by Brad Felver
Karen stands when she sees me. “Marty,” she says.
And then you stand up, too, don’t you, Vick? You aren’t so bald as I thought you’d be. It’s mostly just your forehead, and your hair is dark still. You’re thin and have a strong jawline that I can even see through your trimmed beard. Younger than I expected, too. I’m not standing close enough, but I suspect you smell like Sean Connery would.
We stand there, awkward for a minute. Gus runs up the stoop and starts nuzzling on Karen. Then you say, “Martin. Would you care for a glass of Pinot?”
“No,” I say.
“Are you certain?”
“Err, okay. Sure.” Really, I just want him to stop with the talking.
You stand an extra beat, look at us both, then go inside, which seems like a classy move at the time, Vick.
I look at Karen. She seems thinner somehow. More fit. I think she dyed her hair too, some shade of brownish-black. Auburn, maybe.
“You said I was like Lopakhin,” I say, though I’m pretty sure I pronounce it wrong.
“Marty,” she says, “you can’t be here.”
“Relax,” I say. “I’m not going to pelt him with bratwursts.”
“You need to leave,” she says. “Right now.”
But I’m not going anywhere. I came to apologize for some things, get answers to some others. “Look,” I say, “about the meat smell. I’m awful sorry about that. I could get a new job.”
“That’s good,” she says.
“No more hanging sausages from the lamp shades. No more cold meat storage in our bedroom.”
“We don’t have a bedroom,” she says. “The place is already in escrow.”
I guess it’s at this point I realize there’s no getting her back. She sold our house, lives with you, doesn’t think too much about me. Maybe she didn’t squeeze Gus into her note after all.
We stand there quietly. Gus licks Karen’s hands like they’re made out of butter. She won’t look at me. “About your cousin,” I say. “That was inappropriate. I did the wrong thing there.”
Karen just nods, doesn’t look up, but just moves her head a little bit.
You come back out. You’re not holding a wine glass. You stand in the doorway, your arms crossed. You clear your throat. “You did what wrong thing there, Martin?”
I kneel down and reach out for Gus. I don’t look at you or Karen. “You know,” I say.
“I do, Martin. I know what there is to know.”
And this is hard to hear, you—a total stranger—knowing these kinds of things about me. It feels like a betrayal, makes me want to bolt and never come back. It’s hard knowing that while I was off with Linus Houghton on his leper colony, Karen was here with you, telling our story, explaining all the horrible things I’ve done. Explaining about her cousin and how, yes, I did a bad thing there. My version probably makes it sound a bit more benign than it was, I admit.
No one says anything.
You take a step out of the doorway. “Do you have anything else to add, Martin?” You reach into your back pocket and pull out your little stun rod.
But this only makes me angry. I take a step forward, and we have a little stare-off. “Marty,” Karen says. “Marty, you need to leave.”
I stand still for bit longer, and it instantly reminds me of all those silent fights Karen and I had over the years. I don’t think for a second you’ll actually use your little weapon on me.
I reach forward to grab Gus’s collar, but I guess I move too fast because you jump forward and jam that stun rod into my forearm. And it hurts worse than any cut I’ve ever given myself. Burns into my skin, and I can even smell melted flesh. I yelp and reach down to cover it with my hand, but this hurts even worse.
“Vick!” Karen says.
“Dammit!” I shout, and I want to attack you, but my arm hurts too bad. I shake it out for a minute, and you glare at me like you’ll hit me another time if I take a step forward. You really enjoyed that, didn’t you? So I hold my good arm out for Gus, and he comes.
“Fine,” I say as we reach the last step. “Enjoy your shitty grocery store salami and your city.” And we leave.
You don’t say anything. Karen doesn’t say anything either, doesn’t call after me to say goodbye. Doesn’t even say goodbye to Gus. We walk down the street, in between the luxury cars and expensive brownstones, and I look down at my forearm. It’s already blistering and purpled, and it’ll be like that for a while. Might leave a scar, but it’ll heal. I don’t worry about it too much. Things will work out. I can’t be a librarian or a bald museum docent, but people will always need meat. Not everyone can be one of those vegans. I’m sure I can snag a job in some deli in some crummy grocery store. No need to worry about me.
And you, bald museum docent. Vick. Do please be good to her. Take her to that little restaurant; get her the lamb fillet. Wear nice shoes and a sport coat. No flannels. Act like Lopakhin. Never stop wooing her, taking her to wine tastings and lectures. Make her sizzle with life every day. If she ever starts crying during sex, don’t hesitate. Roll her over, ask her what’s the matter, dear? Remind her there’s no need to salvage anything, no secrets to protect, and you have all the time you need.
Praemonitus, Praemunitus
My son wants to be a cage fighter. He’s seventeen, and so he knows a lot about everything, especially this. He’s considered all the particulars, and he just knows he could be good at it. “There’s a purity to it, Dad,” he says. “Fighting is the original human sport.”
I pray this will pass in a week or so, or perhaps the first time he gets punched in the nose hard enough to make his eyes spurt water and his brain swell against his skull.
His mother lives in Oregon, so it’s just the two of us and has been for many years. It’s perhaps true that I pushed the muscular pursuits too much when he was younger—a small engine repair class, full-bore target shooting, a survivalist weekend up north in which the guide informed me that anyone who called it “camping” was doing it wrong—but this was merely to lodge a few traces of grit under his fingernails, perhaps help him with the gaggle of bullies that always seem to circle him.
When none of this seemed to work, I enrolled us in a Tae Kwon Do class. I thought a martial art might help us bond, maybe give him more confidence. Toughness. But our instructor, a twenty-something kid from Colorado, smelled more like reefer than sweat and couldn’t even remember Jared’s name after two years. But that was my fault, trusting a Scotch Irish guy to teach Jared. White people can knock out crossword puzzles, and we make a terrific green bean casserole, but we shouldn’t be teaching martial arts.
So last year I signed Jared up for wrestling at the high school, but he rarely even dresses for meets. He’s too lanky, too much surface area to grab onto, all arms and legs and no torso. Horrible posture. A chest so concave you could eat soup from it. His singlet appears to be eating him. He never complains about how his teammates pick on him, but I hear them laugh about it. They throw his shoes up into the gymnasium rafters, his jock strap into the unflushed urinals. They stand too close in the showers after practice and pee on his leg while he makes shampoo mohawks.
This is the son who suddenly wants to represent the family in the cage-fighting world. I’m terrified. You spend your life toughening your kid up, hoping to give him some calluses, but then he takes it too far. Trusts your encouragement too much. This can’t happen, you think. Not this. Not my kid. I have a college degree, a mortgage, a job that requires a collared shirt. I never thought I was such a bad parent that my kid would grow up and get inside a cage and kick people in the face. Don’t let your kids become cage fighters or strippers: it’s a universal ambition.
Jared leads me into the living room, taking his long, loping strides. I worry that I could draw an anatomically correct stick figure of him. “Watch this,” he says.
He walks me through one of the cage fights on the television. Both men seem like they’re still wearing shirts because they have such heavy tattoos.
One of the guys sports a red mohawk, the other a shaved head. They dance around each other for a while. The crowd starts to boo. Then Shaved Head tackles Mohawk, and they tumble into the cage, which holds firm and keeps them from tumbling into the crowd. Shaved Head works on Mohawk’s knees, trying to straighten them out and pin him down. He punches Mohawk’s body twice, then his head, which Jared says is called “softening him up.” If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Shaved Head was trying to penetrate Mohawk.
“He’s in half guard right now,” Jared says of Shaved Head. “He’s trying to get the mount, which takes the other’s guys legs out of the equation. If you get the mount on a guy, you can pound his face into ground beef.”
I’ve never heard my son talk like this.
“See how he uses the cage?” Jared says. “It’s not just a barrier; they know how to use it. Just another tool in the arsenal.”
Mohawk is cut under his eye, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He tries to elbow Shaved Head from his back, and a few get through. One catches him on the nose, and it starts to pour blood all over them both. The announcers go ballistic, and so does the crowd.
There’s under a minute left in the round, and Shaved Head turns it on. He starts dropping elbows of his own. He’s dripping blood all over Mohawk’s face. One of the announcers says it looks like Shaved Head is trying to end the fight before the doctors step in and stop it. It’s nice to know they have doctors in the vicinity.
Shaved Head straddles Mohawk, pinning him to the mat, and Jared jumps up. “Got him!” he shouts. He’s punching straight down onto Mohawk’s head, jamming it into the canvas, where it ricochets just in time to get pounded again. These are big punches, and they’re connecting. The crowd cheers. It reminds me of something from the Discovery Channel—a hyena trying to eat a baby kangaroo, perhaps. But then Mohawk pops his hips up and slides between Shaved Head’s legs. “He’s escaping out the back door!” the announcer shouts. Shaved Head tries to fall on him, but Mohawk swivels on his butt. He drops his legs over Shaved Head’s neck and chest, grabs an arm and yanks the shit out of it, and then the ref is on top of them. The crowd completely detonates. Everyone is screaming. Jared too is standing on his toes with his arms raised. I’m not totally sure what I just saw. Mohawk, who’s dripping with his own blood, won somehow. Jared tells me he dropped an armbar on Shaved Head.
“Holy shit!” I say because the little mohawked guy is a real-life ninja.
“It’s called Brazilian jiu-jitsu,” Jared says. “Its strength is when you’re on your back and someone is on top of you.”
I like the sound of that, a more defensive art form. Jared needs that.
I don’t remember standing up, but I am. I’m breathing hard, and there’s sweat beaded on my forehead. It’s a strange and brutal sport, I think, one that awakens those contradictions that drive the hordes: the primeval lust for violence and the hope that we might tame it by locking it in a cage. And I admit that at that moment, I am one among the horde.
When I tell Jared that I’m pulling him from wrestling and putting him in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, he grins like it was his idea. He knows he’s a crummy wrestler, so he needs to learn how to fight off his back. All the successful fighters can. I do my homework. Lots of them study Muay Thai. A few karate fighters but not many. Everyone agrees that you shouldn’t be studying Tae Kwon Do or Kung Fu if you don’t eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or make shitty Hollywood movies.
Jared takes to the jiu-jitsu easily. He’s a quick study, his instructor says. All legs and arms, and when he learns to use them properly, they’ll act like a shield for his body. Within a year, he boasts, Jared will bend his appendages like rope around his opponents. His arms will be nooses, his legs boa constrictors.
His instructor is a Brazilian about my age. Thiago Rodrigo Pereira. He’s from Curitiba, which is where his family still lives, and he has a heavy Portuguese accent. Ears so cauliflowered they look like big heaping boogers clinging to his head. He’s fought all over the world and could clearly beat me up and ride a unicycle at the same time. But he’s an incredibly calm man, stub-legged and full of little wisdoms: An opponent’s hips are gateways to success or defeat in fighting, he says. Or, Look at man’s eyes when first time you punch, and you see if he’s been punched this way before. One of his maxims has something to do with the fiery soul of an iguana, and I can’t make sense of it. He runs a mixed martial arts center in town, one that focuses mainly on his form of jiu-jitsu. His gym, which is tucked in between a Dollar General and a KinderCare, even has a full-size steel cage for sparring. The place reeks of armpit.
“I’m all for toughening Jared up,” I tell him. “But this cage fighting, I can’t see him succeeding in it.”
Thiago nods slowly. “I understand this,” he says. “And you are right for worry. But humans are fighting. The more we practice, the more deathly we become.”
“But should we encourage him?” I ask. “Do we need him getting punched in the spine?”
“No,” he says very plainly. “But he will find other ways then. Humans do violence. Is natural way of things. I feel better with cages over them. Cages are for protections. Cages are good. Safer than parking lots. Better to give instructions than let them do weapons on each other.”
Then I ask him if, perhaps, there is a cultural divide with fighting.
Thiago looks puzzled, and I can’t tell if he’s offended or working out the translation.
“It just seems,” I say, “that many of these fighters are from South America or Asia.”
“Ah,” Thiago says. He nods. “Cultural divide. Yes.”
“Then you agree?”
“No, my friend. All people fight.” He stands up as if to signal his seriousness. “Forgive me,” he says. “Who are best fighters of all?”
I don’t know, and I fear offending him by suggesting the wrong group. “The Japanese?” I say. “The Chinese? Your Brazilians?”
“No, no,” he says. “We are good fighters, but we are not best. This was Romans.”
Thiago lowers his head, bowing to me. “Praemonitus, praemunitus,” he says. “Forewarned is forearmed. Best prepared fighter wins victory. Romans were always best prepared.”
I think the Visigoths might disagree with his assessment, but I understand his point.
“If your son prepares best, he will win victory,” Thiago says. He claps me on the shoulder. “You will feel proud.”
Jared sticks with the jiu-jitsu. If he’s going to do this, I want him prepared. It’s not uncommon, Thiago tells me privately, to have kids his age come in and claim they want to become cage fighters. Almost none of them end up doing it. I don’t know if he tells me this as encouragement or consolation.
Jared advances quickly, working ten hours a week with Thiago. They roll on the mat, Thiago shouting commands about hips and wrists and posture. “Elbows in!” he shouts often, and Jared seems to struggle with this because his arms are so long. “No give up wrists!” he shouts when Jared tries to block punches. “Pancake!” he shouts when Jared gets the top position, and my son flattens out, squishing Thiago into the mat.
At home, he shows me what he learns, practicing moves on me: rear naked chokes, triangle chokes, armbars, kneebars, legbars, omoplatas, Kimuras. We move the couch and grapple each other in a Greco-Roman clinch. He slides his long arms down my chest and wraps them around my armpits, twists his hips, and chucks me to floor. He lies on the carpet and pulls me on top of him to practice his guard, wrapping his legs around my torso while I mimic punches.
“He is improving rapidly,” Thiago tells me. “We must prepare more full.”
I remind him that Jared already has two years of Tae Kwon Do. He looks away and grins. “Tae Kwon Do-not,” he says, shaking his head. “This one is, like you say, very Fisher Price.”
He assigns Jared a striking coach, which I have to pay extra for. He teaches Jared to keep his hands high, bounces his lead knee to block kicks. He learns basic stances to complement what he lear
ned from the hippie Tae Kwon Do instructor: orthodox, southpaw, semi-crouch, Muay Thai. His reach is impressive—nearly that of a light-heavyweight—but his fists still seem to crumple like papier-mâché nuggets whenever they land.
He works his leg kicks on me and drives his shin bone into the meat of my thigh, and pain ripples over my whole leg like a sonic boom. I limp for two days. In the shower, I stare at the purpled bruise, push on it to feel again the newfound power of my son. Thiago is correct: I feel proud.
I pull the Acura from the garage and lay wrestling mats on the concrete slab. On the wall I stick a length of duct tape and write on it: Praemunitus, praemonitus. Thiago starts making house calls, and when he sees this, he scolds me. “You get them flip-side, my friend,” he says. “Is not ‘forearmed is forewarned.’” He shakes his head, steps on to the mat, and tries to tackle my son. I feel like a blundering, stupid American, and so I draw an arrow to signal the order needs to be switched.
Before I even realized it’s happened, Thiago becomes a fixture at our house, eating dinner with us, sometimes drinking gin with me until late, when Jared is already in bed. More than once, he stays over in the guest bedroom, and they roll on the garage mats before school. His family is in Brazil; my ex-wife is in Oregon. We meet new people, use them to putty over the holes in our families.
I show him my bruised thigh one night when I’ve had too much to drink. He smiles broadly. “Jared is spirited fighter,” he says. “You raise him well. You feel pride, yes?”
I look down and drink more gin and nod.
In early November, Jared dislocates his knee. He writhes on the mat, moaning. His face burns red as we race him to the hospital. Thiago and I stay in the waiting room while the doctor resets it. I pace back and forth, and he sits still, legs crossed.
“He will be a-okay with time, my friend,” Thiago says. “This happens to me many times.”
