The regimen for all

08/02/2026

 

“Ladies and gentlemen! The following match is scheduled for elimination by pinfall, submission, or knockout!”

 

Fog still threatens to engulf New Cavalry Cemetery. Gentle wind shapes it into voracious pseudopods that reach out and menace unfortunate headstones. I crunch through the scorched grass, my bootprints slowly vanishing as the blades arise together to regain their former stature. Rote memory guides me.

 

"Entering first, standing at six feet, two inches tall and weighing in at a lean 195 pounds, he is the Asterisk on your pristine record. He is the Mister Irrelevant who boots you off the podium. Some know him as the Criterion of Embarrassment, others as the Suicide Prince, but we all know he fights every fight like he can win! He is Paul Freedom!"

 

I'm sweating through my T-shirt already, and the cans of the four-pack dangling from my left hand are also just about dripping with condensation.

 

"And his opponents, at a combined volume of two quarts and a combined weight of 400 milligrams of caffeine, boasting a hefty eight percent alcohol by volume, they are the barons of blackouts, the lords of liver damage, the loyal cavalry of Liquid Courage... make some noise for the Tallboys!"

 

Stuff's been illegal most of my life, but it was apparently dad's favorite. Thank goodness for eBay.

 

The wind shifts. Mist swirls aside, revealing a simple slab of stone.

 

Piter Svoboda

06/25/1975-08/11/2013

 

I set the cans down on top of his cenotaph gently, but not gently enough to keep them from clinking. I can tell the stone is new. A replacement. It used to happen more often, I guess, but no matter how many times the marker is vandalized, stolen, or destroyed, it's always replaced within a week. In a weird way, I'm relieved there isn't a body for those folks to dig up.

 

He was vaporized in the blast. That's what everyone says, at least, that there just wasn't anything to bury. It's funny, I guess. By the time I found out he existed, he didn't anymore.

 

But he also wasn't gone. In the ten or so years since Jommy told me about him, he's shaped the course of my life, his absence a channel I'm floating along, a barge stacked high with baggage. Before I debuted, before I got to Centerpoint City, before any of this, I looked for inspiration and life lessons in his highlight reels.

 

It didn't go super great, but I learned some fancy moves. Things just kept picking up from there.

 

The first can opens with a susurrant pop. Almost immediately, I smell the earthy sharpness of guarana and the barley bluntness of malt liquor. I upend it over the tombstone, watching it pour out in stages, from clear liquid to cloudy syrup.

 

"Tallboy number one has been eliminated right from the start thanks to some timely intervention by Piter Svoboda!"

 

I set the empty down on his stone and pick up my first round. I’ve got it open and just about at my lips when I hear a woman’s voice behind me. “Hey, Paul Freedom.” I start to turn to face her, but she yells, “Wait!” I wait. “Guess who!”

“One of Charity’s sisters.” She has to be. Her voice is just like Charity’s, but she talks nothing like her.

 

“Oh, please,” she says with a chuckle. “Who am I? You don’t get partial credit.”

 

I take my first gulp. My tastebuds are immediately blanketed in bitter malt and tannin astringency that turns into a generalized burn that spreads down my gullet and into my gut. 

 

My cognitive engine grumbles into gear. I’ve already narrowed her identity down from a pool of four billion to one of half a dozen, so I’m off to a good start. I can practically hear my synapses crackling as my mind makes intuitive leaps between minute observations and embarks on tangential internal expeditions through the thicket of facts.

I take a moment to gather enough saliva to speak before announcing my conclusion. “You’re Temperance White.”

 

“Wow, you’re good. How did you know?” Temperance flows into the space between me and my dad’s stone, momentarily leaning against me for balance. She’s probably hammered. It’s still nice to see a familiar face, I guess.

 

“Because it became a party as soon as you started talking.” That’s a bit of an oversimplification. It’s more that she talks like she’s shouting over a bar sound system by default, which is fine when she’s sober.

At least, I assume it would be.

 

“Good answer,” she says, giving me a playful punch in the arm before peering at the two remaining tallboys. “You know, they say you shouldn’t drink alone.”

 

“I’m not drinking alone.”

 

She looks me up and down, then makes a show of squinting at our surroundings. “So, what, you’ve got a drinking buddy hiding in the fog?”

 

“No! Come on,” I implore her. “I’m just trying to have a drink with my dad.” I take another swallow of Liquid Courage, at first grimacing and soon gagging.

 

“The Tallboys have Paul Freedom down, but is he out?”

I strain to bite back the sheer hydraulic pressure of my nausea.

 

“One!”

 

Given how it tasted going down, I’m not sure I’d survive how it tastes coming up.

“Two!”

 

Fortunately, at least for now, I don’t have to.

 

“Thr- no! Paul Freedom kicks out at the last possible moment!”

 

“Tell you what,” I begin, smiling at Temperance through tears. “One for me, one for you, two for dad.” She regards the remaining two cans warily.

 

“Dude, these are basically antiques. It can’t possibly be safe to drink them.” She picks up one of the remaining cans, scrutinizing the typefaces and graphic design of a bygone era.

I silently extend my right hand.

She sighs and shakes on it. “Fine, you’ve got a deal.” In a matter of moments, she’s got the can open and half its contents down her throat.

 

“Geez, can you even taste it that way?”

 

“Temperance White out of nowhere, and that’s another one of the Tallboys down!”

 

A few seconds later, she sets the empty on my dad’s tombstone and, after spending a bit of time gasping for air, replies. “Barely.”

 

That’s all the information I need to start chugging. An agonizing several seconds later, I’m wiping my mouth on the back of my forearm and feeling a bit dizzy. “Still some,” I lament with a grimace.

 

“Paul Freedom has had teamwork make the dream work and evened the odds!”

 

“You never asked me why I’m here,” she complains, one hand on her hip and the other leaning hard on my dad’s memorial.

 

I shrug. “It’s a free country. Well,” I amend. “Kinda!”

 

“Don’t you want to know?” The last time I talked to Temperance was years ago when I took her and her sisters to prom.

 

It’s nothing weird. They’re just identical septuplets.

 

I’m telling you, it’s not weird.

 

“Um, I guess.” She insisted on getting the first photo with me, offered me vodka while we were dancing, then got so cocked that by the time I was supposed to dance with Faith she needed a spotter to vomit safely.

 

“Oh, that’s great! You should guess,” she says, her syllables getting tangled up like rat tails.

 

“If you’re here on Church business, I’ve been baptized plenty, thanks.” The First Church of Christ, Scientific Wrestler is always looking for converts, and Mr. White is their youth minister. Before I took the White sisters to prom, I met him at a training retreat.

 

“Yeah, no, dad has specifically told us not to try to save you.” He made everyone call him Crusader and ate most of the Hydrox while he had us all in the ring. “I don’t think it’s anything personal. Uncle Mike just hates you.” Crusader’s brother, some sort of self-styled grappling guru, had his name legally changed to Archangel when he founded the Church, but there was neither fee he could pay nor form he could sign to get his nieces to call him that. “Guess again.”

 

“Did Charity send you?” I put in a valiant but losing effort to keep my voice flat. Noncommittal. Charity and I were together for a wicked long time after prom. Before I left for Nepal, for that weird match in that creepy pyramid, she was practically living with me. By the time I made it back, she had given up on waiting.

 

“Not quite,” Temperance says, and I turn away to avoid seeing the pity in her eyes. “Which is stupid, because she still talks about you all the time.” The last time I talked to Charity was when she dumped me.

 

“She does?” Charity told me she couldn’t handle it when I disappeared.

 

“Sure does. Watches your matches, too.” That it had been bad enough when I was on the road.

 

I stare intently at the scuffed toes of my boots. “I’m sure that’s good for a laugh.” She told me she was getting back in touch with someone she used to love.

 

“Oh, stop! She says she taught you that cradle you got Kyle Bright with. That can’t be true, right?”

 

I sigh. “No, it is.”

 

“That’s wild.” She pauses, then crosses her arms. “You’re getting by pretty well for a guy who can barely wrestle, Paul.”

“Geez, thanks!”

 

“Dude, pick your chin up, okay? I’m not trying to insult you.” The focus is starting to soften.

 

“I’m glad that insulting me is coming so effortlessly to you.” I can feel myself drifting away, like the next gust is going to carry me clear to the horizon.

“Look, it’s like Charity says.” That pulls my attention back kicking and screaming. “Anyone who puts in the work can learn this stuff. It’s just a matter of time. Well, she doesn’t say ‘stuff’ and she drops profanity in a couple other places, too, but do you get what I mean?”

“Sounds like you’re saying I’m not training hard enough.”

 

“Nah, I don’t think that’s it. Charity told us that you turned your old living room into a gym.”

 

“Yeah, exactly!  This was my dream, and now this is my life,” I pronounce decisively.

“Paul,” Temperance says softly, “I know you really want this, but that ring isn’t your life. It’s your job, and you’re still learning the ropes. Literally.”

 

“I’ve been doing this for years, and I still can’t keep up.” I massage the bridge of my nose. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel worth it.”

 

“Is that so?”

 

“It is, yeah.”

 

“Like when?”

 

“Um...” Much to my surprise, I’m drawing a blank. Maybe Wade Moor dropped me on my head harder than I thought, but I doubt that’s it. Through every missed opportunity and every heartbreaking loss, all the nights in shared motel rooms and mornings eating complementary breakfasts, each and every hour in a plane, train, or automobile, this has been the only job I’ve ever wanted and I’m always excited to go to work.

 

“Anyone who’s seen you wrestle knows how excited you are to be there. You can see it from the nosebleeds. Imagine what it’ll be like when you figure out how to work in some holds between all your little flips.” I look down at the stone and watch as the more viscous portions of Piter Svoboda’s first Liquid Courage continue to meander their way down, clinging to engraved type and splitting into trails and tributaries. It kinda looks like a road atlas, though not for any neighborhood you’d see outside of Centerpoint City.I never knew my dad, but I know that he started wrestling young like me and didn’t even make it onto TV until he was twenty-three. They say he kept working odd jobs to stay afloat for a while after that.

I guess that’s why everyone says he was a legend in his spare time.

“I’m trying my best!”

 

“I know you are.” Temperance beams at me. “She knows you are, too. That’s why I’m here.”

 

“I thought I was supposed to guess!”

 

“You were, but I need to run soon. Church business,” she says with an exaggerated wink that only leaves me less certain as to whether she’s trying to make some sort of joke. “I just want to give you this.”

 

She hands me a red 7 card from Uno. “Um... thanks?”

 

“You’re welcome. You’re gonna want to hold onto that. For later.”

 

“I’ll cherish it always!”

 

“Don’t be a smartass, Paul Freedom,” she says. After an affectionate pat on my shoulder, she continues, “And don’t be a quitter, either.” She begins to walk away with an almost unnoticeable stagger.

 

“I wouldn’t know how!” I call after her.

 

“And I hope you never learn,” she replies without looking back. Soon enough, she disappears into the fog.

 

I sink down until I’m seated crosslegged in front of the tombstone. Piter Svoboda was a multifaceted person, a unique individual just like everyone else, until, suddenly and violently, he wasn’t. For many people, he remained as a memory, but for some of us that had never presented itself as an option. He instead lived on in pics and promos, clips and clippings. When those are gone he’ll still be a name and a set of dates etched into this stone.

But memories are flawed in the moment and change over time, ultimately failing some way or another with the rememberer. Those pics will fade from their paper or fail from their drive, and similar fates await the rest of the archives before long. Even that meager epitaph will erode away, and in time the stone itself will cease to be.

Maybe Charity really does think it’s just a matter of time, but I’m literally sitting face-to-face with a reminder that time isn’t some renewable resource. When every little moment we get is non-fungible and priceless, some people might think that fighting every fight like I can win rather than only fighting fights I will win is an extravagant waste of my precious time.

I’m not one of those people!

When I step into the ring, I get to spend time with so many people and become part of so many memories that it’s almost as intoxicating as the Liquid Courage I can still taste haunting my breath. It’s the best investment of my time I could hope for, and who cares if it’ll all be forgotten someday?

We have right now!

 

And right now, it turns out, is when I stand and pour dad his second libation.

“Can you believe it!?! Paul Freedom has really shown the Tallboys that he who stands last stands tallest!”