The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  Leonard hung around watching Corey while the chicken cooked. The timer dinged and Corey took his steaming chicken patty out of the microwave and put ketchup on it and took it to his room. Leonard followed him. Corey shut his door on him and sat at his desk to eat. He could hear Leonard outside his door. Outside his door, Leonard flicked the handcuffs and made the bracelet spin around and ratchet into the locking mechanism. Corey heard Leonard moving all around their house, ratcheting the handcuffs, slowly pushing the steel bracelet through the locking mechanism click by click by click.

  * * *

  —

  He went back at five and met the coach, Eddie, instantly identifiable, circling around the mat, explaining technique to early arrivals to the grappling class. “Oh, you want to train?” He excused himself from his students—“Let me take care of this”—and took Corey aside so they could talk.

  Lean and heavy-boned rather than stocky, Eddie’s torso had a boardlike flatness. With his muscular neck and clean-cut head, he looked like a swimmer. But his ears, absent the usual cartilage whorls, stuck out like a monkey’s or bat’s ears on either side of his buzzed head. The bridge of his nose was thickened and his forehead and cheekbones had knobby prominences like bumps on a mace, as if his whole head had become a hitting tool. It was hard to tell his age. He was a professional fighter. He could have been anywhere from twenty to forty. He asked Corey if he had any experience with martial arts, boxing or wrestling. Corey said no: just a street fight he had lost.

  Eddie said then maybe he’d like to try a class. He sent him to get a pair of shorts from the locker room. Corey came out, barefoot, dressed in a borrowed pair of Venum board shorts.

  On the mat, the class was paired up, one student on his back, another kneeling between his legs. Most were male, but some were women. Some women were paired with men. Everyone was in the guard.

  The guard, Eddie explained, was the defining position of Brazilian jiujitsu, a grappling system developed by the Gracie clan in the early twentieth century, based on traditional jiujitsu, which Japanese travelers brought to South America. The founder of the art, Hélio Gracie, a physically frail youth, pioneered an approach to combat based on conserving energy through efficient movement with the goal of outlasting an opponent and wearing him down. The guard was where you might wind up after being pinned on your back by a bigger, stronger adversary. You wrapped your legs around his waist like a woman with whom he was having sex. This position of apparent weakness, in Hélio’s method, became one of strength. You pulled the top man in, broke his posture, sucked him in, thwarting, smothering, fatiguing, unbalancing, sweeping him over, trapping him in chokes and joint-lock submissions with your legs.

  Eddie demonstrated. He locked his legs around Corey’s waist, gripped his wrists so he couldn’t use his hands, and pulled him in. Corey fell face-first on the wall of the coach’s abdomen. Then Eddie shoved his head away, spun on his back, threw a leg across his face and put him in an armlock that straightened out his elbow to the breaking point.

  “That’s an arm bar.”

  Eddie let him spend the rest of the class having his body bent and stretched in weird ways by his partners.

  Midway through the night, he was matched up with another novice—a guy named Troy who worked at the Finish Line, a sneaker store in South Shore Plaza. Troy tried to bully him, Corey got sore, and the two of them started wrestling in anger.

  “Whoa!” people said. “White-belt fight!”

  They were head-locking each other. Someone told them to calm down. They didn’t listen. Troy twisted and threw Corey on the mat. He fell in Corey’s guard. Out of nowhere, Corey shoved Troy’s head away, threw a leg over his shoulder, put him in an arm bar and made him tap.

  “I can’t believe he got me. I’m stronger than he is.”

  “Troy, you can’t leave the arm in there for him.”

  Corey went home, speeding on the wide nighttime highway going north, listening to Aerosmith’s “Big Ten-Inch Record” on WAAF. That night he couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed and borrowed his mother’s laptop. He looked up Brazilian jiujitsu online and sat in the dark watching videos of submissions.

  The next day in school, he invited a hockey player out into the hallway to wrestle around. The jock was muscular and strong but had no idea what he was doing and Corey submitted him easily.

  * * *

  —

  He went back to Bestway. “You’re back,” said Eddie—“Go on, get out there”—and sent him out on the mat for class. This time he had his own shorts. They didn’t talk business until after training. “Did you like it?” Eddie asked. That seemed to be all Eddie wanted to hear, that someone might love what he loved and share its infinite value. There was not so much concern over money. Corey would pay tomorrow or the day after or soon. He’d have to sign a waiver. Since he was sixteen, a parent would have to sign it for him.

  This was conveyed in Eddie’s unique way: He talked in rapid run-on bursts in which you couldn’t tell the individual words apart but could get the general sense of what he meant. Everything was vague, everything but athletic technique. In his obsession with martial arts, Eddie was so fixated on an alternate world, a quasi-mathematical system, that, combined with his relative silence, which could read as shyness, he seemed—almost—like a gamer geek. Maybe he was shy. He didn’t like talking. He was from Brockton and his accent was a rural twist on the East Coast Boston sound of dropped r’s.

  So Corey began going to BJJ class. He gave Eddie a down payment of fifty dollars, all the cash he had saved, and a permission slip signed in his mother’s shaky handwriting. Within a week, he was staying late to roll with purple belts who cared more about what they called flowing—noncompetitively chaining techniques together, almost a form of partner meditation—than getting up for work in the morning. They would have stayed all night exchanging techniques; they all had Eddie’s bug.

  Corey flipped a page in his notebook and began keeping track of what he was learning, which he illustrated with human figures locked in combat. There were innumerable techniques and limitless combinations. To master a single thing, you had to embed it in muscle memory by drilling it ten thousand times—or one hundred times a day for about three years. Scoring on somebody, tapping them out, brought an addictive rush of power thanks to the dopamine reward system, a feature of brain neurology that keeps the chess player playing chess and the cocaine addict snorting cocaine—a phenomenon he had read about in physiology, though it was not a topic that Mrs. Clark assigned.

  Instead of doing homework, he lay on his room floor at night and did arm bars on invisible Troys. Holding his textbook over himself like an enemy, he reread the chapters on nerves and muscles.

  Around the house, his mother saw him perpetually reviewing what he was learning at the gym, twisting on the floor, as if he had a special kind of palsy. Corey announced that he was training in an art that was mathematical and infinite. He said, “When I can afford it, I’m going to go for another month.”

  His mother called him over and gave him her credit card.

  “No, Mom. I don’t think it’s responsible of me under the circumstances.”

  “Corey, I want you to.”

  Finally he accepted. He told his mother, “I’m going to pay you back.”

  * * *

  —

  By the end of April, the trees had started blooming in the rain—millions of yellow-green buds arrayed in three-dimensional space throughout the armature of the dark wet branches under the gray spring sky—and the landscape seemed to shrink, screened off by foliage. Sunrise featured new and intensely beautiful violets and pinks, as if the sun were shining through a piece of watermelon candy. Early one morning, Corey went to his old job site and found the house had been completely refurbished. He wandered through, looking for the boss. The interior walls had been plastered and painted, the floors carpeted and tiled. The kitche
n ceiling, which Corey had degreased, had been torn out and replaced, just as Dunbar had said it would be, and was now a brand-new plane of low-gloss white.

  Around back, he found the boss meeting with a group of older men in clean mackinaws and sweatshirts, holding coffee cups in hands that wore wedding rings, looking at blueprints.

  “Could I speak with you a second?” Blecic turned and Corey put out his hand. “I made a mistake.”

  “I don’t have anything for you.”

  “I’m just here to apologize.”

  The fearsome set of Blecic’s strong features relaxed. He didn’t offer Corey his job back but talked with him a little, in a guiding way, about life and work. In his youth, he said, he had served in the army in the former Yugoslavia. Mountain training had been arduous. Wearing a pack and holding a rifle, he could do knee bends with another soldier, similarly accoutered, on his shoulders. When he got to the United States, he had worked at a meatpacking plant for a year—heavy, repetitive lifting. “I lose fifty pounds. I am your size.” Then he had started his own construction company, doing all the work himself—plumbing, electrical, even finish carpentry—“beautiful, like antique.” He’d built his own house, where he still exercised with gymnastic equipment as in his army days.

  Corey said he was proud to know him. They shook hands and that was that.

  The rain began letting up at the end of April. Corey sought jobs on Craigslist. He cleaned a homeowner’s grill; reorganized a basement rec room, which was full of hockey sticks, beanbag chairs, sleeping bags, and toys; and disassembled Ikea furniture.

  He was too preoccupied with his new obsession to visit Adrian. They talked once by phone before the end of the month, and he told Adrian excitedly that he was taking martial arts.

  15

  Smoker

  Corey began training four, five nights a week in May, thanks to his mother’s credit card. The other grapplers at Bestway were high school wrestlers, firemen, bearded jiujitsu hippies in full-sleeve tattoos who worked at the mall, computer programmers, a DEA agent with a mustache, a young sullen Marine with acne, a thick-limbed tow-truck driver and various other guys of mixed complexions, ages, sizes, body odors and temperaments. There was a woman, Cindy, a black belt who was a doctor. People’s jobs and identities off the mat mattered little; the only thing that counted was their skill. A guy named Scott was very good. He wore a shirt from the Mansfield Fire Department. He’d been training several years and during Corey’s painful tutelage as a beginner made a custom of putting Corey in his place. When it was time to spar, Scott didn’t even look at him; he lay back with his hands behind his head as if he were at the beach and talked with friends while toying with Corey with his legs. Corey fought his legs, which fell on him like rollers in a car wash. Eventually Scott would notice him and casually flip Corey over and finish him with a one-arm guillotine.

  While he was still coughing from the choke, Scott would ask if he wanted to go again, to which Corey would of course say yes, and with a sigh of boredom, Scott would gather Corey into his guard like a father pulling a baby into his lap and choke him again.

  One day Corey tried to use one of the tricky moves he’d picked up online to surprise the fireman. He trapped one of Scott’s large clammy feet under his arm, leaned back on his side, and heel-hooked him. A heel hook is a dangerous move that can pop somebody’s knee and rip their ligaments. Scott tapped.

  “Finally! Thank you, God.”

  Scott said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I was gonna take a break.”

  “Oh no you don’t. Get back here. You’re not walking away now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Get over here now.”

  Corey came back and kneeled down. They slapped hands, and the fireman scooted into Corey, hooked his feet under Corey’s legs, grabbed his elbows, and butterfly-swept him. When he scrambled, Scott took his back, and the relentless process of getting choked began again, a process that consumes the whole body. Corey was gasping, fighting to feed his working heart. Scott worked his arm under Corey’s chin. Then the choke came, the massive brain-killing pressure. Grimacing, his eyes rolled back to the whites, Corey tapped his partner’s arm. Scott let him go, and Corey lay slumped on the mat, coughing.

  “There’s a time to play and a time to play.”

  The same thing happened in Muay Thai, which met on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays. The trainees were different from jits; there was a Mexican guy who tied on a headband with a red sun like a kamikaze before they rang the bell. Muay Thai is a striking art and an important component of unarmed combat perhaps best known for its roundhouse leg kicks. Corey felt he had to try it. He crept forward, hands high, bouncing his toe in blind imitation of the others, no idea what he was doing, trying to sock people in their headgear and nearly getting knocked unconscious. Eddie thought he was going too hard, so he had them switch partners so he could spar with Corey himself. With the ball of his foot he kicked Corey in the stomach. The blow knocked Corey on his behind and sent him rolling backwards head over heels like a stuntman in a movie. People thought it was hilarious. “Ong Bak!” they shouted.

  Unsmiling, Eddie marched over to Corey, high-fived him and made him finish the round.

  To Corey, getting beaten, getting tapped out, getting humiliated was a disaster. He got another old tire from outside a Midas and hung it on the baseball backstop out in Houghs Neck and cracked it with his fists. Guys playing catch ignored him. In his room at home, he reviewed the mechanics of how your weight shifts onto your lead leg, your hips and shoulders twist as you push off the ball of your rear foot. Outside his brown room door was his father. The mechanics are: You’re slamming a door shut. The plane of the door is your shoulders. Your arm travels forward, the hand turning over, the fist tightening on impact, snapping, striking the target with your first two knuckles. If it goes out at ninety miles an hour, it comes back at a hundred miles an hour to protect your face. The Thai fighter has eight limbs: fists, feet, elbows, knees. Nine, if you count the head—the head-butt—the Irish kiss. He made his artistic strokes—jab, cross, hook, uppercut, overhand—learning to raise his heel and twist on the ball of his foot when he threw a hook, his eyes looking in his mirror over the blurred bar of his hand.

  For Mother’s Day, he gave his mom a card. No sailboat this year. He drew his mother as a fighter with her knee on the belly of an anonymous man and her arm cocked back to punch him in the face.

  The train to Dorchester is aboveground. It comes on a curve. The tracks curve and away beyond them, out the back window, is the South Shore. Then the train stops at the platform. The sun is shining in the car. The doors open. She uses the cane to stand. She rocks to her feet. Now she is on her feet and stepping to the door, carrying a knit bag which has a Sanskrit word on it, the first syllable of OM. She has fifteen seconds, she has timed it, to get off, if no one knocks her over. People go around her, chatting, taking e-cigarettes out of their purses. She steps across the gap and doesn’t trip. The doors slam and do not catch her dress, which is long, loose, linen; she seems not aware of how close it comes to being caught. It touches the ground around her feet. It drags on the cement as she goes down the steps. The T has gone away, north, to Boston. She descends the staircase, one step at a time, using the cane, knit purse on her hip, back bent, head thrust forward on atrophying neck. At the bottom of the stairs—she hasn’t fallen yet—she heads down a tunnel, graffitied, that goes beneath the tracks. On the other side, there are stairs again. She rests a minute and then starts climbing.

  When she makes it to the street, she sets off through an alley—it’s the only way to go—through a maze of concrete barriers and rusted cyclone fence. A littered embankment rises up from a retaining wall to a decaying fortress of brick housing projects. The other commuters have all outpaced her. She travels here alone.

  There’s a crazed man blocking the side
walk on Dorchester Avenue. He’s there every day saying “Hey, baby” to the office women. If Gloria wants to get around him, she has to cross the street, but the curbstone is very high; it must have been built in the horse-and-buggy days, before sewers, to keep doorways above floodwater and manure. Furthermore, two avenues cross here in an X like a pair of open shears, making a wide distance for her to cross before a car—and the light is short.

  She presses on, pretends he isn’t there.

  Getting to work has become the hardest thing she does. Still, she does it—has been doing it since February—and, as a result, she’s fallen. She’s fallen numerous times since beginning to take the T. Once, she stood up early on the train to anticipate her stop, the train lurched, and she pitched over sideways. Blacks and Vietnamese ran to pick her up—minorities she’d always believed to be more enlightened, and maybe they were; they were her saints—they gave her back her cane—and she was too embattled to even thank them, for the train kept roaring on—to Savin Hill—and now she had to go back. What was she to do? Change at JFK. Two enormous flights of stairs or an elevator that stank like urine.

  Heroin gives people diarrhea. She found the elevator reeking with a sludge of brown shit like pudding batter. There was shit smeared on the stainless steel buttons. Two floors: 1 and 2. She managed to push 2 with her elbow.

  “I apologize for that,” an MBTA guy told her. The MBTA people were great—Boston’s best. She had a new appreciation.

  She fell again and again—climbing into buses; in the street across from Planet Fitness; beneath the Cambodian signs. Her dropping toe, which she tried to raise, caught the ground when her thigh got tired. Shin and thigh grew quickly weary. Anterior tibialis. Her arm was too weak to hold her on the cane. She’d begin to twist and lean. She’d scream when she saw the fall coming. She couldn’t help it. People looked. She’d pitched over and smashed down on the cement. Her Greek hat fell off, her woven purse spilled open, her keys and lipstick, which she never used anymore, rolled out. The cell phone popped open and the battery fell out.