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.
The world does not pass the front door.
> Here, there is silence.
Here, this is where I escape.
Where I live, that apartment somewhere posing as my place, broken into more than a handful of times by desperate media seeking something of me, might as well not even exist. I might as well just consider the world out there as unreachable.
Because when I retreat to the calm of the house, it feels like I no longer exist. And you know what?
I like the fact that I can lose it all with a single step into the house.
It swallows us whole and it feels like we operate on an entirely different spectrum of time. Spencer was always aware of this fact. I’m not the only one that finds worth in the home. He offered me one of the spare rooms, “Fuck if I think you’ll get any solace anywhere else.”
The house holds onto a simpler time.
That’s what I believe, anyway. Spencer would never tell you but he never got over the passing of his wife. It happened quickly, the details omitted, but the fact that he drove away the grief by fixating on something all-encompassing as boxing, he began a new era of his life.
The previous era, I imagine, is felt in the confines of this home.
His daughter, Sarah, nine years of age, has the house and it’s hauntings to take care of her whenever Spencer leaves for work.
No nannies, no daycare—
Spencer can leave and Sarah never feels like she’s been left alone.
There’s something about the house…
And hear that?
SILENCE
It is what I seek. Especially now, given what we must do.
So I have to admit that I can’t believe that Spencer thinks it’s a good idea. A good idea…admitting to murder. A good idea… sensationalizing and lying about fiction made fact. A good idea… no-showing all of today’s prefight media events. A good idea…
How much is it worth?
Is it really worth the calm, the silence that helps settle those bothersome thoughts?
SILENCE
Sarah skips into the kitchen, sits with us at the table, listens to talk about theoretical murder made ‘true.’
Sarah giggles, “Are you going to die?”
“Maybe,” Spencer grins, “maybe.”
I tell him about how it might not catch on. I tell him, “Really how easy is it to pretend you murdered someone?”
Spencer’s reply: “Easier than you’d believe.”
“What about name, motive, all of that?”
YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT
“Why don’t you go back upstairs and play?”
Sarah frowns, “But James won’t let me back into my room.”
James. Just another one of those hauntings, I gather. The names change every time; as far as I’m concerned, I haven’t come across any of those so-called hauntings. Neither has Spencer. Product of a child’s imagination? Well, there is something here, something about the house, but I’m not about to try to explain it. I like it here. Isn’t that enough?
“Well tell James to play nice.”
Sarah skips around the kitchen table.
She punches me in the arm, “I punched you.”
Pained expression, “Yes you did.”
“Did it hurt?”
Actually it did. She got me right where I was already sore.
Turning to Spencer, “Your daughter knows how to throw a punch.”
“Course she does. Her father is Spencer Mullen.”
Sarah shadowboxes, “I fought James once. I won!”
“Good girl,” Spencer sips cold coffee from a mug.
We’ve been sitting here, scheming, not getting anywhere. Doubt on my end, assurance on his, we mostly drink coffee while scouring the internet on our respective laptops, attempting to find something to use.
Material, an image, I don’t know.
Ask Spencer and he tells me:
YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT
“Lie about what?”
Say anything. It can be true if they believe it to be true.
Sarah runs up the stairs, leaving Spencer and I to the unproductivity of this day. Waste of a day. Spencer is determined that this will help rebuild some of the cache I have lost.
“You know we were supposed to continue with prefight promotions,” I warn Spencer, given that he’s usually the one stressing out about this kind of stuff.
Spencer types something, looks up at me, screen glow causing him to appear pale, malnourished, “I have something in mind.”
When I ask, he shakes his head, “Later.”
Later becomes much later becomes a lot of wasting time searching websites, playing free browser videogames while Spencer types away at something he won’t show me until “later.”
LATER
After the painkillers start to wear off and I sit still, not moving at all, staring at my screensaver—a series of colorful psychedelic light shows—because to move an inch is to send radiating waves of pain up my arm, my leg, across my face.
I sit still because pain has me pinned.
“Okay,” Spencer says, sigh of relief.
WHAT IS IT?
Well, it’s a bunch of lies.
If it doesn’t make any sense, lie until it does.
Okay, I’ll do my best to summarize:
HE HAS A PAST
As in, I have a past history of violence.
As in, I have been known to partake in drunken misconduct.
As in, there have been a lot of bar fights.
As in, pretty much anyone would agree, given that I’m a fighter and that bar fights are so common someone will step up and attest to the lie, validating it via testimony.
As in, whatever we don’t have an answer to, we’ll lie about it later.
As in, I might have taken a knife to a man during one of these quarrels.
As in, I should have been training but instead I was busy blacking out during the killing.
As in, that’s my cover story:
My excuse for not remembering.
As in, I will plead innocent and in pleading innocent, people will think I’m even guiltier than they thought.
As in, there is a missing dead man, no longer in this world, dead by my drunken hands.
As in, it’s all a lie but the search for evidence will fuel promotions, sending the media my way.
As in, all news is good news, no matter if it’s terrible, bad, slanderous.
As in, you will know me in the next couple days as “that boxer guy who killed a man.”
As in, the world is fickle, but the media-outlets are far worse.
A TERRIBLE PAST
I have my reservations about all of it but it was my idea, remember?
Can’t back down now.
I move into the other room, leaving my laptop and that link to anxiety, on the kitchen table. Spencer follows me, carrying the laptop, reading aloud a dizzying list of deceit.
YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT
“If you haven’t a clue, it doesn’t matter ’cause you killed a man and everyone will believe it even if they don’t.”
Where is my heart?
Why is my heart not in this?
I can lie to Spencer, you know. I can lie, saying that I’m excited, that this will be a boon for us. However, what I think about as I sit down on the old couch, the couch that always smells of chocolate ever since Sarah accidentally spilled hot chocolate into the cushions. No amount of cleaning washes away the smell. Frankly, I look forward to it. It pulls me out of my head and back into the house, this room, right now.
Here I am.
I want to relax.
The pain numbs the soul.
I look like I’m listening.
I look and act like I am tuned into our “most deadly” little plan.
I look the part but really there’s only one thing I’m listening to:
SILENCE
The silence I seek is right here, cradling my beat-the-shit-up body, carrying me away, in search of one of those hauntings.
I seek an adventure, if only becaus
e by going on an adventure, I will be going somewhere else. Somewhere away from Willem. Meaning, I want to step outside myself. I am often way too self-absorbed and not because I care so much about this identity but because I feel obligated.
I am not the only Willem Floures.
There are forty-one of us. A whole league.
I am number two, which means I’m not number one. How can you be second best to yourself? Does it make any sense to you because it doesn’t to me. The internal monologue isn’t mine. I hear voices, all of their would-be voices, discussing dreams, ambitions, and what it means to be ‘me.’
Sometimes I just want to be a person.
Not this personality.
The pressure to keep fighting is the force of the fight itself; we fight to entertain and to be enlightened. I am not so sure I’ve achieved any sort of enlightenment. Once, back when I was minted as “undefeated” and destined to build and brand the league as one of the best, the premier boxing syndication worldwide, I thought I knew.
I thought I saw it, that spark in my eyes.
“It’s me,” that’s what I said.
In the mirror, I see the shadow take shape.
My silhouette is cookie-cutter, just another permutation of the identity that is ‘Willem Floures.’
We all manage to look, act, speak, and spell the same.
That seems remarkable until you realize—
Scratch that—until I realize what’s at work here.
Don’t ask.
If you do, guess what?
YOU CAN LIE ABOUT THAT
I will be forced into another lie.
Never was very comfortable, barely any good at, lying but when you have an agent like Spencer who does all the talking for you, I just have to be there. Just barely.
The Laughter of Strangers Page 6
