The Laughter of Strangers (7 page)

HOLD

BLOCK

HOLD

Spencer’s head is in his hands, not even watching.

I can hear him say, “You don’t need me to tell you. I’m sure you’re still feeling the impact of that left hook.”

I tell him that I am.

The left hook heard around the world.

“That should have been your left hook.”

It used to be mine.

Now all I do is hold.

HOLD

HOLD

HOLD

HOLD

Even though he doesn’t knock me down, the judges score round four an “eight,” two points that hit right at the heart. The round goes to Executioner.

It’s because I performed little more than the role of the punching bag.

I took the punches and grabbed for dear life.

X mumbled about thirty seconds from the end of the round:

What is wrong with you?

You tell me.

I’m kind of finding it difficult to say much of anything.

ROUND FIVE

No comment.

That’s the official statement.

Spencer stares at the dry-erase board, baffled at the scribble.

“You need a lot of work…”

You can say that again.

He stuns me this round with something that doesn’t quite register but it definitely stung. Much like a bee sting, it tingled and then shot right to the back of my brain, a numbing pain.

It’s the uppercut.

The same damn uppercut.

I was always good at carefully throwing in an uppercut at the end of a combination. I could really get the glove right under the chin, the kind of punch that sends glassjaws crying and cast-iron chins to the ground.

Not that I ever really did.

During my prime, I fought more just like me.

We took the punches like we planned on early retirement. They wear on you over the years. I wonder how bad my memory, my reflexes, my conditioning will be five, ten, fifteen years from now.

But okay, the uppercut.

Didn’t see it coming (which means X did a great job connecting).

I don’t remember how long I was on the ground but it wasn’t for long. You fight enough and you can get by for a while, at least half the fight, on instinct, muscle memory, the routine of having heard, smelled, and felt pretty much everything you’d expect in a fight.

Sensory cues from decades of self-affliction.

Remnants of a fighter that can’t stop fighting himself.

ROUND SIX

It all comes apart after that uppercut knockdown in the fifth.

Spencer is silent, chews gum. Watches in silent dismay.

It’s bad, and he’s no longer bothering to rant or even comment. I get the sense that he wants to shut the footage off as much as I do; however, it stays on as I look like a wreck in round six.

X has me pinned against the ropes for a third of the round.

BLOCK

HOLD

SHORT LIFELESS HOOKS TO THE BODY

It’s what I do to survive.

To the referee it appeared as though I was all right.

Can’t say that I was but again, fighter’s instinct.

“Were there any lights on during the last three rounds?”

Can’t say that there were so I don’t say anything.

Spencer blows a bubble, lets it pop and hang over his lower lip for a few seconds before pulling it back into his mouth with his tongue.

“Rookie mistake.”

ROUND SEVEN

So by now everyone in the audience expects X to win. If it goes to decision, X is victor, no doubt about it. This is one of those cases where I basically have to knock him out in order to win.

And that wasn’t going to happen.

Everyone knew it.

People stood up and left.

There were a few rounds left in the fight but it seemed as though everyone had it all fought out in their mind. They knew how it would end. We fought it out, lagging behind the times.

I watch the footage, not at all familiar with what happened in round seven.

I was out on my feet, nothing there.

You know how everything is muted when underwater, both sight and sound cloudy and obtuse?

That’s how it feels after being stunned, your mind slush, random thoughts, sometimes as odd as the last time you called your mom, rise up from the grey matter of your memory.

For me, round seven was all about hamburgers. I tasted a bacon cheeseburger, craved it, after the half-memory of eating a double-decker at a local restaurant resurfaced somewhere towards the beginning of the round.

I could go for one right about now…

Spencer runs his palm across the dry-erase board, smearing everything he’d written. Conceivably, this would be alarming.
Conceivably.

Yeah, well I’m just hopeful that there won’t be a follow-up lecture.

I mean look at what I’m doing:

JAB

JAB

JAB

JAB

HOLD

Versus what X is doing:

BLOCK

WEEVE-JAB TO BODY

LEFT HOOK

RIGHT HOOK

STRAIGHT

Keep in mind that this is all news to me.

Can’t recall what happened this round.

Turns out I didn’t miss anything. I missed every single punch thrown, leaving myself open fifty percent of the time for X to throw in a combination, score more points, make me look terrible.

It’s a horrible performance. I admit it.

When I attempt to clinch, I leave myself wide open. X sees every single clinch coming so what does he do?

BACK PEDAL

TWO STEPS

LEAN BACK

WATCH ME GRAB AIR

PERFECT STRAIGHT

HOOK TO THE FACE

I don’t cut easily. I have taken a lot of damage these last couple decades, compounded misery on layaway, but hell if I’ve kept myself fairly clean, give or take a welt or two on occasion.

But blood flows by round seven from the wound on my face that would swell and become the welt that led me to the hospital.

Take one of those dry-erase markers and draw a face on the welt and from a far enough distance, from the POV of a druggie or drunk son-of-a-bitch, they just might figure the welt for a conjoined twin, a second face, skull and all. It swelled and throbbed and pained me for hours, a day, even now I feel numb to the touch on that side of my face.

The painkillers, you see.

Spencer sighs.

Says nothing.

Here it comes.

ROUND EIGHT

Wow, the welt is already forming; the referee pulls me aside and says something to me. Can’t hear it from the side of the ring but it’s the usual measure of consciousness. Answer the question:

Is this fighter out on his feet or is he still fighting?

The referee should have called it right then and there. Part of me is glad that he didn’t because it’s far more embarrassing to lose the fight between rounds; however, what happened next, about a minute into round eight, might have been one of the worst experiences of my life.

You’ll see what I mean.

I still see the sequence in slow motion.

X opts to let me try for the clinch but for a time, about fifteen seconds, we are at a standstill, waiting.

He waits for another stupid mistake.

I’m waiting to fall asleep. The audience wants this to be over and those that remain in their seats are only there in hopes of seeing a KO.

JAB

He toys around with the jab.

JAB

I block one but absorb the next.

JAB

He wants me to fight.

X knows that he has the fight won; he’s looking for the perfect time to plant that exclamation point on VICTORY.

JAB

He gets there quickly, with the single most important tool in the sweet science that is boxing.

JAB

I block.

JAB

Again, I block.

JAB

Only a matter of time and the time is now.

I absorb the jab and try for my own. Grazes his glove, which he then uses as an opportunity to threaten me with an outlandish, taunting haymaker.

I narrowly block it.

He grins, mouthpiece showing, ‘XXX’ can be seen printed across the piece. The audience is a low roar, everyone sensing blood.

JAB

JAB

JAB

Trio of jabs, two hitting me right on the nose, shaking me free, doing the trick by sending a signal, ANGER, from some part of my mind that’s still somehow working and you know what happens next. What happens next is exactly what X wanted to happen.

I foolishly go for the clinch.

I grab air.

NOTHING

And something for any highlight reel:

Perfectly executed uppercut, landing right under the chin.

And I fall back, perhaps because I was still grabbing for him I end up grabbing the ropes on my way down. I bounce back upon reaching for the top rope, stumbling in two directions, one of them happens to be X.

As if coming back for more, he hits me again.

UPPERCUT

And I hear laughter.

I look like a ragdoll being tossed around.

To the ground I go and Spencer stops the footage.

I fill in the rest.

Their laughter.

Laughing at me.

For a moment, the way the video is paused, each of my arms going a different direction from my legs, which are floating, on my face the expression of sinister confusion: I feel the tickle of a giggle rising from the base of my throat. I burst out into laughter.

Spencer says, “You think this shit is funny?”

Fact of the matter is, I don’t.

I find it all frightening.

I will never sleep well again.

At night I hear that laughter, the lacerating kind that feels like another fight in and of itself, twelve rounds of ridicule, the roast of ‘Sugar’ Willem Floures by all the others that know more about him than he knows himself.

The receiving end of all jokes.

It’s as bad as an inside joke that I’m not in on…

And it’s about me.

WHAT NOW?

SILENCE

I stop laughing and I’m only a cough away from crying.

Spencer sighs, he rewinds the footage and replays the KO again.

THAT PERFECT UPPERCUT

THE UPPERCUT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD

Are they satisfied?

Spencer makes a face, “It is you when you were twenty-two.”

Shakes his head, “Right down to the penchant for combinations.”

He shuts off the footage, looks at the dry-erase board.

SILENCE

Everything he had written is now a smear.

“‘Sugar’…you are no longer sweet with the science.”

I feel the side of my face. This would be sore if I were sober.

He turns to me, “Well?”

I raise my eyebrows, “Well what?”

“Got any bright ideas?”

SILENCE

But I only hear laughter.

We sit here for a time, drifting between caustic thoughts and, at least for me, a deepening fear that is borderline indescribable.

I say, “You shouldn’t have signed us up for the rematch.”

Spencer sighs, “We have no choice. You take the rematch or you no longer exist. ‘Fade out on a sorry sack of shit.’ You want that? Because I don’t. I’ve spent the last three decades building you into the definition of Willem Floures. ‘Sugar’ as in sweet; ‘sweet’ as in the sweetest display of the science that is boxing. And look at you now…”

SILENCE

I have nothing to say.

Thankfully, I am not left with the laughter for long, the laughter exclusively for me. Spencer still speaks for me, and what he says next is about as succinct and on-point as anything I could have hoped to hear:

You either win or you wither away.

This is it. In terms of chances, I’m on my last and I’m lucky to have one more. Very discouraging when you look in the mirror, you look at any form of identification, and you are no clearer in your comprehension of what it means to be THIS person than you were ten, twenty, thirty years ago.

Follow that up by something a trainer and agent should never ask their client, their fighter, their friend:

“Got any ideas? Because I’m done.”

As a matter of fact, I do.

Remember what I had said earlier, about that little flicker that became something full-featured and, at least during this era of desperation, became a fantastic idea? Yeah well when Spencer Mullen seems to get behind it and approve of such an idea, what would you do?

You go along with it.

You even get a little excited.

Maybe, just maybe, you think that you might have a chance.

I MIGHT WIN

Old age does not bring wisdom.

Old age turns smart minds into fools.

THE SILENCE I SEEK

A lot of what I don’t like might follow me wherever I go, but there is one place that saves me from the shame, the swarming of scrutiny and shit talking. It really doesn’t look like much, older two story house just outside the city, slightly neglected lawn, paint job on the place faded, in need of a facelift.

It is a lived-in home.

Spencer’s house since as far back as his previous life. It is also where I reside when I’m not on the road, on a plane, shoved into another stunt, or stunned by an uppercut in the eighth round of a fight that I’d rather forget.

The house looks a lot like me.

It creaks with every step just like my knees make a snapping sound as I sit down. This house isn’t much at all, but maybe neither am I.

I like it here.

It feels like I can push everything, the pressure, away; it’s almost like I can leave it all outside.