LETTER FROM CAMBRIDGE
A couple of years ago I joined one of those clubs where they teach you how to knock the shit out of other people. The first lesson is how to get the shit knocked out of yourself. The first lesson is all there is. It lasts between eighty and a hundred years, depending on your initial shit content.
* * *
There is no diamond as precious as a tooth, so I shoved a boil-and-bite mouthpiece into my backpack with my cup and jockstrap before I headed for Allston to begin studying Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It was 5:00 a.m. on a January morning in 2008.
The gym was under a laundromat and it smelled like a sweat sock. I looked around and saw an octagonal cage with its door hanging open, a boxing ring, four heavy bags, kettle bells, medicine balls, a rowing machine, interlocking mats on the floor, and a sign in the bathroom that said HEY GENIUS, DO NOT PUT PAPER TOWELS IN THE TOILET.
I signed a standard waiver promising not to sue the management in the extremely probable event of my incurring an injury. I was thirty-three years old, five-ten, one-sixty.
We ran laps and did five hundred sit-ups, a hundred of this, a hundred of that. Then Big Tony knocked me down and sat on my neck for two hours.
Tony had been fighting on the ground for three years, he said. He’d gone to college to be a high-school social-studies teacher, but the job market was unforgiving and he’d adjusted his plan. He was now owner of a successful dog-walking business, not a bad way to spend your days, plenty of sunshine and fresh air.
“Everyone I work with is always happy to see me,” he said. “How many people can say that?”
Tony talked about walking dogs while he pinned me and strangled me, until I tapped him to signal I’d had enough. Choke, tap, release, resume.
“Good grief,” I said, coughing and snorting.
“Three years,” he said.
My neck felt funny and I took a week off to recover. The next Tuesday morning, as I waited in the snow while he searched for his key to the front door, Cristiano said, “Where you been? You standing up today.” He threw me in the cage with Brian, who dragged me by my arm into a side headlock. I slipped his hold as I started to see the twinkling lights, and I cranked his bent arm up behind his back in what my friend Russ used to call a chicken wing. The cops call that a hammerlock. The Brazilians call it a kimura. “Nice one, man,” Brian said, surprised. Then he stomped on me for a little while.
* * *
Ten years ago, after we’d been shooting nine-ball and drinking all day, my old friend Jay insisted on getting into a scuffle with half a defensive line in an empty lot outside the bar where my grandmother used to work at Third and Gaulbert. This was in Louisville.
“You’re all right,” one kid said to me, “but if your friend keeps asking for it, he’s going to get it.”
We’d already made it to my car, safe. Then Jay opened his door and charged at them. He got knocked flat, and the big boy he was tangling with crawled on top of him into what the Brazilians call the mount: sitting on Jay’s chest with his knees up under Jay’s armpits, Donkey Kong–ing on Jay’s face while his confrères egged him on.
All right, I thought, what kind of friend am I, anyway, and I pushed my way into their circle and grabbed the kid on top of Jay by one of his shoulders.
“That’s enough,” I said.
“Tell him to say uncle,” the kid said.
“Say uncle,” I told Jay, and Jay said, “Uncle?”
“Are we straight now?” I said to the kid.
“Yeah. Okay,” he said, and he got up and lumbered back into the bar.
“Open your mouth,” I said to Jay. Two of his teeth were chipped. I put him back in the car and drove him to María’s. I never did know what her story was. I think she loved him and she wanted to marry a U.S. citizen, both of those things.
“Oh God. What you do?” María said, while I stood there propping her boyfriend up on her porch, his bloody face print on my shoulder and chest. “Give him to me. I take care of him.”
Jay called the next morning. “I don’t know what happened, and I don’t want to remember,” he said. “Just tell me one thing. Do you look like me?”
I had to admit that I didn’t. He hung up. I put the phone down and poured half a can of beer into half a glass of tomato juice as the back door opened.
“There’s blood all over the inside of the Pontiac,” my wife said.
And it was more or less in this manner that my wife became, as the years passed, my ex-wife. She moved to Nigeria and took an Islamic name, Djamila. It means beautiful.
* * *
Brazilian jiu-jitsu comes in two flavors. There’s the gi, that heavy cotton jacket you may have seen competitors wearing in judo, and there’s no-gi, which is just what it sounds like. You use the gi’s collar to choke your opponent, and you hold his pants or sleeves to control his movement. It’s hard to escape from the grips and the friction. I wanted to learn about that, too, so I went to a Friday-night gi class.
I had expected my gi to be plain white, but it looked like a cross between subway graffiti and a full-page ad in Cigar Aficionado. On its back was a picture of a pit bull encircled by these words: Gameness means that neither fatigue nor pain will cause the fighter to lose his enthusiasm for fighting contact. I put it on and got to work. We did calisthenics and drilled chokes and armbars for an hour, then we sparred with one another.
At the end of the second hour, the head coach came by with a clipboard and a sign-up sheet. He had gray in his Afro and braces on his teeth.
“How long you practice?”
“This is my third day.”
“You fight at tournament? End of February.”
“If you think it’s all right.”
“Listen,” he said. “After three days, is not like you try to kick nobody in ass or nothing. We go. Fight all day. Then big party. Okay?”
* * *
I chose the gym because the fittest guy I knew—boxer, former NCAA gymnast, marathon runner—had gone to check it out and had gotten a couple of ribs broken for his trouble. That must be the real thing, I thought, that’s the place for me.
It was on my fifth day of training that I realized how high the attrition rate was: many people do not like to get beaten up. I’d expected to be unremittingly dominated for at least six months, but there was a steady supply of beginners each weekend, and a mere eleven hours of experience was enough to provide a slight edge.
I rolled with a big kid and was surprised to find myself in control of the situation. “Come on, mate, get him. What did we just talk about?” his friend yelled from the sidelines.
“But he’s a spider monkey,” the kid said, gasping.
That was me: I was the spider monkey in question. I wrecked him. Then we changed partners and I got crushed by Noah and Courtney and Darryl—rear naked choke, armbar, arm triangle—as if I weren’t even there. I went home and showered and searched for pictures of spider monkeys on the Internet.
* * *
At or around this time I began to become David. I don’t know why. It’s my middle name, but that seemed to be a coincidence.
A lot of people turned around if you said David: David the software designer, Lebanese David, Speedy Dave the ex-boxer, Big David with his big smile and his shaved head, also the other big David with his own shaved head.
There were a lot of bald guys named David, and a preponderance of people named Big—Big Jim, Big John, Big Tony—not in order to differentiate them from, say, Minor Jim or Small Tony, it was just that they were so gigantic it was difficult not to mention it.
I wasn’t big or bald. I was skinny and hairy. People said, “Hey, David,” and I didn’t look up—I didn’t know who I was supposed to be, I didn’t know who they were talking to.
I saw Cristiano again. “So you David now?” he said. “When this happen? Okay, David. Why you don’t training in morning, David? Miss you in morning.”
“I’m asleep.”
“Sleep is bad habit, man.”
“Just wait for the summer.”
“Is summer now, already. Come see me in morning, David.”
I had often wondered, filling out government forms that required me to disclose other names by which I might have been known, how a man acquired an alias. We began to get calls at the house from my new friends, wanting to train, looking for Dave.
“How long do you expect to be involved with this crap?” my girlfriend said.
“Go ask Jacob why he wrestled with the angel,” I said. She rolled her eyes.
* * *
At the tournament I fought no-gi, novice class, at 154 pounds. My opponent was five inches shorter than I was, thick and stone-jawed with a silver flat-top.
I scored a smashing single-leg takedown but dropped inside his closed guard and fell victim to his guillotine choke: he looped an arm around what one coach had called my giraffey neck and began to uproot my spine the way you pull a weed out of your garden. It was quick and painful, and I tapped out. I had been training for two months. The forearm I wiped under my nose came away slick with blood.
“You all right, David?” my coach said.
“I’m fine,” I said. And it was true. I mean, I wasn’t David, but I was all right.
Medic to mat four, medic to mat eleven: I had already seen a kid get choked unconscious. I had seen a guy pull on his foot to tighten a figure-four leg choke until he’d sprained his own ankle. I had seen a dislocated shoulder—maybe it wasn’t technically dislocated, but I can promise you that is not where it’s supposed to be located. I had seen a kid go out on a stretcher, his neck strapped to a board. I had seen a broken arm and some broken ribs and plenty of broken toes.
I shook my opponent’s meaty hand. “Good luck,” I said. “Now beat them all. I want to tell my friends I lost to the guy who won this whole division.”
He blinked. “Hey, thanks, man,” he said. Then he beat them all.
I decided not to fight in the next tournament.
* * *
I needed better wind. I had to stop smoking cigars. It’s amazing, what you’ll have to give up in this life. I used to think my uncle Charles was joking about waking up in a Dumpster in Tucson until I woke up in the bed of a pickup truck humming down I-64 in southern Illinois.
No more whiskey, no beer, no vodka, no gin, no wine, no brandy, no pot, no acid, no cocaine, no mushrooms, no opium, no nitrous, no Xanax, no Ritalin, no Thorazine—it’s hard to believe that we ever took Thorazine for fun—no Vicodin, no Percodan, no Flexeril, no kidding.
I thought about not smoking while I sat on the pavement and smoked before my evening lecture. A bearded man in his late fifties, wearing a tattered safari vest and pushing a grocery cart down the street, turned and said, “Want a little booze? I don’t mean no harm.” He parked his cart and sat next to me. A pretty coed ran past us. “Slow down, girl,” he called after her.
* * *
As I put on my tie and jacket one day after practice, Big Jim said, “Are you really a professor, Professor Dave? Did you have to go to school for, like, a long time?”
When Jim wasn’t getting paid to beat people up in a cage, he had a part-time job delivering hot wings.
“Is being a teacher a good job? Do all the little schoolgirls sit on your lap?”
“I used to work down at the trailer plant with my dad,” I said. “It’s better than that.”
“Where’d you find a place to go to school in Kentucky, anyway?” Dennis said. “I-eat-a-lot-of-fried-chicken University?”
“He went to KFCU,” Steve said.
“Professor Dave went to F-U-C-K,” Jim said.
“That’s funny, man,” Dennis said, not laughing.
* * *
At the next tournament I fought in gi and no-gi, and made it both times nearly to the end of my rounds before being submitted, as they say. I got triangled—caught in a figure-four choke that pressed on my carotid artery, cutting off the flow of blood to my brain and threatening me with unconsciousness—and I got knuckle-choked, a painful vise-grip in which the neck is crushed between the opponent’s arm and opposite fist.
I sulked for two days and decided my main problem was general physical fitness. If you can’t run, you’re not fit. My knee hurt then and it hurts now. It’s hurt for twenty years. I guess it’s going to hurt for the rest of my life. Cambridge is lousy with runners, and every time one of those scarecrows breezed past me and my knee brace, I thought, I’m glad you can run, because when I catch you the ER nurse is going to pick your teeth out of my elbow the way Mamaw picked raisins out of her slice of cake. That impressed my knee for about four slow miles before the ligament I’d torn twenty years earlier turned back into garbage.
I went to the running-shoe store. “Can I help you find anything?” the kid at the counter said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Where do you keep the shoes that when you buy them you actually go running in them? Because that’s not the kind I bought last time.”
He smiled. “I hate running so much,” he said. “You have no idea.”
* * *
And then one day my friend Jamie said, “Are you still doing your Brazilian thing? I’m giving a talk at a conference in Porto Alegre in September, and they comped me a double room.”
Jamie is a biostatistician and an epidemiologist who writes papers with titles like Adaptive Nonparametric Confidence Sets: “Consider an observation X(n) distributed according to a law P(n) depending on a parameter θ,” and so on. I don’t understand it, and I don’t need to understand it. What makes sense to me is a man who would rather do his work and eat a jar of mustard than interrupt himself with a trip to the grocery.
We touched down four minutes before Jamie’s talk was due to start. He took a cab from the airport to his conference. I bought a ticket for another taxi, dropped our bags at the hotel, and headed to the gym. My driver looked around the neighborhood in question with some alarm.
Tudo bem, I said, and I got out of the cab and said Boa tarde to the nice young man who spent the rest of that week kicking me in my ear.
“Okay, now I angry dog. Where a snake looks? Look my eyes. His will in him eyes. Okay, I punch your face. Punching your face! No, no, okay, better, good. Vai! Loose hip. Don’t previewing, take what he offering you. Okay. Slip and turn, hooks in. Espalha frango, break him down. Surf. How you don’t surf?”
Off the mat, he was calm and kind, that young man. He gave me a lot of good advice.
“Fighting make my life,” he said. “You know what you feel in fight. Excite, scare, now I kill him, oh God, don’t hurt me, I win everything, I never win nothing, you know? And without fighting, when you feel this in your life? For someone else, is once in ten years, when he get marry, when son is born, when his father die. Two, three days in life, he feel this. Here you feel every day. Fear, happy, anger, strong, can I do it. No, I can’t do it. Yes, I did it. It make you a more major person—is this right, major? It make him have his life.”
He was ashamed to ask for money. “Mas eu quero pagar,” I said. “Eu vou pagar.”
“Yes,” he said. “I am not a mercenary, you understand. But we have to keep lights on. Why it is so expensive, you may wonder. You cannot teach to just anyone. Not, how do you say this, pit bully, fight unfair when he know he will win, stab you, hit you with a bat. Not this person. No. And this is why it is so expensive, it make him understand the value. I am sorry.” Finally he asked me for fifty reais, about twenty dollars.
* * *
There were two things on television in Porto Alegre: pretty girls in bathing suits singing and dancing, and solemn panels discussing José Saramago and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. In the display window of the average bookstore were Sontag, Baudrillard, Borges, and Heidegger. I saw men and women of astonishing beauty and self-possession in that city, and I saw people as poor as stray cats, not merely homeless but without clothing to wear, on Avenida Goethe and Rua Schiller. I bought some Cohibas and a cafezinho and the nice old man behind the counter wanted to know what I was doing in his country. As little as possible, some tourism, some sports, do you like Brazilian jiu-jitsu, senhor? He put his hands up as if it were a robbery and said in Portuguese, “Listen, we’re all friends here.”
Every day after practice I had feijoada and collard greens for lunch, and in the evenings, after more practice, I went out with Jamie and his colleagues to fancy restaurants. One night a long blond New Zealander in a short black dress asked me why, if I wasn’t an epidemiologist, was I sitting next to her at a table of epidemiologists while taciturn gauchos fed us heaps of meat shaved from skewers. I made my usual mistake of telling the truth.
“Really,” she said. “And when I was a little girl I wanted to be a Brazilian ballerina. Do you hear this? He says he’s doing something called Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Go on, you’re just ashamed to be an epidemiologist, like all the rest of us. Now tell me another one,” she said, moving closer and putting her hand on my arm, but I didn’t know another one. It still wasn’t altogether clear to me what epidemiology was. An accordion wheezed. On a stage in the center of the restaurant, men began to dance with knives.
* * *
Back home in the States, I had a whanging bruise in my ear. I had tendinitis in both wrists and a sprained thumb. I had a broken toe, the first of many: you just buddy it up, taping it to its intact neighbor, and you go about your business. My neck sounded like a marimba.
This hurts, that hurts, perhaps you should consult your gynecologist. My girlfriend said, “I have no pity for you. None. What happened to the bookish layabout I fell in love with?”
My friends at the gym weren’t interested, either, and I didn’t plan to inform them. It was rare to hear a fighter, especially a professional, admit to pain.
“How was it last weekend?” I asked Jim.
“Great, man. I murdered him.”
“No kidding?”
“Brutal. No chance. Stoppage at a minute fifty. It was a slaughter.”
“Is he okay?”
“I guess,” Jim said. “I broke the bone of his nose with my elbow until it was sticking out of his face.”
“Right on. How’s your elbow?”
“It’s fine, man. But you know what? My hand really stings.”
He showed me a minuscule scratch on his knuckles. The lion, victorious, had earned the right to complain of a thorn in his paw.
* * *
January 2009. A talented young man from our gym got signed to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, that mixed-martial-arts program you can see on your television, and he won his first fight. Later he won his second, then his third, then his fourth. Have you ever seen that show? It began to dawn on me how fortunate I had been to have survived for a year.
After an hour of circuit training, an hour of drills, and an hour of sparring, the owner of the gym came over and slapped me on my back. “Nice work, professor,” he said. “Everyone else here today is a professional fighter.” Nice work: I had a pair of bloody slashes from inadvertent elbows, one across my cheek, the other from my lower lip to my chin, God only knows what an intentional elbow might have done. I was ugly but I wasn’t crippled, and it was in this way that I began to train more with the mixed-martial-arts pros.
“You don’t look like such a hairy guy,” one of them said, “but you take your shirt off and it’s all Teen Wolf. I’m the same way if I don’t shave it.”
“You trying to tell me you shave your chest?”
“Got to shave that shit,” he said, smiling. But I wasn’t going to shave my chest.
What I liked best about the MMA guys was that they tended to forget we were at grappling practice. Somebody would get on top of me and get enthusiastic about his position of advantage and start punching me in the face, bare-knuckled. “Oh, hey, sorry, man,” he’d say, coming to his senses after I’d eaten a couple of swats, and I’d say it’s okay, forget about it, let’s keep going. But almost nobody really likes getting hit in the face. After one practice I touched my nose and it made a little skutching sound.
“What is it now?” my doctor said.
“I want you to tell me if my nose is broken.”
“It’s broken,” she said without looking up from her clipboard.
“But it’s still straight.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“But it doesn’t hurt. I mean, it hurts, but not a lot.”
“Uh-huh.” She put her hand on my face. “How about this?”
“No.”
“And this?”
“Gaah. Aaah.”
“X-ray is down the hall,” she said.
I filled half a dozen surgical gloves with tap water and froze them into V-shaped ice packs to balance on the bridge of my nose.
“You are mentally ill,” my girlfriend said.
When Dennis saw the tape over my nose, he smiled and said, “What’s that, a target?”
* * *
Shoulder-stability push-ups on and off the medicine ball. High knees and sprawl drills. Honeymooners: “Shut up, pick up, stand up, run up. Now drop him and submit him,” our coach said, “you know, just like your wedding night.” Skip-step knees into the heavy bag. Farmer’s walks. Dummy slams. Kettlebell swings. Medicine-ball Russian twists. Dead-hang knee raises. Mountain climbers. Planks and side planks. Into the weighted harness to run sled dogs, dragging the coach. Fireman’s carries. Muay Thai clinch drills. V-sits, hitting the heavy bag, hitting the focus mitts, leg sparring with shin guards.
And there are also many other things, which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.
You learn a lot about yourself when you train to failure, when you go out to the edge of your ability, wherever that is.
“I can’t finish, Mark,” I said.
“Shut up, Dave. You can. Never can’t.”
“I have to throw up.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have to shit.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’m going to shit.”
“Not during my drill, you aren’t. Finish my drill.”
I finished and staggered to the bathroom, where only I was surprised to find that I had no urge whatsoever. “And these last ten, they better than first ones,” our coach yelled at me. “Can you make me to understand this, David? How you try to show I can’t do no more, then five more best, then ten more better? Don’t stop, go. And don’t be mad at me right now. Okay, David and Andre. Andre, kill him, please. Joey, you come here. Oh my God, Joey, you just twenty years old. How you going to be when you thirty, man, you dead already.”
* * *
I was becoming hard to live with. One night in bed my girlfriend said, “Honey, don’t do any of that jiu-jitsu crap to me.” It’s tough to spend much time rolling around on the floor with a bunch of sweaty guys without admitting that sex and violence are drawn from the same well. Remember what you told that kid on the playground: I’m going to fuck you up.
I kept getting skin infections. Ringworm (tinea corporis) sounds revolting, but it was an easy home cure with topical ketoconazole. Flat warts (verruca plana, a human-papillomavirus subtype) had to be removed with liquid-nitrogen-induced surgical frostbite. That hurt, and was expensive, and left nasty purple-and-brown scars on my forearms.
I was smelly and tired. “Get me some paper towels, will you?” my girlfriend said. I went into the closet and came back with a gallon of water. “Paper towels, honey.” I put the water away and came back with a different gallon. “Honey, I need those paper towels.” I put that gallon away and returned with a roll of paper towels and a third gallon of water. “Now can you open them for me?” I opened the water and took a drink.
* * *
I couldn’t pay attention to anything without some relation, however tangential, to Brazil. I read Skidmore’s Brazil: Five Centuries of Change and Eakin’s Brazil: The Once and Future Country. I read Levine’s The History of Brazil and Burns’s A History of Brazil and MacLachlan’s A History of Modern Brazil. I read Rubem Fonseca’s High Art and Caio Fernando Abreu’s Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? and Patrícia Melo’s The Killer and began to recognize a subgenre of Brazilian literature: the noir novel where people smoke cigarettes, talk about Roland Barthes, and now and then stick the handle of a hunting knife up somebody’s behind. I ripped through Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s jagged Zero. I endured Antônio Callado’s pious Quarup. I read most of Ivan Ǎngelo’s The Celebration. I couldn’t finish João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands although it was good—God knows I tried. I reread Machado de Assis, author of Quincas Borba: Philosopher or Dog? and Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. I read Appleby’s biography of Heitor Villa-Lobos. I read the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. I read Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil and Peter Fleming’s wonderful Brazilian Adventure.
Yo soy aficionado a leer, aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles—I am very fond of reading, writes Cervantes, even torn papers in the streets.
For many years I had loved João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s brilliant Sergeant Getúlio, a novel so good it shouldn’t be buried in a long list. I read it again.
* * *
And I read Clarice Lispector. Here’s a thing that happens sometimes. Karen says, “But don’t you like any female writers?” and you say, “I don’t keep score,” and she says, “Let’s give it a try.” “Natalia Ginzburg is a good writer,” you say, and she says, “Natalia Ginzburg is a man.” You say, “I like Dubravka Ugrešić,” and she says, “Man.” You say, “I guess Flannery O’Connor is a man, too,” and she groans and looks out the window. Doris Lessing, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jean Rhys, Patricia Highsmith, Joan Didion, Iris Murdoch—until you say, “Listen, if all women are men, then no, I can’t think of any female writers I like.”
And now it’s time to have an argument. That’s a thing that happens, sometimes.
You say, “What about Clarice Lispector?” and she says, “Who’s Clarice Lispector?”
* * *
I’d wanted to be a writer for a long time, almost thirty years. A writer, what a dream. I spent my twenty-seventh summer in Kentucky working as a night watchman doing twelve-hour shifts, eating fried mushrooms from the Moby Dick across the street before it closed at 8:00 p.m., nine hours to go, downing pseudoephedrine bronchodilators to stay awake, drinking King Cobra to manage the consequent anxiety, smoking Macanudos and banging away on my portable typewriter in the back room of the flower-and-fruit market I was protecting from no one but an occasional stray dog until the bar across the street disgorged its staggering belligerents at three the next morning, and they weren’t much of a threat: I told them to fuck off, and they fucked off. All I did was sleep and tell people to fuck off, perhaps identifying my vocation, and I saved a lot of money that summer.
Then I moved to Boston and met some professional writers, and developed a more realistic idea of what I’d gotten myself into. I had always assumed that a writer had adventures and met other people, and then told a story about what had happened, or else just made the whole thing up, or both. Now it looked like what a professional writer did was pontificate, you know, like the Pope, about social justice and foreign affairs and the Internet and the energy crisis. But I had formed myself on the Ruskin model. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way”: thus John Ruskin, who was terrified of pubic hair.
Above all, a professional writer had the correct opinions, and I couldn’t figure out what they were. I was asked to write something for The New Republic, and I sent my copy and never heard from them again. I was asked to write something for the London Review of Books, and that was bought but it never ran. I was asked to write something for GQ, but I couldn’t make that happen, either.
I was ruining big chances left and right, and it was nobody’s fault but mine, and I was twenty-eight years old, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, and soon all I wanted to do was beat the shit out of somebody.
I wanted to beat the shit out of somebody, or else I wanted the shit beaten out of me, apparently either one was fine, and a good thing too, because it turned out there was plenty of that to go around: the beating of shit out of me, is what I mean.
Fighting was an adequate substitute for writing. I got in a couple of fights, under controlled circumstances, almost every day, sometimes before breakfast. A fight is a story. It offers the shaped comfort of narrative: a beginning, first this happened, and a middle, then this happened because of that—and, if it is not interrupted, an end.
* * *
June 2009. As the third tournament approached, I realized I was going to have to cut some pounds to make my weight class. I had been on the “seafood diet”: whenever you see food, you eat it.
“Honey, I can’t stand this,” my girlfriend said. “You’re so irritable when you’re hungry. I’m going to stay in New York until it’s over.” She went south and I went feral. I skipped meals and I skipped rope, and at last I sweated my way back to 155, where I wanted to be. I drove to Rhode Island for the prefight weigh-ins, after which I drank two Gatorades and half a gallon of water and peed right there in the parking lot next to my car like the drunken idiot I had once been: drunken no more, fossilized idiot part remarkably intact. Next, standing there in the smell of my own urine, I ate a cold sausage pizza, then two bananas, then a bagful of roasted almonds. On the way back, I ate half a loaf of bread and drank the other half of the gallon of water. At home, I ate a big steak salad and the other half of the loaf of bread and some chocolate cake and ice cream. And the next morning I weighed 163 pounds.
These were the rules as announced over the loudspeaker:
All submission techniques are legal, including heel hooks, knee locks, neck cranks, guillotine chokes, et cetera … No elbows or forearm strikes, no butting with the head, no knees to the head, no hand strikes, no kicks. No attacks to the front of the windpipe, eyes, or groin. No pushing palm or elbow directly into nose. No dropping or slamming of opponent on head … Eye gouging, fishhooking, biting, pulling hair, pinching, twisting of skin, sticking a finger into a cut of an opponent,… and putting a finger into any orifice—
“Does that include the butthole?” Big Will said.
—are all fouls and grounds for disqualification … Please wear clean clothing.
I shook my opponent’s hand and dragged him to the mat into my closed guard, controlling his posture, and we got to work. I whipped one of my legs over his arm and trapped his neck and other arm in a figure-four, a too-loose triangle choke. As he struggled to stand up, I hooked his leg and swept him, rolling him over. Then, sitting on his chest, I let go of the triangle and hooked my outside leg over his face while I kept his arm, pinching it between my knees, and I leaned back and shoved my hips into his elbow, bending it the way it doesn’t go. That did the trick. He tapped. The ref stopped the fight. I let my opponent up and hugged him. I was so happy. Someone handed me a medal. I wore it.
Later that same day, I caught a pair of losses in my gi division, one of them astonishing in its speed. “Who cares?” Dennis said. “Look around you. Who’s here? You see all those people who aren’t here? Do you know why you don’t see them? It’s because they aren’t here. But you are here. You showed up and did your work. Try to relax, man. You can’t win them all.” It was news to me that I could win any of them.
* * *
What next? What else: I made a sickening cut to 148 to fight as a featherweight, so weak and hungry that my hair hurt, and I came in third at yet another tournament. My face looked like a sandwich someone had already eaten: everything, really, looked like food to me. I had night sweats and a nasty cough.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” my doctor said, frowning at her stethoscope, and it turned out I did have to stop smoking in the end, if this is the end. There’s no at last, it’s not the end, there is no curtain, it does not fall.
I took eight weeks off to squat and dead-lift heavy and eat everything that wasn’t nailed down, and I gained thirty-five pounds and had to buy new pants. Then I went back to sparring and I broke a guy’s ribs. That was nice.
And then I did it all again, the way you find yourself eating dinner again the next night; the way you have sex, if you do, again; the way too much to drink was barely enough. It didn’t end, it doesn’t end, and if I knew what to say next, this wouldn’t be the end.
* * *
The angel said to Jacob, Let me go, for the day breaketh; and Jacob said, I will not let thee go except thou bless me. That was all he wanted.
So the angel said, What is thy name? Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, and the angel blessed him. And Jacob let the angel go.
Copyright © 2017 by J. D. Daniels
