The Laughter of Strangers (11 page)

“What did you say to me?”

Spencer whispers into my ear, “Either you set the tone or you don’t make it to fight night. Your choice.”

He’s right.

This is not the time to be so hesitant and confused. I might not have control over myself but at the very least I can play the basic role of “fighter.” I can pretend to care. I can wear that face.

I can gamble away whatever cards I have yet to play.

Fine.

“Say it,” I shout.

“Fucking say it!”

AUDIENCE SUSPENSE

And I am the cause of the suspense.

X grins, doing his best not to be intimidated. Truth is he probably isn’t and finds this charade to be predictable, but he plays along too.

The weigh-in is a popularity contest.

Who lights up the room the brightest?

X with his reply:

YOU

CAN’T

BEAT

ME

OLD

MAN

Still wearing that scowl, I whisper so that only X can hear:

“You’ll have to do better than that. Set the stage you shit.”

I lob another line, this time louder:

YOU HAVEN’T BEEN IN AS MANY WARS AS I’VE BEEN, KID

YOU HAVEN’T A CLUE HOW HARD THIS SKULL OF MINE IS

YOU WILL HAVE TO CRACK IT TO SEND ME TO THE CANVAS

I want him to push me.

I want him to take a step back.

I want this confrontation to cause him discomfort. He is already annoyed, already bothered by the MURDER. Being this close, right in his face, naturally encroaches upon that feeling that you’re losing your cool.

I know him.

I know enough about him to know that this is one of the worst feelings in the world:

Being called out in front of such a large crowd.

Spencer brings me a cinderblock that has been treated to collapse to pieces with a swift strike.

Do you know what I’m about to do?

I have to break from the stare down in order to take the cinderblock but the inclusion of something like this at a weigh-in is unusual and as a result they light up the room brighter than I could have imagined.

I get high off the attention.

The fact that it is working gives me enough confidence to send my head careening against the cinderblock.

It breaks but not without breaking the skin.

Tearing it open right where I had been torn open in the last fight.

I scream, I shout, I choose to gamble…

YOU

CAN’T

HURT

ME

And it looks like I win.

It is caught on camera and it will be played back on all major venues.

A little alarming though to find it so easy, so one-sided. X didn’t choose to fight back. When I’m afraid, I tend to make excuses. He didn’t make any. His silence alarms me. Did I really intimidate him?

I cared more about the reaction from the audience.

This old fighter can still break some faces.

That’s all I hoped to get across.

Seems the gamble paid off. And then some.

The fact that I killed a man warmed them up. The fact that I don’t care about my health sends them over the edge.

AUDIENCE SILENCE

IS AUDIENCE SUSPENSE

IS AUDIENCE APPEASED

Executioner looks over his shoulder right before leaving the stage.

It’s a look that kicks over the house-of-cards charade I had built all along. It’s a look that says:

You’re running on fumes.

It’s a look that says:

Nice try.

It’s a look that says:

You are going to lose and everyone knows it.

And he’s right.

THIS ISN’T GOING TO BE MUCH OF A FIGHT

I want to fast-forward through the fight, all twelve rounds, just so that I can find out how bad I’m hurt when it’s over. The cinderblock breaks into clumps, loose, like chalk; Executioner’s signature strike to my old and busted cranium will do far more damage. I want to skip forward and somehow find out that I won. Everything will be okay. Executioner knocked out cold. Somehow I knock out a younger version of me.

Me: ‘Sugar’ Willem Floures with his oh-so-impressive twelve wins by KO.

Knock X out.

Who has won most of his fights by knockout.

How can that be?

It’s because he’s changing things. He’s learned how to correctly sit down on his punches and maximize the precision of every landed punch.

DON’T LAUGH

A person can change every part of himself.

At any given point in time we can take a picture and capture the person you were at that very moment; however, a dozen blinks later, the picture might no longer be accurate.

You might gain weight, gain insight; lose weight, lose a whole lot.

People change. You will change too.

You got to wonder what must it take to remain precisely the same, in the image wanted and expected.

DON’T LAUGH

Because I’ve tried my best to remain the same.

I can’t say that I like who I am but at the very least I’ve gotten this far. One of my biggest worries is “losing it.” Whatever that means. I don’t know how it happens but I’ve seen it happen.

It is happening to me.

Shh.

It’s okay.

I admit it.

It is happening to me.

Losing whatever it is that made things bearable.

Give it enough time and your grip on that shade of reality will loosen.

Of course, I’m saying this mostly because I need to say it. No one needs to hear it more than me. I admit it and I say that I admit it but that’s not actually true. All hot air…more bullshit, just like the lies I’ve used.

Just like that cinderblock.

Just like the fact that the murder is a fake.

It’s bullshit. Treated to be spectacle, made to generate enough light to wash out every part of me that might be in contention.

Wash them all out.

Leave only the basic fact:

That I am ‘me.’

I made this all possible.

This league wouldn’t be as popular as it is if it weren’t for me.

WATCH ME

Everyone used to look forward to watching me.

Sure I basically just beat the shit out of myself but that was entertainment for the masses. They liked seeing my skills put to the test. Fight after fight, I wasted away my youth and my health but at the very least I sold out arenas, I moved products, I gained a number of endorsements.

I was at the peak of popularity.

Willem Floures.

Household name.

Solid gold, certified celebrity.

People would bow down if I dabbled in egocentricism and forced them to treat me like a god.

But you see I never got comfortable.

LOOK AWAY

I always worried and never enjoyed my success.

How many have been washed out?

How much does this hurt?

Will I remember anything ten years from now?

My memory lapses…

Are they an indication of my passing?

When people talk about retirement do they mean to say that I am not Willem Floures and maybe I never was?

BIGGEST WORRY

WORST SOUND

Their laughter, directed at me.

They are all nameless, strangers not confidants, family, or friends, and yet that somehow makes it far worse. I want their approval.

I want to make sure that this weigh-in means more to them than it does to me. I don’t know where to divide and draw the line, which is why I have made a career out of hurting myself. Who does that?

Fighters are considered to be athletes.

And yet…

I see myself standing there, on the other side of the ring, and I always think the same thing:

WHO IS THAT?

WHO ARE YOU?

I look at that person like it’s someone else.

I look at myself in the mirror and confuse the reflection for a person I haven’t yet met.

My memory lapses…my mind erased…

With every fight I begin to wonder if the oddity and inconsistency of my words, my voice, my life, my choices, my actions aren’t one long ramble.

I begin to wonder if any of this is real.

And then I feel foolish.

I tell myself, “Get real.”

Because it is very real.

What’s about to happen.

This isn’t going to be something that I second-guess. Really, if I were truly prepared, there would be no guessing.

READY OR NOT

I would be prepared enough that I wouldn’t need sleeping pills the night before the fight. I would be prepared enough that I could keep cool, my mind never wandering back to the impending fight.

No nausea. No anxiety.

I would be myself.

And I wouldn’t follow up that statement with the words “whatever that means.”

I would know.

See that person across the ring?

It’s me.

WILLEM FLOURES

We get paid to fight. People watch us fight and marvel at the mastery of each punch thrown, shudder and cringe when they hear a punch landing against our body, aimed right at our skull. The blood splatter sometimes traveling out of the ring to the immediate vicinity at ringside, they pay top-dollar on online auction sites for blood-splattered garb stained and authentically signed by me, by us, after the fight.

We get paid to fight and the world around us develops a second and third party economy. The industry of the fight:

We last as long as we need.

We last as long as we can.

GETTING AHEAD OF YOURSELF THERE

Really though, I shouldn’t be able to speak for myself. I’ll only end up losing the point halfway through. I write down most everything worth remembering. Sound advice—keeping a log of information—but what no one ever realizes is that it’s equally worthless if you keep forgetting where you put the log. I’ve lost so many lists of facts and information about myself that it has become a bit of a joke.

I anticipate finding them long after they are lost.

It’ll be like discovering correspondence from the person I once was.

Log of the identity known as ‘Willem Floures’s complete with run-on sentences and an unfamiliar voice ringing out in my head like a moralist:

HOW COULD YOU?

HOW DO YOU DO THIS?

SELLING YOURSELF

HURTING YOUR BODY

FOR THEIR AMUSEMENT

But then it’s funny because in one of those logs, I believe I’d find a better answer than I could conceive at a moment’s notice.

Something wise and clever like:

“Don’t we all sell ourselves to seem more important?”

Or—

“We sell a part of ourselves just so that we know what’s at stake during the lost-and-found of our lives.”

Needless to say, I haven’t found any of the logs.

It’s like the moment I finish they cease to exist.

I only hope I won’t cease to exist before leaving something behind as confirmation, something that proves that I was ‘Willem Floures.’

Incapable of being replaced.

The one the only.

That kind of stuff.

Extremely sentimental and positive statements from people that knew me and/or loved my fights.

No attention paid to my many failures.

No attention paid to the parts of me that are left behind.

He was, past tense, the greatest.

He was, past tense, Willem Floures.

In passing the name is rendered a past remembrance.

That’s what I want and I know that it’s impossible.

Willem Floures will live on.

SORRY

My mind tends to wander.

Right before a fight, I have to let my mind wander if I don’t want to psych myself; if I focus on the fight for too long, I forget why I’m fighting.

I forget who I am.

And that already happens way too much.

So I preach the silence that comes with the territory of being scatterbrained. I intentionally lose myself in thought, sitting alone for long durations, staring off into space.

I am not here.

I can’t be.

Not tonight.

Save it for the ring.

Tell myself:

Shh.

YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE

 
VERSUS

True sign of a manic mind: Moments before I’m confident and self-assured, only to pick up where we left off: doubt.

WHO DO YOU THINK I AM?

It’s those cursory signals, hearing the click and the boom of the arena lighting up with anticipation, that equally manic sense of anticipation:

Electricity.

I shadowbox to do something, to fill the time, to get my heart rate up in the fifteen minutes, half hour before the fight. Really though, my mind is floating, my gaze nowhere near the glow of a focused fighter. I might as well be sitting down next to Spencer, next to the few paid-for crewmembers, including an extremely expensive cutman, because as Spencer said:

“Your skin tears like paper. Last thing we want is having the fight stolen from us via TKO.”

Really, I watch myself shadowbox, voyeur to my own actions.

The locker room is silent; brooding out from underneath the silence is the impending laughter and cheer of the audience.

Hear it.

Feel it.

Nothing.

I wish that were true.

I settle on the one-two jab followed by a right or left hook.

JAB

JAB

HOOK

There it is: My strategy.

Other than clinching, I don’t have much else except the buildup of psychological residue that I know isn’t working on someone like Executioner. It wouldn’t have worked on me back when I was his age.

We can hear the ground shaking from the audience erupting in applause as the previous fight seemingly ends.