Dirty Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Romance (6 page)

M
y dad wasn’t exactly
a dream cruise.

I guess everyone’s old man fucks them up in one way or another though, some people get so messed up they get excited about mortgages or low income tax, I got fucked up in another way. Brooklyn, now her life was unfortunate, but the only reason I was able to help her out was because of my dear old dad. He was the only reason I was even able to go out for the MMA auditions.

The auditions were bullshit, by the way.

I was a damn good fighter. I knew that, I’d worked my ass off my whole life for it. They didn’t care about that, though. That wasn’t the immediate thing that caught any of their eyes. They wanted you to fill out registration information before you could even show them what you were worth.

I just wanted to be allowed in the rink, I didn’t care about getting signed to anything. I didn’t care about TV or the money, I just wanted to be able to fight. My body was a perfectly trained machine and I’d worked so long for that and now it was going to waste in that gym.

I couldn’t tell them why signing was a problem, I couldn’t explain why I’d been looking over my shoulder since before the last time I saw Brooklyn. A full night longer.

I couldn’t tell them what these hands had done before.

I’d never had any siblings to protect.

I didn’t have a mom around to claim it was for.

It was selfish, but hell I guess I took after him in that way.

There was a lot of blood, people don’t tell you how strong that smell is when you’re around that much blood. Some part of your brain reads it as your own nose bleeding and you catch yourself sniffling, just accidentally dragging more of that awful smell in. I can’t tell you how many nights I would wake up just angrily rubbing at my own nose to get the smell out of my head. Sometimes I’d go hard enough without realizing that I’d actually get a nosebleed. It was God-awful.

I wish I could say it had been raining, or was dark that fateful day; I wish I could say he was worse than he’d ever been before, but none of that was true. It was a summer night and sunny as hell, not even dusk yet, and he was the same as he’d been for the last eighteen years of my life. Angry, loud, drunk. You see, I took his wife from him when I was born. It wasn’t a fair trade as he saw it, he thought it was a first indicator of my selfishness. He kept that thought in his head for the rest of his life.

Not to say I wasn’t guilty for that, I felt guilt every day of my life over her loss.

I got that he was upset, I understood why completely. It’s rare in your life that you find someone that makes you think you’re actually worth anything. He had that in my mother, she was the only person he’d ever loved, and I snatched that away from him, replaced her with a whiny son instead. So he’d beat me to ease his pain.

I took it because I loved my father and I hated myself. I hated what I took away from both of us.

It was one hell of a pattern, but I could always see it coming on. He’d get more and more aggravated for a couple days, at little shit, and then one night he’d get off work and just let the fucking floodgates open. I’d be wailed on until he was tired of me crying, or sleepy from his drink, and then he’d wander off while I fixed myself up.

He taught me that I needed to be able to take care of myself.

I had to learn to be self-reliant. I had to learn that if I couldn’t count on myself then I was out of fucking luck. It wasn’t an easy lesson to learn but I had no choice in it.

I got into fighting so I could defend myself and stop the beatings from going too far. I could wait through it, let him get out what he needed, and then we’d move on like it never happened. I tried to at least, but I usually flinched if I knew he was in the house. Often, maybe once a month or so, he’d go out of town for a week or more and I’d get to relax. It was like losing the handcuffs that usually kept me chained down. I’d use the whole house, instead of just my room. I’d watch television, eat properly and even have friends over.

Then he’d be back in town and I’d go back to acting like I didn’t exist.

He worked construction even though he didn’t need to, that’s just the kind of man he was. He needed some extra dough to get an even nicer car than his brand new one, so he got the most grueling job he could. He had enough money from when my grandparents passed, but he had a plan for spending it so he could make sure to make it last. The side hustles were just for perks.

I didn’t get any perks.

So that night, with the sun still up and orange above the horizon, my dad was in a mood when he got home. He got off work and was slamming down beers, just chugging them like they were vital to his life. The television was roaring and I had locked my door. I knew better than to go out there and try to eat or use the bathroom, I knew he’d be on me and start wailing.

I kept my head in a book and distracted myself, doing what I could to drown out the man out there. It didn’t help too much because soon I heard my doorknob jiggle. Immediately there were three loud and punctuated bangs, his heavy fist knocking so hard on that door it was deafening.

“WHO THE HELL SAID YOU COULD LOCK YOUR DOOR?” he said, angry. I closed my book and set it aside. I was shaking, I was scared, I had trained forever and I knew I could take him down if I wanted, but I was still fucking terrified of him.

“Dad, I’m going to bed early,” I lied. I wanted him to leave me alone. I wanted him to get the hell away from my door.

“ADAM, OPEN YOUR FUCKING DOOR,” he shouted, his words were pretty clear for how drunk he was. I knew that the longer I put it off the worse the beating would get. I was muscular enough, I was strong enough, I knew that I could have kicked his ass, hell he probably knew that, but that didn’t fill the narrative of our relationship. I stood up from my bed and the mattress creaked like it was trying to convince me to stay. The walk to the door was awful, I felt like I was having the shit kicked out of me before I even got to it.

No sooner had I unlocked it and he was on me.

Shouting things like “YOU USELESS PRICK”, and “UNGRATEFUL SHIT”, as he just wailed away on me. It hurt, it fucking hurt. No matter how much you work out your mind and your body, you’re still made of flesh and skin, you don’t become stone. I was angry and tired of being blamed by him. I was tired of being blamed by myself. I was tired of being beaten up by a fifty year old trust fund child for the cardinal sin of being born.

I just wanted him off me.

So I pushed him hard, I pushed him so fucking hard that he lifted off his feet. He hit the wall and then tumbled down and bashed his head in on the table that my book was sitting on. I knew he was dead before he even stopped breathing. The smell of blood was so thick, so bright. He’d been drinking so his blood was thinned out already, and it just didn’t stop. I shoved some sheets under his head and paced back and forth for what must have been an hour, the top of the sun was now flirting with the horizon.

I took some deep breaths, had one of his beers, and then started the longest night of my life.

His car was already in the attached garage, out of sight of the neighborhood, so I wrapped his head in sheets so he wouldn’t drip too much. I wasn’t completely able to carry him out to the car, he was a floppy mess which is hard to grip, hard to direct as you’re walking backwards through a house while trying not to get too much blood on yourself. I got him onto the floorboards of the backseat, wedged in there like a duffle bag someone was bringing on a trip.

It didn’t feel real.

The sun was down but it was still too early to do anything without being seen, so I spent a lot of the night cleaning out what blood I could. I puked until I didn’t have anything left in my stomach to offer up. The floor was hardwood so I had that going for me. I used sponges and bleach to get any speckles of blood off the furniture and wall that I could. The table took almost half of the cleaning time,

It was pretty common knowledge that he liked to leave town—liked to travel and vanish for days or weeks at a time. I knew if I made him disappear that nobody would question it until I had time to get myself out of town for real.

At two in the morning I decided my cleaning job had been done well enough.

I got into his car after showering. I had put gloves on. It was summer but I never drove this car. If they found my hair in the car it wouldn’t matter, but with my finger prints on the wheel there would be no doubt what happened.

I drove slow, careful not to miss a stoplight, careful to stay at the speed limit, anything that would keep the eyes of cops off me. I couldn’t imagine the people passing me on the road, their normal lives. Their cars that didn’t have a parent’s body in it.

I drove the car into a lake no more than three miles from the house. I had the windows cracked open just enough to let water into them, not enough for his body to float out. As I watched it sink in the light of an almost-full moon I realized I’d now killed both of my parents. A self-made orphan. On the jog back home I started to feel there were eyes on me.

Eyes that don’t exist.

I could feel them now and then, it was the middle of the night and I hadn’t slept. I was running down grown over back alleys and roads to get back home. It’s no surprise that I felt paranoid at the time. I hadn’t sleptat all that day. I had packed a small bag of belongings and set it by the front door. I knew there was no chance of anyone finding the car that quickly, but my eyes kept wandering to the front door, expecting someone to knock and come in.

Almost expecting my dad to come back.

It was in this sleep-deprived state that I decided to go and see Brooklyn for the last time.

I didn’t have any family, besides my dad’s estranged brother, so I wasn’t worried about saying goodbye to family. I just needed to see her and then leave.

It didn’t end up being that easy.

Every leg of my journey after that, the buses, the gym, everything, made me worry about them finding me. I had no doubt in my mind that they had found the car in the lake. That they found the body. That they realized those sheets were from the house, from my bed, and put it all together.

I would take long routes to anywhere I was going if it meant I could just avoid cops. I almost always felt like their eyes were on me. I didn't want to kill my dad! I just wanted him off me. That’s difficult to prove though when you drive his bloodied body into a lake afterwards, I guess.

Registering for MMA fights would mean they’d have my ID, they’d know who I was.

Within hours I felt like cops would have me in cuffs and toted off to jail for murder. There was no way in hell that I was going to jail for my dad’s sorry ass.

So I couldn’t be a professional MMA fighter then.

I was getting ready to leave the arena, disappointed that I couldn’t even do this simple thing, when I was stopped by someone who was the literal embodiment of shady. He looked like what you’d get if you made a batman villain’s goon from the 1940s into a human being. This was Ricky. Ricky was actually an alright dude once I got to know him.

“I see you didn’t want to register,” he said, walking at my side and matching my pace, falling in so naturally next to me it almost looked practiced.

“Mm,” I replied, dismissive. I didn’t want to just go handing out my information to anyone.

“I could get you into the actual fights if you want,” he said, making me slow down a bit. “You look like a hard ass, I’m part of a circle of fighters who don’t have to deal with any of this frilly shit,” he continued, nodding back to the arena behind us. “Money’s amazing,” he added.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, wanting more details. He slid his hand into the back pocket of his jeans and produced a card. It had just two lines on it.

I looked at it, confused, and then back at him.

“Call my boy Ross, tell him Ricky sent you, tell him you’re interested in taking up a labor job,” he said, shrugging. “He’ll know what you’re talking about, probably try you out first and then you’ll be in mad money,” he smiled. “As long as you win.”

T
his guy Ross
wanted me to audition for his fights as soon as possible. On the phone he sounded nice enough. I wasn’t sure why I imagined him to be a classic mob-boss kind of guy. I didn’t mind starting immediately, the sooner I could get myself back in the action the better. I just wanted to do what I was built to do.

I wanted to kick some ass.

As long as I was able to get the audition kicked off well, as long as I was able to pound my opponent into the fucking ground, I would be able to keep fighting. I’d be able to live off that, get an actual apartment, fix my diet, and sleep in a bed regularly. It sounded more than heavenly after almost a year of living on the streets.

I wasn’t sure how I’d do that without an ID, but I didn’t think that far ahead at the time.

I loved my gym, but it wasn’t doing enough to keep my mind active. I needed to be able to train on how to react to people; to be able to focus on the things around me as I worked out. I was able to get some sparring time in, nothing serious, no knock outs allowed. Nobody wanted to fight me after the first couple. After that I decided running was the best way to get as many distractions around me as possible.

I could take a different route of running every day and never see the same things, never worry about repetition. Some roads reminded me of that strip I’d ran down when I wanted to get away from my father, some were so cluttered with people so obviously wealthy that it made me think of Brooklyn and her mother.

I couldn’t help but think about Brooklyn in my day to day life anyways.

I wanted to know if she was okay. Did she go back to her home after she visited her aunt? Was there fall-out from that? If she got hurt again I would have been fucking furious. I couldn’t imagine her dad getting up off that ground and not trying to tear apart the nearest people to him as easily as possible. I didn’t understand why she was still in that tiny town to begin with; she was worth so much more than that.

My feet slapped along on that concrete hour after hour, day after day. I kept on lifting weights, I kept sparring anyone who was willing, but I mostly ran. Running improves balance. It helps with your breathing, helps keep your mind clear, and lets you work on avoiding obstacles.

I loved it, the perfect workout.

On one of my runs when I was trying to fit in a couple extra miles more than my usual daily amount, I had to stop dead in my tracks because I felt like I saw a ghost.

It was Brooklyn.

Now, I don’t mean that I saw someone who looked like her, or that I was just imagining it, like the eyes, finally cracking after stress. No, it was Brooklyn. Her long dark hair, huge beautiful green eyes, and slender but fit body.

She was dramatically pulling back an arrow on a bow, the camera panned over her arms and back, she’d been working out since I last saw her.

I stopped running and stood still, staring up at the television that was playing in an open-air bar. There were shots of her running, shooting more arrows and jumping through a portal, a close up of her gorgeous face, all cut between phrases like “THIS SUMMER”, “A FLINT LOWE PRODUCTION”, “LIKE”, “YOU’VE”, “NEVER”, “SEEN”, “BEFORE”. As the trailer continued on, the cuts to the words were shorter and shorter, as most shots were taken up by orangey pinks and dark blues or greens. Brooklyn was touted as a new and exciting actress in it.

I kept standing there, staring at that tiny screen, even after the next commercial came on.

She was so beautiful. Something I’d never get over is someone with a mind like hers also lucking into a face and a body like that. At least I knew she wasn’t stuck with her dad, but I couldn’t figure out how she got that far that fast. I was relieved, but also amazed at how well she was doing in just under a year. Just under a year and I was still homeless, just auditioning for a fight; I couldn’t imagine what kinds of things she was auditioning for.

I was glad she couldn’t see me in that moment.

I was proud? It was bittersweet, because the moment I finally see her again it’s on a screen, but at the same time she was out there living. She wasn’t letting her father drag her down. It made me want to be someone worthwhile for her too.

That night when I made it back to the gym, I turned one of the televisions on to a random channel. Once the commercials ended on that channel I switched to another, then another, until finally after an hour I caught a repeat of the commercial.

I had been in love with her long before this point.

I had almost used her as my reason to stay alive, the beauty that gave me life.

And now there she was, as if she was waiting for me to watch and keep my eye out for her again. It felt like it did back when I’d stand under her tree and make sure her father wasn’t laying his hands on her, but now the rest of the world could watch with me. The rest of the world could fall in love with her with me.

I hoped that she was happy. I needed her to be happy.

I kept the television on for the rest of the night, making myself work out when her commercial wasn’t on, but the second it was I was there and watching. I had it memorized, every transition and sound effect, it was heavy with loud percussion outbursts that ended up being obnoxious by the end of it. I was disappointed that she didn’t get to speak in the commercial.

The next day I went out and got one of those directories that people, tourists 99% of the time, would buy of the hills. Flint Lowe’s production company was only ten miles from my gym. She was literally that close to me the whole time and I never knew it.

Any time I jogged after that, I’d fantasize about her seeing me, recognizing me, and I’d imagine what she’d say.

Would she be happy to see me? I didn’t think so. I was the guy there to remind her that at one point her father hit her so hard she fell down the stairs. I was the guy who was there to remind her that at one point some guy stood in her yard and stared at her window until something happened.

I didn’t entertain this fantasy for too long.

Still, I wanted to see her, and although I would never approach her in person I could always watch her trailer as often as I wanted to.

She was beautiful.