttons. With the sort of grunts and sighs indicative of a working man who felt thoroughly thrown out of his rhythm, he busied himself in collecting a VHS tape from a cupboard by his knees, placing it into the player and returning to his sandwich.
He was as helpful as he was willing to be. The video he’d fished from his collection was for the camera handily positioned at the end of the corridor that she’d been situated on that night. The footage started early, and when she’d asked how to fast forward it he’d passively pointed at a specific button on his control panel without looking up from his dirty magazine. She watched the sped-up tape, pausing momentarily the first time Lord Vincent appeared on-screen. She let it play at normal speed, watching on as the general manager walked up to her locker room door, knocked it, waited, and then walked away again. The time stamp read ’06/26/2020 18:48:32’, which she noted down in her little black pad. That was over an hour before the show started, and visiting this early was only ever bound to end in disappointment. Twice more the general manager came back, once at 19:35:06 and then again after the show had started at 20:15:11. There was also a lone visit from Gerald, at 20:08:42, and she didn’t doubt his intentions were to discuss the recent draw for The Elite Tag Team Classic. She noted it down nonetheless. Finally, at 20:33:42, she herself walked into the shot. Her rucksack was slung over her shoulder, the sleeves of her hoodie rolled up around her elbows. She pushed open the door, and before she walked in she took her cigarettes out of her pocket. She lit one and closed the door firmly behind her.
She returned to the fast forward function, watching the motionless corridor for a few moments, before finally Lord Vincent walked back into shot at 20:38:16. He paused at her locker room, considered knocking, and then continued on around the corner. A few minutes later, Ty Johnson made his way through the shot, failing to pause as he wandered past in the opposite direction to the Blackbird. Naturally, his eyes drifted onto the door of the locker room as he passed by, tracing over the name of its occupant. Michelle leant back, placing her hands behind her head as she regarded the image. She reached into her pocket, taking out her cigarettes.
“You mind if I smoke in here?” she said, holding the box in front of the Head of Security’s eyes.
“It’s against state health code regulations,” he declared, turning a page in his magazine.
Michelle placed them down in front of her and looked at the screen, and was confused to find it blank. She reached over for the fast forward button again, and eventually the feed of the corridor came back, with a time stamp of 21:52:48. The main event would already be in full swing, and she’d be in one of the wings of Richmond General. Instinctively, she pressed the button directly to the left of fast forward to rewind the video, the image finally returning at 20:49:36. She let it play, watching once more as Johnson walked past her door. He didn’t notice the camera whilst turning the corner underneath it and disappearing from sight. Less than a minute later, the feed cut to black.
She watched the footage again, perhaps half a dozen times, and then took her leave.
“You find what you were looking for?” a portly man with red cheeks asked as she emerged into the corridor. He stopped to offer out a hand, which Michelle stared at awkwardly. “Malcolm Cressen, Head of Public Relations for the Richmond Coliseum. I must say, you’ve caused me a fair amount of work these past few weeks…”
When it became apparent that she had no intention of shaking his hand, he took it back and used it to neaten up his greasy hair. He wiped the excess moisture away on his pant leg, and then stuffed his hands emphatically into his pockets.
“Have you seen the arena?” he asked, his spirits not dampened by the rather one-sided nature of the conversation. She shook her head, and the next thing she remembered was standing within the centre circle of a basketball court. Cressen had a big grin on his face.
“It’s something, right?” he said, taking it all in whilst turning a three-sixty. It was a question but it wasn’t really a question. “We’re putting on a charity basketball match. Friday night. Raising money for the elderly. Or maybe children. One of those age brackets, anyway. We’re still looking for a celebrity to throw the ball for the tip-off, if you’re interested?”
She thought ahead to Friday night, when she’d be standing opposite Ty Johnson. Division’s Rules would be in its closing stages and reaching its most important point. Just as they were about to come together with a collar and elbow tie-up, her mind’s feed cut to black, mirroring the security footage that she’d just been apathetically shown by Ron.
“I’m afraid I’m busy on Friday,” she said, her quiet voice echoing unnaturally around the empty arena. From their right, the sound of a door opening disturbed their sanctum, an elderly man with a hunched back pushing a mop through its frame. He obliviously went to work, scrubbing away at the concrete steps ahead of Friday’s big game.
“Not now, Jeffrey,” the executive said, taking a couple of steps towards the janitor and projecting his voice. “I’m in the middle of something.”
Jeffrey, leaning on his mop, looked down at the court. When he saw the executive, Michelle fancied she could see a momentary flicker of annoyance pass over his old, kind face. He suppressed it, nodded, and disappeared the same way he had come.
“It was you who dealt with the police?” Michelle asked, feeling the need to push the narrative thread along. Cressen turned back towards her, his grin disappearing quickly. He gripped the lapels of his jacket as he addressed her question.
“Yes, it was me,” he said. “Weeks they’ve been. First, there were two uniformed officers. One white guy and one black guy. You see a lot of that nowadays, you know? Anyway, they took the tapes, all of them, and they had them for three, maybe four weeks? Funny thing is: in the meantime, a different set of officers, your downtown sort of detectives, all polished and in suits, they came asking for the tapes as well.”
“A different set of guys?” Michelle asked, taking her notepad out again. “The plain-clothes pigs didn’t know that the uniforms had already been?”
“It didn’t seem like it,” Malcolm said, shuffling his weight uneasily between his left and right foot. “But they said this sort of thing happens. Different units with overlapping investigations and priorities, you know? When the tapes came back in the mail, I called the second set of detectives and they came for them. They were only interested in the one that you saw today, at the end of corridor A-34B. When they were finished with it, I called you. Or I would’ve done, if you had a phone.”
“There’s other tapes?” she asked. “Can I see them?”
“I’m afraid not,” he answered, shaking his head in rueful fashion. “When it became clear the police didn’t have a use for them, we re-used them. I only kept that one as a courtesy to you.”
“There’s a gap in the feed,” she said, trying to lock eyes with Cressen. “About an hour, between roughly 8:50pm and 9:50pm.”
“Yes, I noticed that. Ron and I obviously watched the tape back the morning after the attack, and that gap was there before we’d even removed it from the machine. The police commented on it, too, of course. The funny thing is, all of the tapes were like that. Corridor A-34B's camera and the rest of them, too. We think there might have been some glitch in the system.”
“A glitch in the system?” she asked, raising an eyebrow above her pad.
“A glitch in the system,” he repeated.
Half an hour later, she had been stood outside of the employee’s exit of the Richmond Coliseum, desperately trying to light a cigarette. She was out of gas, and she kept getting a spark that miserably petered out when she brought it towards the smoke. It appeared that the task was beyond her. She felt a wave of relief when a wrinkled hand holding a lighter appeared to perform it for her. She nodded in appreciation as she took in the first, deep, blissful drag.
"I'm sure Cressen seemed more helpful than he was," the old man said, sucking at his cigarette. With each drag, he let out a small, uneven cough that suggested he'd long stopped enjoying smoking, and kept the habit up out of nothing more than resilience. Only then did she realize it was the same janitor who had tried to wheel his mop through the arena a half hour before.
"He didn't seem very helpful at all," she said.
"That's Cressen for you," he said with a knowing chuckle. "So he couldn't tell you who attacked you?"
"You watch the show?" she asked, hesitantly, in-between drags. She was always cautious of people who watched the show.
"Every week," he answered, with a kind smile. "My money's on Bell. But I'll be damned if it isn't that Gerald Grayson kid all along…"
"Well," Michelle began, wondering what help the Coliseum janitor could possibly be in her investigation. She carefully concluded that he probably couldn't be much hindrance either. "He says two uniformed cops took the tapes, before the detectives came along. I don't know. I think the tapes have been tampered with. They seem almost useless. This whole journey has been almost useless. Only thing he told me was…"
She paused, flicking the end of her cigarette into a nearby drain. The show was drifting through her mind again, around forty-eight hours in the future and a stubborn feature upon an uncertain horizon. She should be there, she mused. Skulking around the corridors and asking questions. Instead, she was more than five hundred kilometers away, searching for meaning in blank screens and enquiring upon janitors for their judgement.
“He said the uniformed guys... one was white and one was black."
The old man couldn’t help but let out another chuckle.
“What are you thinking? That Sullivan and Johnson came to get the tapes themselves? Brought some fake badges and guns and aviator sunglasses from the fancy dress shop and duped old Cressen into handing them over? One white, one black… believe me, girl: the only color that that man sees is green…”
On the hood of the Buick, somewhere south-west of New Brunswick, another cigarette had smoked away to the filter, and she dispassionately placed it next to the others on the car’s hood. Behind her, Marianne let out a yawn, shuffled her position, and then continued to sleep soundly. On the screen, Celia Johnson was convincing her husband that she wasn’t up to no good… which, of course, she was. “It’s so very easy to lie when you know you’re trusted implicitly.” Celia only had half the truth. People found it easy to lie regardless of whether or not they would be believed. Michelle closed her eyes, imagining what it would be like to be able to fall asleep. It was, of course, utterly useless.
She had met Marianne at a bar somewhere in the north-western suburbs of the city, the Greyhound bus station visible through the window at which they were sat. Michelle had given up on the idea of being in Brooklyn in time for the show. It no longer seemed possible. When the young girl had decided that none of the empty tables were as inviting as Michelle’s, the wrestler decided she might as well see how things played out. She had explained her disaster at the bus station: the protests had spread from Baltimore to DC. If that wasn’t enough, Charlottesville and Hagerstown had increased local lockdown restrictions because of a spike in new cases. Standing at the information counter, Michelle was educated by one of the Greyhound Bus Company’s well-informed and thoroughly pleasant employees. She explained how the political situation, especially in an election year, when combined with a global pandemic have caused great uncertainty throughout the travel industry as a whole. The Greyhound Bus Company was not exempt, and as a result she would have to endure lengthy lay-overs in Charlotte and Columbus if she wanted to arrive in New York on Sunday afternoon. Two days after Division’s Rules.
Marianne was pleasant enough, but spoke too much. Everyone spoke too much. Generally, she discussed her travels across the States in her battered old car. She was from a small town in Montana, somewhere along the Canadian border, and had quit her job eight months ago to sale away in the Buick. ”North, east, south, or west…” she had said, whilst the pair of them smoked outside of the bar. She stared off at the moon as she spoke, as if one day she might be able to drive all the way there. Of course, a deal was quickly struck: a ride to New York in exchange for a motel tonight and a full tank of gas tomorrow.
“Whose funeral is it?” Marianne had asked from behind the wheel on the following day. They had just turned eastwards somewhere north of Hagerstown and were striking towards New York. It was already late, the sun just about giving up on the day and disappearing behind them as they drove.
“Funeral?” Michelle asked, blowing a plume of cigarette smoke through the open window.
“In New York, on Friday,” Marianne clarified.
“I told you it was a funeral?” Michelle did her best to dredge up the memory, but found it had been lost.
“Yeah,” Marianne confirmed. “Whose is it?”
“Ty Johnson’s,” Michelle answered, rather absently.
“Who is Ty Johnson?” Marianne asked, staring out of the windscreen and indicating as she nervously pushed out onto the highway. She thought for a moment, and corrected herself. “Who was Ty Johnson?”
“That’s not important.”
As she sat on the hood of the Buick in the Pleasant Pines Drive-In, she found it difficult to focus on the film without thoughts of Ty Johnson finding their way into her head. Hell, she’d be lucky if it was just Johnson: Gabrielle and Parr and their unknown motives were there, too, whilst Krash and Bell were never too far away either. She felt almost certain that she could consider Grayson clear now. His behavior was not the behavior of a guilty man and, without meaning to be condescending (but definitely being condescending), she felt he was too simple for the deception. And there was Sullivan.
The film was playing out its final moments, the same scene from the start of the film running once again. An hour and a half earlier, we had seen (but not heard) the handsome couple of Celia and Trevor sat in the corner of a railway café. An obnoxious waitress serves an obnoxious sort of neighbourly woman, who proceeds to notice our Celia. She is interrupting something, but at the time we have not been told what. At the film’s other end, we see it from the secret lovers’ perspective, having recounted their whirlwind romance before arriving at its bitter climax. Somehow, we are back where we started. Michelle’s mind raced to Gerald once more, and she found it disappointing that the closest human relationship – positive human relationship – that she could lay claim to was with her tag team partner. A tag team that had two matches under their belt, and a fifty per cent win rate. It was hardly Celia and Trevor.
But still, it was nice to be illuminated, and she enjoyed the narrative contraption that Lean had utilized to give her that. She only wished for a similar illumination in her own life, where scenes could not be replayed from different angles and perspectives. She only had her memory, and of the night in question that was understandably a little foggy. A lead pipe will do that to you. Division’s Rules was less than twenty-four hours away. Johnson waited: ready to protest his innocence and doubtlessly harboring a desire to make a name for himself. It was funny to think that only six months ago she had been in his shoes, and already the newcomers were looking to cement their own place at the expense of her and hers. And always, of course, Sullivan was there. If not at Johnson’s side, then his shadow loomed over them still. He was undoubtedly capable of something like this. And his own guilt was intrinsically linked to Johnson’s, if it could be proven. Sullivan wouldn’t have swung the pipe himself, she felt sure, and Johnson wouldn’t have acted alone. It was both or neither. And yet, she had spent the last six months convincing herself that Sullivan was doing his best to simply stay out of her way. Had she been wrong then, or was she wrong now? She made a note on the back of her mind’s polaroid of Sullivan: DON’T BELIEVE HIS LIES.
“Whatever your dream was,” Celia’s husband – attractive in his own way but certainly no Trevor Howard – asked her. Rachmaninoff swelled on the film’s soundtrack. The whirlwind romance was over, and all that was left a fading memory. “It wasn’t a very happy one, was it?”
Attacking Johnson last week had been… juvenile. Watching it back, as she had done numerous times, it had seemed like the act of a child flailing its arms. From the moment they had spoken, she found herself as suspicious of Parr and Gabrielle as she was of Johnson and, by extension, Sullivan. But Johnson was there, and he was a target. A good target, too. He may have taken a couple of falls since his uninspiring return, but he was still the King’s right-hand man. Simply by lashing out, she had managed to find herself as close the world champion as she had been in months. It would’ve been genius had it been planned, but now she found herself overwhelmed by the sudden proximity. The weight of the match suddenly seemed very real, and what at one stage felt a throw-away singles match had now spiraled into something of multi-faceted significance. It answered to her investigations into the assault, as well as the tag tournament, not to mention the overarching journey that would eventually lead to Sullivan.
Underneath her, the Buick’s engine roared into life, its headlights flicking on and projecting two cylindrical beams of light towards the screen. Michelle turned her head, and Marianne sat in the driver’s seat, her hands on the wheel.
She pictured Johnson’s face, and she judged him to be weak. If he was guilty, she would break him.
