by Josh Samman
On the right leg, gauze wrapped all the way from my kneecap to my hip. The outside was soaked in blood, and there were two tubes inserted in the front of my thigh, attached to a vacuum system, sucking out dried blood in sporadic increments. I looked like a science project.
The doctor was also in the room and explained what had happened. I tore a muscle grappling, and exposing it to altitude forced a blood clot, causing a deep vein thrombosis. I’d had a history of blood clots in my family, and by the time the doctor had removed it, he said it was the size of an orange.
Underneath the blood-soaked gauze, they still had my leg open, with clamps I couldn’t see. The metal would remain there for a few days until the tubes could be removed, and my leg fastened shut. When it was all said and done, I’d received 200 stitches, three layers deep, and 40 staples on the outside. I’d been in the hospital for nearly a week when I got the call.
“Hey Josh, this is Jamie Campione with The Ultimate Fighter. We’d like you to come back out next week.” I was doped up and told her I’d be there as soon as I got out of the hospital.
“Hospital?” She said.
“Yeah, everything's gonna be fine though.” I told her what had happened, that Joe Silva had been right about my leg. She offered her condolences and told me I’d have to try out another season.
It was a powerful feeling of disappointment, thinking I’d been that close, and blew it in a freak accident. When it was all said and done, YouTube street fighting sensation Kimbo Slice signed onto the season, and my weight class wasn’t even showcased. The whole roller coaster of emotion, pain, and disfigurement was all for nothing. Nothing but a scar and a story.
I was bedridden for weeks. I couldn’t walk for months. I had to use crutches until the bottoms wore thin several times over, slipping and sliding with every stride. The whole thing was scary and happened at a young age. It was the worst injury that I’d seen anyone have, and it was hard to not wonder why me?
I called girls that I knew liked me enough to help. I hadn’t spoken to Izzi in months, and wouldn’t have asked her for assistance anyway. I didn’t want to be seen like that by her. I also didn’t want to rely solely on my mom. I phased through them until Karla came along. She made things easier for me, carrying piss bottles to and from the bed, like my mom when I’d broken my leg. Karla was helpful, and brought over food. She believed in me. It was nice to have people do that again.
She was strong enough to keep me from running over her, but I was always hesitant to commit. I met her at a point in my life where I saw girls in two categories: Izzi, and not Izzi. It was hard to break that pattern of thinking, and Karla got caught in it.
They gave me lots of medicine. I didn’t abuse any of it. I detested it, with pride. The worst part was the self-injecting blood thinners I had to use once a week. I never liked needles and dreaded the task every time.
The Burtofts continued to support me, in recovery, and mental coaching to keep a positive state of mind during the ordeal. We all knew I’d gotten close to succeeding, and that things like this were a risk in the sport. To roll with the punches was the motto for all of us, and they doubled down on me being able to do that. Joey came one day, with a proposition that would give me something to look forward to while healing up.
“We’d like you to become a partner with us. We want to open an MMA gym, with you as the coach. We want to promote fights, and for you to be a part of that too. We want to you to be the face of it all.” It was a fantastic compliment, and a slingshot to opportunities I’d never had possible. I agreed, and we began buildout right away.
75.
“It seems right now that all I've ever done in my life is making my way here to you.”
-The Bridges of Madison County
Piece by piece we’d let each other into our own little worlds of insecurities and peculiarities. When we began living together, it was the definitive joining of my life and hers, into ours.
Before she came, I surprised her by having the house painted, including our bedroom, the same garnet that she’d had in hers growing up. She brought an assortment of items from her house. Many were hers, many her roommate Stephanie had given her, a nice parting gift for the sudden move. She’d likely seen it coming.
Among her most prized possessions was a cairn from her Aunt Jo, a stack of stones to symbolize the things she’d been through in life. She brought the dried petals from the first dozen roses I’d bought her, still intact, in a small glass container.
The last thing she pulled out of her car was a framed photo she made, a quote from Alice in Wonderland. She was always doing that, taking screenshots of verses or lyrics that she liked, or pictures of places she wanted to visit on our next trip. She’d send me at least a dozen a week. Many are the same quotes used to begin these chapters.
“Have I gone mad?” The frame read, quoting the Mad Hatter as he asked Alice.
“I’m afraid so,” Alice replied. “You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.” It was perfect.
I gave her half my closet and several dresser drawers, and we spent the night settling her in. When woke, it was with the comfort of knowing that the rest of our days would be spent like this. No more back and forth with long weeks apart.
“Let’s go play,” she said. It was always play this and play that. Most mornings she would want to take Juice to the park, or go play soccer on the beach.
“I thought you wanted to go house shopping?” I asked her.
“Well, if you insist,” she said with an impish grin.
We’d discussed it prior to her coming down, although I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. We went to IKEA, the mecca of home furnishings. What we thought would be a quick trip for some knick knacks turned into three shopping carts full of stuff. We bought everything. Lamps, rugs, candles, throw pillows, wall canvases, picture frames, shower curtains, indoor plants, outdoor plants, dinnerware, tiki torches, I mean everything. And I loved every second of it. The trip was so exciting for the both of us, such a significant moment as we shopped for our shared home for the first time.
She was having a blast, driving around exploring her new home, finding obscure shops around town. Isabel was the first girl I’d ever trusted with my credit card, and I let her have at it. She found a little used CD shop that sold all sorts of neat stuff, and bought me a poster of Albert Einstein riding a bicycle. She was the first one to tell me that he and I shared a birthday with my mom. She found a pet store for us to buy Juice a new doggy bed, and special Burt’s Bees dog chapstick for his nose. She even went to the store and found the brand of deodorant that I wore as a teenager. I had no clue how she remembered.
She kept receipts of everything we purchased, in a little folder. “What’s this for?” I asked when I saw it.
“Your mom told you start keeping all your receipts for your taxes next year. You didn’t listen, so I’m doing it for you.” I didn’t remember my mom saying anything about receipts, but it was another good example of her learning what she could from the women in my life.
We crawled into bed after a long day and laid in our typical position we’d grown accustomed to sleeping in, both of us on our sides, her head resting on my left arm. Her backside pressed firmly against my belly and lap, sandwiching my leg between hers as she would a pillow. My right arm laid underneath hers, draped around her torso. She held onto it tightly. My head rested right behind hers, positioned for neck kisses, or to peek over her shoulder if I wanted to see her face. Every night she nestled and wiggled her way into my arms like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, forcing me to spoon.
She had the remote and was flipping through channels on the television. She stopped on the Science Channel to appease me. The program on was on the science of love, which made her want to keep it there. It was explaining what happens to the brain when we experience what humans know as being in love. Heart rate fluctuates, pupils dilate, and pleasure endorphins are released, that let us know we’re in th
e presence of someone special.
These were all things I’d read about before, but Isabel was fascinated by it. She had it all explained, finally, the things that she felt when we were together, she said.
Isabel had just discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald, and had been texting me quotes from him that she liked. The program on TV reminded her of one she’d saved, but not sent. She scrolled through her phone’s pictures. She didn’t say anything, just motioned for me to read as she handed me her phone. She had a sly grin, pleased with herself that she had something relevant to what we were watching.
The quote read, “Her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.”
“That’s how I feel, like it says here,” she said. “Like you move me chemically, in a way no one else can.”
My heart melted through the bed. They were the sweetest words ever spoken. In one sentence and gesture, she’d managed to encapsulate exactly how I’d always felt about her. Something I’d always struggled to express, she was now explaining to me. Isabel was the only one that could tickle my brain’s amygdala like she did, but I didn’t know how to tell her that without cliches. We were always looking for new ways to say “I love you,” and she’d just knocked it out of the park. Maybe the acknowledgement that love was a chemical reaction rather than an act of God got her wheels turning.
“Why don’t we ever talk about God anymore?” she said. “We used to talk about it all the time. Now you never bring it up.” Gone were the days of our ideological debates, for plenty of reasons. While the height of my religious rebellion was when I last knew her, I no longer cared. I’d given up my atheistic crusade, learned to let people just believe what they want to believe if it wasn’t hurting anyone. Most importantly, I wanted Isabel to use whatever tools she had at her disposal to help get through the things she’d gone through, and was still going through. Her faith was one of those things.
I was in love with her wholly, not partially, and that meant loving everything about her, including her beliefs and all else, good and bad, as she did me. Her convictions were something that defined her, and I didn’t want her to change a thing. We had different feelings about our spirituality but respected each other’s notions. She finally coerced me back into a conversation about it, picking up where Kevin Casey and Jimmy Quinlan left off in the kitchen of The Ultimate Fighter house, almost a year prior.
“I just still don’t understand how you can think we’re all just a random happening, that there isn’t a reason we’re here,” she said.
“Just because I think we’re here by coincidence doesn’t mean I think there’s no reason,” I told her. “I’m here to feel all those chemicals we just talked about.” They were the ones that told our ancestors who to start tribes with, the ones that pointed the way to who was worth living and dying for. “I think the reason we’re here is to do what we’re doing, right here and now. People look their whole lives for something like we have.” Those were my convictions, strengthened by her. She made me understand life, and I didn’t think our paths were pre-determined. I believed we chose our own purpose, our own destiny, and Isabel was my fate.
“Well, I think God brought me to you. You’re my silver lining. I had to go through all those things that I did, to get to where I am now, with you. And it helps me when I think like that.”
76.
Later Summer, 2009
The Burtofts and I had set up shop in Tallahassee, to Orkin’s chagrin. He and I gloved up one last time and parted ways with a final sparring session at his gym. It was our attempt to end things amicably.
The new school was called Tallahassee Combat Sports. We’d gone through a few warehouses before we found the right complex. When we finally did, it was complete; two rings, mats, cages, and amenities and features that no gym within 100 miles could boast.
The Burtofts invested serious money into it, and their experience with the fitness industry helped in a lot of ways. Joey became more involved in the coaching side with me. He’d watched Rodolfo in detail. He knew he wasn’t sustainable, that if we wanted to build something, we had to rely on ourselves to do it.
The nature of MMA was that it was so new, everyone was forced to learn primarily from people who were still learning themselves. I was the most experienced fighter that anyone in Tallahassee had access to, the only one in town that had made a career of it. We wanted to build a team of fighters with the same dreams. Folks came from all over, Mitchell and Matt included. Matt had sworn one drunken night that he was going to become an MMA fighter. Lots of drunk people said that, and I wrote him off. He was there the next day and never left.
We didn’t try to poach from Orkin’s gym. Many came without asking. I had men that were older than me, calling me sir, asking for advice on fighting and otherwise. It was all new to me, being in a position of leadership.
I mimicked Orkin in coaching style, striving for structure and method, with a hint of big brother bullying. I took things that I’d learned from Roberto, and Rodolfo, and every other training partner along the way, and tried to implement curriculum. Most importantly, I took my own experience in constructing training camps for fight preparation, which I felt was my biggest asset.
I taught MMA, and we hired other folks to teach specific classes. They were mostly kids my age that we’d grabbed from the university. Our wrestling coach had placed nationally in high school. Our boxing coach had once been on the Junior Olympic team. Our grappling instructor did a few tournaments here and there. We were all absorbing what we could from one another.
We were taking our amateurs to Georgia for all the same events that I came up in, while the wheels were turning in Tallahassee to put together a show of our own. Orkin had always told me that live MMA would never work there, that folks weren’t ready for it. He became another person I had something to prove to.
While I’d left most my old friends behind in the wake of aiming to be a better person, I still had plenty links to my past. I still went by Animal Aid to see Sue and ask about Izzi. She’s, well, you know. I didn’t know, but I’d heard. I told Sue I’d be fighting in Tallahassee soon, and she promised to try to make it.
The Burtofts and I partnered with an old boxing promoter, JC, and a local club owner, Scott Carswell. JC was European and insisted on calling the new promotion Ubersmash. We didn’t care what it was called, as long as we were able to use his promoter’s license.
The mission was to showcase our hard work and to test our up and comers. I’d reached main event status of the regional promotions. It wasn’t quite the UFC, but it gave others something to strive for and showed them how long this thing really took to get to the top. I had responsibility, and I was proud of it.
77.
“Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic.”
-Frida Kahlo.
We both had several sides, but more than any, I was in love with Isabel the Housekeeper. Maybe it was from her years of practice, maybe she just held an eagerness to please, but she was a domestic goddess. Isabel had an innate ability to turn a house into a home better than any girl or woman I’d ever met. She was what every housewife in the world strived to be. I thought I knew how good she was. Until we lived together I had no idea.
She had tricks for everything, and kept the house immaculate. She could turn a dirty pile of clothes into a neatly folded stack in no time, could clear out a sink of dishes into ready-to-eat-off plates and silverware in minutes. She could put a duvet on a comforter, and make the bed with fitted sheets in a matter of seconds. She could tell me where anything in the house was without having to think about it.
She had my suits dry cleaned and pressed before I even knew I needed them done. She pleated pants with precision and knotted ties to the perfect length. She hemmed clothes and sewed
on buttons. She could do any and every thing imaginable around the house. She joked that her brothers had trained her well, that Wyatt told her one day she’d be the best wife ever.
On top of that, she was just so much fun to live with. She was always doing silly things, hiding behind doors trying to scare people, or convincing us to jump off the roof into the pool with her. If anyone at the house was ever playing video games, she’d always want to join. She jumped up and down as she played. Half the time I wasn’t sure she was even looking at the right screen.
She always had music on. It flowed through her, she oozed with it. There was hardly a time when she wasn't dancing or singing, never one for idle ears. She didn't like any of her senses idle for that matter and was an expert of avoiding such. Always candles burning and music blasting and coffee brewing and touching and kissing, new hot sauces and recipes being tried. She was the perfect counterpart for me, companionship and compatibility embodied. She truly was the epitome of sensational, a spitting image of life being lived to the fullest.
There was something beautifully fulfilling in not just having someone to take care of me, but someone to take care of as well, like we’d talked about on the canoe ride. I may have been supporting her financially, giving her a place to live, but it was largely her that was taking care of me. I wasn’t an easy person to be with, I’d learned from numerous failed relationships with friends and lovers. She managed it with ease.
It wasn’t just me she took care of, it was all of us. She’d lived with men her whole life, and it showed. Several times I’d have to tell her to stop doing Brian and Matt’s laundry, to stop cleaning their bathroom. She would bathe and comb Juice, clip his toenails until he was perfectly groomed. He followed her around the house wherever she went. She was motherly beyond her years, and we were all smitten by it.
