X opts to let me try for the clinch but for a time, about fifteen seconds, we are at a standstill, waiting.
He waits for another stupid mistake.
I’m waiting to fall asleep. The audience wants this to be over and those that remain in their seats are only there in hopes of seeing a KO.
JAB
He toys around with the jab.
JAB
I block one but absorb the next.
JAB
He wants me to fight.
X knows that he has the fight won; he’s looking for the perfect time to plant that exclamation point on VICTORY.
JAB
He gets there quickly, with the single most important tool in the sweet science that is boxing.
JAB
I block.
JAB
Again, I block.
JAB
Only a matter of time and the time is now.
I absorb the jab and try for my own. Grazes his glove, which he then uses as an opportunity to threaten me with an outlandish, taunting haymaker.
I narrowly block it.
He grins, mouthpiece showing, ‘XXX’ can be seen printed across the piece. The audience is a low roar, everyone sensing blood.
JAB
JAB
JAB
Trio of jabs, two hitting me right on the nose, shaking me free, doing the trick by sending a signal, ANGER, from some part of my mind that’s still somehow working and you know what happens next. What happens next is exactly what X wanted to happen.
I foolishly go for the clinch.
I grab air.
NOTHING
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Perfectly executed uppercut, landing right under the chin.
And I fall back, perhaps because I was still grabbing for him I end up grabbing the ropes on my way down. I bounce back upon reaching for the top rope, stumbling in two directions, one of them happens to be X.
As if coming back for more, he hits me again.
UPPERCUT
And I hear laughter.
I look like a ragdoll being tossed around.
To the ground I go and Spencer stops the footage.
I fill in the rest.
Their laughter.
Laughing at me.
For a moment, the way the video is paused, each of my arms going a different direction from my legs, which are floating, on my face the expression of sinister confusion: I feel the tickle of a giggle rising from the base of my throat. I burst out into laughter.
Spencer says, “You think this shit is funny?”
Fact of the matter is, I don’t.
I find it all frightening.
I will never sleep well again.
At night I hear that laughter, the lacerating kind that feels like another fight in and of itself, twelve rounds of ridicule, the roast of ‘Sugar’ Willem Floures by all the others that know more about him than he knows himself.
The receiving end of all jokes.
It’s as bad as an inside joke that I’m not in on…
And it’s about me.
WHAT NOW?
SILENCE
I stop laughing and I’m only a cough away from crying.
Spencer sighs, he rewinds the footage and replays the KO again.
THAT PERFECT UPPERCUT
THE UPPERCUT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD
Are they satisfied?
Spencer makes a face, “It is you when you were twenty-two.”
Shakes his head, “Right down to the penchant for combinations.”
He shuts off the footage, looks at the dry-erase board.
SILENCE
Everything he had written is now a smear.
“‘Sugar’…you are no longer sweet with the science.”
I feel the side of my face. This would be sore if I were sober.
He turns to me, “Well?”
I raise my eyebrows, “Well what?”
“Got any bright ideas?”
SILENCE
But I only hear laughter.
We sit here for a time, drifting between caustic thoughts and, at least for me, a deepening fear that is borderline indescribable.
I say, “You shouldn’t have signed us up for the rematch.”
Spencer sighs, “We have no choice. You take the rematch or you no longer exist. ‘Fade out on a sorry sack of shit.’ You want that? Because I don’t. I’ve spent the last three decades building you into the definition of Willem Floures. ‘Sugar’ as in sweet; ‘sweet’ as in the sweetest display of the science that is boxing. And look at you now…”
SILENCE
I have nothing to say.
Thankfully, I am not left with the laughter for long, the laughter exclusively for me. Spencer still speaks for me, and what he says next is about as succinct and on-point as anything I could have hoped to hear:
You either win or you wither away.
This is it. In terms of chances, I’m on my last and I’m lucky to have one more. Very discouraging when you look in the mirror, you look at any form of identification, and you are no clearer in your comprehension of what it means to be THIS person than you were ten, twenty, thirty years ago.
Follow that up by something a trainer and agent should never ask their client, their fighter, their friend:
“Got any ideas? Because I’m done.”
As a matter of fact, I do.
Remember what I had said earlier, about that little flicker that became something full-featured and, at least during this era of desperation, became a fantastic idea? Yeah well when Spencer Mullen seems to get behind it and approve of such an idea, what would you do?
You go along with it.
You even get a little excited.
Maybe, just maybe, you think that you might have a chance.
I MIGHT WIN
Old age does not bring wisdom.
Old age turns smart minds into fools.
THE SILENCE I SEEK
A lot of what I don’t like might follow me wherever I go, but there is one place that saves me from the shame, the swarming of scrutiny and shit talking. It really doesn’t look like much, older two story house just outside the city, slightly neglected lawn, paint job on the place faded, in need of a facelift.
It is a lived-in home.
Spencer’s house since as far back as his previous life. It is also where I reside when I’m not on the road, on a plane, shoved into another stunt, or stunned by an uppercut in the eighth round of a fight that I’d rather forget.
The house looks a lot like me.
It creaks with every step just like my knees make a snapping sound as I sit down. This house isn’t much at all, but maybe neither am I.
I like it here.
It feels like I can push everything, the pressure, away; it’s almost like I can leave it all outside.
The world does not pass the front door.
Here, there is silence.
Here, this is where I escape.
Where I live, that apartment somewhere posing as my place, broken into more than a handful of times by desperate media seeking something of me, might as well not even exist. I might as well just consider the world out there as unreachable.
Because when I retreat to the calm of the house, it feels like I no longer exist. And you know what?
I like the fact that I can lose it all with a single step into the house.
It swallows us whole and it feels like we operate on an entirely different spectrum of time. Spencer was always aware of this fact. I’m not the only one that finds worth in the home. He offered me one of the spare rooms, “Fuck if I think you’ll get any solace anywhere else.”
The house holds onto a simpler time.
That’s what I believe, anyway. Spencer would never tell you but he never got over the passing of his wife. It happened quickly, the details omitted, but the fact that he drove away the grief by fixating on something all-encompassing as boxing, he began a new era of his life.
The previous era, I imagine, is felt in the confines of this home.
His daughter, Sarah, nine years of age, has the house and it’s hauntings to take care of her whenever Spencer leaves for work.