The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

  I must have watched this video of the pinheaded girl a hundred times. The pinheaded girl did not look like Ann Marie. Her hair was darker than Ann Marie’s for one thing, and her eyes were not wide set. But it was the smallness of the head, and perhaps the way they were built, the angles of the shoulders, something. But I could not stop thinking of that pinheaded girl as Ann Marie.

  “You are clinically depressed,” Conor told me.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  In the end, I finally called her. Obviously, it was all leading up to that. Calling her was the only thing that would break the spell and allow me to resume my life. And so I found her website, she wasn’t on Facebook for whatever reason, and I sent her an email, very short and sweet in case she didn’t read her own emails, and I got a note back, with her number, that appeared to be from her, and which said: OMG, CALL ME!!! Xoxox.

  So I called her right then, afraid I would lose my nerve if I waited, and she picked up on the first ring and said, “Well, that was instant gratification!”

  “I know!” I said. “I just got your message.”

  “I just sent it!”

  “Modernity!”

  “Or whatever,” she said. “You serving up some academic realness now?”

  I laughed. “I guess so.”

  “God, I’m so glad you called!” she said. Her voice sounded exactly the same. I felt seventeen again. It was truly surreal.

  “I don’t have long hair anymore,” I blurted out.

  She laughed. “How do you wear your hair now, Michael, my love?”

  “God, I feel so stupid.”

  “Don’t.”

  “So you’re a boxer?”

  “Yep.”

  “And do you like that?”

  “I love it. It’s like I was born to do it,” she said. “I mean, I’d much rather do MMA because that’s where all the money is, but I’m too big. The UFC’s highest weight class for women is featherweight, which is like one forty-five, and I just can’t cut enough weight to get down there and still, like, keep my eyes open.”

  “Oh yeah,” I was saying, but I had instinctively withdrawn. I realized I was hoping that she would say she hated it, that Ray was making her do it. I didn’t like the idea that she was born to do it. But on the other hand, boxing was a legitimate sport. What she was doing wasn’t wrong. It was like a televised thing, not something to be ashamed of. She was an athlete, which is what she had always been.

  We went on talking about the trivialities of our lives, catching up as best we could. In moments it would feel like everything was the way it used to be, and in other moments I would catch sight of a side of her I didn’t recognize. She swore a lot. About her most recent fight she said she “dominated that binch.”

  “Ugh, binch. Don’t say binch,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Wait, what were we talking about?” she asked.

  Then we started talking about meeting up. She was going to be in New York City the following month for a match, would I come down? I said I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

  “I’ll get you tickets to the match!” she said. “I’ll book you a hotel! I’m writing a note so I don’t forget!”

  “Oooh, yay!” I said, even though the idea of watching the match live horrified me. But I agreed to meet her at a diner she particularly liked off Union Square on the Wednesday before her match. I would take the campus-run bus down. She would book us in the same hotel. It was all arranged.

  * * *

  —

  I entertained fantasies of missing my bus accidentally/on purpose, or of standing Bunny up in some way, only because I was so nervous, but in the end I caught my bus, and I took a cab downtown, and I was a little bit late, but not too late, and when I walked into the diner, my heart dropped down to my stomach. Ray and Bunny were sitting in a booth in the back, and they both waved at me. She had said nothing about Ray joining us, and I was deeply unprepared. I had thought since I was an adult and no longer brought my parents everywhere, Bunny would be the same. I could not anticipate or control how strongly seeing his face made me react. Why was it easier for me to walk around North Shore and park in the same parking lot I had been almost beaten to death in than it was for me to look at Ray Lampert’s face?

  His nose was the dark raspberry of a true alcoholic, but his forehead lift had held up well. It was like my subconscious had simply stored all my animus from that time in his file, and now looking at him was allowing it to spill out and spread panic all over everything. But I walked over to their booth like a normal person, and did an impression of a normal person saying hello, sitting down, taking off my denim jacket, which was stupid to wear, it was too hot in the city in September.

  I sat next to Ray, mainly so I wouldn’t have to look at him, and he immediately put his arm around me and began slapping me with his giant, warm hands. “Well, look at you!” he crowed. “What a handsome queer you turned out to be!”

  “You’re not allowed to call me queer,” I said, trying to say it in a friendly way.

  “I thought that was the word now! It’s not fag, is it?”

  “No, ‘queer’ is a fine word, it’s just you aren’t allowed to call me that.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Hey, Michael,” Bunny said, as though I had just gotten there, and I thought she was just trying to end the mess I was in with her dad, and so I focused on her, and made eye contact, and I smiled, and for one long moment that’s all we did, smile at each other, and it was good. She looked incredible. She was in peak physical form. Her skin glowed with vitality. Maybe boxing was good for her. Maybe I was just being a ninny. After everything, I marveled, Bunny Lampert was so damn beautiful. Part of it was that the world had changed around her, and people now saw Serena Williams and understood that she was gorgeous. Part of it was that her face had settled into itself somehow. Part of it was just the luster of extreme physical health. But she was a knockout. She took my breath away.

  We ordered. Bunny requested seven egg whites and a side of broccoli and two chicken breasts, which caused the waitress to do some eyebrow lifting, which caused Ray to brag about Bunny’s boxing record to the waitress. “She may even be,” he said, “in fact she probably is, the best female boxer in the world.” The dynamics were all very familiar, and at first that felt oddly good, who we used to be and how we used to act coming back to me so vividly, like I was rediscovering something I had lost.

  “Have you heard from, oh god, what’s her name? Oh, I know her name, it’s right there, I just can’t get it,” Bunny said.

  “Kelsey?”

  “No. God, no, we were friends with her. She was black. It’s right there, I just can’t get it.”

  “Naomi?” I said, shocked that Bunny could forget her name.

  “Yes! Naomi!” Bunny said. “Whatever happened to her?” And so I told Bunny everything I knew about Naomi from Facebook, and since Bunny was not on Facebook all of this was news to her. I filled her in on what I knew of the others, and told her about my life, but when I spoke too long about my work and my dissertation, I could sense her attention wandering. There was a lot we couldn’t speak of with Ray there. Bunny didn’t mention her time in prison, her girlfriend, or what any of that was like.

  “Wait,” she said at one point, “is my fight today?”

  “No,” Ray said, “it’s tomorrow.”

  “I thought it was today.”

  “No, Bunny, it’s tomorrow, I promise.”

  She loved boxing and she talked about it rapturously. “I just wish my mom were alive to see me box,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I just think she’d be so proud of me.”

  “I bet she would,” I said, even though I thought Allison probably would have preferred it if Bunny went to
college or got married. But maybe that would have been wrong of Allison. Maybe it was wrong of me to have preferred that too.

  “Did you ever think of going to the Olympics for boxing?” I asked. “They have that, right?”

  She shrugged. “They do background checks, so I don’t think that would work.” I had meant to imply that she had achieved or still could achieve all her girlhood dreams, but instead I had stepped in it.

  “Wait, is my fight today?” Bunny asked.

  I looked at Ray, alarmed, but he answered calmly, “No, sweetie, it’s tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, like she was deciding to trust him. “Okay.”

  What the fuck was going on here? Ray wouldn’t look at me.

  “Did it get rescheduled or something?” I asked. “All this confusion over the schedule?”

  Ray didn’t answer, took a huge bite of his club sandwich.

  “Wait, what were you just saying?” Bunny asked. “Your train got rescheduled?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, clearly confused.

  When Bunny got up to pee, Ray leaned over to me. “Sorry about that,” he said. “She’s taken one too many in the head, if you know what I mean.”

  “What?” I asked, though I had heard him perfectly well.

  “She’s had a series of concussions,” he said, “so she gets confused a lot. Her memory’s bad.” She hadn’t been uninterested when I’d been telling her about my life, I realized, she’d been literally having a hard time following what I was saying.

  “And she’s still fighting?”

  “We’re doing this new therapy, that’s part of why we’re in New York, the doctor is the best, the best. They inject stem cells right into her brain, it’s incredible!”

  “Why is she still fighting?” I asked again.

  “Ach,” he said. “She’s not that bad. Really, with the brain stuff. It’s a very common problem, very common. She’s at the height of her career, she can’t stop now!”

  Her brain was dying, and her father was fighting her anyway, like she was a racehorse who could win the cup and then be turned into dog food. Or maybe she would have stem cells injected straight into her brain (Was that even a thing? How could you inject something straight into the brain? It didn’t make sense! Ray Lampert was insane!).

  “What does her doctor say?” I asked. “Does he know she’s fighting?”

  “He knows, he knows,” Ray said. “He advised against it, but they have to say that for liability reasons. What doctor is going to tell someone with brain trauma to go get in the ring?”

  “Well, exactly,” I said.

  “You think Mike Tyson never fought with a concussion?”

  “I think when Mike Tyson was fighting we didn’t understand how bad a series of concussions was, and the whole joke of Mike Tyson is that fighting messed up his brain so it’s just a really poor comparison.”

  “Touché,” Ray said, and drained his mug of coffee.

  When Bunny came back from the bathroom, I stood up and I hugged her and I said it was wonderful to see her. “Are you coming to my fight?” she asked. I told her of course I was, that I would see her later at the hotel but I had to run some errands. Ray wouldn’t look at me and when I said goodbye, he was silent.

  “I love you,” I told Bunny, my arms still around her. I only came up to her neck. She looked down at me, smiled with so much sleepy love and joy that it physically hurt me.

  “I love you too,” she said. “Always have, always will.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Take care. Be careful.”

  “I will,” she said.

  I walked out of the diner, and then I walked north for a few blocks, my heart pounding. I hailed a cab, and I had it take me to Port Authority, where I intended to take the next bus to Ithaca.

  I didn’t believe I could stop Ray Lampert. I could not avert the tragedy, but that didn’t mean I had to watch.

  * * *

  —

  But I didn’t get on the bus. I didn’t even buy a ticket. Instead I bought a pack of cigarettes, even though I had quit smoking my freshman year at Pomona. I stood outside Port Authority watching the frenzy of taxicabs and sweating in my stupid denim jacket in the September humidity, the hot smoke in my lungs like the city itself entering me.

  I kept thinking of this joke Bunny and I used to have, where she would pretend to be what we called the “Love Monster.” And she would talk in this strange Muppety voice, and she would say, “Love meeeee, love meeeee!” as she wrestled me and pinned me down so she could lie on top of me like a gigantic cat. “I do love you!” I would cry. “I do love you!” No matter what I said back to her, that’s all she said. “Looove meeeeeee!” And once she had gotten herself arranged comfortably on top of me, she would begin to purr and pretend to fall asleep.

  “You’re crushing me,” I would whisper.

  “Love me,” she would say.

  * * *

  —

  I spent a few hours wandering the city before finally returning to the hotel. I didn’t want to see them. But when I went to my room and passed by their door, I was somehow disappointed that it didn’t open. I paused for a moment outside it, listening, and heard the low murmur of the TV. Then I kept walking down the long hallway to my own room, slid the key card, collapsed on the bed in a sweaty heap, and listened to the air conditioner singing some terrible robot madrigal until I fell asleep in my clothes, my shoes still tied to my feet.

  * * *

  —

  Bunny’s fight the next day was on the undercard of a fight between heavyweights Tony Barsotti and Mikhail Volkov in Madison Square Garden. When I looked at the ticket Ray had given me and it said Barsotti vs. Volkov, I thought he gave me the wrong ticket. I hadn’t understood that women’s boxing was just the opening act for the real boxing, the men’s boxing. I had watched all of Bunny’s fights, so I thought I knew what to expect, but I had been unprepared for the size of the spectacle itself.

  My seat was, as I should have known it would be, right up front, in the second row next to Ray Lampert. “You made it!” he cried. “I’ve been backstage with her, how long have you been here?” he asked.

  “Only a minute,” I shouted over the noise of the crowd.

  “She’s ready, oh is she ready,” Ray said, rubbing his hands together.

  “Yeah?” I said. It seemed disgusting to me, the way that Ray was excited, like we were about to see a sex show instead of a boxing match. Maybe it was just that there was now something lewd about the cranberry-colored bulb of his nose. He could make eating a turkey sandwich seem indecent.

  “This is what she loves,” he said. “This is what makes it all worth it. She trains for months, and it kicks her ass, and it’s hard and it’s boring and it’s hard. But then you get this.” He gestured all around us.

  On the screens above the ring Bunny’s face was projected in pink pixels. A booming bass began, the hype music, and I could smell the fog machine before I saw the smoke rolling down the aisle, the ramp down into the arena. And then a figure pushed through the white wall of fog, and it was Bunny, but she was wearing a white satiny hooded robe, the hood pulled down low over her face. Her gloves were white, and not being able to see her hands or her face made her even more frightening and beautiful. As she walked to the ring, trailed by her coach and some assistants, she moved with a roiling, liquid power.

  The announcer over the loudspeaker: “In one corner we have Bunny Lampert, the Knockout Queen, at one hundred sixty-six pounds, with twelve wins, five by knockout, undefeated.” Bunny swept up into the ring and paced in a tight circle, then threw her hood back and the crowd roared. She ripped the robe off, and underneath she was wearing her pink satins. They were so tawdry. I wished Ray had picked a better color. She was spray-tanned a burnished tangerine that made her muscle definition look
insane. It was like a twelve-year-old boy addicted to comic books had drawn her.

  A new, different hype music began to play and fog rolled down the other ramp into the arena and then a beefy girl with frizzy brown hair in a ponytail pushed her way through. The moment I saw her, I knew she had no chance. She was jogging in a peppy way, but pep, I could already tell, would be inadequate to the situation.

  “She doesn’t have a chance,” I said to Ray.

  “I know!” he cried with utter glee.

  The announcer: “Weighing in at one hundred sixty-two pounds, we have Courtney O’Day, with an eight-and-oh record.”

  “Look at how short her arms are,” Ray said with scorn. I looked at the girl’s arms but I could not detect any shortness in them, until I looked over at Bunny and then I understood. The other girl did not have freakishly short arms, but Bunny had freakishly long ones. The bell rang and the round began, and I worried that Bunny would just pummel her, but what happened was in some ways even worse. Bunny was calm and, most upsetting to me, playful. She would use those long arms to just sort of reach over to the girl and pop her in the face, the way a cat might reach a paw into a fish tank. There was such lazy power in that insane reach of hers, and every time it would surprise the other girl, who just couldn’t seem to keep Bunny’s absurd wingspan in mind.

  When O’Day would go on the offensive, Bunny would hunch down behind her gloves and wait a few seconds, letting the girl get close enough to get in her combinations, a good deal closer than she probably usually had to get since she was having to punch up (Bunny was a solid six inches taller). And after a few of these ineffectual punches, Bunny would explode into a counterattack series, blows that landed hard, jerking the other girl’s torso like she was a mannequin. Weirdly, this kept happening over and over again, and every time O’Day would take the bait, get Bunny backed up to the ropes, set about babyishly beating up Bunny’s raised gloves, and then get surprised by devastating counterpunches. In between these little exchanges, Bunny just slowly followed the girl around the ring, reaching out those long arms every now and then to hit her in the face.