Submission's End

The locker room smelled like menthol and old canvas. I had my boots up on a folding chair, laces half-tied, watching the monitor in the corner run the same highlight package they'd been running all week. Punk's face filled the screen. That smirk he does, the one that says he already knows the ending and he's just waiting for you to catch up.

April came in carrying two cups of coffee. She handed me one and sat on the bench across from me, close enough that our knees almost touched.

"He's in a mood," she said.

"He's always in a mood."

"More than usual. He's telling people this is a comedy match."

I took a sip. The coffee was terrible, the way arena coffee always is, burnt and thin. "He's not wrong. It's not like they're billing it as a classic."

"They're billing it as a joke. AJ, they put it in the death slot. Second match. Right after the opener. Nobody's even going to be in their seats yet."

I knew that. I'd known it since they handed me the sheet. Second match on the card, between the cruiserweight title bout and whatever comedy bit they'd booked for the mid-card. The message wasn't subtle. This was a bathroom break. This was the match people would use to go get nachos.

And Punk, who I'd known since we were both scraping the bottom of the independents, who'd once driven me six hours to a show in Ohio when my car died outside of Toledo, who'd held my hair back when I had food poisoning in a motel in Kentucky, had apparently decided that the best way to handle being booked against me was to treat it like a vacation.

I finished my coffee and crushed the cup in my fist.

"You've got that look," April said.

"What look?"

"The one where you're about to do something that's going to make a lot of people mad."

I stood up and started taping my wrists. The tape was old and didn't stick right, so I had to go around twice. April watched me without saying anything. She knew better than to try to talk me out of things. She'd been around long enough to know when someone had made up their mind.

The thing about Punk is that he's not wrong about the business. He's not wrong that the crowd wants what it wants, and what it wants is big guys doing big things, and a match between two people our size in the second slot on a Tuesday night isn't going to change the world. He's not wrong that we're not the draw. He's not wrong that this is, on paper, a throwaway.

But he's wrong about me.

I'd spent eight years learning how to make people tap. Not the flashy stuff. Not the stuff they put in video games. The real thing. The stuff that hurts in ways people don't expect, that makes you feel like your arm is going to come out of the socket, that makes you think about your family and your mortgage and whether you really need this paycheck that badly.

I'd learned it in armories and VFW halls and high school gyms where the mats smelled like feet and the pay was forty bucks and a hot dog. I'd learned it from a man named Sal who was sixty years old and had hands like vice grips and who told me, the day I started training, that the secret to a good submission wasn't strength, it was patience. You find the hold, you lock it in, and then you wait. You let the other person decide how much it's going to hurt.

Most people tap too early. They panic. They think the pain is going to keep getting worse, so they give up before it gets bad.

Punk wasn't most people.

That was the problem.

I walked out of the locker room and down the corridor toward the gorilla position. The arena was already half-full, the early crowd buzzing with that pre-show energy, the smell of popcorn and spilled beer settling into everything. I passed a couple of the guys from the opener, still in their gear, still sweating, laughing about something I didn't catch.

One of them, a big guy named Marcus who worked as a monster heel, nodded at me. "Hey. Good luck out there."

"Thanks."

"You need anything, you know where we're at."

I didn't need anything. That was the thing. I didn't need anyone to save me. I didn't need a run-in or a distraction or a finish that protected me. I needed fifteen minutes and a referee who knew how to count.

Punk was already at the curtain, stretching his hamstrings, talking to one of the producers. He saw me coming and straightened up.

"Hey," he said. "You ready for this?"

"Are you?"

He laughed. That laugh, the one that used to make me smile, back when we were kids driving through the dark on I-75, back before either of us had a reason to be anything other than what we were. "It's a comedy match, AJ. Let's just have fun out there."

"Fun."

"Yeah. You know. Remember fun? Before you got all serious about everything?"

I looked at him for a long moment. He was taller than me, heavier than me, stronger than me. He'd been in the business longer, he'd main-evented pay-per-views, he'd held titles I'd only dreamed about. On paper, he was better than me in every measurable way.

But paper doesn't tap.

"Okay," I said. "Let's have fun."

His music hit. The crowd popped, because they always pop for Punk, because he's the kind of guy who makes you forget, for a few minutes, that everything is terrible. He walked through the curtain and I watched him go, watched the monitor as he played to the crowd, that smirk still on his face, that easy confidence that came from never having been truly tested.

I waited.

My music hit.

I walked through the curtain and the lights hit me and the crowd, what there was of it, made the kind of noise you make when you're not sure what you're supposed to feel. I didn't care. I wasn't there for them. I wasn't there for the bookers or the producers or the guys in the back who thought this was a bathroom break.

I was there for him.

I slid into the ring and locked eyes with Punk and for just a second, just a fraction of a second, I saw something flicker across his face. Something that might have been doubt. Might have been memory. Might have been the ghost of that kid who drove me to Ohio when my car died outside of Toledo.

Then it was gone, and he was smiling again, and the referee was calling for the bell, and the match was starting, and I had fifteen minutes to prove that I wasn't a joke.

The bell rang.

Punk came at me with his hands up, loose, playful, like we were sparring in a gym somewhere, like this was just another day at the office. He threw a lazy jab that I slipped without thinking. He laughed.

"See?" he said. "Fun."

I didn't answer. I was watching his feet. Watching the way he shifted his weight, the way he telegraphed his next move before he made it. He was good, he was always good, but he wasn't paying attention. Not really. Not the way you have to pay attention when someone wants to hurt you.

He threw another jab. I caught his wrist.

And then I started to work.