The building you can see from the highway with the WWE logo on it isn’t where the offices are anymore. The headquarters got moved to 677 Washington Boulevard a while ago. Luckily for me, this is still in Stamford because this is a fact I learned about two days into the time it took to get here from Fresno, when my car broke down outside of Omaha. I should have been able to make the last 16 hours of the drive in a day, but the transit from Nebraska to Connecticut wasn’t direct without my car. 

The most difficult leg of the journey was trying to get from where my car gave out to downtown Omaha, where I could get a bus. The guy in a beater who picked me up, the first person who stopped and didn’t question why I’d abandon my car on the berm, only took me as far as a nearby 24 hour diner in Prague, Nebraska. 

At the Kolac Korner, I learned that it’s pronounced like “Craig” here, even though all the original settlers were some variation of Czech and should have known how to say it right. The interior looked more like a VA hall than a diner but the menu had blue plate staples alongside a lot of sausages and pickled bullshit. The linoleum woodgrain pattern tables, the sort that are just barely a step above folding tables, were all sticky with beer. Being in a town with a twee little name like that always makes my skin crawl. Prosper, Texas seems too self aware of the kitsch element, too proud of it. It’s like giving yourself a nickname and then enforcing its use. 

On the back of the menu were a few paragraphs detailing how the World’s Largest Kolach, a pastry I had never heard of before that looks like a less appetizing Danish, was baked right there in 1987. A few grainy photographs accompanied the story, all of squat church ladies and Rotary men dumping vats of fruit goo onto a circle of dough the size of a living room. Their hands were covered in sticky red like extras in a B horror movie. On the sign into town, there was an artist’s rendition of this claim to fame. Without the context of understanding that a Kolach is a sweet and not a regional slur for Bohemians, the image looked to me like a painting of a sphincter with hemorrhoids.

The waitress kept trying to get me to order one, since they were the town’s specialty, even though I just wanted a southwestern omelet. That’s the thing with places like Prague, NE. It’s not enough to make the Kolach and eat the Kolach and leave it at that. You have to make one as big as King Arthur’s round table then spend 40 years convincing anyone who passes through that they should care, as if I agreed to play along in this big production by winding up car-less on I-30 in the middle of the night.

Luckily, a trucker eating at Kolac Korner took me to Omaha no problem and from Omaha I could take a Jefferson Lines bus to Chicago, then transfer to a FlixBus to Newark. From Jersey, a NJ transit bus got me to the New York Penn Station, where I got on a train to Boston that made a stop in Stamford along the way. In the end, it worked out that they’re not in what I thought of as “the WWE building” but what is officially called Titan Towers, even though it is just one building and not really that tall. The new location on Washington Boulevard is really close to the Amtrak Station, literally just across the turnpike. It was, all things considered, very convenient to get here.

Vince McMahon deserves to die because he is a liar and a cheat and his whole career and business is built on the backs of the lives he has destroyed. The breaking point, for me at least, was the Hell in a Cell match at WrestleMania 39, but I should have reached this conclusion years ago. Everyone knows that Finn Bálor was supposed to beat The Edge, but Vince intervened at the last minute and rigged the match so that Edge would win. It is all because Finn is from outside the organization and short and got injured so Vince hates him. If Vince let him fight fair, he would have beat Edge, no questions asked. This is basically Vince at all times. If he pushes you and you have the audacity to get injured, you’re dead to him from then on. It’s all because Vince is an inconsistent freak. If he likes you, you’ll get all the chances in the world. If he decides he doesn’t, because you’re too short or too foreign or he just doesn’t like your face, it takes one “incident” and you’re in the doghouse.

The woman standing in front of me smells really good but she pressed floor 4, so I try to sniff her as much as I can in the short period of our shared ride without being indiscreet. She is carrying one of those tote bags where the straps are a color but the bag is plain and her hair is absolutely shellacked to her head like a flamenco dancer’s. What sort of movement would it take to dislodge a single strand? I can’t imagine she expects to get up to that sort of velocity on a Wednesday at work. Her thick ponytail is a completely different texture in that it moves at all, but the hair in it is just as straight and almost as shiny. She looks like she only ever moves with sleek efficiency. 

I forget sometimes that women can lose their hair too because women don’t have receding hairlines, they bald all over like a dying lawn. There was a woman on the Flix Bus from Chicago to Newark who had the thinnest hair I’d ever seen be that big. No clue what sort of materials she used to achieve it, but she had this massive,translucent pouf of a curly mullet with poodle-like bangs. She was sitting across the aisle from me and a few seats up, so I got a great view of how the sun came through it. Her whole head glowed like she was on fire or an angel or something. It’s hard for me to tell if it’s easier for women to hide their balding or if they’re just a little better at it.

One of the guys on the elevator has a ginger comb-over taper-fade combination that, in tandem with his too-tight skinny khakis, makes me feel a little embarrassed, second hand. He and a younger guy are talking about a “kid”, presumably a college student or 20 something that works in sales for them.

The older guy says that he wasn’t sure when he hired the kid if he’d work out, since he’d had zero experience with SAAS, but he has been really impressed by his work ethic. The kid is the last to log off everyday. The younger guy tells the older guy that even the clients are noticing. They were laying a bunch of compliments on him on a recent call and the kid said, “Oh please, stop glazing me.”

“He said that to a client?” The older guy asks, suddenly sounding a bit less enthusiastic about the new hire.

“Yeah, why?”

“It’s a bit unprofessional, right? Like, in a client call, at least.”

“He was just being coy. It didn’t come off as rude to me. I think they found him charming.”

“The phrase “glazing” though, it’s a little…”

“I don’t know. It’s just slang.”

“But the term, I mean. It means, like, cum, doesn’t it?”

“Like you don’t say things suck?”

“Huh. I guess that’s also about sucking dick, too. You forget that.”

I made the mistake of timing my trip on the NJ Transit bus with the early morning commute. Two of the guys sitting right behind me were wearing polos with a storage unit company logo on them. I couldn’t tell if they worked the front desk or security or if it might have been more of a B2B storage service that kept inventory and stuff because all they talked about was whether their manager could tell that the taller one’s vape was a weed pen. Their argument boiled down to whether or not the shape was distinctly marijuana coded, since it was long like a pencil instead of being Tomigachi or AirPod container shaped, as has been in vogue with vapes since the decline of Juuls.

Puffs of what I could only assume were the aforementioned weed pen were wafting up from their seat to mine and I figured their whole discussion was kind of pointless because it completely smelled like weed. So much so that I changed my clothes in a bathroom at Monihan Hall before I got on the train. 

There was a list of things you can’t take on the bus, printed on once-white 8 by 11s and taped all over the bus station waiting room. Gun was definitely up there, but no one was really checking for anything. The list also included contraband as innocuous as non-TCH e-cigarettes and fish, so I imagined any confiscation of disallowed materials would lean more disappointed-school-marm than calling-the-cops. Still, I was probably checking and re-checking the contents of my bag enough to raise suspicion had anyone been paying attention. I riffled (ha) through it sightlessly, keeping the backpack mostly zipped and consoling myself with just the feeling of the gun against my fingertips. I slept with it clutched tight to my chest, but so did most people around me and I assumed they were only carrying phone charges and wallets and changes of clothes.

There were guards at the front doors of 677 Washington Boulevard, but they didn’t pat anyone down. I looked, to my credit, pretty well put together for a guy who’d spent the better part of the past week in transit. Before taking off, I bought all these business pants and dress shirts that feel like golf pants material. They don’t really crease and don’t make you feel sweaty even if you’re baking all afternoon in direct sunlight through a dirty bus window. They were sort of expensive, but it was important I looked the part because I had to convince the front desk guy to let me use one of the 5 passenger elevators. It is a swanky place. There’s a food hall and a yoga studio on the ground floor. I saw them when I was walking across the parking lot to the main entrance. 

My initial plan was to book an interview with WWE and use that to get into the building, but I changed tactics when I couldn’t get any bites on my resume. Instead, I brought a ring box with a fake engagement ring in it and told the doorman that I was there to surprise propose to my girlfriend. This, too, ended up working out for the best. The doorman was so charmed by my plan, he didn’t even radio up to the 13th floor to let them know I’m on my way. When these doors open, he and I will be the only ones on Earth to know that I’m coming.

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Ella Gray Hickman is a writer in Brooklyn. She has published work in The Cleveland Review of Books, The Eidolon Journal, Angel Food Mag, Burial Mag, BRUISER Mag, and Expat Press.