The Thunder Eagles

***THE THUNDER EAGLES***

How about we take a break from the high school drama known as Silent Warrior so that I can tell you a little story about my childhood. I promise you we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled program after these messages. Although, chapter thirteen will contain graphic sexual content, so if you want to look for it when it’s up, go to Wattpad. Until the day I write that chapter, you’re getting a story from my past.

In spite of the fact that I was raised on WWF, WCW, and ECW, I didn’t have much love for sports or exercise of any kind growing up. I’m paying for it now that I’m north of three hundred pounds, but even back when I was a skinny little string bean, athletic competition was hard for me. I’d gas out after the first few minutes. Imagine this kind of negative attitude applied to elementary school-level soccer.

In the early to mid-90’s, I lived in Elk Grove, California and achieved success in my third, fourth, and fifth grade academics. Athletic achievements? Not so much. My parents signed me and my brother James up for soccer, albeit different teams. James’s team, the Laguna Lasers, was successful and happy to be so. My team, The Thunder Eagles (not to be confused with the Thunderbirds), were an intergalactic disaster. We only won two games out of god knows how many and one of those two games was against a team of children who were much younger and smaller than us. For all of you wrestling nerds out there, it’s basically Bone Soldier beating the shit out of James Ellsworth.

As a child, I’ve always been a sore loser no matter what the game was. When I brother beat me at Connect Four, I threw a hissyfit like no other. When I played Hero Quest and my barbarian was killed, I threw game pieces across the living room in frustration. When the Thunder Eagles lost over and over again, I wanted to beat something up. It didn’t help matters that I was always getting knocked down (accidentally) or hit with the ball (accidentally) by the other players. Whenever one of them would hit me, I’d chase after them and throw hammer fists until I was benched for the rest of the game. And then when both of our teams formed lines to high five each other, I withdrew my hand. Hell, as angry as I was, I might as well have flipped them off instead. Vinny Jones would be so proud of me.

It also didn’t help matters that my own teammates were conspiring against me most of the time. I remember during practice how they would play keep away with a soccer ball I brought myself. I never could get the ball back from them, but every time someone kicked it away, I’d either shove them to the ground or kick them in the legs. I also remember a time when a fellow teammate named Jorge kept bouncing the ball off my legs, so I ran up to him, kicked him in the asshole, and made him cry. I’d later recall these stories as an adult to James, who kept asking me why I took everything so personally back then. I’d jokingly respond with, “They tried to kill me!”

If I had been an adult and committed these violent and vengeful acts against other players, I’d probably be in jail right now. But as a kid, you can get away with pretty much anything and the worst you’ll get is detention or a suspension (which is really just a nice vacation away from the stresses of school). In the case of soccer, my mom bribed me with a trip to McDonald’s after each game on the condition that I didn’t clobber anybody who accidentally bumped me down. One particular game, I got smacked in the thigh with the ball and it stung like hell. But instead of beating the shit out of another kid, I cried my eyes out. Needless to say, I earned my Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese that day.

The lesson I learned from all of this soccer immersion was that if at first you don’t succeed, cry and cry again. As I said before, the Thunder Eagles lost every game except for two. Plus, I was getting sick and tired of being smashed around and gassing out after only a few seconds of activity. While my brother James continues to enjoy an athletic lifestyle, I’ve resigned myself to a life of videogames and have remained injury free since then. That reminds me of another lesson I learned from soccer: if you get hit in what’s supposed to be a no-contact sport, the admins might as well make it as violent as possible. I would have loved to bring steel chairs and kendo sticks onto the soccer field with me, maybe even a barbed wire bat. Extreme Championship Soccer! ECS! ECS! ECS! ECS!

I’d like to think that this is why I continue to watch wrestling and MMA as an adult: because violent sports don’t try to hide behind the façade of being safe and conscientious about self-esteem. I guess football could be considered violent because of all the concussions the players get, but I have yet to see any of them whip out some martial arts moves on the gridiron, so football doesn’t count in the end. And now that we’re on the topic of violent sports, when, oh when are the Wrestling Observer Newsletter awards going to come out already?! That Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic award is ripe for the picking this year! Come on, Meltzer! I’m Garrison Kelly and I’ll see you next time!

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“I’ll hypnotize you like a vampire. Bite your neck and set your head on fire. Shoot me with silver bullets, okay. I’ll pull ‘em out, pawn ‘em, and get paid!”

-Violent J from Insane Clown Posse rapping “Bring It On”-

Wendi Kael

NAME: Wendi Kael
AGE: 10
OCCUPATION: Elementary School Student
CANON: Kill the Power Rangers


When my niece Reina was little and still living with me and my family, she watched a lot of corny cartoons on my TV, among them Spongebob Squarepants. Whenever she did something wrong, I would threaten her by saying, “If you do that one more time, I’m going to kill Spongebob!” She saw right through me. It’s not like I could leap into the TV and strangle the shit out of Spongebob and his friends right in front of Reina. Well, I could leap into the TV, but not only would I have nothing to watch my shows with, but I’d have glass cuts to show for it. Killing Reina’s favorite cartoon characters was a benign threat, but it was one that amused me to where I wanted to write a short story about it.

In the case of 10-year-old Wendi Kael, her favorite TV show was the early 90’s version of the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. The flamboyant martial arts, the giant dinosaur robots that could form into one badass (reminds me of Voltron), and of course, there was everybody’s favorite Power Ranger who would one day become a legitimate mixed-martial artist: Tommy Oliver aka The Green Ranger, played by Jason David Frank. Was Wendi old enough to have crushes on older gentlemen such as Mr. Frank? Maybe an innocent schoolgirl one, but nothing more.

In the end, it didn’t matter how emotionally invested Wendi Kael was in her show, because her mother’s boyfriend Chad was determined to screw it all up for her. All that fatherly anger over poor grades in school and Chad knew physical punishment would land him in jail. So what was the next way to break Wendi into becoming a serious student? Kill the Power Rangers, of course. But how was Chad going to do it? He can’t leap into the TV unless he wants to be slashed to pieces by the screen glass. Beating up a stuffed toy of the Green Ranger is even less convincing. In order to make the death of The Power Rangers convincing, Chad had to get disturbingly creative.

Wendi came home from school one day and went back to her room to find The Green Ranger’s rotten corpse lying in her bed gathering flies and bloodying the sheets. Then Wendi went into the garage and found the Yellow and Pink Rangers lynched from the ceiling. Then she went to the backyard and found the Black Ranger lynched from the oak tree (that’s not racist at all). And then she found the Blue Ranger in the tool shed bent over a saw horse with a rake handle shoved up his ass (that’s not homophobic at all). Okay, so these weren’t the real Power Rangers; they were just already dead bodies dressed in their uniforms, which begs the disgusting question of where Chad got the dead bodies.

I tried to pass this story off as black comedy and it would have succeeded in getting those due chuckles. But then the story had to be terminated due to its Deus Ex Machina ending. Chad gets into a standoff with the police and the Red Ranger’s sword miraculously flies through the overbearing step-dad’s throat. Did I also mention that next week the world will end? But don’t worry, because we’ll be saved at the zero hour by a mutant fish koala bird. Clerks came out in 1994 and the original Power Rangers show came out a little earlier, so I didn’t set my time machine too far back.

The black comedy of killing a child’s favorite TV characters could still work in some capacity and Wendi Kael would definitely be the one who took the burden of such heavy jokes. If anybody needs discipline in her life, it’s an obnoxious 10-year-old who doesn’t give a shit about school and watches more TV shows than she reads books. This is the kind of traumatizing tough love she needs to get back on track. But it has to be more convincing and more legal than what Chad did. Otherwise, the joke will fall on deaf ears.

I think I’ve found the perfect solution to “kill” Wendi Kael’s fictional characters: with drawings. So she has a crush on The Green Ranger? Fine. Let’s tie him down to a torture table and have Rita Repulsa put a spring-loaded clamp on the base of his penis. Okay, that might have been influenced by Tales From the Hood, another movie from the 90’s time machine. So let’s be original with our Rangers. Let’s have the Blue Ranger get sodomized by Zed and Maynard from Pulp Fiction, another movie from the 90’s. Let’s have The Black Ranger’s mouth get taken away by Agent Smith from The Matrix, here we go again with the fucking 90’s movies. Anachronisms aside, the point of these drawings is to put the Rangers in violent or sexual situations that would disgust a normal human being. I’ve drawn many pictures like that of Bugs Bunny and Inspector Gadget and showed them to my best friend Susan. She was horrified.

Okay, so we’ve sent poor Wendi Kael to therapy at least once during this rehabilitation process. Now what? Does she spiral into madness or does she become a respectable citizen in the making? A small part of me is leaning towards spiraling into madness. Children as young as 10 don’t have the mental toughness to question the bullshit they’re being fed. They’ll believe anything adults tell them whether it’s detrimental or beneficial. That’s why a lot of teachers get away with insulting their students into becoming soul-dead conformists: when the kids are that young, they’re vulnerable. Come to think of it, this might sound more like psychological horror than black comedy. The only way it could ever be black comedy is if Wendi Kael was on an episode of either Robot Chicken or Family Guy.

　

***MOVIE DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***

BARTENDER: How far are you willing to take this?

MARCELLUS WALLACE: I’m ready to scour the earth for that motherfucker. If he’s hiding out in Indo-China, I want a nigga hiding in a bowl of rice ready to pop a cap in his ass.

-Pulp Fiction, a movie from the 90’s time machine-

Tony Wayne

NAME: Tony Wayne
AGE: 30
OCCUPATION: Competitive Motorcyclist
CANON: The Motorcycle Man


If there’s ever any doubt as to whether or not Tony Wayne should be on my unemployed list, consider this: “The Motorcycle Man” was a movie script I wrote in the early 90’s. When I was alive and well in the early 90’s, I was still going to elementary school in Vancouver, Washington. Do you think that a little kid at that age has it in him to write a full-length movie script? That’s a lot of work for someone that small. I had a hard enough time figuring out adding and subtracting.

Paying attention to literary details? That was clearly asking too much. The script for The Motorcycle Man amounted to me writing all of the dialogue for Tony Wayne and nothing more. The “script” was about as long as a half sheet of sketching paper. But it must have been a movie script, because it had the Parntitmount (which was how I spelled “Paramount”) logo at the beginning of it. Back then I took more interest in the vanity logos than I did with the actual movies. Comprehension was not my strong suit when I was a kid. Then again, it might be because I was born with autism. Or it could be because I was a kid and didn’t know better.

The vision I had for this movie came about when I went to a yard sale with my mom and she got me a little toy motorcycle with a rubber rider on top of it. I would run this motorcycle all over the furniture thinking the couches, desks, and boxes were all part of an elaborate obstacle course. I could have fight scenes, chase scenes, and the occasional gratuitous showing off with this toy alone. Tony Wayne, at least in my imagination, was America’s next big action movie hero.

You’re probably wondering why I would resurrect a character from my childhood and bring him into my adult life considering Tony Wayne didn’t have a whole lot going for him in the way of development. You would be right to ask such a bold question, because Tony’s resume is a blank slate at this point. Yes, he entertained me for hours as a toy, but as a character in one of my stories, he doesn’t have much to work with.

Okay, so he’s a motorcyclist and an action hero. Since I’m not into motocross or anything like that, I should just stick Tony in the action hero category. If that’s the case, he would be a lot like those guys in “The Fast and The Furious”: a bunch of con men trying to get away with something. But since Tony is meant to be a hero, his conning could be seen as an homage to Robin Hood. Let’s see if his motorcycle trickery can get him across the Canadian border when he makes off with a backpack full of Citi Bank’s money.

I know, I know. It’s a backpack, so mass wealth distribution isn’t going to work out the way he had hoped. But maybe he can bring the backpack to a homeless hangout that’s really personal to him. One act of Robin Hood kindness can spread quicker than a Trojan Horse virus on the internet. Would that mean Tony Wayne has partners in crime? The more, the merrier! He could start his own motorcycle gang and do good for the people instead of exploiting them like the Hell’s Angels and Mongrels do.

Anywhere with an action and adventure setting is sure to attract a thrill-seeker such as Tony Wayne. He could visit Disneyland and ride his motorcycle across the rollercoaster tracks in an attempt to thwart an evil plot. He could jump across the Grand Canyon to thwart another evil plot. He could ride across the stage at Carolina Rebellion and have Lamb of God be his live soundtrack. That’s the beautiful thing about having a clean slate: they’re fun to fill up. Would you rather have an experienced character who has so much baggage or would you rather have a young gun you can mold into whatever you want? Think about it.

　

***WRESTLING QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“Neville is so quick that every time I try to call his matches, I get more confused than a chameleon in a bag of Skittles.”

-Jerry Lawler-