Chapter 1: Death or Quarter

Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
-T.S. Eliot “The Hollow Men”



Your mind goes blank.
Pop! Like that moment during an orgasm or yawn. That one instant when everything shuts down, leaving an empty chassis...higher consciousness forfeit...senses unfiltered..time and place forgotten. You notice the world rising all around.
You're falling.
For that one instant, you are falling. A flash vision of that fall continuing all the way to the dust that will soon become your permanent residence.
But then your knees catch—instinct takes over, and you duck the next punch. Adrenaline floods gut chest neck eyes mind, sucking away pain and pumping in rage. An animal takes charge.
Raw reaction and a surge of calm violence. Control.
Squinting at my opponent behind a wall of forearms, I twist my head and crack my neck. Roll with the punches.
The first hit in any fight is the best. You build up this anticipation thinking about the fight, imagining worst-case scenario after worst-case scenario, picturing that jaw-breaking first blow.
But when the knuckles connect, it's never as bad as you expected. Training and toughness. Recognition and experience. The rest of this will be a breeze.
And now I make this man pay.
Luis Corpus. Squared off, wary of retaliation and looking for openings. A born fighter—quick, and more or less wiry for this event. Six-seven, two-forty. Tattooed and scarred like nobody's business. Prison ink. He's the Peruvian favorite, brought in from Lima by some of my...associates.
These guys whose names I don't even want to know, guys involved in business networks with fingers in pies of all kinds, these corporations wielding so much raw power and money that few even know they exist. Who else would organize illegal bare-knuckle fights?
The bets are flying thick and heavy, and everyone is serious. For the spectators, it's serious cash. For the Feds, it's serious felony behavior. For us— for me and this man Luis—it's serious life and death.
Each player thinks his own serious is the most important.
Head bobbing, nostrils flared. Squared-off and circling. Smelling blood, and thirsty. Luis Corpus. A dead man.

There's a reason I'm facing this man I don't know, this Peruvian kid wearing creased-new Carhartts and a pair of Timberlands so fresh the leather is still unburnished over the steel toes. There's a reason I'm bare-chested and carved like granite. There's a reason my nose is bleeding and broken flat.
And there's a reason I don't give a shit.
We're all in it for the same reason, however many zeros come after it. At the very basic, it's a thing of survival, of continuing to thrive, of adapting to the environment and amassing as much of its fruit as possible. The instinct to possess, to maintain a foothold in this slippery world––to ensure tomorrow.
There's a world full of things people would do for money. Who among us can say he's never done anything other than right, for the almighty dollar? That guy can throw the first stone.
And then I'm gonna throw it right back, straight at his head.
Money.
Money makes the world go round. Money grows on trees—if you own the trees. Money makes men do a lot of things. Money makes me fight—well, money plus an uncontrollable impulse to win.
There's a lot I wouldn't do for ten grand, but punching the shit out of some other juiced-up gorilla for the pleasure of a bunch of drug lords and tycoons doesn't bother me. Hell, I'd do it for free.
But I don't. I'm paid and enthralled, contracted and honor-bound. Life signed away. Might as well have been my blood in that fountain pen from long ago. My blood is in the fight as much as the fight is in my blood.
So here I am.
Winner gets ten thousand.
I get ten thousand. Loser gets two grand. You want to see me fight, you have to have a million cash, just to get in. From there it's side bets worth more than my car, on every little aspect of the fight. Hundred Large on someone calling mercy; quarter million on whether a guy gets up from a stumble. Fifty Grand on over/under number of punches landed.
I'm a valuable champion, but don't be fooled: these guys couldn't care less about me, and I don't give a shit about them, as long as they don't ever try to get me to take a fall for cash. That day happens, if one of these cologne-soaked glass-jaw gangsters ever offers to buy the outcome of a fight, if a slickie crook ever asks me to go down after five punches, that day I quit. That day I quit by taking his wide colorful tie and adjusting it three or four inches.
Here's a secret: pride is the only thing worth more than money...you just can't buy anything with it.
Here’s another secret: it’s also the real reason I fight. These days I can make more cash in other ways. But there’s no better way to get that feeling, that thrill when you walk out and start circling, measuring up the opponent, and it’s just you and him, life and death. There’s no other way to make thirty spectators disappear than to face off one-on-one in a game that might leave at least one of us dead. There is no drug that can compare.

Believe it or not I'd rather fight a guy taller than me. Truth. Against a taller guy, you throw uppercuts and high-explosive jawbreakers. You drop in under his guard, and right there at eye level is the soft throat. When you fight a giant, it's all he can do to swing downwards, exposing himself to devastating blows to the chin with each level drop. This isn’t boxing.
No, it's the little dudes you have to watch out for, the little Bruce Lee roosters who dodge in and out, ducking right under your punches. Plus you look like Superman when you fuck up a guy with inches on you. But God forbid you ever lose to someone smaller than you. Never let the underdog take away the bone.
This guy, this Luis Corpus, thinks his wingspan and height give him the edge. It's making him cocky—that or he's just got a sloppy, lanky style. Either way, I'm seeing openings.
He's getting careless, throwing haymakers that I easily dodge. He's grown up fighting in prison, where fights are haphazard at best, a matter of wild swinging in hopes of landing some ferocious hits before you take a nightstick to the belly. His style is like using a Mac-10: spray 'n' pray. I've got conditioning and experience on my side.
His chest is heaving, shining with Vaseline and sweat. I can rope-a-dope this guy until he makes a crucial mistake. Just a matter of time…

You don't see a guy's eyes much in a fight. The eyes lie. There's a point in space somewhere around his mid torso and a few inches in front of his chest. That's where you focus. Maximize the field of peripherals, brain concentrating on the whole picture. Motion-sensor mode.
Timing is everything.
He drops a hand to hitch his dungarees, and I dive in with a glancing cross. He stumbles back and shakes it off, blowing a mist of spit and blood before shrugging and returning to his guard. His lips glisten scarlet and tremble slightly as he breathes.
We circle, bouncing on toes in the dust, never still.
Stop moving for one second in this sport, and next thing you know, you're on the ground, and a steel-toe boot is making a hole in your head.
Footwork is essential, and the hours spent hopping over a jump-rope pay off in the end. I don't want to have to think about my feet.
So we circle, bouncing on toes, glaring between uplifted fists in search of openings.
Jab.
Jab.
Tentative. Lunge and jab, lunge and back again.
Left foot forward, right leg flexed like a coiled spring. Round and round.
Get the fuck to it, cabrón! someone shrieks from outside the ring.
And then I get hit.
I'm on my back, rolling away from Corpus' boots and trying to shake the
stars out of my eyes and the ringing from my ears. He seems surprised that I'm down, and I take advantage of his hesitation to scramble back and get on my feet again. Distraction is part of the game, and this time it caught me off-guard. If Luis Corpus had been more experienced or more driven, I'd be a dead man.
A fight is a dance. Shuffle back, bob and weave, bouncing toes, back and back, back back and BANG! Lure the motherfucker in and make him pay. Pinpoint punches—hard!— jaw, ear, break the nose, smash the collarbone.
There's a technique and a reason for everything.
It's not chaos.
It's choreography versus choreography. If I can break this guy's nose, his eyes will water, no matter how tough he is. Then I'm attacking a blind man fighting through a blur. If I can snap his collarbone, he's minus a weapon; minus a shield. If I can scare him enough about my ability to deliver pain, he'll make a mistake, and then I'm in.
There's a hole in the ground waiting for him if I catch him just right.

It’s a funny thing about this bare-knuckle death circuit that rotates among a scattering of secluded ranches owned by a file cabinet somewhere. You try it out and it's kinda scary, kind of exciting, like skydiving or racing cars. You're jacked on adrenaline, and it hurts like a motherfucker sometimes, and you're constantly aching: permanent black eyes, throbbing knuckles, cauliflower ear—the works. But it's also addictive like no drug I've ever tried. You get the feeling that you can wreck absolutely anybody, and you cannot wait to start hitting.
I walk through the supermarket, and I want to punch that guy in the Gold's Gym t-shirt just for standing in front of the protein powder I want to buy. I want to slap the bartender for overfilling my glass and spilling beer. I want to pick fights with two, three, four guys at a time. I want to fight fight fight. Nobody can fuck with me, but I have to find someone with the grit to take me on toe to toe, someone who can actually stand against me. There's an instinct we all have, no matter how deeply buried, to find the alpha and bring him down by any means available, to dominate no matter what. Ask Darwin. Ask Brezhnev. Ask the President.
Call me an animal. I agree. We're all animals, kept in line by a set of social standards and hereditary habits. And as an animal, I'm absorbed by an evolutionary need to win win win, to prove my progenitive prowess time and time again—to keep partaking of the sweet juicy fruits of the world. My world.
And to do that, I need a challenge. A challenge. Not this guy. He's just a kid I'm going to demolish.
Luis Corpus. He advances as I swipe a fist across my lips. The stinging pain galvanizes my body, and I leap toward him, juking right and swinging a left-hook pap! directly into his temple as he bobs away from the feint.
His arms drop, his eyes glaze over, and he falls like a cardboard cutout in a puff of chalky dust. My left arm vibrates with pain, radiating all through my elbow and into my shoulder.
I can smell the blood dripping from my split knuckles, and I step back to watch the kid.
He doesn't move.
It's over.
I turn away, and my body sags in an adrenal aftermath. A metallic taste, like sucking pennies, on my tongue. I collect the purse and walk away, past the waiting backhoe, past the food-laden tables, toward a shower, not bothering to see if Corpus gets up. If he does, he'll be sent packing. The loser isn't invited to the after-party.
A wrecked car sits at the edge of a grove of trees, still smoking from the weapons demonstration before the fight. Long ago, after one of my earlier bouts, I bought a concealable Walther PPK to carry around, after watching the arms dealer with a semiautomatic SPAS-12 shotgun rip apart a taxi in seconds. In another show, I'd nearly gone deaf from the concussion of an RPG. And a demo of an AK-47 mod once made me worry about the plight of Democracy. But now, it’s sort of just a pissing match. I don’t even want to know who’s buying what weapons.
At this ranch, where you drive about six hours from the highway up the driveway before you get to the main house, there's an ominous presence of power. You can feel it prickling the hair on your neck, tingling the skin under your balls, dancing at the back of your throat. This is the kind of place where you're on your best behavior.
Despite that, I'm leaving before the party, as soon as I get my suit on. I have to get back to Boston. There are thirty keys of the finest snow stashed in a couple of duffels in the locker room of the gym I’m now the sole owner of, since Alonzo’s demise, and I'd hate for it to melt in the summer heat.


© Paul D Blumer 2011

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