| CassandraAvery | Date: Friday, 2011/06/17, 7:36 PM | Message # 1 |
 Development
Group: EWA Roster
Messages: 12
Status: Offline
| A warm, gray day. Heat sifts down from the cloud cover, but the sun itself just won’t burn through. On the west coast they call it “June Gloom”. It feels like a summer tease with all the dreary washed-out color of a Thursday in mid-February. All of this matters very little to Cassandra Avery. In her favorite place to be, everything and everyone looks and feels the same; dark and shadowy, cold. Cass comes to this bar often because they let you smoke inside and there is a heavy, enveloping silence that the few patrons respect and uphold faithfully. Quiet like a church; less candles, more shot glasses with cloudy water-drop stains. The bartender sits behind a shelf of battered oak, reading back copies of a low-budget tattoo magazine. Everything looks wet. Puddles of water on all the well-beaten wooden tables, as if the place never gets wiped down. The door remains shut to the outside world. The dimly illuminated juke box in the corner sputters out Zeppelin tunes at an almost inaudible volume; a low background hymn for the shut-mouth day-time drinkers; a white noise buzzing to complement the occasional sigh, clearing of throats, or whispered request for another Jack and Coke, make it a double. Cassandra sits leaned back in her rickety chair at a table in the dead center of all the rest of the unoccupied others. There are several empty beer bottles in front of her. Her pack of cigarettes sits in a small puddle, her cell phone resting on top. Cass picks absentmindedly at the chipped black nail polish on her fingernails, a half-smoked Camel filter held loosely in her right hand. It feels like she’s waiting for someone she’s in no rush to speak to. The heavy door at the front of the bar swings slowly open and a short man carrying a small black bag enters and squints to let his eyes adjust to the dim tavern. He spots Cassandra and picks his way through the maze of seating to her table. Only when he plunks down his bag rather loudly does Cass look up. Her face displays no cheeriness, no warm greeting.
“Lukas…..you made it.”
“Not without a struggle, let me tell you. This place wasn’t even on my GPS.”
“Pity, that”
“Yes, well. You said to meet you at your office. Not exactly what I had pictured.”
He speaks with a smile, eager for conversation. Cass turns her head slowly, taking in the under-whelming establishment.
“I’m going to assume you have a point there. What’s this meet up for anyway? Let’s get this manager-client shit out of the way. I have a lot on my dance card this afternoon.
Lukas looks down at the empty beer bottles. Cass keeps her eyes locked on his small, pinched face.
“….you know, like, the gym.”
“Yes, well…right to it then. I got your signed contract in the mail the other day. Um, thanks for that.”
He extracts a small bundle of papers from the black bag. Lukas gives the paper-clipped stack a shake. A few small pieces of glass patter dully onto the table top. Cass’ uninterested stare remains unaltered.
“Oh, and AC called the office a few days ago.”
Cass blinks twice and stamps out the cigarette she’d been holding, the end almost completely turned to ash.
“Should I care about this?”
“Uh…..no, no. Actually he didn’t have much to say.”
He stares at Cassandra, eye-brows knit together in confusion. Aaron had called, been told Cassandra was not in the office for meetings that day, paused for a too-lengthy silence and fumbled a good-bye. It was rather strange, Lukas thought.
“ Did you see the card I faxed to you? IC title shot rumble with ….”
“Yeah, yeah I saw that. And what the fuck is with the fax, Lukas? Is this 1998? E-mail that shit that the rest of the universe. “
Cass bites her lip in thought, casting her eyes off in a different direction…
“You know….I caught SNA’s little diatribe the other day….talking about jerking curtains. Fuck yeah, I’ll jerk curtains in a title shot rumble. It’s not even a pride thing. Easiest fucking job these EWA hacks could have assigned for me. Toss a couple of glorified rings rats, a few carps, and an old psychopathic wash-up over the top rope? Done and done. And anyway, SNA needs a punch in the dick as a wake-up call. He spends 15 minutes in a closet with another man yelling his own name and he’s trying to talk shit about me? Fuck off, Nick. You’re not worth a shit anymore, you burned out old asshole. I hope Frankie Manning had the business end of a steel chair in one hand and an economy sized bottle of lube in the other. I heard that’s how SNA likes it.”
Lukas pauses, staring at Cassandra blankly.
“CEW reference. Check your archives, Manager-Man.”
Lukas opens his mouth to say something else, but Cass continues talking like he’s not even there, staring past Lukas’ slack-jawed face, into the middle distance.
“ …..trying to tell me I was only big in this business because of him? Hah-fucking-hah. That BJ in a Hardee’s parking lot? Sounds a lot like the first date you had with your bitch ex-wife, Nicholas. Better pop some Ginseng and buff that memory, old man. You and me? A shitty fucking footnote in the Epic Poem that is my career. Nick’s just pissed that I dropped his ass for a bigger, better, MAIN event talent. AC spent the majority of his career dominating Nick’s ass and I spent mine holding more belts than any of the rest of these jerks doing the J-O-B for mid-card slots. THREE belts at one time, fuck ass. How easily the paranoid attempt to throw off the legitimacy of people who are better than, greater than…people like me. All that plus a world title run on my resume. This rumble is going to end so quickly it’s going to be embarrassing. “
Lukas attempts to interject himself into the conversation again. He even puts one finger in the air to try to almost physically wedge himself into the one-sided exchange, as if to say “pardon me, ma’am”. Cass’ body language communicates more of a “fuck off”. She swings her feet on top of the damp wooden table, boots making the empty beer bottles rattle and a few patrons start in their seats.
“And SNA says he has something for me?”
Cass makes the jerking-off hand motion and rolls her eyes
“Cool. Neat. Great. I’ll try to muster up some shits to give about Nick’s attempts to appear ambiguous and threatening.”
She furrows her brow in a moment of silent contemplation. Lukas takes the silence as a sign that he can now make himself part of the dialogue. With wide eyes and a half smile, he questions, “And what about the other women, eh?”
As if Lukas hadn’t uttered a word, Cass doesn’t break her chain of thought, face still lined with contemplative confusion.
“And these women….these….these GIRLS in this rumble. This is a joke, right?”
She swings her feet down off the table quickly and leans forward intently in her chair, seeming to notice Lukas sitting there for the first time since she began speaking. She stares him directly in the eyes, holding his gaze with her own.
“They have to be kidding. Is this some tongue-in-cheek joke that everyone but these poor saps is in on? Is this like one of those sorority parties where all the hot broads find the biggest nerds on campus and invite them over to see who could round up the hugest loser? See, Lukas, the nerds don’t know they’re the unwitting dupes in this equation. But they get FUCKED….embarrassed…humiliated…torn down for being a sub-species of human. Well, these girls can consider themselves the pocket-protector wearing virgins, living in their mother’s basements, surrounded by die-cast models of the Starship Enterprise. And me? I’ll be the merciless peroxide blonde socialite with the rockin’ tits who drives a champagne-colored Mercedes and only fucks the football player with the biggest scholarship. I’m going to spend all night making you ladies feel like the bigger wastes of space on the fucking planet. “
Lukas sits back, at a loss for words with how to process those remarks. He awkwardly looks down at his black bag and then back up at Cassandra’s face. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and shakes her head a few quick times, as if attempting to break a trance or a good stare. She leans back in her chair, stretches her arms above her head. Her back cracks over the top back of her seat.
"Whoo, boy, that felt good. Alright! Excellent. Great talk."
She rises to her feet, collecting her cigarettes and cellphone with one hand and reaching over to give Lukas a few condescending pats on the shoulder with the other. The confused look won’t slide off his face.
“What…what about Thrax and Jason Xavier?”
Cass’s expression immediately drops and her mouth sets into a firm line.
“Didn’t I already talk to you about the GIRLS in the match? You’re making my brain hurt. You know what people like Thrax and Jason Xavier are? Professional curtain jerkers. They are fucking FILLER. People like them get pushed over the top rope for a living and people like me step on them on our way to the top. Everybody has to start at the bottom rung, but some people camp out there for the rest of their sad little lives. No more questions. And uh….”
She makes a sweeping gesture with her hand, taking in all the empty beer bottles.
“Make sure to pay the nice man behind the counter for these. This shit ain’t free. Excellent talk. See you next time.”
Cassandra makes her exit, leaving Lukas sitting there with his thumb up his butt, not entirely sure what just happened. She ducks out into what is now a dusky early evening. She pauses just outside the front door, spotting her car at the back of the parking lot and considering the distance in between. Cass fishes another cigarette out of her near-empty pack and turns left to walk around the back side of the building instead. In the shadowed overhang of the back entrance, she lights up and inhales deeply. Exhales. The smoke curls up towards the gray-black sky and disappears. It is even quieter outside than inside the tomb-like bar. Cassandra takes in all of the mundane details about the immediate surroundings; the dumpster with the signs about state trash regulations, the empty pallets, the cigarette butts, the cracks in the dirty black asphalt. The tip of the cigarette in Cass’ hand slowly burns to ash. She takes a deep breath.
]
Beyond you. Utterly.
Message edited by CassandraAvery - Friday, 2011/06/17, 11:47 PM |
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