[2 months ago, days after plans of the CXA Reunion show are announced]
Joxide was sat in his office in an expensive lazy-boy recliner. He'd invested in a carpenter to come to his residence and modify his desk so that he could fit the chair at the desk. His Macbook Air laptop sat in front of him and he was plugged into Youtube. Unfortunately, it was difficult to find good music where he lived, so he relied mostly on the internet and Youtube for his musical needs. It was a lot of effort to get to the nearest place a foreign band was ever likely to go. He occasionally made the commute but hasn't for some time. Most of the bands he was interested in were small time English outfits who never even toured outside the country, let alone this side of the Atlantic ocean.
Joxide didn't really take much interest in the wrestling business anymore. He found it strange how easily he had forgotten about wrestling and moved on. Wrestling clearly wasn't in his blood like it was in some of TXA's former elite. Despite this opinion, Joxide still kept an eye on the old circuits. Steve Awesome was still going strong as were the Frayed Ends of Sanity in a new fed NCW, but he hadn't heard much from the other guys in years, only old rumours and irrelevant stories about their personal lives which he wasn't interested in. He also occasionally Wikipedia'd his name to see what people had written. The last time he looked it told him he had been competing in a Japanese organisation in a mask. First he'd heard of it. In fact, Joxide had been absent from public eye or public knowledge for over four years. He wasn't exactly in hiding, as that implies that someone was after him. Maybe 'voluntarily removed from society' is a better term.
The hacienda he lived in had been purpose built for Joxide to live in, and because of his vast wealth, he was able to grease the right palms and the house flew up in two months flat. One of his favourite things about living in Chile was it was what Joxide named a 'second world country'. He didn't know the actual term for it, but it was a mixture of a developed and underdeveloped country. People here lived normal lives, without various modern conveniences found in America or Europe but still not in poverty. Luxury here was available for money, just like anywhere. But Joxide could make pretty much anything happen with his vast fortune, here in Chile. Low wages for the working masses and civil servants meant that there was always someone ready to take a backhander for something. In developing Latin America, morals most certainly did not equal money. Unlike Great Shitain, he thought. Where bribery only got you in a load of shit. Here, money could truly buy you anything.
Joxide had purchased the land from the state government after a short search for a suitable location to set up camp. He'd purchased three square kilometres of flat land in the middle of a valley in the mountainous forests near Ovalle, in the Coquimbo region of Chile overlooking a crystal clear lagoon on the Choapa river, the centre of Chilean winemaking country. His huge farm produced numerous kinds of wines which were shipped to and bottled, labelled and shipped overseas, although some was sent to the capital of Santiago. It didn't stop there, he also had a huge allotment, growing numerous kinds of fruit and vegetables, although this was mainly just to be self-sufficient more than for profit. The idea to open a vineyard had originally been to keep a supply of money coming in should Joxide ever run out, but he could tell that wouldn't happen. He had overestimated how easy it was to spend money; he'd been splashing out with gay abandon for years and he hadn't even spent 10% of what he'd thieved from TXA, not counting interest earned since then. He was receiving more money than he could spend.
Joxide's farm also kept livestock and produced milk and cheese and all kinds of dairy products, along with high quality meat. A more recent idea of his had been to expand into the tobacco market by planting his own crop. But again, not for financial gain, as he didn't exactly need money, only as something else to do, and it would need harvesting and drying in a month or two. He also had a small hydroponic cabinet in the basement of the hacienda complete with UV lights where he grew potent cannabis to smoke in the evenings, along with legions of tomatoes, pineapples and the like, just because he could.
Obviously it wasn't Joxide who did all the work. He didn't have time for such manual labour. Well, he did, but he was far too lazy to do it. The whole farm was tended to by 37 staff, all paid a generous wage by Joxide. What was money to him, after all? The majority of the staff lived on the farm. Joxide had built a series of large houses around the site where they stayed rent-free, and he'd decked them all out with big TV's, pool tables, the internet, their own phones, nice comfortable furniture and pretty much anything else they'd asked for. Although the people of the Chilean countryside were relatively new to such civilisation and the evil of greed and money still hadn't crept its way into their hearts as it had Joxide's.
He had changed a lot in the last few years, he'd conceded. As he got to Panama City and sorted out the money with the bank manager of Caja de Ahorros he remembered feeling invincible. For 3 weeks, everywhere he went he was flashing the cash and walked around with his nose in the air and his head up his ass. Once he'd picked this nice place, originally intending to be a lone mansion hideaway, he'd seen that the Ovalleans, the people of the region he'd stayed in for the last week or so, weren't impressed by wealth. They were happy to see this strange white man with colourful clothes and broken Spanish because they knew he had money to invest in their town. They were happy that a rich man had come to Ovalle to invest, but wealth didn't impress these people.
The only white people that came this far off the beaten path were rich. Wine enthusiasts mainly. Typically rich Americans who want the 'real Chilean winemaking experience'. Since English was pretty much unheard of around of these parts, also TV and the regular domestic conveniences like hot water and electricity were scarce too and they didn't usual last more than three days. On second thoughts, they'd rather stick to the 'tailored-for-tourists' winemaking experience.
The only other people to come here were young people returning to see their parents, having moved to the Big City. Just like in Argentina, Bolivians had immigrated to the more-affluent country of Chile to seek a better life, much like Eastern Europeans into the United Kingdom or North Africans into France. Bolivians had even come to Ovalle. Joxide employed a few of them himself. Racism here was widespread, but in Ovalle, the Bolivians worked hard and contributed to the local economy. The Chilean people had embraced these hard working foreigners as they realised these hard workers would bring prosperity to the region. That's why I love Chile, thought Joxide. The blindly stubborn and bigoted English people are worlds away from here.
In the region, Joxide was a fairly well known person. He was, people told him, the only white man to come here and stay longer than two months. In that time, he'd picked up a fair bit of Spanish, and spoke in an exaggerated Chilean accent. The huge kitty he had certainly helped loosen his purse strings and in the three years he'd lived there Joxide had made an unfathomable contribution to the people of Ovalle. He'd lent the regional government money to build schools, install sewage and hot water lines and had bought a fleet of disused buses and had them brought down from Santiago to provide a bit of transportation around town, the proceeds of which were being managed by some civil servants to keep the firm running. He was currently paying an architect from the capital to design the layouts for a electrical power station on the outskirts of the town, which he would probably end up financing. Not that he minded.
After a letter from the natural preservation society of Chile, Joxide had planted, and funded the planting of several Jubaea trees. The Jubaea tree, or Chilean Wine Palm, as the name suggests is endemic to central Chile, specifically the wine-making regions and around Santiago. The sap, which is used to make a sweet drink, requires the cutting of the tree and through centuries of this being left unchecked the species, the sole one in it's genus, had slowly been dying out. Joxide had dedicated a large patch of land of his to these trees, and had funded expeditions into the wilderness specifically for Chilean naturists to plant these trees. It had taken some persuading for the authorities not to mention his name in their reports. Even that needed a few palms greased. And the guy he'd paid had taken all the credit! It didn't worry Joxide though, as long as he had anonymity.
Sitting at his desk, Joxide had just found a an official notice confirming the CXA Reunion show. CXA: a band of wrestlers who all competed under the CWA and later, the TXA. At first, his interest was only raised. No matches confirmed as of yet.
Later that night, he checked again. There seemed to be a lot of commotion about it from internet marks. It seems this is going to be quite big.
The next morning, Joxide checked again. He was getting keen. He spent most of the day sat at his laptop, checking for updates every few minutes.
A few days later, Joxide was training again in the gym installed downstairs. His staff, blissfully unaware of Joxide's past life, just put it down to the white man being strange again.
At long last, a date was confirmed for the show. And spots available for matches! Joxide could feel the wrestling bug waking up after lying dormant in him for so long. Sure this life is great, no people, no one from England, fine food and drink, and a blissful, quiet existence, but his inner-showman raged to be let out. He had to admit, it was a little bit boring here. A few weeks away won't hurt anyone right? Miguel, his chief of staff was more than capable of running the place in his absence!
And that was it. By the end of the week, Joxide was boarding a flight bound for not-so-sunny England!
Subject: The King's Back 
Thu Feb 03, 2011 3:33 pm
