Alicia Goon 038: Movie night

Content warning, highlight the hidden text between the lines: 

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Descriptions of blood and violence

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Allen lowered the microphone and shrank inside his crimson suit like the air had been let out of him. The made-for-TV smile melted and refroze into a look of utter bafflement. "I have about a thousand questions," he remarked. "And they're all the same word: why?" 

"She won't leave me alone," said Alicia, throwing up her arms in exasperation. "I touched her belt, and now she's stalking me. In the arena, at home, who knows where else. She wants a match. I guess I'm going to give it to her."

Confusion mixed with disbelief on Allen's face. "Black Violet followed you home?" 

"She's made it clear this is what she wants," muttered Alicia, casting her gaze to the linoleum floor. "It's the only way."

A hush shouldered its way into the conversation as the weight of her disjointed explanation settled upon Allen's brow. His eyes narrowed as he seemed to consider the claim before offering his thoughts, "Huh." Alicia endured an uncomfortable stretch of silence, waiting for him to offer any insight, but he had spoken his piece. "Alright. Well, good luck next week," offered Allen in lieu of advice, encouragement, or help.

Hardly a bother when Alicia knew someone who could offer all three. "Sabrina here tonight?" she asked.

"Ah," said Allen, making a sound that has never preceded good news. "We've got her in Mexico scouting until next Thursday. She did say to let you into her office if you want to watch tape as long as you don't–and let me make sure I get this right–'jack up the VCR.'" Finger quotes. Of course he used finger quotes. "Call ahead to make sure I'm there, and I'll open it up for you. I'm not just handing you her keys. Cool?" With a casual half-salute, Allen headed with his crew toward the production area. A few steps further down the hall, he called back over his shoulder, "For what it's worth, you definitely did just make us some money."

Alicia found the unpainted wooden hockey stick about a dozen feet farther down the corridor than expected. Despite Black Violet's sickly, elongated appearance, those wiry arms posed a significant danger. Alicia wondered if crawling around in the ducts on her hands and knees would explain the incredible upper-body and grip strength. That, along with startling reach and easily standing six feet tall, allowed Black Violet to overwhelm Alicia in each of their encounters so far. Although she did have the benefit of surprise, thought Alicia in her own defense. And home field advantage, let's be fair. 

A straight contest could either be a different story or a different chapter from the same book. She trudged back out the staff and talent entrance and trekked across the parking lot back to the car, either numb or indifferent to the cold. She had left the car door unlocked.

Alicia collapsed into the driver’s seat and leaned back. She turned the key, cranked the heat, closed her eyes, and took a minute.

She took a minute.

Since no one was looking, she took a few more. 

She wanted another but she forced her eyes open. She didn't skip a workout day on account of a sore throat, and that same internal coach once again kept Alicia honest. The weight of spent adrenaline hung from her limbs as she slid the cell phone out of her pocket. She had just come face-to-face with her fanged, blood-drinking wrestle-stalker in her boiler room lair and beheld her homemade death cocoon. Now it was time for the scary part. 

Darvingtonfordhamfordshire Upon Avon was six hours ahead of Beaver, Illinois. Alicia could only hope that somehow Party Girl was awake, alert, energetic, and feeling talkative at 1:30 AM on a Saturday. It seemed unlikely, given all the skiing it sounded like Party Girl was doing.

Breathe in, breathe out. Alicia hit 1 on the speed dial. She waited two rings and part of a third. 

"HEY THE GOON I'M IN A CLUB NOW! CAN YOU HEAR THAT IT'S LOUD IN HERE?!" Party Girl's formidable volume held its own against the overpowering beat of electronic club music.

A drawn-out sigh escaped Alicia's lips. Right. Of course she's up. She screwed her eyes shut with a wince of anticipation before answering, "Yeah, i- YEAH, IT'S REALLY LOUD! CAN YOU GET SOMEWHERE QUIET? IT'S VERY IMPORTANT!"

"OKAY, AFTER THIS SONG THOUGH, ALRIGHT?" Party Girl answered back.

Eleven minutes and twenty-nine seconds later, the throbbing rhythmic computer noises ended or at least became different sounds. Alicia could hear the music slightly fade as Party Girl left the dance floor and must have recognized someone as they shared a little hello and a 15-minute conversation about why Janice was a not-nice woman (not in those words) and how Party Girl's favorite assistant should switch to a dandruff shampoo. Finally, it sounded like the career socialite made it outside.

"What's up? I'm super busy and my phone's got, like, no battery, so make it quick," said Party Girl, far too loudly for her new surroundings.

The sick pit in Alicia's stomach came back. "I'm sorry, Party Girl. I have bad news. Something terrible happened tonight."

"Uh," sputtered the millionaire. "What are you talking about? I'm fine."

"No, look, somebody, um… not somebody, Black Violet. She, uh," Alicia floundered. She backed up the story a bit and got a running start. "When I got home from work, the door to my side of the house was open."

"So why are you telling me?" asked Party Girl before seemingly asking herself that question. "You- Oh my God, Mr. Cattywampus!" shrieked Party Girl. The disbelief in her voice turned accusatory. "No. Nononono. Tell me right now you didn't let Mr. Cattywampus run away!"

The former cat-sitter had good news and bad news. She braced herself. "No. Something a lot worse."

"But just to you, right?" Alicia didn't appreciate the callous optimism in her tag partner's tone. Party Girl paused for a long-for-her moment of silence, then shouted again into the phone, "Janice! What about Janice? Did you call her? No. Shut up. I'll call Janice. How fast can you organize a search party?"

Alicia took a moment as she searched for the least worst answer possible. The pause turned uncomfortable. Time was up.

She instead started saying words as they came to her, "I'm so sorry. I don't know how to tell you this. Black Violet broke into the house while I was at work and trashed my place, and Mr. Cattywampus-" Alicia paused to choke back the lump in her throat. "Mr. Cattywampus is dead. Black Violet, she- I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I locked the door when I left the house. I promise, I swear I locked the door. I don't know how she got in."

"What?" Shock, rage, and grief poured through the phone. "How could you let this happen? I trusted you! My presh-presh is gone. You were supposed to take care of Mr. Cattywampus!" Alicia thought she had gotten away with it. Then came the pause. "Wait. Did you leave the door unlocked? Oh my God, at your house! When I visited, you left the door unlocked! She didn't BREAK in?! You fucking LET her in?!"

"No!" Alicia volleyed back. "I told you I locked the door!" She raised her thumb and forefinger to her forehead and tried to massage away the stress of a month-long sleepless nightmare. It was a valiant failure. She retorted with the obvious question, "Why did you leave your cat with me? You knew Black Violet visited me once already!"

Party Girl shouted back, "Because I wanted to believe in you! Alright? You seemed sure, so I trusted you. I trusted you. You're the smart one, you know?" Her voice started to crack again, "What did you do? What did you even do?! You waited and waited and waited and now my widdle presh-presh is dead! Why did I listen to you? Why didn't you listen to me?!"

Alicia could feel her own emotions rising to match her hopefully-still-but-probably-not tag team partner. Out gushed the apologies, "I'm so sorry, Party Girl. You were right. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm just so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I just want you to know I am fighting Black Violet next week, okay? I'm going to fight her. I'm just telling you so you know. I know it doesn't make a difference now. It's all my fault. I'm sorry, Party Girl. It's my fault. I know it's too late. I understand if you hate me." That knot rose again in her throat.

Seconds passed, and the unbreakable quiet lingered. Alicia couldn't breathe. She made the first move, "Party-"

Party Girl shed the forever-cheerful demeanor as her voice dropped to a lower register. "I hope you kill her," said Party Girl. "I wish you would kill her. She deserves it. If anyone deserves it, she does! I want you to kill her. Please? Please would you please just kill her? Literally no one would care. Does anyone even like the crazy turd-smearing psycho living in the vents?" 

"Don't joke like that," said Alicia, chastising her partner with kid gloves, which were pink. "I promise you, whatever happens, I'm gonna hurt her really bad. Really, really bad. Okay? Win or lose, she will never forget what I do to her. Either I leave the ring on my own power or neither of us will."

Party Girl interrupted again, "Why are you talking like a loser? Do you want to turn your career around and prove the haters and doubters wrong? Then win. Take her precious fucking belt! She deserves to have the only thing she loves taken from her. It's the closest she'll ever feel to how I feel now." 

"I have a request," Alicia began the sentence she hoped more than anything she wouldn't regret. "My match with Black Violet? It's a Last Woman Standing match. You've been through too much already. You don't need to have anything to do with this. I know it's personal between you and her, but could you please stay in the back until after the bell? Don't help. She's my monster now."

"I wasn't planning on it," Party Girl answered back matter-of-factly.

"Oh," replied Alicia after a beat.

"But I'll be cheering for you!" offered the celebrity as consolation. The call dropped, and Alicia was alone.

* * * * *

"Tapes, TV, VCR," Allen said while pointing to each item. "You know what they look like. I don't know why I'm pointing them out. I trust you can find a chair on your own," he remarked, gesturing around the densely packed ten-by-ten-foot office. "Just so you know, the door locks when it's closed. I've got the key, so come knock on my door if you need to get back in."

"Can I just hold onto it and give it back when I leave? I don't want to bother you," said Alicia, attempting a bit of self-serving generosity.

The rebuke was immediate, "No. I told you, I'm not letting you just 'hold onto' the key. Do I look stupid?" Not when you're off-camera. "You and your tiny bladder can knock, and I'll let you back in," Allen repeated.

Hang on. "Sorry, did you say the door locks on its own when you shut it? Automatically?" Jeepers creepers, Dr. Pupe is never going to believe this! thought Alicia, to entirely her own amusement.

"You can also set it to stay unlocked. I mean, you can't, and I'm not going to, but it can be done," Allen muttered. "We live in exciting times."

Though she couldn't understand it back then, Alicia had known teammates who voluntarily spent their own free time in the tape room--watching tape, no less. Breaking down a play was something an assistant coach did. She played the game on the ice, setting records and putting up hat tricks on the same night as double-digit penalty box minutes, but the Professler's infectious passion turned Alicia into one of those nerds. Watching with Sabrina meant taking the occasional browbeating and getting her ego bruised, but Alicia could bear it now. Wrestlers get used to taking bumps, after all.

Alicia tossed her threadbare, fluorescent green and teal backup gym bag onto the chair next to her and stepped behind the desk with a strange trepidation. She felt like a kid in the teacher's lounge. A folded three-step ladder leaned against the scuffed wall by the bookshelf with the sign at the top reading "Singles, Standard." She checked first under B for Black Violet. No luck. She tried V for Violet, Black. Maybe it was a legal name. Nope. Two shelves from the bottom, another section had been labeled "Singles, Stipulation." There she was. A single VHS tape in a white cardboard sleeve caught her eye.

Black Violet Dec 2001 -
12/7/01 SF vs Riptide (W) 3:10
2/22/02 SF vs Tiffany Bertha (W) 6:12
4/26/02 cage vs Kat Cable (W) 10:07
4/30/02 SF vs Trace Roote (W) 28:58
8/23/02 barb. ropes vs Kendra Terminus (W, TV title) 50:06
10/31/02 barb. cage vs Lady Gallows (W, retains) 1:05:11
11/30/02 I quit vs Shieldbreaker Mazenda (W, retains) 1:18:30
3/31/03 ladder vs Party Girl (W, retains) 1:31:46

Black Violet didn't have many matches on her record, but she was still undefeated. Every single bout was some flavor of no-DQ match, assuming "SF" stood for "street fight." How would Sabrina prepare for a fight like this? If Alicia recalled correctly, the retired grappler spent most of her time looking for injuries to exploit. That's at least something, thought Alicia. She pushed the cassette into the VCR, looked at the back of the VHS box, and fast-forwarded to the start of the first match three minutes and ten seconds in. Then she grabbed a Pupe's Full-Mouth Dentistry pen and leafed through the bicuspid-shaped legal pad looking for a clean page. 

"Ow!" cried Alicia, instinctively bringing her index finger to her mouth and sucking on a fresh paper cut.

The final bell of the last match sounded at 8:27 PM, according to Sabrina’s wall clock. Alicia paused the cassette on the same camera shot she saw during the Party Girl interview at the first show Alicia attended: Dark, wild eyes, face streaked with violet tears, and Party Girl’s blood running down her pale chin.

Black Violet’s unorthodox—heck, unnatural—fighting style made the straitjacketed wrestler difficult to predict, except for the biting. Lady Gallows grabbed the champion’s belt from the referee and held it up to the crowd before Black Violet’s title defense. Chomp. Shieldbreaker Mazenda looked to have the match won with a Brainbuster onto the steel ring steps. But when she grabbed the championship belt to try and hit Black Violet with it, Mazenda went from controlling the match to having a set of fangs in her neck to screaming "I quit" in submission in seconds, and Black Violet somehow rose from the splintered remains of a barbed-wire table and raced up the ladder to bite Party Girl when she touched the TV Championship belt and retained the title.

Touch the belt, and Black Violet comes running. That definitely feels like something I can use.

More impressive than the champion’s capacity for violence was her ability to endure it. After wincing her way through most of those eight matches, Alicia wondered what it would take to keep her stalker down.

She looked at the notepad in her lap and felt confident she had circled the words "exploit injuries" enough times. She checked the back of the VHS box again. Black Violet had only fought eight matches total. She was still very much a rookie in her own right, although she probably hadn't been trained at a place like Hard Times. It seemed like a fair assumption--now to wring something useful out of it. With so few matches and little to no formal training, Alicia guessed Black Violet probably didn't know how to escape or reverse submissions, probably couldn't chain wrestle, and probably couldn't reliably counter throws, either. That also feels like something. Shieldbreaker Mazenda had been the only one brave enough to even try using submission holds, but based on the few examples Alicia had observed, the theory seemed to hold water.

Alicia hadn't noticed any obvious injuries from the tape. Maybe she could create one, but would it even matter? It was a Last Woman Standing match; winning by submission wasn't even possible. The match only ended when one competitor couldn't stand up within a ten-count. What did Alicia have that could keep Black Violet down for ten?

Nothing. 

But something clicked. She thought back to the first time watching tape with Sabrina. Was she focusing on the obvious answer instead of the correct one? Alicia didn't need to knock Black Violet out for ten seconds--just keep her down. She looked at the paper cut on her finger. Maybe she just needed to hit the right spot.

The seeds of a plan started to come together. Sabrina would be proud: one of her lessons about ring awareness finally stuck. The Hard Times graduate tidied up and headed for the parking lot. The match took place in four days. Tomorrow after work, she'd swing by Things 'n More to pick up some supplies for an arts and crafts project. Alicia was feeling inspired.