Pain Don't Hurt

by Mark Miller

  I had to go back to Pennsylvania. My son Ben was having a small operation to have a birthmark removed, and I needed to be there for it. But I agreed to come back afterward, to help Josh and to be in his corner. It had been years since I’d been in or near an actual fight. I felt old but excited.

  Upon my return I started working with Josh. Every time, Shelby would stand in the corner quietly and watch or would work a bag. Her form was far from perfect, but she was driven. Finally one day she approached me and asked if I would mind holding pads for her, just once. After that I would train both her and Josh at different points during the day. They were both infinitely coachable. Open to listening, committed to perfection, and polite. Even with our friendship, as it were, to this day when we train together Shelby and Josh both call me either “sir” or “coach.”

  Josh walked at a heavy weight. Between fights he had a tendency to blow up, that West Virginia diet not suited to his athletic lifestyle. He was around 190 pounds. By the time I met him his initial weight cut was well under way and he had shaved down to about 170. When the time came for him to weigh in the day before his fight, I opted to enter the sauna with him, Shane, his friend Eamon, and a few other friends of his. Shelby would have gone in with us had the health club we cut weight at allowed her to. She was as much a part of the team as I was, and sitting in a steam room with a bunch of naked guys smeared with Albolene wasn’t a big deal if it meant being a support. Josh sweated out his remaining weight, and then we made our way to the venue in Eamon’s car. He weighed in at 155 on the nose. We headed out to get him fed and into bed. Next day was fight day.

  Shelby had never seen an MMA fight up close. She had been privy to unlicensed boxing fights earlier in her life and had even participated, but this, this was going to be different. And it’s always worse when your friend is fighting instead of you, because you have distance and time to worry. Josh was the main event. He entered the cage with myself; his jujitsu coach, Jim; and Shane in his corner. Shelby sat beside the cage chewing her cuticles.

  Round one, Josh landed some heavy hands, but his opponent wanted to play the blanket game, taking Josh down and pinning him while inflicting minimal damage. Jim kept shouting, “Josh, you need to get up,” while Josh desperately searched for ways to grab ahold of a limb. Josh was winded; this weight cut had hurt him. In between rounds I encouraged him to use his hands, stay away from kicks, and cut angles. All three rounds looked virtually the same. Josh would land unholy-sounding blows on the guy, then he would be taken down and smothered. At the end, Josh lost, three rounds to none.

  Shelby came running into the back room, pushing past security to where we were.

  “Josh is fine, Shelby, he’s fine. He’s over there eating a candy bar.” I pointed to Josh, who sat smiling his bright smile and shoveling a Hershey bar into his face with ferocity. He had a black eye but was otherwise totally fine.

  “I’ve already been checked out, I’m fine. He’s not so fine, though.” Josh pointed with one sticky finger at his opponent, who sat in a chair surrounded by commissioners and paramedics, gagging into a bucket and crying. He was taken to the hospital, and it was determined that he had a multitude of injures—a bruised larynx, a broken nose, bruised ribs, and a few other things. This is why I preferred kickboxing to MMA. In kickboxing, that guy wouldn’t have been able to win a fight on takedown points. He would have had to stand and face Josh, and he would have lost. It seemed ridiculous that Josh was sitting here happily eating candy, and his opponent was leaving in an ambulance, yet his opponent was deemed the undisputed winner.

  “I needed that win, damn it. I needed it. Let’s go to the bar, I have credit for my fight pay with the casino, we are drinking tonight.” Josh was doing what so many fighters do. You get a win, you party for a few days, then you hit the gym and get back to it. You lose . . . and you party to forget. It makes no sense, but I have seen it done a thousand times. Josh wanted to go drinking, and I knew what this sort of drinking was going to look like. I reluctantly followed him to the bar. This was going to be bad.

  Shelby had changed since L.A. She wasn’t the same drinker. She had a shot of whiskey and then just proceeded to nurse a beer for the rest of the night. It didn’t interest her anymore, almost seemed to bore her. Something had changed. She didn’t seem so sad, so lost. Instead, she and Eamon made it their jobs to start removing half glasses from Josh when he wasn’t looking and dump them out, for Josh and I were on a mission: Get as drunk as possible. I don’t know what I drank; I know at some point I had tequila, Jägermeister, vodka, whiskey, some sort of cherry-based alcohol, all kinds of stuff. Shelby and Eamon kept trying to take glasses from us to limit our intake, but it wasn’t working; we’d just order more. Finally, the money started to run out. We had drunk almost all of Josh’s fight pay, and while Josh had a room at the casino, we had to drive back to his house to sleep. As we climbed into Eamon’s car, Shelby made sure to stick me in the front, saying, “This is a Mustang; when you puke you need to be able to do it out a window.”

  Puke? I never puke. Not ever.

  Twenty minutes into the drive, I puked.

  I puked straight into my hands, and then, after Eamon, the ever-tolerant driver, rolled down the window, I tossed it out, only to have it splatter on the back side of the car. Eamon pulled into a gas station to hose off part of his car so the paint wouldn’t get eaten off, and to buy me a shirt since I had vomit down the front of mine. I was humiliated. This was not me being cool. This was me clearly being out of control, a feeling I did not like. I could hear my father’s angry voice inside me saying, “Toughen up.” Eamon came out of the gas station and handed me some four-dollar shirt he had just bought for me to change into. In my idiotic drunken state I simply used the shirt as a rag and wiped the vomit on my shirt off with it. “Or you can do it that way . . . that’s one way to do it,” Eamon said sort of bemusedly.

  Once we got to the house, Shelby forced me to check my sugars and take insulin. Then she forced me to eat, something I did not want to do. After that, she started a shower and led me down the stairs to Josh’s basement, where the washer and dryer were. She stood there tapping her foot while I stripped down to my boxers and handed her my puke-covered clothing, which she dumped into a washing machine. I leaned on the washer, sulking.

  “Mark, you’ll feel better in the morning. Don’t worry.” She was trying to console me, but she was irritated. I could hear disappointment in her voice. She had looked up to me until now.

  “Yeah, I’m just mad though,” I slurred. I couldn’t make a lot of sense out of my feelings, but I knew I was upset. What I would come to realize was, I hadn’t felt proud of myself in a long time. The way she and Josh had seen me made me feel proud again. Made me feel like a fighter again. Made me feel like a person again. And here I was, in neon-blue boxer-briefs, standing barefoot in a basement, drunk off my ass, while the one person alive who saw me as her hero washed my pukey clothes. What a fucking winner. The self-loathing was so oppressive I wanted to crawl into the washing machine and just hide.

  “Mark, it’s fine.” It really wasn’t fine. At all. “Just go upstairs and shower and you’ll be okay.”

  As if I hadn’t already made a lovely impression, I decided halfway up the stairs that it made no sense to wash some of my clothes and not all. So I stopped, pulled my boxer-briefs off, and hurled them at the washer, instead landing them on Shelby’s shoulder, and in trying to dismiss the embarrassment, shouted, “I don’t give a fuck, so what,” as I clomped up the stairs to greet Eamon with my stark nakedness.

  “Really? This is like the fifth one of my friends I’ve seen naked today! Can’t one of them be female? God!” Eamon shouted, causing Shelby to burst out laughing. He was referring to the sauna, where he had accompanied the rest of us earlier.

  After my shower I came out in a clean pair of underwear and some shorts Shelby had left in the bathroom for me. I wandered out to the couch that was opposite her air mattress and flopped down. She was watching
old cartoons and handed me a glass of water. “You need this, believe me.” I finished the entire glass and then went to refill it. By the time I came back she was asleep.

  The next morning we all got up and went for breakfast. Josh met us, his black eye much more prominent now. As we sat down and ordered coffee, Shelby turned to me, her blue eyes incredibly bloodshot. “You okay, kid?” I laughed.

  “I didn’t sleep hardly at all, kept waking up to check on you,” she mumbled.

  “Why? I was fine. Once I threw up I was all right.”

  “Mark, you’re a type one diabetic, your sugars are delicate, you could have experienced a low in the middle of the night. I don’t need that to happen.” She had been doing her reading. In fact, that’s all she did. Shelby was already in the middle of pursuing a single certification in sports science and strength and conditioning training at the recommendation of Shane and was an avid reader. If she heard about a new condition/product/diet craze she would go read about it until she had read everything there was to read. She had been pulling up multiple articles about type 1 diabetes since we first met. She now knew how utterly irresponsible I really was, and it was frustrating but comforting.

  She sat stirring her coffee. This was the last time I was going to have this teammate feel with her. In a day or two we would fly home. I would go back to my giant empty loft downtown and she would go back to her sad apartment in Hollywood, where all her neighbors would either funnel alcohol down her throat or make fun of her for trying to pursue combat sports. It wasn’t right. We were a good team.

  “Hey, Shelby, I have an idea. . . .”

  “Yeah? What is it?” She turned to me, rubbing one eye and yawning.

  “My loft is a two-bedroom. It’s nearly two thousand square feet, and I have a lot of room. I could train you if you structured meal plans for me, and you wouldn’t have to pay anything. It would be a working relationship and—”

  “Mark, what are you asking me?” She laughed a little and dropped her chin into her palm.

  “I think you should move in with me. I would handle everything, and you could just focus on finishing your certifications. . . .”

  And in November of 2009, that’s exactly what she did. She brought with her her boatload of furniture, her cooking, and her unbelievable worrying over me. On one hand it was a pain in the ass, because I could no longer slack or misbehave. On the other hand, I started sleeping, and I mean sleeping a minimum of eight hours a night. It was amazing. She earned her first certification within months and set about putting me on a structured diet plan and a strength and conditioning regimen. We worked out of various gyms, bouncing from one to another. I had her to keep me in shape, but I had no skill coach, and I had no fight scheduled. With no money coming in, I was burning through the last of my cash very fast just keeping us alive. I had lied about how capable I was of taking care of both of us financially, but I wasn’t about to ask her to go to work, even though she wouldn’t have cared, not after I had promised. In retrospect I should have been at least a little forthcoming about the situation and how dire it was getting. I hid it from her; I just didn’t want her to worry. She was working so hard, training me and whoever else she could get her hands on, staying in touch with Shane to continue learning from him. . . . I just didn’t want her to have to give up, and I was convinced I could get something going before things got too bad.

  One night we were doing mitt work in the loft when I heard voices. Shelby paused and ran over to the big old windows. She stuck her head out and started talking. As I approached I saw two heads peeking out from a loft window across the way. They quickly introduced themselves as Adam and Mikee. They were asking what we were up to and wanted to invite us over sometime. They said they had seen us working in the loft before and were really impressed with the hard work they saw. We chatted for a few minutes. Learned that they both were interested in pursuing careers in fashion. Mikee had rugged rock-star-ish looks while Adam, more clean-cut, looked like he could have been an actor. I would learn after spending more time with them that both were quintessentially fashion oriented, and though what they wore looked easy on them, it was also carefully chosen, each piece. Mikee was loving, sweet, took to hugging me and telling me he loved me very soon after we started hanging out with him. Adam was tough, dry witted, cynical, big-brother-like. We shared a love for fashion and art, and over the next few weeks we had many a conversation at nearby cafés about these subjects; then something new came up. Mikee and Adam were both in recovery. They were both sober. Outside of the cigarettes they smoked and the coffee they drank, they abstained from substances. Mikee shared his path, his story; it was as though I was listening to a version of my brother’s story, but one where he got out. Mikee had been deep into drugs. He’d seen the underbelly of Los Angeles laid out before him. Yet here he stood, smiling, open, one of the most emotionally raw people I had ever met. Adam’s sobriety was newer, fresher, but he still had this raw sort of attitude when talking about himself. They seemed so fearless, so committed to honesty. I felt that I wanted to walk this path. . . . But I wasn’t ready.

  On Thanksgiving Shelby made a massive turkey, chestnut gravy, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and a pie. She packaged up leftovers and handed them out to neighbors she called over. When Mikee came to receive his, he offered us both a hug so big it could have cracked us, followed like always with a sincere “I love you guys!”

  Christmas came and I decided to go visit my kids. Shelby set up a miniature Christmas tree for when I returned so that the gifts we were going to give each other could stay there until I got back. Pennsylvania was bad for me. Outside of my children, there was nothing there for me but ghosts. The friends I had left tried very hard to keep me preoccupied when I wasn’t with my children, to keep me out of the bars. Most of them did anyway. Right when I landed in Pennsylvania I had gone to visit my old doctor. I had been feeling under the weather, and it turned out I had a low-grade respiratory infection. He handed me a bottle full of antibiotics and sent me on my way. After a few days I ended up linking up with one of my tattoo artists. He had decided he wanted to do some work on my ribs while I was in town, but before starting he opened up a bottle of tequila. After a few sips we abandoned the idea of doing any tattooing and just decided to drink. Upon emptying the bottle, I sent Shelby a text. I don’t know if it was guilt or what . . . but I needed to send it.

  Hi. I’m drinking A LOT

  I did not get a positive response.

  Oh good for you. And while you’re on antibiotics too! You must be so proud of yourself, just stellar behavior for a “professional athlete.”

  So I did the only thing a drunk would do. I sent this.

  :(

  She didn’t say anything. I knew she was pissed. At this point I was sitting at a bar in Greensburg with my tattoo artist and a few of his friends. Alcohol wasn’t the only thing being passed around. The truth of the matter is, oftentimes when I drank, I didn’t just drink. If there was pot available, I smoked pot. Cocaine was a favorite because it allowed me to drink more. I was definitely partaking in one, and possibly both, of the aforementioned “side dishes.” I got up to “use the restroom” and accidentally left my phone. Apparently my tattoo artist saw this as a chance to jump. By the time I returned, the damage was done. I picked my phone up to see a rant from Shelby . . . something like this:

  Oh sure, no problem. Tell him to have a fucking great time. Tell him to have a blast. Tell him to have a few more drinks and maybe drive home! And tell him that if he ever gives his FRIEND his phone again I’ll be more than happy to find a new place to live.

  The tattooer sat there looking sheepish.

  “What the fuck did you say to her, dude?” I asked. Shelby was not fucking around, and now she was really angry.

  “I just told her she shouldn’t be so controlling and should just let you have a good time once in a while.” Oh jesusfuck. He had no idea how deep he’d dug me in.

  I had drunk brain. I had drug brain. So of
course my brain was telling me, YOU MUST CALL HER. YOU MUST. IF SHE DOESN’T ANSWER RIGHT AWAY THEN YOU MUST KEEP TRYING UNTIL SHE ANSWERS YOU. So, like a grown-up, I started calling her, obsessively.

  I got a single text in return after my fourth or fifth attempt at a phone call. It was very short and went something like this:

  I am too angry right now, and if I talk to you and hear that you are smashed I will lose my cool. Please give me about fifteen minutes to cool down and I will return your call then. Thank you.

  Oh man, that thank you. It was so cold. It was the final word. I was instantly ashamed of myself. She was fucking right again. Drunk when I met her. Drunk to the point of puking in Cincinnati, and here I was drunk and out of my mind in a bar in Pennsylvania in winter. We didn’t have a sober driver, and the roads were icy. I was playing Russian roulette with my life drinking as a type 1 diabetic anyway. Here I was risking it blatantly in the town that my kids lived in. I was not having fun anymore. I asked to be taken to Amy’s house. I still had a key she had given me so I could come and go with the kids when she wasn’t there. Her house was close, which meant minimal driving and minimal risk. I wanted to go lie down.

  I was dropped off at Amy’s door. My self-loathing grew like a heavy coat over my shoulders. I quietly unlocked the door and got myself settled on her couch. I thought about my kids finding me and smelling the alcohol on me like I had smelled it so constantly on my father. I knew Amy was going to be so pissed off. The drugs were wearing off. I sat on the couch, my phone facedown on my lap, and fell into a terrible, accidental drunk sleep.

  Around three hours later I awoke with a start. I had only meant to rest, not pass out. My phone was blinking at me. I looked at it to find I had forty-three missed calls and sixty-seven texts. My heart froze. I was so fucked. The calls were mostly from Shelby, but there were calls from local friends, friends in L.A., friends in Cincinnati. The texts were also mostly from Shelby and ranged in flavor from pleading for me to respond just so she could know I was all right, to outright threats that if I didn’t respond and she found out I was alive and ignoring her on purpose, she was going to throw my very expensive television out the eighth-story window. I didn’t even read through the other texts from a myriad of friends she had called who were begging me to call them or her. . . . I called her right away. She answered immediately.