Voices from Beyond (PART 1 OF 4)

“He’s going to the top,” screams Jessie ‘The Body’ Ventura from the commentator’s desk as Macho Man Randy Savage climbs his way to the top rope before 93,000 disciples at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan for Wrestle Mania 3.

With perspiration as his only armor, Savage, wearing hot pink tights emblazoned with a trinity of white stars, perches himself above the top turnbuckle. He raises both arms with his index fingers pointing to his father who art in heaven.

“If Macho connects it’ll be all over!” Ventura growls. Savage leaps off of the top rope. He crushes an almost lifeless Dragon with his muscled arm as hammer amidst a sea of flashing cameras. Savage goes to pin Ricky ‘The Dragon’ Steamboat, but the referee is knocked out cold.

On this night, the brighter side of destiny bestows its light on The Dragon. He beats Savage for the intercontinental title with an unexpected victory roll to the delight of a raucous capacity crowd. With George ‘The Animal’ Steele as his guardian, The Dragon returns to the locker room with the championship belt in hand.

Juan Viajero is lounging on his living room sofa like a mountain of stale mashed potatoes inside of a porcelain fruit bowl. As he watches the wrestling extravaganza on closed circuit television, his underarms hunger for t h e s u s t e n a n c e o f a f r e s h b a r o f soap. His crotch and rectum thirst for fresh bath water. Unlike the thousands of fans who are live in attendance, Juan is too lethargic to be enthused with the match he just witnessed.

With an empty beer can in one hand, and a crumb-filled styrofoam plate in the other, Juan sits with his legs spread, wasted in a near catatonic state. He looks to his right and rests his tired eyes on a portrait of his pregnant wife on the credenza.

Her Ethiopian eyes are bright, penetrating, and full of abundant life as she proudly palms her stomach to claim the one growing inside of her. Juan slowly looks away from her with pursed eyebrows. He closes his eyes tightly, trying to build water dams made out of flesh to hold back steady streams of tears. His clenched eyelids are in a losing battle with a formidable foe named Grief. The levee breaks.

The closed circuit TV extravaganza is interrupted as the screen regresses back to the primordial chaos of channel fuzz. Snowflakes jockey for position across the monitor before the pitch-black expanse that obscures the television screen’s secrets to parts unknown.

Juan doesn’t get up to fix his television set. He’s way too tired to move. He resigns himself to the reality that prolonged pain can do this to a man. The transparency invoked by glassy tears of

sorrow allows him to see his dimly lit world clearly. However, in this moment, Juan would rather be blind.

Waking consciousness slips ever so gently from his mind’s grasp as he falls asleep. In his sleepy underworld, Juan finds himself locked in a dimension of desolation outside of the circles of time. It’s a world that conceals the lofty visions of The Inner Mind’s Eye.

An image of a grinning Macho Man slowly emerges from behind the dense fog of Juan’s graveyard of dreams. Savage is wearing a tiger- print du-rag and darkly tinted ski shades with peach-colored frames. Grinning like the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland, he has one hand on his waist, and the other slightly raised with his index finger pointing to the sky.

Around his waist is a leather strap covered in polished yellow-gold. It’s the intercontinental title that gives him dominion over the globe. The lucid image fades and gives way to Michael Angelo’s rendition of Jesus Christ, who resembles Caeser Borgia, the ruthless Spanish aristocrat by way of Romagna, Italy.

Jesus is in a similar pose, with the same arm slightly raised, with his index finger pointing to his father’s thrown of glory. The other hand is gesturing towards a glowing heart on his chest made of silicon, yet overlaid with a leafy green metallic circuit board and solid gold microchips. The heart is mounted by two flash drives that form a cross at the top. Jesus’ body, cloaked in white raiment, is suddenly consumed by a sudden burst of flames.

“Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch!!!” Jesus screams in a hoarse voice, flailing his arms for dear life, as his body is burnt to a smoldering still-life carbon statue. The charred corpse crumbles down into a black pyramid of smoky ash before a blazing wall of fire. Rising from the ashes is the head of a black dragon wearing a conical gold crown with seven spokes protruding from its base.

As Juan stares into the dragon’s red eyes with ominous black vertical pupils, the beast’s head gets bigger—expanding in size like a black and scaly hot-air balloon. The dragon’s skin is rough, dry, and black, like burnt fried chicken crisps sitting in a greasy frying pan. In a deep Geoffrey Holder voice, the dragon yells “Bambaraaaaaaaaaa!!!” as a blood-red and gold flame projects from its mouth directly into Juan’s face.

Juan is frightened out of his dream, and his face is hot. His eyes are burning. Juan feels a slight burning sensation on his eyebrows and mustache too. Much to his surprise, he finds himself fast awake in a garden of sleep beneath a dark night sky. He walks past a gazebo in an open meadow amidst slumbering roses and snoozy snapdragons.

Juan looks up in the air and sees three blazing white stars in an equilateral triangle formation with one lone star at the very top. The three supernals start to flicker. The one on the lower left burns the brightest. Juan stares at it intently as if expecting to see it dance, or even relay a secret message to him.

The star turns into a luminous white hexagon. From the figure proceeds a winding spiral staircase that reaches the grassy earth directly in front of Juan. “Come and see,” says the ghostly voice of an elderly woman whose location Juan cannot determine. Juan places one foot on the step and immediately finds himself standing at the entrance to the hexagonal stargate high above the clouds.

Just beyond the entrance is a moist and humid pink cave made of tender flesh, rhythmically expanding and contracting, like an accordion played with intense pride and passion. Juan is gripped by the sudden chill of astonishment coupled with caution. But not even the flesh- freezing gases of trepidation and self-doubt can extinguish his flair for exploration in the quest for mystical unknowns. Juan proceeds onward.

As he walks through the cave, which has several twists and turns inside of it, he smells frankincense burning. The aroma seems to be getting stronger the deeper into the ribbed tunnel he walks. A dumpy male dwarf made out of lapis lazuli appears out of thin air. It has bright gold dreadlocks and solid gold Chinese baoding balls with no pupils for eyes.

The naked creature giggles at Juan like a child in a toy store and runs away down the corridor before it makes a right turn. “Hey, wait,” Juan reassures the dwarf, who leaves a trail of glittery blue mist that smells like fresh lavender. “Don’t be afraid, little, fella. I won’t hurt you. Come back, I wanna to talk to you.”

Juan feels an unexplainable sense of familiarity with the dwarf that he can’t explain or rationalize since he does not remember seeing

it prior to this encounter. He walks down the breathing tunnel as the three-foot-tall dwarf peaks at him from around the distant corner to giggle at him again before running off to God knows where. Juan trots after the dwarf gingerly, so that he does not slip on the wet and fleshy pink floor.

He makes a right turn where the dreadlocked dwarf was standing, and to his surprise he finds a large black door with the number “03212015” inlaid in solid gold on it. Adjacent to the door, which is embedded in the cave’s organic structure, is a button with the word “Change,” right above it.

Befuddled, Juan tells himself that the dwarf must have disappeared, because it was way too short to have pressed the button which he suspects is the only way to open the door. Juan pushes for change. The Hermetically sealed door jars open.