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.
“Turn on the TV,” I tell one of the crewmembers.
“No,” Spencer shakes his head.
STAY FOCUSED
I want to see who won. ‘King Crown’ Willem Floures or ‘Gallows’ Willem Floures? It should have been a close fight. At that age, I would have been desperate for the KO. Anything to gain some regard. We’re all the same except that somewhere during their first fifteen fights, their career took a wrong turn. Instead of climbing the league ladder, they stopped climbing.
They became journeymen.
Gatekeepers.
Basic examples of who I am, plus or minus a few addictions.
I always had an addictive personality. It comes with the territory of being Willem Floures. In Gallows’s case, he got into painkillers. He got in them bad, real bad. I know the feeling of being pulled into the nonspace of relaxation and half-thought. In that space, there is no such thing as poor thought. Nothing fazes you. It feels about as real as you want it to feel; everything else floats by as something fake, nonessential.