The Head One

THE HEAD ONE Filed transcript. Submitted by "Toxic Waste" Rancid to the STRIFE media coordinator's office in the days following NO ESCAPE. Recorded on a handheld phone camera. Vertical orientation. The federation's editorial team has again declined to release the video on production-quality grounds. The audio transcription has been filed for the record at the contributor's insistence. ———————————————— [Audio begins with a mechanical thump on a repeating cycle. The location appears to be a coin-operated batting cage, outdoors, late. Sodium light. The pitching machine is running and nobody is batting. RANCID is sitting on the ground inside the cage with his back against the netting. Every few seconds a ball goes past him and hits the tarp behind. He does not react to any of them. The grin is present before the first word is.] RANCID: Hey. Me again. Filing. RANCID: Somebody left this thing running and there's a bucket of tokens with nobody's name on it, so I've been here a while. That's not part of it. I just want the office to know where I was in case anybody asks later. [A ball goes past his shoulder.] RANCID: So they made the match. RANCID: Me and Static. It's on the card. I didn't ask for it — I want everybody to hear that, because there's gonna be a version of this where I begged the office and that version's wrong. I said what I said at the big one. I said I wanted to see what's on the other side of them four rules. And then somebody in an office read that and thought yeah, alright, let's find out. RANCID: Which — respect. Genuinely. That's the most reckless thing anybody's done to me since they hired me. [He shifts. Another ball. Another.] RANCID: Now. Here's the part I been chewing on, and it ain't the part you think again, so settle in. RANCID: They booked it straight. RANCID: No stipulation. No nothing. Regular match. Two guys, bell, cage, whoever gets got. They didn't give me the light tubes. They didn't give me the wire. They looked at me and they looked at him and they went: nah, plain. [Long pause. The machine thumps twice.] RANCID: I have never had rules before. RANCID: Not once. Not the barbed wire ring outside Tijuana. Not the basement. Not the parking lot behind the second parking lot. Nobody ever told me what I couldn't bring, because nobody ever thought they had the standing. First time in my life somebody's handed me a list and said don't. RANCID: And I'm gonna break it. [He says this the way another man says he'll pick up milk.] RANCID: Obviously I'm gonna break it. That's not a threat, that's a weather report. Ref's gonna warn me, ref's gonna warn me again, and somewhere around minute six there's gonna be something in my hand that the office did not put there and everybody in the building's gonna go OHHHH like they didn't know. That's not interesting. Nobody needs to think about that. RANCID: Here's what's interesting. RANCID: He's not gonna break his. [The grin goes quieter. Attentive. The thing that is worse than the grin.] RANCID: Nobody's making him. That's the bit. That's the bit I can't put down. The office gave me rules and I didn't want 'em and I'm gonna eat 'em like a sandwich. Nobody gave him nothing. He wrote his own, fifteen years ago, and he's kept every one of 'em in every room since, and there is not one person on this earth who would know if he stopped. RANCID: Who's checking? Nobody. There's no ref for that. There's no fine. He could put one in on the head tonight and the tape would say clean and the office would say clean and he'd go home and that'd be the whole of it. RANCID: And he won't. He just — won't. RANCID: What is that? Somebody tell me what that is. Because from where I'm sat it looks like a man carrying something heavy up a hill on his own time for no money and I have asked around and nobody can explain it to me in a way that takes. [A ball goes past. He watches this one go.] RANCID: I only know one of 'em for sure, by the way. The rules. I know the head one. Not the head, not once — I watched him do sixteen minutes with the Irishwoman and he never went near it, not when she made him bleed, not when she had him. Not the head. I could set my watch. RANCID: The other three I been guessing at. And I'm not gonna guess out loud, because if I guess wrong I look stupid and if I guess right he changes 'em. RANCID: Don't need 'em anyway. One's enough. You only gotta find the one that costs him something. [He gets his feet under him. Stays sitting.] RANCID: I'm not mad at him. I want that in the transcript because people keep putting it in my mouth. I got no problem with Static. Never did. He's better than me at pretty much the whole thing and I'd say so in a room. This ain't a grudge. I don't do grudges, they're too much homework. RANCID: I just don't believe it's real. RANCID: Fifteen years is a long time to hold something that nobody's ever pushed on. Maybe it's real. Maybe it's the realest thing in this whole building and I'm the idiot. But I've picked up a lot of stuff that was supposed to be one thing and turned out to be another when I squeezed, and that's — look, that's the only way I know how to find out about anything. I squeeze it. That's it. That's the whole method. RANCID: So I'm gonna squeeze. RANCID: And one of two things happens, and I've thought about both, and I'm telling you straight up I don't have a favourite. Either the line holds — and then I'll know, and I'll shake his hand, and I'll go be somebody else's problem, and I'll think about it for the rest of my life. RANCID: Or it don't. [He grins properly again.] RANCID: And then I get to meet the guy underneath. Fifteen years he's been keeping that guy in the shed. Whatever's in there, he built the whole shed around it, and a man doesn't build a shed that good for something small. RANCID: I bet it's the good stuff. I said that already. I'm still saying it. [He stands. The machine thumps. A ball goes past where his head was.] RANCID: Hey — Static. In case you read the ones the office won't put out. I know you don't answer. That's fine. You keep not answering, that's your business, I'm not owed a letter. RANCID: Just don't go easy. That's all I'm asking. Don't come in there managing me. You come in there careful and count your shots and beat me clean, and I'll have learned nothing, and we'll both have wasted a night. RANCID: Bring the guy in the shed. [He walks toward the gate of the cage, then stops and turns back to the camera.] RANCID: Or don't. Either way I'm gonna go looking. RANCID: Bell rings. Hey. [The recording ends mid-laugh. The machine is still running.] ———————————————— [End transcript.]