EPISODE 9 GET YOUR SHIT IN

“Holy shit! That could have killed us!” I gasped to Charlotte, who was sitting in the passenger seat as a car sped by us near the exit to 8 Mile in Detroit.

Wham!

Another car whizzed by and we were hit from the side.

Our car swerved as I tried to control the steering wheel. My mind was having a hard time registering what was happening, but I was 99 percent sure we were going to die as I prayed I wasn’t veering into any passing semitrucks.

We jolted from side to side, possibly hitting cars. Possibly hitting walls. It was too much of a blur.

We finally crashed hard against the center wall in the highway.

The windscreen was completely smashed, the airbags inflated.

I couldn’t see out the window or where we landed. We could still be in danger.

I looked over at Charlotte and saw a stream of bright red falling down her forehead.

My heart was in my mouth as I feared the worst.

“Are you okay?”

Three seconds felt like an eternity until she responded.

“Yeah, are you?” she said as she picked the red line off her head and looked at it, disgusted.

It was a red pepper from a prepackaged meal in the back that had gone flying.

Phew. She had just moved from Raw to SmackDown and this was a horrible way to begin the Thelma and Louise reunion tour.

We cautiously got out of the car, which had now turned into a mound of smoke. Stepping out onto the grassy patch in between an exit and the highway, we quickly moved away from the vehicle, terrified it could explode at any minute.

After trying to wave down passersby to help us, with no luck whatsoever, I apprehensively approached the wreck, climbing inside to retrieve our phones to call for help.

The police came quickly. We hadn’t been the only ones who got hit, though the other wrecks were nowhere to be seen. You could only see flares shimmering in the dark smokey night some distance away. We really had gone adrift.

We rejected being checked out by paramedics, though I was almost certainly concussed, and my wrist had been jacked up by being jammed in the steering wheel. Charlotte is akin to the Terminator: you can’t injure that woman.

The police offered to drive us to our hotel, so I got to ride in the back of a police car for the first time in my life. Sitting on the hard plastic, which had clearly not been designed for comfort, I thought of how close that could have been to the end. That could have been my last breath, my last show, and would I be happy with how I had lived?

I waited for some sort of beaming light to come down from the heavens, telling me that I was doing it all wrong and needed to denounce my life and go live in an ashram in India. Certainly get out of the dead-end relationship I was in. It never came.

Charlotte and I still made it to the rest of the shows that weekend, though we were certainly traumatized.

For the next little while, I was terrified to drive anywhere, suspicious of every driver who passed me, sure I was only moments away from certain death anytime I was behind the wheel.

I called my dad, the best driver I knew, as if he could give me some reassurance. But there was nothing he could do. Getting anywhere was going to be tough for the next while, both physically and metaphorically.

I had been with the nice boy for over a year now and I would lie awake with a sense of dread that I was wasting my prime years with someone I knew wasn’t right for me. We had even moved into a new apartment in Los Angeles, as if that would help things. It only seemed to make things worse.

With Charlotte back on SmackDown, she was now the priority and I was moved to the back burner. Obviously it wasn’t her fault, and I never held any resentment towards her in real life for that. But I felt like my career had come to a standstill. I was even left off SummerSlam that year.

But I was still brought to New York for the odd appearance and would have to watch the event as a fan.

The night before the big PPV, I went down to collect some shoes that my friend and trainer, Joshy G, had given Colby to give me.

I knocked on the door of Colby’s Holiday Inn hotel room. He opened the door looking sleepy, box in hand.

“Thanks, Colby.”

“No problem.”

“Are you ready for tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess so. How are you doing?”

“I’m okay,” I lied as the tears built up in my eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he said, startled by this emotional outburst over such a benign question.

The tears were now streaming down my face, impossible to stop.

“Come in, come in, you can’t be crying in the hallway.” He ushered me into his cramped hotel room, quickly clearing off the clothes on his bed to make space for me.

“Sit down here,” he said kindly as he stood, not wanting to crowd me. “What’s going on?”

“It’s everything,” I blubbered as I went into the problems in my relationship. “I like the guy as a friend, but I’m not happy. But I’m also not brave enough to end it ’cause I’m an insecure coward.”

He listened, knowing there wasn’t really any advice he could give if I wasn’t ready to end it.

“And I just don’t know what to do with work. I feel like every time I gain momentum, it just gets shut down. They’ll either take me off TV, or I’m pushed aside for whoever else they want. I don’t know what to do,” I continued through sobs.

This was his area of expertise. What with being the world’s best wrestler and all.

“Man, it’s tough. How are you at getting your shit in?”

“Not good,” I admitted.

“You gotta get your shit in, dawg,” he said in the cool way he says things.

“I don’t know how.”

“You know who you should look at?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Daniel Bryan.”

“Does he always get his shit in?”

“So when I say that, I mean moments. It’s not that he has to do a shit ton of moves or anything, but he carves out moments for himself. Or will have a way of selling that gets him more over; look for those opportunities,” he advised.

I had stopped blubbering.

“It’s all gonna be okay,” he reassured me.

“How do you know?”

“ ’Cause it always is in the end. And if it’s not okay, that’s okay too.”

“Thanks, buddy. You’re the best.”

He gave me a big, comforting hug before I went back to my room, feeling a bit more uplifted and grateful I had a friend like him.

That was the kind of guy I needed to date. I just didn’t think there were too many Colbys in the world, so I stayed stuck in my rutty relationship.