The Lost King - A Terrible Hangover

[Peter Shelley]

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A

WHY DON'T YOU SHUT THE HELL UP?

PRODUCTION

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It's a wind-swept early Wednesday morning in the decadent suburban enclave of Beverly Hills and as the sun retreats behind a granite shaded cloud, the districts populace in suits to match the sky disappear into anonymous glass towers to perform their overpaid desk jobs in their overly lavish offices. Always one to buck the trend, Peter Shelley sits at an overly heavy and unsteady IKEA table in one of his favorite coffee spots 'Bueno Bean', the finest coffee shop this side of the border, or at least that's what their loyalty card says. Nursing his third skinny vanilla latté in the hour while anxiously checking his watch every other minute, Peter is acutely aware that his extended stay and excessive coffee consumption has been duly noted by the dark haired, black lipstick wearing woman with full sleeve biker tattoos serving him.

Every time he breaks his fixed stare away from the door his son was meant to enter through an hour ago, he watches her having a hushed conversation with the store manager while making an awful attempt to pretend she's not suspicious of his presence. Peter could care less and is more concerned with the poor punctuality and the whereabouts of his only son. Dipping into the pocket of his slate colored rodeo jeans, he whips out his Strawberry business cellphone and scrolls through the contact list looking for “S” but as he goes to hit the dial button, Stephen bursts through the door a huffing and puffing, exhausted mess

“Oh God... so sorry dad! I woke up late!” Stephen splutters, gasping for air and trying to finger-comb his hair into something presentable.

”What the Hell happened to you? Did you get dragged through a hedge?” Peter sighs, shaking his head disappointedly as Stephen whips off his coat and backpack and pulls out a seat. Peter turns and pulls his tongue at the gothic barista, scowling at her and mocking her for her concern.

“No... I just, I went to a party last night and I didn't get home 'til four so I slept through my alarm. It was Molly that actually woke me up when she started blasting her meditation music,” Stephen explains as he clumsily scrambles into his seat.

”Molly is actually useful for something. Who'd have known?” jabs Peter, much to Stephen's chagrin but in his grovelling lateness he can't say much to reply. ”Listen, Stephen. You can't live your life like this forever. You're going to be a big city architect, designing the homes and the commercial buildings of the future. Do you think you can turn up to Brandon Architects or Brooks and Weissman an hour late smelling like a hammered mule? You'll be fired quicker than you can say 'Design Brief'.”

“I know dad, I know, but I'm in college and I'm only really gonna' get this time to live life to the fullest and get crazy.”

”Even that window is shutting on the future generations son. With the internet and camera phones, your most awful moments can be captured and published to the world without you even knowing. Do you want a major company that you're applying for seeing you naked from the waist up, covered in paint hand prints and surrounded by Hispanic gentlemen of questionable orientation? We may live in a tolerant society, but prejudices still remain in the employing class. Electronic footprints last forever.” Peter warns, having heard all of the horror stories of Facebook parties gone wrong.

”Now it's your round Count DracuLATE. I'll have a large vanilla latte. In fact you sit down, I'll get this round in. You're gonna' need to get comfortable for what I'm about to tell you.” Peter makes his way over to the glaring Elvira looking employee of Bueno Beans and makes the order while Stephen rifles through his wallet for the dollar bills. Every move the gothic girl makes, Peter watches with the eyes of a hawk to make absolutely certain that loogie doesn't end up in either of their drinks. When he returns to the table with their beverages, Stephen is playing Feisty Fowls on his U-Fone and has already put the coffee money on the table for Peter to take.

“So, I called you out here today because I've got good news and I've got fantastic, world breaking great news. Which do you want to hear first?” asks Peter, offering out two open palms as if the choices were something physical to take.

“I dunno, the good news I guess?” says Stephen tentatively, yawning sleepily. He takes a sip from his cup as his dad spills the gossip.

”Well the good news as you already know is that I beat my opponent last week by the proverbial country mile. I was a hit with the fans and I hit a man in the junk so hard that I think he actually blacked out from pain for a minute.”

“When I was a kid, you grounded me for two weeks because I kicked Greg Holloway in the nuts to end a fight,” protests Stephen, stinging from the injustice of a punishment burdened upon him a decade ago.

”There's a difference between a playground slap fight in junior high and getting mangled by a homicidal mask wearing maniac in a professional fighting contest. If some idiot comes at you in a backstreet with a knife and the urge to make a salad out of your face, you're not going to put your pistol away because it's an unfair advantage. You're going to give him some American acupuncture until he stops moving. Then maybe you'll empty the rest of the clip into his body to make sure that he's not getting back up. I mean Christ, I'm not Beowulf.” Peter defends stubbornly, trying to distinguish the events so he can justify it to himself as well as Stephen.

“So you struggled then?” cuts in Stephen, surgical and to the point. Peter claims to be a no nonsense individual but his penchant for waffling on is known. Stephen on the other hand can take a ten minute rant from Peter and cut it down to a sentence, an ability inherited from his mother.

”Absolutely, Scott Wilson was a real beast. I'm never, EVER going to admit that on camera but I will put my hands up and say that was probably the toughest thing I've accomplished since I did the Canyanaro LA County Challenge. Thirty miles of leg pain. Never again. Except I have to do it again because this week it's a rematch but with another person in the ring, Jack Slade.” The name sails off Peter's tongue and clean over Stephen's head but then that's to be expected, Jack Slade is greener than Wilson and Shelley.

“Great. Another distraction. Stand back and let them fight,” suggests Stephen, intuitively knowing that that was his fathers plan to begin with.

”You know me far too well son.” Peter says with a smirk. He takes a sip of his latté and takes another look at the barista whose lusty attentions are now fixed onto Stephen. Peter scoffs and turns back to his son.

”Now, do you want to know the brilliant news?” chimes Peter with a dazzling, surgically enhanced white tooth grin.

“Go on.”

”I've got you a job! This year is the year you've gotta' do your internship right? Well I've got you a paid placement at Action Packed Wrestling as my ringside manager!” he says excitedly, but the lack of synchronisation in their response to the sentiment is staggering. Stephen bites his bottom lip anxiously, grateful but unsure if it's ideal.

“I'm studying to be an architect, dad. No facet of wrestling is going to look good on my resumé. Besides, ringside manager? Doesn't that mean I'll get beaten up by the same dianabolic steroid scoffing idiots that you're trying to blend in with?” frets Stephen, shuddering in horror as he imagines what happened to his dear old dad, a trained professional and a tri-athlete being done to him, a meaty zilch with dreams of having both arms still attached to his body to draw schematics with.

”Now hang on, hear me out Steve. APW is a global scale operation. Second to none. Everyone and their mom has heard about it. They sell out in arenas all around the world. Now while we're out making the rounds doing PR and talking to the fans and spreading the word, you can vanish to look at the city and speak to some of the big wigs in the city and get yourself some real insight to the corporate buildings of various locales around the world. You're getting to see an entire world of construction live and at your fingertips and you're getting CASH to do it. All I ask of you is that you stand in my corner, hold a water bottle and a towel and that you wear... this.”

Peter reaches down to his side and produces a miscellaneous plastic bag for his son. Stephen reaches in and produces an incredibly garish turquoise American football jersey with “SHELLEY 13” written on the back and a side-on cartoon turtle logo with “Slow and steady wins the race!” written on the front and “#TEAMTURTLE” on the sleeves in huge letters. It's the most disgusting piece of merchandise ever commissioned.

“Team Turtle?” stammers Stephen, baffled by the irrelevance in symbolism that he can't quite connect the dots of.

”Yes son, Team Turtle, because I'm Peter SHELLey and turtles have shells. I've got this big thing going where I'm the Arch General of Team Turtle. I've got APW merch working on some crash helmets that look like baby turtles too with little kicky legs. The kids'll love 'em.” Peter chirps, boldly enthusiastic. Stephen stuffs the shirt back into the bag and slides it across the table.

“I'll do it but I'm NOT wearing a Team Turtle football jersey. Also, 'Slow and Steady Wins The Race'? That's Tortoise and the Hare, not Turtle,” counters Stephen.

”Eh. Same thing.” retorts Peter dismissively. He puts the bag back down on the floor.

”Oh they're both dumb shell having creatures and they--”

The debate rages on for some time and it's only when Stephen provides photographic comparisons that Peter appreciates a difference, but the merch is already commissioned and Team Turtle sounds way cooler.

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”Good evening everybody! Pete Shelley here, Arch General of Team Turtle here to talk to you today about something that I'm sure every one of you watching at home can relate to, and that's things that make us sad. Everybody gets sad once in a while. Strains of life get you down. Work gets hard. Kids start flunking school. Your significant other is cheating on you. These are things that make you sad but when I talk about what makes me sad, I don't mean 'ugh, ugh', weeping willow sad, I mean sad as in 'Jesus, you are awful' sad. The kind of sadness that is usually felt as a direct result of someone else's poor decisions that make you not want to live on this planet any more. When awful people do awful, negative things and all you can think to say to them is 'Man, just die already, yeesh'.

What makes me feel that kind of sad, and again I'm sure a lot of you know what I'm talking about first hand are those god-awful burden bearing people who just can't let something go. They cling onto things for dear life like sickly emotional hoarders. They'll draw back on things that happened decades ago to keep that feeling of entitlement and superiority over you because they're an 'aggrieved party' and deserve your sympathy. BS, all of it. These people are a scourge.

I'll give you a compare and contrast example to better illustrate what I mean. On my thirty fifth birthday when my ex-wife Nicky handed me a poorly made chocolate fudge cake and divorce papers, I signed them off and while I cried a little, a lot, and was sad we eventually got over it. She doesn't bring up the fact she thinks I had an affair. I don't bring up the fact she probably knew I wasn't cheating at all. We get over it and we move on because in the grand scheme of things, these are just symptoms of a much bigger problem that we weren't emotionally ready to face and that's the fact that the love was gone from our relationship.

On the other hand, you have someone who will cling to these petty incidents like Leo DiCaprio to a plank of wood drifting from The Titanic. The LOST King Scott Wilson, partly because he lost to me and partly because he's definitely confused if he thinks Asylum is his kingdom, for damn sure is one of those disgraces to humanity. Last week, I did him a HUMBLE service. I made him look a million dollars in a neck and neck, down to the wire match that could've gone either way until I picked up the big win and got my hand rightfully raised because I played smart and he has truly lost his mind about it.

Rather than look at the bigger picture and say I was the better man on the evening, that I had the better stamina, that I outfoxed him and beat him with a powerful strike which may or may not have been a little bit low, he dwells on that frankly miscellaneous point and claims I cheated him, that I'm a bad guy. Well guess what chumley? This world is FULL of bad guys. This world is full of people who will do far worse to you than punch lower than they honestly intended to to get one over on you and until you appreciate that and understand that not everyone is going to try and win a match with Lightning McQueen pillows and puppy dogs and rainbows, you will continue to lose to 'bad guys'.

The truth is Scotty, you didn't lose to me because I 'cheated'. You lost because your head is so far stuck in the past and the atrocities you went through on your road to wrestling that you can't even think two moves ahead, never mind the two hundred moves that I'm planning for you. You will lose to me time and time again until you appreciate that. Now we face again this week but with a third party, Jack Slade added to the mix. Now I'm used to competing with two, I'm used to competing with thousands in the cut and thrust world of the stock market but for you Scotty? It's going to be another distraction for you to cope with and before you know it, I'm going to rightly get my hand raised over your limp and unconscious body AGAIN. Don't be so overzealous to put me in my place Scott because as I always say, slow and steady ALWAYS wins the race.”

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Credits roll.

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