by Mark Miller
Over the summer of 2009 I was visiting gyms in the surrounding area, but I really wasn’t training much. I was floating at this point. Burning through what money I had left. I had no plans, no idea what I was doing. I still had it in my mind that I wanted to come back, but I really didn’t know how to begin doing it. In August of 2009, I was thrown a life preserver.
It was the evening of August 2, and I was supposed to be staying at my friend Tim’s house. Tim lived in North Hollywood, and Tim had a car. The following morning I was catching a plane very early to Philadelphia. I was attending an MMA event there. Shortly afterward I would be either renting a car or catching a short flight to Pittsburgh, where I’d be spending some time with my kids, whom I hadn’t seen in a while. I was supposed to stay at Tim’s house, and he would drive me to the airport in the morning. He had to pick me up from my apartment first. And he was late. I was exhausted. I wanted to get to his house and fall asleep on his couch for an hour or so. I didn’t sleep much, so when I knew sleep was coming I got protective over it. I was pissed off that he was late. Suddenly, he was calling me. I answered.
“Dude, I’m coming to get you and we’re going to my house, but we are going out tonight first.”
This was not what I wanted to hear. I was trying to avoid going out. I was trying to stay away from alcohol and partying. “Where the fuck are we going? Dude, I don’t want to go out. And I’m starving, I need to eat.” I would go days without eating regular meals. My weight had plummeted. I was maybe one hundred eighty pounds at best at this point.
“Dude, seriously, I’ll bring you food. I’ve been out at dinner with this chicky and she wants to go to this bar, so we are going.”
The implication being made was that Tim had an opportunity to score and therefore wanted to meet up with this girl. Now, two things are important here. One—Tim was not a lady-killer. He was overweight, socially awkward, and kind of obnoxious. I couldn’t stand him when he would drink, as his obnoxious tendencies would be enhanced. It was horribly embarrassing. Two—I had played wingman to Tim twice already, and both times it resulted in my getting dates, without my trying, and his getting shafted, and then getting really really whiny with me. I think that the juxtaposition of the two of us when placed before a female truly resulted in an unfair advantage for me. In my current state I was brooding, heavily tattooed, still in decent shape, quiet, and undemanding of attention. I also wasn’t impressed easily, which I found that girls in Los Angeles considered very appealing. Tim came off as desperate, loud, and ridiculous. It never worked out for him when I played wingman, so I really don’t know why he kept asking me to do it, and tonight I was really angry, so that meant tonight, she was really going to love me.
“Fuck. Just bring me some food, man. Please.” And I hung up.
Tim showed up at my door without food and dragged me out. I made him stop on the way. He told me, “We’ll be picking chicky up and then walking to the bar from her place.” The way he kept calling her “chicky” was making my skin crawl.
We pulled onto a crowded Hollywood residential street and started hunting for parking. Once parked, we walked up the street to a small building, and Tim knocked on the door. The door opened, and all I heard was “Yeah, come in, I’m just pre-gaming!”
The inside of the apartment looked like Marie Antoinette and some bondage-obsessed mad scientist had converged and decorated. Bookshelves flanked the doorway and were overflowing with books of all sorts, on everything from ancient soapmaking to Irish history. Above a massive blue velvet couch was an almost Giger-esque painting of a skull screaming. Underneath a window was an old gynecological table with a massive drape over it, and next to two large candlesticks was a muffin tin filled with what looked like tiny seedlings. On one wall was a large framed photograph of a girl’s face wrapped in a tight rubber mask, the only parts of it visible a pair of massive blue-green eyes and large red lips parted as another girl bit onto her tongue. Tim was now staring at this photograph a little too hard, as I heard “Oh, that’s me in the hood.”
Standing behind a minibar area in the tiny kitchen was a tall woman with very strong features. The kind of features that were so strong that had they been arranged in any other way, they wouldn’t have been attractive, but as they were, they made her look like she was brought here from another time. She looked foreign at the least. Eastern European or something like that. Her skin was icy pale. Her nose was prominent and very straight. Her cheekbones were high and sharp. Her mouth was small but full lipped and heart shaped, dressed in blood-red lipstick. Her eyes were feline, crowned with dangerously arched brows and encircled in some mess of turquoise and black, making the blue of her irises burn. She was wearing a short cut-off white leather jacket with short sleeves, and her left arm was clad in a whirl of color, various flower tattoos crawling up it. She reached up with her right hand to brush a lock of long copper-fire hair behind an ear and then stretched out her left, holding a short, fat tumbler full of golden liquid and ice cubes. “Here, Jameson and ginger ale.”
Tim was a liar. There was no way this girl had gone on a date with him, not one that she knew about anyway. And there was no way she was assuming that this was a date now. I couldn’t even hide my disdain at his attempt to try to pass this woman off as a willing participant in his imaginary dating life. I turned and cast him a look of utter disbelief. He shrugged and acted as though he had no idea what I was on about.
“You guys want these?” She gestured to the three drinks sitting on the counter.
“No. I’m not drinking,” I said as I stepped forward. “And I’m Mark, by the way.”
“Oh, cool. I’m Shelby. I’ll just drink them myself then.” And she tossed all three drinks back speedily. “Let me just grab my keys and we’ll go.” She came from behind the bar to reveal shredded blue jeans and spiky black boots. I figured that flat-footed, this girl must have been huge, because in these shoes, she was eye-level with me.
I saw a tangle of leather and snakeskin crumpled on the edge of the couch “This your purse?” I asked, lifting it up by a strap.
“Oh yeah, thanks! What do your knuckles say?” she asked. I turned my hands over and made two fists. “ ‘Lead Pipe.’ Oh. So you’re a badass. Well, at least you let everyone know.” She said this without a hint of a smirk. She took the purse from me and walked past me; her perfume smelled like leather, tobacco, and frosting. I was in fucking trouble.
Shelby had this weird, almost aggressive presence. Everyone who reads this and knows her will know exactly what I’m talking about. She pulled the oxygen out of a room. She didn’t have to say anything or do anything. She was commanding, almost masculine. One of her friends once said to me, “She is a force of nature,” and there couldn’t be a better description of her. She had hurricane omnipotence within her. And right now, at this first meeting, she was making me feel very uncomfortable, as I was not prepared to actually meet a girl I would find interesting for another few years.
She was walking ahead of us at a clip that was forcing both Tim and me to speed up. She was walking like she wasn’t with anyone else. It was bizarre. Like she had no idea that we were supposed to be going with her. At a stoplight crossing, she stopped and turned her head. Seeing us struggling to keep up, she rolled her eyes and motioned with her hand. “Come on, you are going to miss the light.” As I got closer I saw her hand, a silver band on her ring finger.
“Are you married?” I asked.
She sighed heavily, indicating that there wasn’t an easy answer. “Yeah. I am. I guess. I never see him anymore. He just . . . Yeah, he isn’t around much.” She dropped her head suddenly and then stomped her foot. “Ugh, this fucking light . . .”
I looked at Tim again, this time almost parentally. He cut me off. “Oh, don’t even . . .” And he was right. Who was I to judge?
We got to the bar and a security guard who was clearly enamored with her brought us inside and showed us to a table. Shelby started a tab and instantly ordered shots. This girl was r
unning from something and running hard and fast. I knew this pattern.
“I’m not drinking,” I told her again.
She narrowed her eyes. “That’s fine. I’m ordering you a shot anyway.”
“I’ll drink it!” Tim shouted. Shelby got up and moved to the opposite side of me to ignore him. Her body was turned to face me directly as I was staring straight ahead. Now she was going to start grilling me.
“So what’s your deal, man? What’s with this ‘brooding sad guy’ shit?”
I burst out laughing. “Is it that obvious?”
“Well yeah. And why aren’t you drinking? I want you to drink with me.” She held up a dripping shot glass full of whiskey. I grabbed it.
“You want me to drink with you? Okay, fine.” I downed the shot, grabbed ahold of her shot, downed that, and then grabbed a beer. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
“Hey, whatever. So Tim tells me you’re flying out of town tomorrow. What for?” She grabbed the beer out of my hand, took a long pull, then wiped the rim with her hand, leaving a red smear across her palm.
“I have unfinished business. And I’m going to watch some fights in Philadelphia. What about you? Tim told me that you’re also heading out of town in a week or something like that?”
She straightened her shoulders and ordered more drinks. “Yeah, I’m flying to Cincinnati for a month.”
“Jesus Christ, what for?”
“I’m piggybacking on my friend Josh’s training camp. He’s a professional fighter getting ready for a fight. I used to train in boxing, and I’ve been wanting to get back into it. . . . Just been needing a change.” She got a distant look in her eye and reached for the beer again.
“So you’re going to be training out there. You ever trained at that level before?”
She laughed. “No, I’ve never done most of this shit before. But I need to get away. I need to go do something for myself.”
“Are you worried about how hard this is going to be? I mean, you’re going to get your ass kicked on a daily basis, honey, you ready for that?”
She passed the beer back to me. “Yeah, well, it’s better than sitting in this fucking apartment waiting for attention and drinking myself stupid every night.”
This girl was lonely as hell. She had nothing about her that said married. She didn’t carry herself with her the air of someone who was married. She seemed preoccupied and sad. Over further conversation I found out that her husband worked nearly sixty miles away at a place that had opportunities available within five minutes of their home, but he refused to switch locations. He rose at five A.M., drove to work, and came home at eight P.M. exhausted, expecting food and sex. She had no one to talk to. She was a good conversationalist and was just wasting away in that apartment waiting for someone to engage her brain. So, she had decided to pursue what she loved, and what she loved just happened to be combat sports. I felt my heart swell. I felt proud of my profession for the first time in a long time. After trying to be a compatible half, she was diving headfirst into her own passion. She was just leaving. I had originally jumped into fighting to get away from something else, so I understood. She had this animalistic desperation about her, but if she was afraid of her new ventures, it didn’t show.
Later that night a very drunk Tim, Shelby, and I ended up being driven to her doorstep by a mutual friend. As the car pulled up to her door she drunkenly fumbled with her keys and said, “Well, all right, g’night, guys.”
I popped up and said loudly, “Well, a man should always walk a lady to her doorstep,” and I hopped out after her. I could feel Tim’s eyes boring holes into my back.
We walked up to her door, and she turned and said, “Hey, thanks for being awesome, I hope you find whatever you’re looking for, you know.”
“Hey, give me your phone,” I said. She handed it to me half-bemusedly. “I’m putting in my phone number, so that you don’t do it and forget whose number it is tomorrow when you aren’t drunk. We should hang out again, but by ourselves, okay?” I’d already decided that I had every intention of meeting up with her in Cincinnati, even if it meant I had to hitchhike the entire way to get there.
She smiled at me. “Yeah, sure,” she said, and closed the door in my face.
Who the fuck is this girl? And what brought her to me now?
chapter fifteen
The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families.
—JAY MCINERNEY
It didn’t take Shelby more than a few hours before she started texting me after I gave her my number. After that, we were in contact every day, nearly every hour. We talked about authors we liked, what inspired her to pursue combat sports, films, art, everything. Everything except for our sad lives and the stories we were running away from. By the time she landed in Cincinnati we were already good friends. Several days later I was standing inside of a gym called the Sweatt Shop watching a thick-shouldered, bald-headed beast of a man named Shane put Josh, Shelby’s friend, through some of the meanest and most creative strength and conditioning work I had ever seen.
“This guy is a fucking genius. He is really who inspired me to want to be a trainer,” Shelby whispered. She was referring to Shane. Moving deftly from modified powerlifting moves to explosive plyometrics, Shane was blurring the line between torture and training. He walked alongside Josh carrying a stopwatch, glancing at it every few seconds and speaking very calmly. There was no shouting, no anxiety-inducing urgency in his voice, just supportive persistence and a constant reminder of the time. Within twenty minutes Josh, a stocky and good-natured West Virginia lightweight fighter, had thrown up twice and crawled through his own vomit once. Shelby was beaming.
“You should see his wife. Strongest woman in the world, and kills at sprints. This guy builds explosive endurance muscle tissue better than anyone I have ever seen. I want to do what he does more than anything. I want to build better athletes.” She was completely lit up. Josh was currently strapped to a sled, vomit slicked on his forearms; Shane was sloshing a hose at him as he passed by. Shane’s wife Laura stood to the side holding a small black Staffordshire terrier and smiling a bright smile. She looked like she could bench-press a Ferris wheel.
Shelby had told me through multiple conversations what had led her to this point. She had grown up in a house with parents who didn’t like violence and eschewed combat sports. She used to sneak into various friends’ houses to watch boxing fights. As she got older she sought them out more frequently. In June of 2003 she saw the third Arturo Gatti–Micky Ward fight. She had been an Arturo Gatti fan going into the trilogy, and this third fight cemented Arturo as not only her favorite boxer but her inspiration. She recounted the fight on the phone to me once with almost shocking accuracy.
“In the fourth round Arturo went to throw this body shot and caught his hand on Micky’s hip, breaking it. He telegraphed it right away, shaking it and looking at it. The whole rest of the fourth Arturo was stunned. Then he went to his corner to Buddy McGirt, one of the best trainers in the world, and as he sat down he looks at Buddy and he says, ‘My hand, my hand, I broke it’ . . . and Buddy did this thing where he just said, ‘What do you want me to do about it, Arturo?’ and Arturo Gatti stopped, thought about it, and said, ‘I just have to deal with it.’ Fifth round, he favored his right hand. Sixth round he got rocked by Ward. . . . Suddenly, he turned on the jets. Arturo won that fight on pure heart. Changed my life. I started pursuing boxing right after that.”
She had met Josh through a mutual friend. Josh was a character. A five-feet-five-inch MMA fighter built like a fireplug, with a country West Virginia accent so thick he sounded like he was faking it. Josh had incredible tenacity in training and is to this day one of the most amiable people I have ever met. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who has a bad thing to say about Josh. In an act of desperation to find a new path and to get her away from Hollywood, Shelby had asked to come to Cincinnati and train with him in exchange for fixing him a few mea
ls and just generally being company throughout his camp. She hadn’t played around either. She went and bought a gi, shin guards, a new pair of gloves, and a customized mouth guard, and had packed a small suitcase full of supplements and training clothes and flown out to sleep on a sandy air mattress and train sometimes six hours a day. She had already learned how to burn ringworm off using hydrogen peroxide and Clorox; she had already had her own training session with Shane during which she had thrown up and wept before calling me to tell me how awesome it was. She had busted her nose in a sparring session. She had been kicked in the crotch full force by an Olympic Tae Kwon Do competitor. She had drained a cauliflower ear (Josh’s were magnificent) and she had accidentally kicked Josh’s kickboxing instructor square in the face during a head-kick drill when he had told her that he doubted she could lift her leg that high. She hadn’t worn makeup in nearly three weeks when I got there. For a woman who came from a world of false eyelashes and red lipstick every day, this was a huge change, and she was absolutely loving it. Her passion for it was inspiring. I had almost forgotten what it was like to love the sport so much.
“Oh my God, I need to shower and then go get somethin’ ta eat!” Josh was a sweaty mess but was still grinning. He offered his hand and then laughed as I grimaced at it. “It’s all good, man. I’m fixing to go wash off, you can get me back then.”
Over a carefully balanced meal of chicken, brown rice, and steamed broccoli, Shelby started her pitch. “You see, Josh, Mark was a K-1 fighter, and I think he could really add a lot to your camp. . . .”
She was selling me as a coach to this guy.
Normally this would be unheard of. At this point Josh was about three weeks out. Established camps start oftentimes six to eight weeks out. Josh already had a kickboxing coach, but he suddenly piped up with, “Man, I would love to have you help me with my trainin’. And if you wouldn’t mind, I’d also love to have you corner me on the night of my fight. My kickboxing coach can’t be there, and I would really be honored to have you in my corner.”
