The Laughter of Strangers (2 page)

It benefits one it benefits all. Younger throws the shot and I, the older, take it. I hit the canvas. I taste copper. Sure, sure, I look bad but it’s getting better. The audience gets a knockdown. We both get purse money.

He’ll go out after this, night on the town, while I go to the emergency room, welts the size of a second head swelling from the side of my face.

That’s my rationalization and I’m going to stick to it.

I’m going to keep applying pressure to the wound on my forehead and I’m not going to look in any mirrors.

I don’t want to see what I look like.

I can feel the welt on the side of my face throbbing. It must be the size of a baseball. I can get past most of the loss but it’s what they do to drain the welt that I associate most with my current situation.

Proof that I’m not a narcissist:

I ADMIT IT

I admit it, okay?

I admit that I’m getting old.

I should think about retiring. I really should.

If I do, that means…it means the worst for what I wanted out of this life. You step aside. Retirement is about as punishing an act as it sounds; you retire all cred; you are incapable of climbing into the ring, between the ropes, never again able to wear the gloves, bite deep into the mouth guard, stare yourself down across the ring, fighting not only yourself but everything you don’t see boiling to the surface.

No matter what their alias might be, they are all me.

We are all alike.

And no one will take the place of ‘Sugar’ Willem Floures.

If I retired, though, how would I be able to protect my record? My legacy? My name? This brand? Can they really have the brand in their best interests? It’s too easy to be forgotten in this world.

BRAND AWARENESS

Willem Floures is synonymous with the sport.

However, it might not be in a few short years.

There are plenty of other names fighting, all of them trying to book the same stadiums, secure the same Pay Per View slots, that Floures has successfully achieved in the four and a half decades of fight that I’ve championed. All of us in the league, we fight each other as much as we fight the world. The world might not care for much longer. That’s what bleeds the most, hurts the deepest: The thought that every punch landed, every punch absorbed, every scar carved into my skin, will be as insignificant as the dead buried six feet under, aging stone slabs the only real remembrance, their only real legacy.

I AM AFRAID OF IT

What I worry most is that my time in the ring is passing, slipping from my grip.

THE LAUGHTER

Looking back all I hear is laughter. All I see is white. All I taste is the ache of my bleeding mouth, tongue numb, my eyes wanting so very much to roll back, have a look at the inside of my broken skull.

Looking ahead, all I hear is Spencer.

“Before I send you to the hospital to lick those poor little wounds of yours, we have to go through this!”

Just his way: tough, stern, uncompromising.

I can barely sit up straight but he’s throwing a screen in my face, pointing at the fight footage fresh from the feed.

I always wonder how Spencer can afford every little new gadget in the world but then again I forget that Floures is a moneymaker of a name.

Haven’t spent a dime myself, but that’s because I’m not in this for the money. I’m in this for—

Well if I said it I wouldn’t believe it.

People step in the ring to fight themselves.

That’s the plain truth. No doubt about it.

“Round two you got it all wrong! What the hell were you thinking?! Did you not hear me say duck the left hook? ‘Executioner’ uses the left hook as much as you fucking did back when you were ten fights into your career. How could you forget?!”

That’s another problem:

FORGETTING

My memory. It’s not what it used to be. I have a lot of bad habits, many of them I have no recollection of and it probably makes me look horrible.

I tend to apologize as much as I thank the fans.

“Left hook, left hook, left hook! Round five you’re all over the place!”

Spencer pauses the footage and points to where I stick my chin out like an amateur, getting caught with an uppercut that resulted in the first of two knockdowns.

“Yeah well at least I get up after this one,” the best excuse I can make.

Spencer does that thing where his right eye closes and he shakes his head. Something only Spencer Mullen would do, his way of dealing with smart-ass remarks (my forte).

“Round eight flatline!”

“I know, I know.”

“You ‘know,’ but you don’t understand! How
does
the man carrying the legendary name of ‘Sugar’ get caught with such plain shots to the face? Why the hell were you not covering your face?!”

Spencer fast forwards the footage to where I foolishly drop my arms, making it look like a taunt, when in fact it was because I felt the tickle, the feeling of goose bumps, going up both of my arms. I was gassed.

Completely gassed.

If I bothered to block, much less throw another punch, it could have been swatting a fly. And the fly would get away without a single mark.

“It helps the brand,” another smartass remark.

Spencer taps at the screen, bringing up one of the countless fight reports, checks the CompuBox, number of punches landed versus thrown, and doesn’t say a word. He looks up at me, eye closed, a sigh, and taps the screen.

Yes, I get it.

This wasn’t just a loss.

It may very well have been a turning point.

‘X’ won, 11-0 record. Ten by KO.

DECENT FIGHT RECORD

Is he a prodigy? You might say he is.

“You’ll want to take him up on the rematch clause,” Spencer insists.

A rematch. What does it mean when I go pale, flush with fear, at such a thought? Don’t answer that. Spencer leans in close and looks at the welt.

Makes a clicking noise with his tongue, “This was the left hook that done it.”

Yeah, it was. And it probably hurts. I just don’t feel it yet.

Adrenaline hasn’t fully flushed from my system yet.

Once it does, I better be on the painkillers.

“Just get me to the hospital,” I say.

He pulls back, crosses his arms and shakes his head:
“Tell me first, what is it that you’re fighting for?”

I lower my head, no reply.

“It must be something because it used to be for you. You fought to fight yourself. When you were two and zero, fresh out, you told me you wanted to fight to be the best you could possibly be. Now I look at you and I see someone bruised up and broken, looking to blow it all.”

He grabs my forearm, my hands still wrapped in tape, “What. Are. You. Fighting. For?”

I look at my taped up hands.

I look down at the blue gloves hanging slack against the side of a nearby bench. I look at the locker room door, open ajar, not a single invading source, typically we’d have to keep it closed, locked, because every media personality would be clawing at the door, finding a way in, wanting a sound bite, something, anything, but now, I see an empty hall and the lingering nuance of stale laughter. At my expense, at my loss.

I look up at Spencer, the only person that cares about who I am, rather than who I fought so hard to be, and I…

I can’t.

I have no answer to that question.

Likely the most important question to be posed at this point of my life and career and I haven’t a clue.

I have lost focus, lost favor.

“I can’t answer that question.”

Spencer relents, but still manages a sigh that digs under my skin.

“Let’s get you to a hospital. God forbid you’d want to
feel
the magnitude of your decisions.”

He’s right. I’m quick to act but last to understand the effects of what I’ve done. By the time you read any of what I’ve said, I will have yet to fully comprehend the telling. I might tell you everything, more than I want to tell, and it won’t hit me as reality for weeks, months; it might never register as reality. That’s another scar on the surface of my being:

Incapable of keeping private and public life apart.

I don’t know how much they know about me.

They probably know the whole story.

You probably already know what’s going to happen.

You know where this is going, right?

Wish you could point me in the right direction.

LAUGHTER

A CHUCKLE

Not quite cheery, more like the clearing of one’s throat. A sweet feminine voice, made to be sweet because it’s her duty to take care of me. Nurse of many, nurse of few, tends to my wounds while holding my hand, checking my pulse, scribbling notes onto my chart.

How am I doing?

I’m on painkillers.

Right about now, I’m doing swell. If you’re asking about later, we don’t talk about later. We let everything that isn’t the dozy trance of “right now” slip by as nonessential.

The nurse notices that I’m awake, “How are they treating you?”

By “they” she means the pills.

“Swell,” I reply, slurring the word so that it sounds more like “
shwellp
.”

“Oh boy you don’t need any more.”

No I don’t.

But she gets me feeling good, asking me if I feel this, feel that, scribbling more onto my chart.

I do my best to strike up a conversation, “I used to go twelve rounds and still have enough energy to hit the bars for another twelve!”

That’s what I said. I can’t be sure it’s actually what she heard.

Again, the painkillers.

She smiles and giggles because that’s what she does, as part of her ‘cute nurse’ routine. Says something like, “A lesser man would have tapped out.”

Whatever that means.

I just don’t want her to keep scribbling in my chart.

“I used to see that left hook from a mile away. I used to be the one that threw the hook just so that they’d see it coming and duck. I used it to get them into a position where I could land an uppercut right under the chin. Left hook, left hook, pause, assess, uppercut while they block, block, weave, duck, impact.”

“My my,” pandering, being nice, because, why not?

“Those were the days when I could really throw a punch. Never went down though, never got them down to the canvas for more than a five count. Power but I have a chin. Had a chin. Cast-iron, I’d say. Now I can hear glass shatter whenever I take one to the jaw.”

More scribbling, not really listening, but the nurse is nice enough and who really listens to anyone anyway?

“I’m ‘Sugar’ Willem Floures. Got to mean something right?”

The nurse nods, “My mom used to watch every single one of your fights. She always bet on Sugar.”

“What about you?”

Not understanding my slurred speech, she seems to say, “You had one of the best win-streaks I’ve ever seen.”

Again I ask, “What about you?”

“Me? Oh I always bet on the other guy.”

She looks at me, must have some kind of grimace on my face because she chooses to explain herself, “Don’t get me wrong; I love watching a good Floures fight but I always bet on the underdog. I watched every fight hoping that you’d surprise yourself, catch one and go down for the knockout.”

“Then tonight’s fight was good then?”

Oh, now she hears me loud and clear. “If you want me to be honest, yes—I enjoyed the fight. Executioner looks just like you when you were just starting out and the league fights were in those high school stadiums and broadcast on cable TV.”

I want to defend myself but my guard is already down and the nurse managed to jab her way right into the most fragile depths of my ego.

Not that there’s a whole lot left to maintain.

I go quiet. She continues scribbling into the chart and for a brief moment I consider what she might be writing down, what must be so important that she sacrifices legibility for the speed of the scribble?

IS MY CONDITION REALLY THAT BAD?

There’s something I don’t want to think about right now, not while I’m on so much medication. Think about the wrong thing and it becomes all you can think about. So I’m thinking instead about what I might do as a counter, saying something that will somehow make her regret her choice to cheer for ‘Executioner.’

I garble my words, not quite sure what I’m trying to say, when Spencer walks into the hospital room, instructing the nurse to leave.

“Yes, sir, I must keep a log of—”

“That can happen later. He’ll be here all night.”

Spencer glares at the nurse. She looks at me, “You feel better, okay?” and quickly leaves the room. Door squeaks shut.

Spencer pulls a chair up to the left side of the hospital bed.

Sits down and leans forward, “Don’t you talk to anyone. How many times have I told you, huh?”

I close my eyes, letting the nameless force pull me under, into a deep sleep more preferable than listening to yet another lecture, but Spencer’s voice cuts deep enough to sever that tether, and I rise back up, eyes opening, looking, focusing, Spencer asking me what I told the nurse.

“Nothing, just good times.”

“Good times? That won’t cut it. What did you tell her?”

I take a moment to recall what I had said.

Sure, fine, I tell him. You don’t need to hear it a second time.

Spencer shakes his head, “You never learn do you? Do not talk to anyone when you are under the influence
of anything
.” 
A younger version of me would ask why.

For Spencer’s sake, he doesn’t manage a younger version.

He’s stuck with old and busted.

Old and busted he can deal with.

Doze through the lecture, about how I am susceptible to disclosure of information that could leak to the media, ruining the prefight promotional junkets, which is, according to Spencer (really, according to anyone but me; I loathe it; loathe it all), the
fight before the fight
.

THE LECTURE

Lecture about how a match is divided into two, maybe three if you count the post-fight conference.