Fear is the root of all evil. Fear from the stars above you that guide the way--- fear of the beaten path that starves those who drift from its tenure. The fear of going forward like a blind man without staff, without rod, and walking into the Valley of Death and the City of the Damned—places where tufts of grass don’t grow, and seeds pushing into the Earth never fester. Blind-folded, we walk as startled lambs in many directions. Isolated, and alone, we walk through wilderness, and sleep on barren ground until we reach majestic skies or thrones of dirt; but these are far off still, and the Road, the broken Road with forking tongues at its penultimate moment, grows ever steeper.
After I iced Punishing Joe Black, the press swarmed me like mosquitos and sucked the fighting blood out of me. Answering questions all day about which fist I used most, and which way I leaned—left or right—when I fight, it all became a hyperextension of the machine. Press was just the long robotic claw that drifted out from the machine and wrapped steel pinchers around my vocal cords so that while they were asking questions, the words I spoke came out as tired whimpers—or so much worse; sometimes the words would leave my lips as lies. They would escape, and I would clamp my mouth shut tight after they left, and try to herald them back into my soul, where the lies could lay dormant. Lies never did come back to me. Instead, they ran rampant, tearing down the world one sector at a time. Soon, I was no better than the press. Telling lies became what I was and the truth became a convoluted and forgotten mess that was an unmanageable tangent of anything I could ever remember it being. Truth became the lie itself, and the lie became me.
The press flashed bright bulbs, clicking and clacking, and taking pictures of me posing with Boxing Commissioners, and Coca-Cola bottles. They flashed big cameras, and I flashed big smiles, and the press and I, we became a team. We worked together for the modern image, and then the mob bosses—the Italian families and the Greek too—they came from the woodwork, and then instead of teaming with the machine, I became a slave.
I have fifty-six lashing scars that run west, parallel with the setting sun. Sleeping curses the wound, and the sensation of having my backside touched, it forces my feet to leave my shoes as I hop out of them and fall back down again. There is no freedom anymore. There is no freedom for anyone. The press—the athletes—the bosses; all of us together are trapped in the machine.
The machine is a home for those who don’t have one. Those who have never known a home, this is where they end up. Milwaukee Ave. never was my home. My home is boxing. It’s all I ever had.
When a tight lipped young reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel asked me how I became a fighter, I felt those cold unnerving pinchers wrapping around my throat like a noose so I couldn’t breathe—couldn’t speak.
The reporter asked me real nervous-like, “Davie what makes a fighter,”
So I told him.
I told him fighters are not born. I told him fighters are made.
Made from the pain, the tears, and the ashes.
And the reporter, he asked me, “What made you, Davie,”
And the answer I had I couldn’t tell. Strong pincers carried my voice far away. The answer I had, it was too hard to tell, and the machine had let me forget it, and move on.
But, how I was made, that is the answer. This is where it all started. I’ve been a fighter since the beginning.
Welcome to the machine.
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The Prizefighter
Mystery / ThrillerThe Fight never ends, even when the Fighter steps out of the ring.
