Exploring the history of modern kayfabe through fiction writing (part 1.1)

So, I thought I was done with this series in which I shared four extracts from my pro-wrestling-themed novel that linked to big events in modern kayfabe. But, when reviewing the draft of my novel, I realised I missed out a short extract related to the Montreal Screwjob. Furthermore, I think this is a particularly interesting sub-section given it features the protagonist Hera speculating in a first-person, confessional style on how the breaking of kayfabe feels. Extract starts below the asterisk. I’d love to hear any thoughts. Thank you!

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Bret Hart. Shawn Michaels. McMahon. The Montreal Screwjob. The death of ‘kayfabe’. Shit.

            Course, whenever you saw on TV a big bump, or a sequence you knew was hard as shit to pull off, or someone manipulating the crowd, drawing some shit-hot heat, you got a buzz. But this, the Screwjob. The shot in your arm, in your chest, it was something else. How can you even describe it? Fuck, let me make sense of this.

It’s confusion, definitely. But also, like, some kind of hope. The way something breaking through is hope. Like light, the sun through the clouds– shit, no, that’s cheesy. Or like a good night’s sleep after insomnia, or when you’re a waitress and someone tips you a couple quid not long after you’ve spilled a lemonade over some other knobhead.

            It’s definitely confusion, though. Probably like if you’re bang in the middle of an earthquake, and snap, like that, nothing makes sense.

            Or maybe it’s more like being let in on something secret. Like gossip. Or celebrity scandal, like when it turned out Lance Armstrong was working us all along, or when it we found out Tiger Woods was batshit-dirty. Or, I don’t know, accidentally copping an eyeful of your neighbour getting changed through the window.   

            I don’t read books, but I know they’ve got words for this shit. When reality and fiction’s all mixed up. We used to call it a ‘worked shoot’, still do. But maybe we should call it something else now. Constructed reality, maybe, like reality TV, Big Brother and Made in Chelsea and all them. I pop for them shows.

            But wrestling, man. Whatever they tell you about reality TV, or stand-up comedy or something like that, whatever they tell you – there’s nothing like wrestling.

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If you’d like to read the rest of this series: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.