Mehrdad is my cousin, my mother's sister's boy. I used to hang out with him a lot when he lived in Miami. Smoked weed my first time with him. I fucked his girlfriend when we were all 16, but he doesn't know that.
If he had come from my father's side, he would know the importance of King Ahriman Ashtaad, the Farsi Firebrand, the Terror from the Near East, one of the greatest Persian wrestlers of all time and my father. He would know what lacing up the boots means.
As it is, he knows drugs, and he's been in New York long enough to get good connects to the best substances, best clubs, best girls. I appreciate it. I came to New York to party.
I'm standing outside of a high school in some suburb of the City, I already forget the name. I've just finished a show with a podunk outfit known mostly for bringing in washed-up talent to have pity matches with rookies who lost more often by tripping over their own feet than by anything those old geezers did. It's a little cold, a little chilly, and I think I should have worn a sweater under my Carhartt. I shouldn't be smoking, but I can't help it, I've bummed one off one of the other wrestlers even though I didn't stay to say more than Thanks and Where's the bathroom? The light at the end of the cigarette burns bright, angry, when I draw in. I knock my knees, look at the two-lane road that feeds into the high school, the two-story planned residences just beyond, waiting for the car that's supposed to come pick me up.
The thing is, I can't help that I'm good at this wrestling business. Not in the way my dad was. He was a professional wrestler in the strictest sense of the phrase. I just fight. Try and survive. It translates well enough. Eddy Hollidae rides home to whatever hovel he calls his own tonight with a loss, even after having wrestled all throughout high school, trained extensively to be the best, won numerous state championships, went to Washington State University and became a two-time NCAA champion, had been wrestling five years prior throughout the world, had busted his ass in Japan, in the sweltering gyms in Mexico, in Britain, Germany, Puerto Rico, South Africa, but here, in Shittown, NY, he took a loss to Naveed 'cause no man who really calls himself a man is gonna walk right after a kick to the nuts and no human that has a working brain to get caved in will get up after a piledriver onto a chair. It translates because pain is pain, combat is combat, and winning is winning, no matter how you get there.
In the seventh grade, when Mehrdad still lived in Miami, he got into some shit with this black kid named Tyrell. Girl that Mehrdad liked started paying attention to Tyrell, I think. Fight breaks out on an alley, shortcut back to our neighborhood, usually deserted. Mehrdad, who has always been a skinny little prick, is getting his ass handed to him. Nobody's here to see this except me. I could have, and I should have, let Mehrdad get the shit beaten out of him, but of course I intervened.
In Miami I learned how to fight. We would get into shit, or I should say Mehrdad would get into shit, or maybe we wouldn't even be doing anything at the moment, selling off pills we didn't have time to take or didn't like the effects of or had just found or stolen, someone would rob us, but whatever happened, we would mobilize, attack. We had to. Earned nowhere near enough to be okay with getting robbed, especially not to get a reputation for that kinda shit. I learned how to fight dirty because that's the only way to do it. Quick. It's not about honor, it's about survival and profit.
It translates directly. But of course, Mehrdad won't understand. I won't make him try to. His heavy black luxury car pulls into the high school parking lot and swings around until it's in front of me. His window lowers and he grins out at me. Mehrdad is skinny all over, still after all these years, never filled out, in his cheeks or arms or torso or nothing. His hair is black, stringy, parted from his face into an effete ponytail. His black silk shirt, delicately patterned with nearblack purple polygons, hangs like a Halloween sheet over his shoulders. He's seen the videos in my dad's house and thinks they're stupid, insists we get out of there as soon as possible whenever he has to stop by.
Mehrdad's picking me up here 'cause if he doesn't I don't have a ride. He's supposed to be showing me this spot he's got an in at. He assumes the black dufflebag is for something illegal or kinky or both, and I say "Let's get back to the fucking City, man." and toss my bag into the back of his car, sink into the passenger seat, and snort a line off of the windowpane he's got prepared. I ask about painkillers, he says he hasn't got any on him. He doesn't ask about why I'm at a high school. He doesn't ask me about what I'm doing in this nowhere. I assume he's forgotten the town's name, too.
"Yeah, my guy at the club, he actually knows your dad," Mehrdad is saying. We're back in the City now. The two hour drive has taken us into proper night, into the Hyatt suite that's being paid for me. Mehrdad has thrown his skeletal body over one of the long seablue couches, bobs his feet idly. I'm stashing my duffle bag away, making sure I've got cigarettes, cash, lighter. I don't change from what I've got on. No need to draw questions.
"Yeah?" I reply.
"Yeah, old Firouz's a wrestling fan," Mehrdad laughs. "Used to watch all those old shows, apparently, with King Ahriman down in Florida. Persian pride or whatever."
"Huh. Weird." I'm looking at my phone. I hadn't checked it for what must have been hours, stuffed it in my bag and forgot about it. I've got a voicemail message.
"Mr. Naveed. We haven't heard back from you yet. Are you still coming to LEGION? We need a tape. Send it by noon tomorrow and we'll be alright. The Church of Fight. You can find it."
One of the people at the head of the company or franchise or whatever the fuck LEGION is. I had barely talked to them before myself, though this message was left by the guy I'd had my phone interview with after they had already gotten a look at my tapes and decided I'd work for them. And yeah, I forgot to call the guy back. I've been busy since I got to the City.
"Yo, EnVee, what's the hold up?"
"I'll be right out."
I close the phone, pocket it. I'll keep my eye out for the Church of Fight if we roll past, but my mind is on the club. Has been on the club. Will be on the club. LEGION is a payday, a means to an end, an end which is coke and X and special K, heroin when I want it, which is not regularly, meth if I'm feeling reckless and broke, poppers for fun, and I'm telling myself as I exit the apartment, flanked by Mehrdad, that LEGION is just a payday, that I'm not doing it because I want to, it's just because I've got good instincts in the ring, because it pays well enough, even though wrestling doesn't pay nearly well enough for the damage I'm doing to my body to justify it to anyone who doesn't already know why I do it.
The EC6, the club that Mehrdad had talked about. The bouncer in black suit and shades reacts when Mehrdad says Firouz's name and perfectly plays the irritated V.I.P. I know the role well enough, grin patronizingly at the bouncer as I glide past him and into the beat of the club. Rolling house, my style. Mehrdad's got the same taste as me, so he avoids hip-hop clubs, rock clubs. The pitch black is inflamed by varicolored lasers, the sea of gyrating people briefly illuminated in hot greens, reds, blues, purples, the DJ presiding, cap turned backwards, skinny but of huge presence in the room, and my arm is already up, pumping in the air, but Mehrdad isn't going to the dance floor and I follow him up a curving staircase to the balcony above.
Upstairs is scarcer, but still peopled. Maybe it just seems more spacious because nobody's dancing. Here, everybody's well-dressed, invariably well-monied, probably well-drugged. I don't feel out of place because I come from money and I know how to get money quick if I need it, which is the same thing as having money. Some of the people here have seen Mehrdad before, look up from their mixed drinks with coked eyes and smile slimly, manic energy focused into gesticulating or cutting lines or laughing as boisterously as possible and shoving people and enjoying themselves. Nobody talks to Mehrdad, even if they smile at him. Their eyes pass over me as if I'm not there.
"Mehrdad!" someone calls, an older voice, deep and masculine. "Ah, and is this the one you said was coming?" Mehrdad grins, approaches a table set into a half-cylinder nook, his arms spread to accept the terse embrace of a portly, middle-aged Persian man that I assume is Firouz. Beside Firouz sits a woman who looks somewhere between his age and mine, good-looking but not beautiful, dressed in a silver dress that didn't hide her cleavage but hid her thighs, wearing enough pearls, gems, and gold that I knew she was marked property.
"I always do what I say, don't I?" Mehrdad says, moving so that Firouz can look at me. Firouz has mirrored Mehrdad's style almost to a T, though he's not in Mehrdad's starvation shape, and though he's allowed a full black beard to grow over his jaw and hide most of his mouth. Firouz holds his hand out for me and I shake it firmly.
"Naveed, yes? I am Firouz. Come, come, sit down, make a space for him." We sit awkwardly, the woman scooting aside, me glancing at her often, helpless, sitting down between Firouz and Mehrdad. A tall white guy with a buzzcut and a braided beard steps out when Firouz lifts his hand. He fixes me with his stare briefly, trying to scare me, which is his job so I let it slide. "Powder." And the man produces it, sliding the small bag across the table. Like a magician, Firouz unknots the bag and dumps cocaine carelessly on a windowpane that I don't even remember being produced.
Disinterested in the cocaine, the woman shifts her body, rests her chin on her hand, and stares out at the sea of flashing laser light and bobbing heads.
Firouz deftly makes coke lines with a credit card, all the while talking: "How long you been here, Naveed? A week! A whole week and Mehrdad hasn't brought you? Ahh, ha ha ha, come, Mehrdad, you know I tease, and besides, Friday night, best night for partying anyway. I'm not mad! Ha ha, of course I'm not mad! Here, you first, Mehrdad, please! You know Mehrdad helped me set this place up? Yeah, six months ago, he did! Lots of legwork for me. Couldn't have done it without him."
"I just do what I can," Mehrdad says, still slyly grinning, passing straw and glass to me. I snort quick, feel it in my nostril, rub my nose and slide the apparatus along.
The conversation isn't Mehrdad's. He's barely part of it. Firouz has locked on me, wants to talk to me. He starts bringing up my father, King Ahriman Ashtaad. He knows his real name, Ardesh, used to live down in Florida and would go to all the matches. He saw my father put a fan's eye out when the motherfucker was getting too rough and rowdy, which were Firouz's words. Firouz passed the coke to the woman, she declined, he passed to Mehrdad, who now stares out at the crowd the same way Firouz's woman does, interested in the coke but disinterested in our wrestling conversation. I'm not conversing. Not much. I'm really just here, a target for Firouz to let out this Persian wrestling love onto, and I appreciate it because King Ahriman is my father, my idol, the reason why I even looked at a wrestling ring in the first place. I'm not saying anything, trying to keep cool for Mehrdad, snorting coke and passing, ordering drinks, but Firouz knows his shit, knows everything about my dad, about Florida wrestling, about Persian wrestlers in general, old school wrestling in general. While I play the part of the helpless and distressed adoree, I'm drawn in to all this history.
"I'm going down there," Mehrdad says after a while, disgusted, and he disappears.
Cocaine gives Firouz energy, access to memories he maybe thought he had forgotten but now dragged up rabidly. "Uh huh." is all I can say. "Yeah. Wow." Not sarcastically, just stupefied. I can see the woman glancing at me out of the corner of her eye, watching me, without Mehrdad's sneering overbearance, with the chemical erosion of my inhibition, turn into the devoted wrestling fan I am at my core, the ambitious wrestler that is still a hidden part of me. I want to shrink, but the cocaine has made sure I have nowhere to shrink to, no shame to hide behind.
I start to tell stories of my own, half-remembered shit my dad would let slip out sometimes, big shows and the aftermaths. I tell Firouz one where my father met a group of fans outside the ring and he broke one's nose but the others didn't believe he was tough so he broke one of their arms and they still kept coming (and this was with a couple other guys there helping my dad, too, but I don't remember their names) and then he bit one of their lips off and spat it at them and the fuckers scattered.
"King Ahriman Ashtaad!" I shout it loudly but probably not loud enough to get over the pulsing house, laugh, sit down and snort a line. Firouz is howling with laughter like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard. I feel good until the woman looks at me again. I try to put her haughtiness out of my head, involve myself in story and substance.
Eventually Mehrdad returns, dog-faced. He's gotten shut down by some chick no doubt. He takes it hard, always has, always will. Firouz grins and suggests we go back to his place, because he has all these old tapes of the Florida territory he wants to show me, and the woman rolls her eyes but she's obviously going to come, and Mehrdad doesn't give a fuck where we go, he just wants to get out of here. Firouz enlists the white guy who'd got the coke to drive and Mehrdad leads him to where he's got the car. Firouz needs to piss, so he excuses himself, allows me to take the final line, and I let it energize me even though I don't have anything to get excited about.
The woman, that saucy, silent siren with the breasts, she's still here, though I was about to forget when she asked me for a cigarette. Marked goods, I remind myself. I agree, we slink out past the monied drug-partiers, avoid the heavy dance scene that I haven't even enjoyed a bit of tonight thanks to Firouz's rambling, into the chilly night. We wait on the side of the road with our cigarettes, myself tugging frantically, needing nicotine, her completely calm, detached, more interested in watching the unused smoke lift than in smoking the cigarette.
"You're a wrestler, aren't you?" she says. Doesn't ask me. I look at her.
"What makes you think that?"
"You know it too well." Her upper lip twitches and I know she isn't impressed.
"Think there's some better way I should spend my time?" I step closer to her.
"Please." She tosses her hair arrogantly, flashes a dirty look at me, turns to the empty road ahead of us. "Wrestlers are fat half the time. Roided up freaks. Or like you."
"Like me?"
"You ain't fat." She smiles, condescending. "But you ain't in shape either."
"You think I can't kick the shit out of somebody if I wanted to?"
"I'd be surprised if you've ever been in a fight in your life."
In Miami I learned how to fight. We would get into shit, Mehrdad or my boy Jani or Press or whoever, we would have to throw down, and I would throw down. Always. I didn't back down because my father always told me, he said if you back down people will hear about it, and the first time will be the last time. And then I got into wrestling, and yeah, I learned that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor, sometimes you duck and dodge to get what you want, to get ahead, but it's always like that, in the ring or out. And so I'd learned by the time I got into the ring. I already knew what it was all about.
I take a drag, trying to emulate her calm.
This chick wants to boil my blood.
Dragon's breath billows from my nostrils.
She wants to boil my blood. She thinks I can't cut it.
But there's a way to show her. I'm backed into a corner. I spill it.
"You ever been to the Church of Fight?"
Her eyebrow lifts, intrigued.
