Post by Tamika Strader on Feb 17, 2022 19:59:28 GMT -5
Meghan is the mother of twins, prince Clay and princess Lizzie, three years old, and they were adored. By Christmas, they would be four years old, and they definitely had the same father, Meghan’s husband, Dustin Kelser. Now that she was back on the road wrestling, she would have to settle for FaceTimes and meet, if possible, depending on how close to home she was.
She gets the opportunity to watch her babies grow that she never had with Victoria and Cara. That feeling of guilt would never go away inside of her even if SNS took that option away from her, knowing both existed and raising them. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it doesn’t change how anyone would feel in her position.
Layng on the couch in the coach heading down the road, Meghan has an ice pack laying across her left knee, and Tamika is getting a kick out of driving the large coach. “29 Palms” by Robert Plant starts to play over the coach’s sound system, and Meghan pulls herself up, bringing her bad knee up with her. She flips the ice pack over, leaning her head back; she ponders on what knowing her girls would’ve been like if she had the chance to be there.
Cara Strader is a carefree spirit, and she has been her whole life. As a little girl, she wasn’t afraid to get dirty playing outside with her friends, and that continued all the way through and up into high school, playing on the volleyball team, the basketball team and even playing goalie in the girls’ hockey program. While she was a tomboy in that sense, she was always aware of and fully embraced her femininity. She could rock a pair of denim Levi-Strauss or go dancing in a full-length dress or a mini-skirt. Everyone loved Cara. She was Meghan in that sense.
When Cara met Jake in the Eleventh Grade, she was instantly smitten, and it wasn’t long before they were a couple. Victoria loved him too, not in that way as she is a lesbian, but she always wanted the best for her best friend. It was important to Cara that Vee approved of him. The two girls had been best friends since meeting as eight-year-olds. They never expected to find out they were twin sisters with different fathers as that was something out of Days of Our Lives or Passions with the little guy named Timmy who hung out with an old witch. Meghan appreciated the fact that fate brought her girls together.
Cara and Victoria every Wednesday would get together at Vee’s for Wednesday Night Chaos and then Cara’s on Friday for Friday Night Rampage as they absolutely loved wrestling and were massive marks for the Cowgirls From Hell and even the outlaw biker slash wrestler, Scott Nash Strader. Victoria would always be Meghan, and Cara would be Tamika when they re-enact the stuff they saw for their adoptive parents. Victoria’s dad would always be the volunteer to take the punishment. Meghan always wondered why the world worked the way it did, allowing the Strader family to be involved in the childhood of her firstborn girls.
Victoria met Maxine Riggs out at a Joe Kool’s bar on Richmond Row in London, Ontario. She was training to be a wrestler under Meghan Kelser, better known to the world as Strader, not Kelser, and the girls got really excited. They met Meghan, and she was a sweetheart to them and thankfully turned out to be a good meet your hero moment. Victoria started training, as did Cara, and when Meghan and her baby sister Tamika made an attempt to revitalize the PWA, Cara got a job as hand backstage. Eventually, she got promoted to commentary while Victoria travelled with Max and Meghan, unsure if she would step into the ring.
Finding out they were sisters wasn’t the real shocker but learning Scott had sold baby Cara to her parents, who gave birth to a stillborn child, and Victoria was given up for proper adoption was a tough pill to swallow, even today. Cara still hasn’t spoken to them in the past two years and wasn’t sure if she would anytime soon. Victoria’s adoptive parents died in a nasty pile-up on 401 Highway in Ontario. She never dealt with it while still having the house she grew up in East London cleaned once a week, and the landscaping is done similarly.
The new generation coming into the business are like their predecessors in the sense they are strong and proud women but also with the same amount of baggage. Like the Strader women before them, it was how they carried it and used it as fuel instead of letting it drag them down.
Cara was absolutely determined to get back to 100% and not let getting heaved off the roof of the OCW Arena be a detriment. She was also determined to get her best friend and sister back, but she knew it couldn’t be her that did it; Veronica hated her. It was apparent that Veronica disliked most of them, and with the backing of the Supreme Machine and Queen Machine Jenny, she wouldn’t be able to get close enough to trigger the emergence of Victoria.
But, Meghan was making progress. Supreme Machine wanted to be his own entity as the Savage Champion, as he dealt with Knox enough. Meghan wasn’t looking to add to the pile she was chipping away at, and this mentality was saving the ultimate goal a lot of grief. Meghan was already starting to get close to her. Their interactions in Vegas at Monday Night Massacre weren’t as tense, and she could see that Veronica, even if she was an affliction, didn’t make her feel any less the average person.
Meghan pulls herself out of the history lesson Cara had given her and sighs. She puts the ice pack down on the bar to her left and pulls herself up. She looks out the tinted windows watching the desert roll by and limps up to the seat right to the right and behind Tamika. She has a piece of wheat hanging out the side of her mouth, a John Deere mesh-back hat on, the beak not even slightly curved. Meghan laughs, shaking her head.
“What are you laughing at, fuzzball?” the youngest Cowgirl asks, arms wrapped around the steering wheel as Tamika had them install a 1970’s Peterbilt steering wheel when they bought it.
“You know this isn’t a big rig, right?”
“Look at this bad girl; she’s more than a big rig! Barreling Buella!”
Meghan laughs again and looks out at the road ahead.
“What’s up, Megz?”
The cowgirls had a very tight bond, despite not growing up together. They always had a way of knowing when one another was hurting or needed someone to talk to, which translated inside the squared circle and made them a deadly tag team, regardless of the multiple injuries throughout their careers.
“Was thinking about my girls. I am happy we are starting to open that forbidden door, sort of speak. Still, I feel guilty I am not with Cara as she is rehabbing the injuries caused by the one we are trying to get close to,” she responds to Tamika, and she continues her blank stare out on the road ahead. Tamika looks up at her as she reaches out with her right hand, squeezing Meghan’s knee gently.
“You gotta get out of your own head on this, Megz. Cara is with Gran and John. I talked to biker-boy earlier, and he says Cara is driving him nuts, so she is definitely on the mend. Cara is a tough cookie. She definitely inherited Dad's Wolverine healing factor. She’ll be back in the ring in no time at all! Once we get Victoria back out and in control, they can form Resist & Disorder like they used to talk about.”
Hearing that, Meghan is hit with a bit of nostalgia, remembering when she first approached Tamika about forming the Cowgirls From Hell.
A-Frame Home of SNS
London, Ontario
March 6th, 2010
Meghan and Tamika sit at a bar built in the basement of the East-End home of Scott Nash Strader and his daughters. Tamika had recently discovered the finers joys of Canadian whiskey and enjoyed the bonding time with Meghan. Meghan taps the top of her glass; she is lost in thought. Tamika takes a peanut from a little dish on the bar top and flicks it off Meghan’s forehead.
“Bullseye, hahaha.”
Meghan glares at her, but she can’t keep a straight face.
“You are lucky I love you, you know that?”
The baby Strader sticks her tongue out at her.
“To what you were saying earlier, I don’t think you should give up on the singles career. I mean, you don’t have a losing record or anything. The fans enjoy watching you; I enjoy watching you. I don’t think you should give it up,” she says with a sweet smile on her face.
Meghan smiles and reaches over to squeeze her baby sister’s hand.
“I appreciate you saying that, but as long as the old man is around and still wrestling, he’s always going to come before us. I mean, I was his manager for five years, and I wanted something more for myself, Meeks. But I have come to the realization that was selfish.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, John left me high and dry to follow in dad’s MC footsteps and to be honest, I’m like Uncle Kaleb and have zero desire to have a singles career.”
Kaleb Strader was better known as tHE dREAM rEAPER’s partner and twin brother, tHE cRIMSON rEAPER, who held eight different tag team championships with TDR as tHE bROTHERS' rEAPER. Still, he never had the inclination to be like Payton (TDR), who also had a very successful singles career. Meghan looks at Tamika as they both take a sip of their whiskey.
“What if we formed a tag team, Meeks?” she asks, a smile creeping up onto her face.
“Us? Well, you have been my training partner since late 2005… yeah, I could dig it. What would we call ourselves? Sisters’ Strader?”
Meghan shakes her head and points behind her where a cow skull hangs on the wall behind the bar. The family sneer creeps across their faces.
“The Cowgirls From Hell. Damn, Megz. You are a genius!
“Cowgirls From Hell. A nice tribute to dad and the family but a hundred percent us.”
“We’ll call President Robinson in the morning and make it official. This is going to rock, Megz!”
Meghan and Tamika have arrived at Bed Rock City, Arizona, parked the coach (which was a hell of an ordeal as neither one backed up anything this size), and sat around the caveman-style fire pit. Tamika had their dad’s favourite Canadian beer, Labatt 50, which was considered the stereotypical old man drink warm type of beer, but cold? Pretty damn good if you like ale. The sun is starting to set.
“Say what you will; this is pretty good cold,” Tamika says, holding up the beer looking at it with a furrowed brow. Meghan smiles and laughs.
“Was also great to bring to house parties because nobody would drink my beer,” she says, lifting her brow a few times and a wink. “Gonna throw my name into The Great Illuminatus.”
“Is that a good idea? Do you think you could even beat Outcast?” Tamika asks with concern.
“Well, we helped pay for that thing, and it’s not about beating Outcast; it’s about getting back into proper ring shape. I know those doctors are wrong. I know my body.”
Tamika sits forehead, spinning the can of old man beer in her hands, and she looks over at Meghan on her right.
“Well, slap my ass and call me Charlie! I guess I am too.”
“Yeah?”
Tamika responds with brow raise and a wink.
(On Camera)
Our screens light up in living rooms, mancaves, in hands on subways, and computer rooms with the Gilberts of the world watching on with runny noses drinking the Tang mommy made for them. Meghan stands in front of the gas station at Bedrock City, lit up by CFH’s motorcycle headlights, only the front tires showing in the corners. Meghan is definitely the MILF of OCW, wearing hip-hugging jeans, snakeskin boots, a new OCW styled Cowgirl t-shirt underneath her simple leather jacket. Tamika is filming for her tonight.
“If you had told me a month ago that Tamika and myself would fire up our bikes for one more ride, I would’ve told you to put down the crack pipe. Yet here we are, match under our belt in OCW after doing a one-off for Thunder Pro Wrestling when my daughter was part owner. How we passed our physicals coming in took some work, ya know? But we are here.”
“It’s no secret that the Cowgirls are financing the OCW during the Poblano situation and that included getting the Pyramid built for The Great Illuminatus and while CFH’s goal is the tag team titles (hi Dan and Chris, remember us?) I took a long look at this incredibly original match concept I found myself curious.”
“That’s been the driving force since before our return, and that’s why not? We aren’t even old by wrestling standards. I’ll be 37 in May, my wonderful sister, tag team partner and current cameralady will be 33 in March. Dare I say we are in better shape now than when we beat Hell & High Water and Down South Georgia Boys for our first tag team championship run that went a record 271 days in the PWA.”
“So why not get back into the thick of things, even if my twenty-one-year-old champion daughter is booked higher on the card than us. Only a schmuck lets that bother them,” she says with a wink to OCW’s colour commentator, Hood. “Because of our old man being who he was, and don’t get me wrong, the old bastard earned the spot he had in the PWA. He was a main-eventer, a hell of a technically skilled man being the size of Supreme Machine, but it made it increasingly hard to get out of his shadow. Sure, while Tamika and I were together, we were the bigger draw but aren’t so arrogant not to credit that to being the daughters of SNS.”
She lowers her head, lets out a sigh, and reaches around to the back pocket on her hip-hugging Levi’s. She pulls out her soft pack of Marlboro Reds and lights up her cancer stick. Cigarette hanging between her crimson red lips, she runs her hand through her long raven hair pushing it back. She takes a drag and takes the cigarette between her fingers and exhales through her nose; those icy blues with a frostbite burn look at us watching.
“There are some big names in this match that could ultimately lead to the OCW Championship held by Outcast. PerZag, the current Craze Champion who could theoretically lose that strap in this match. I know this guy is a big deal being brought into the Hall of Fame this past December. He beat another big name in OCW, Ed Houston, so I know the kid is no joke.”
“Then there is The Grand Wizard of Wrestling, Bob Grenier, who is a challenge for anyone. You know this guy wouldn’t be able to wrestle anywhere else because of his questionable nicknames and 1950’s viewpoint, but why wrestle anywhere else when you can wrestle in OCW? So it’ll be a good test to come face to face; he just better not smoke a metric ton of weed and eat the weight in Oreo’s. That would just be stupid, and again, besides his nickname and viewpoint of the 50s, I don’t think he is when he is in a sanctioned match-up.”
“Alice Knight, OWL IS NIGHT,” she says, waving her hands up in the air above her head. She winks for us and takes a drag of her smoke. “A name everyone has heard of. She is a trendsetter here in OCW holding the championship my firstborn is holding, an OCW Champion and a Hall of Fame member. Anywhere she has been, she has been someone to beat and is no bigger anywhere else than she is here. I wish we would’ve crossed paths much earlier in my career because that is just someone you could work with within this business that creates urban legends for generations to come.”
“And, of course, the OCW Champion himself, Outcast. I don’t know if we will come face to face, Outcast, but there is always that possibility. You are one of those premiere attractions that doesn’t need to be on TV every week to be a draw. The OCW faithful come for a number of the talent here, including my daughter (and the Cowgirls, of course), but you are one of those types the fans hope to show up, and if you don’t, they’ll keep tuning in to see if you will. They don’t teach that in wrestling school. I wish you the best of luck, but if my rusty body does make it to the top of the pyramid, I am going to show you why I am the original outlaw’s firstborn.”
“Next weekend on Sunday the 27th of 2022, both Cowgirls From Hell will ride in Death Valley to The Great Illuminatus and mark my words, any of you that come toe to toe with me remember this…”
“God Forgives.”
Tamika’s face comes around the left side of the screen, just showing a bit of the right side of her face.
“She doesn’t.”
The scene fades on the sneering face of Meghan Strader.
