The Prizefighter

The Prizefighter(continued_2)

Time. There’s a period of time before a fight when it’s silent. When there’s no noise at all. There’s the sound of the crowd, and the fighters, and the vendors; for the minutes before though, there’s nothing. There’s only hunger in the air. A fire that burns through fabric and erodes sea-walls. Even the ocean cannot contend.

Crowds wilt their voices; they hold their lust into their hearts, instead of expunging them out into the stadium. Sometimes, when the noise becomes so soft I can hear my shoes squeaking on linoleum in the locker room, Inside I think happy thoughts.

Imagine myself on a hot glade floating on a small skiff downstream a narrow river with towering palmetto’s on my sides, and an exotic browned woman fanning me with bright green leaves. In my fantasy I sip a margarita, and eat small berries plucked ripe off the trees of summer’s day.

But then, and only then, does happiness come so ready. Usually, to feel that happiness, I need to be tasting blood.

You can swallow a pint of blood before you get sick.

And, that time before a fight, it’s an illusion. The calm before the storm, it doesn’t exist. There is no calm. The fight rages on, even when you’re not touching canvas.

Existence is a last century fad.

Now, it’s all about proving how nothing exists.

Not even I exist; Not anymore anyway. Limbo is the home for me, deep in the first rings of hell. God, did you put me here? That was a rhetorical question God. I forgot, you don’t exist. And neither do I. Neither will I, soon enough.

2+2=5. Sensibility doesn’t make any sense these days.

Wakeup. Rewind.

A grease head with a baby-face is in my locker room after I win the fight I was supposed to lose. Next to him, is a man that looks like Kramer, with pubic hair sprouting from the top of his skull. He’s balding. Imagine taking a Glock and gunning them down one by one so that my locker was splattered an oozing red like the color of my gloves.

I’d murder them.

They murder the fight.

“Romano hasn’t gotten back up yet,” the grease baby says. “Lying on the canvas like a fish without the flopping,”

“You done him in good,” the weasel with pubic hair says.

“You aint done nothing,” Greasebaby now. “We had big money on that fight,”

He wasn’t putting up any type of fight. Wouldn’t even land a punch, I say, but they don’t care. They’re all snarling teeth and tire-rims under their eyes.

“Don’t matter. What you did to us was bad business,” grease baby says, and I’m thinking of all the different ways I can make fingerpaintings on the walls with his blood. Thinking of the Nativity scene, and making baby Jesus out of a thicker blood than the rest, because he’s more special and unique than all the rest.

Don’t you wish we could all be special and unique, just like Jesus?

I tell him I’m not afraid of him or his scare tactics, and that he’s a whole lot of fluffy clouds and no thunder, and he gets angry and says I oughtta be terrified. That I need to be. Having only spoken once before, I don’t even know him, but I know he’s the dirt under my feet when I walk through the mud after it rains.

“The whole city lost on you, boy,” grease baby says. The sweat drips off his face and down his Hawaiian shirt like a bad sinus drip. Suddenly, I want to take a showerr. “Romano’s a king. You’re not anything but a small fish in a big pond,”

I tell him that I’m not so little now that Romano hasn’t even stood on two legs yet, and grease baby says, “You’re as little as I want you to be,” and I’m thinking he’s going to bite my neck because how close he gets to my earlobe. The sound reverberates off my inner ears and shudders out, stuttering.

I hate noise.

He says he’s got a van out back and that he wants to go for a little drive, and he fingers a gun hiding in his waist, and I have no real choice but to go with him where he wants me to go.

I tell him let me put my gloves up in my locker, and while I do, a janitor with rags instead of clothes taps me on the shoulder, and whispers in my ear.

“Romano hasn’t got back up yet. They checked his pulse. He’s not breathing. He’s dead,”

Somehow, I knew this before he told me. I could tell from the sound outside, the deadening silence. I could tell from the way my fist collapsed in his face, sinking into his skin until it was swallowed whole

Jonah and the Whale.

I could tell by the way he fell when he hit the ropes, not sliding along them like a fighter should, trying to grab hold of the canvas to his feet, but dropping instead, like a brick suspended from the sky that realized it could no longer hang about floating in space.

I killed again.

Davie killed again.

I wasn’t a fighter. I was a killer. What’s the difference?

The rag-tag janitor that’s so black he’s purple walks off to clean a bathroom or the showers, and grease baby prods me with the gun. Let’s go for a ride, he says.

“Fuck you,” I say to him, and follow him out through doors painted red.

I see Red.

And the blood of my brother.

Cain and Abel.

When there’s no God Cain lives longer than he should. Cain faces no exile. Instead, this is what he becomes. A monster.