Roughhouse friday, p.24
Roughhouse Friday, page 24
Roo and Nicole met us in the lobby. When I introduced Roo to my father, a strange pride rose up inside me. In Roo, I had a model of the man I wanted to be: autonomous, industrious, single-minded, and tough. My father possessed none of Roo’s traits, and I wanted him to know it, and to know that I knew it, too. When my father thanked Roo for “looking after my boy,” Roo shrugged and said, “I reckon he does a pretty good job looking after himself.” My father nodded. “I reckon he does.”
* * *
It was still unclear who was fighting in each division of the Showdown. To beef up the lightweight division, Haag had flown in a team of men from Anchorage. The most recognized name in the group was Glen “the Backyard Brawler” Laufenberger. He sometimes fought twice in a single night, driving between Eagle River and Anchorage, pocketing a thousand bucks by midnight. The heavyweight title was a wash: all the great fighters from Victor’s era had disappeared, and it looked like it was going to be the Showstoppah versus Mike “the Rock” Gravel. As for my division, the Hooligan was still the only middleweight whom Haag could find to fight me, but a single-bout Southeast Showdown wasn’t much of a Showdown. Somehow, Haag convinced a Roughhouse veteran named Fernando Pintang to fight me in the semifinals. In his younger years, Pintang had fought as a lightweight, but he’d gained enough weight to move up a division. I wasn’t all that worried about facing Pintang: from across the barroom, he looked old and pudgy and uninterested in getting into the kind of battle that I was looking for.
I stood with my father as Haag called all the fighters into the ring.
“Paddled from Seattle, Warshington, to Sitka, Alaska, in a kayak!” Haag said. “Jade the Stone Coffin!”
I climbed through the ropes, saluted the crowd, returned to my father’s side.
“You’re going by Jade now?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“How’d that come about?”
Changing my name had been my way of declaring that I was my own person, that the story of who I was belonged only to a past that I alone had written. But now, insisting on calling myself Jade instead of Jed felt juvenile. “Everyone up here just started saying it that way. I just never got around to telling them they were wrong.”
Without Victor to warm me up on the mitts, and with Roo busy preparing for his own fight, I asked my father to step in. First, we tried with a small pair of mitts—the same kind Victor used—that we found lying on the pool table among gloves and wraps, but my father didn’t have the coordination or hand speed to hold the targets effectively. Then we found another pair of mitts—two large yellow rectangular pads—that worked better and didn’t require the person holding them to do much more than hold them up in front of their face. But even that was difficult for my father. Every time I punched one of the pads, he’d fall off-balance or shift position, so that the next punch I threw missed the target. I tried to show him how to time the mitts with my punches, but he couldn’t figure it out, and kept flinching every time my fist hit the mitts. His expressions of surprise made me punch harder.
After a few minutes, I started throwing punches with the same speed and power I used with Victor. But the pads were too big and, behind the yellow wall, my father had difficulty seeing my punches coming. In one instance, he lost his balance, one of the pads fell, and my glove glanced over his guard and clipped him on the side of the head. The impact knocked his glasses off-kilter. I stopped punching. “Keep going,” my father said, rearranging the mitts. I was in a full sweat now, all the prefight emotions rising to a crescendo, but the image of his crooked glasses, his earnest, yearning face, took the heat out of me. “I’m warm.”
“You sure?”
I waved my father off. “I’m good.”
My father pulled the pads off his hands, straightened his glasses. “Jesus, Son. You’re a goddamn steam train.”
* * *
Fighting Fernando was like trying to inflict pain on a soggy blanket. By the second round, he’d lost all interest in winning the fight and calmly fell to his knees after I landed a powerless jab on his forehead. He took the count, got up, but as soon as I jabbed him, he went down again. By the third round, all the aggression I’d built up before the fight had no place to go, and when the final bell rang, I went back to my corner, furious that I hadn’t been able to finish him off. When I found my father in the crowd, he patted me on the shoulders. “Looked good in there.”
I shook my head. “That guy was nothing. Should have knocked him out.”
For the rest of the evening we stood together watching several bouts in the lightweight division. Roo advanced to the finals after beating the Haitian Sensation in an awkwardly matched clash of styles pitting Roo’s clean boxing against the Sensation’s raw, overhead club-fisted attack. In the second round, the two men butted heads, and Roo’s eye swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. He got the decision—the fight was much closer than it should have been—but afterward he wandered around the barroom squinting out of his swollen eye, an expression that made him look like he was scrutinizing the motivations of every fighter in Marlintini’s, calling us out for the real reasons we were here.
* * *
The next morning my father and I ate breakfast at Donna’s. Over biscuits and gravy, we talked about what was next for him. He drummed the table. “You know, there might be an opportunity for me to go over.” The work would be entirely administrative, but he’d likely be serving on a base in Afghanistan. I asked him if he wanted to go. He shrugged. The allure of leaving home, of reporting for duty, had already captured him. There was only one thing holding him back. “It’d be hell on my marriage. I’m not sure if Martha would ever forgive me.”
He told me a story about being at dinner with Martha and several friends a few months earlier, when Martha had asked him what was more important, his service with the military or their marriage. My father paused. “I was in a dark place. I’m doing work that feels important for the first time in my life. I’m starting to understand what I was put on this earth to do.”
“What did you say?”
He took a deep breath, nodded to himself. “Let’s just say I made the mistake of telling her the truth.”
It was a heroic tale: service over marriage, his loyalty to his brothers-in-arms over his commitment to a woman. But the moral equation of his heroism didn’t balance. As my father rambled on about men and sacrifice and truth, I began to calculate the facts of my father’s story as I understood it. I saw in his eyes a lack of understanding of what had been left out of the story: her side of it.
And then I started talking, saying everything I had never before said. About betrayal and sacrifice, about lying and cheating and empathy and pain. About my mother. About me. About my father’s weaknesses as a man, about my strength and my mother’s strength and the strength of her bloodline, about the sacrifices she had made in my name. “You have no fucking idea what that does to a person.” Leaving a country behind, raising children, alone, in a culture that is not your own. My voice rose to a pitch I didn’t recognize. “You went to live with her best fucking friend. Her best friend. And we had nothing in Maine. Nothing. We were alone.” As I spoke, I felt myself come alive: my body filled with power and rage and anger and joy. It coursed through my arms, pumped in my blood, flooded my brain. Not even in the ring had I ever felt such emotions with such clarity. It was like they were all swirling before me, in a cloud of smoke and mist and formless, wordless power. In that power lived all the stories and memories and failures and feelings I had carried with me for twenty years, all the things I had been too young to understand, all the things I had seen but not said, felt but not named, overlooked but never faced squarely. “You’ll never know,” I told my father. “You have no idea.”
By then, several people in Donna’s had turned their attention upon us. I paused, leaned back, looked out the window. I was not sure what I had just said. The words did not feel entirely like my own. They were new to this world—expressions of another person still emerging. I knew only what I saw in the moment: that my father, sitting across the table, silent, sullen, the mask of his manliness hanging crookedly from his face, was as separate from me as a stranger, as endemic to my being as my two hands. In that hidden face I could see his own pain—far off and unknowing, tied to the myths of a heritage that lived in my blood, too. I understood only one thing: that my father, as large and powerful and important a man as he appeared to me in my boyhood, had held no power over the pain that possessed him. As I studied his face, examined his skin and eyes and teeth and bald head inscribed with lines of aging, my father became more real to me than he’d ever been, more vivid and human and flawed and complex. And it was only in seeing him this way that a single word rose up inside me, a word so simple and fundamental that for so many years I had not been able to see it hanging before me like a swinging pendulum. I said the word, a single, unanswerable syllable.
“Why?”
The word hung between us. And in it lived all the variations of its meaning. The why was asking my father why he’d left my mother, and me, for another life. But that was the question of my younger self, a question driven by a childish longing to fix what was broken. In time, the meaning of the why would reveal itself as something much bigger: Why do we love? Why do we go to war? Why do we leave our homes? Why do we forget where we come from? Why must we bury the past? Why can we not live without it?
I wanted my father to tell me the answer to every why—as if he alone were my maker, as if I alone were the only person who had ever railed against the most basic facts of existence.
We sat in silence for several minutes.
“You know, my son, I used to tell people that I’d kiss your mother’s boots before I ever left her.” My father laughed. “I actually believed that.”
I remember little of what he said after that. My mind was already floating somewhere above the conversation, lost in the echo of the why. I recall that he tried to defend himself, explained that he’d been out of his mind, that it was a strange time in his life, in the life of the nation, that I shouldn’t accuse him until I’d gone through the same situation myself. But I would hear none of it. I was twenty-four years old, hungry for ground to stand on so that I could go forth into a new world on my own terms. Our conversation was just beginning, and we would have it over and over and over, in different ways, in different circumstances, for many years, marveling at the shape of the why in all of its infinite forms. Even now I still find myself believing that out on the horizon, on the other side of the mist that forever hangs between us, is a final redeeming answer.
My father took a long, deep breath. “My only hope is that maybe you’ll do a little better than I did. That you don’t make this story your own.”
I looked out the window, studied the shapes of the mountains beyond town, searched the line of their ridges for some far-off blinking truth. Our server brought our bill to the table, and my father took it to the register to settle up.
The world was a good place to buy in, but the bill always came.
* * *
The first rounds of my fight with the Hooligan passed in a blur of unmemorable motion. By then, we were in the midst of our fourth fight, and our exchanges became merely the inevitable consequences of the physics of our bodies. I was bigger, stronger; he was faster, leaner. Over the three minutes, my size and wind would wear him down. The other things—my desire to fight, the lack of his—would only shade in the outcome. By the third round, the Hooligan started to tire and, rather than meet me in the ring, retreated to the ropes. I came at him, he tied me up, and while I fought my way out of the clinch, I felt myself detach not only from the Hooligan, but from the action of the fight, from the breathing intensity inside the ring. Then I began to notice things outside the ring: The twisted faces in the crowd. The shimmer of the neon lights. Individual voices floated through my ears, then faded. The clinking of glasses, the distant bark of Haag—“Teacher! Student!”—tumbling across the barroom. As the Hooligan swayed before me, he appeared like a stranger. But around us there rose up a swirling narcotic mist. For a moment, I saw all the faces of the men who had made me. The whalers of Nantucket, as they drifted out to sea. The slouching soldiers, wandering through the jungles of Southeast Asia. The knights of the Round Table, slaughtering their enemies in the name of their king. Lancelot, alone, stricken by sin, exiled by his own betrayals. Kwai Chang Caine, in a Shaolin robe, sparring with the Last Electric Knight, as Muhammad the Asian Buddhist Prince duked it out with the Red Baron. And there was Kostya Tszyu and an angry, seething Jesus, fighting for a welterweight title. Beyond the ropes, in the darkness of the Marlintini’s barroom, I could even sense the presence of my father: dressed in his Middlebury College football uniform, kneeling before the broken sword of a Thai warrior in the moments before he brought the man’s daughter back to his country. As the faces swirled in the cigarette smoke over the ring, they all became part of the same story, tied to one another in a single mythology. A hero with a thousand faces, squaring off with Iron John. A solemn, tortured Buddha, meeting his son for the first time before deciding, in the middle of the night, to leave him behind.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
The Hooligan and I stood in the middle of the ring. Then Haag came between us and read the cards, then I felt him raising my hand. “The winner! From a little town called Sitka, Alaska!”
The Wildflower wrapped a belt around my waist. There is a picture of this moment: of me, a towel around my neck, staring directly at the camera. For many years I looked at the photo, laughed at it, because in the details surrounding me you could see the small-time-ness of the Roughhouse Friday boxing show: Haag is standing ringside, in a goofy-looking hat and bow tie. The judges sit at a crooked table, in lawn chairs, in front of a drooping American flag. The Hooligan, standing next to me, looks out of shape. My shorts are too big, my frame too bulky for a boxer.
But sometimes when I look at the photo, I see another story: one that, ultimately, is a message to my father. It was, after all, my father who took the picture. And it is me, after all, who is looking back at him from the ring. Do you see? my face asks the camera. Do you see what I’ve become?
And in that moment, I should have understood the meaning of my name: The quiet vein of violence that ran through me, that made me want to fight, was not my own, did not belong only to me. It was the tail of a much longer story, of friendship and betrayal, race and love, dislocation and war. Of whale hunters and rice farmers, pilgrims and soldiers, sons and lovers. And now it had found its way into my life for a brief moment. And this whole time I had been thinking that I was the weapon, that I was the sword, when, really, I was only its temporary home.
“The Stone!” Haag shouted at the crowd. “Jade ‘the Stone’ Coffin!”
* * *
For the main event, the barroom had grown hot and surly with the heat of the crowd. Everyone was drunk and looking for something to yell about. Roo’s eye had all but closed, and the wound had turned dark purple. I was working his corner. Nicole stood with my father in the crowd, arms crossed, biting her lip. For two rounds, the Backyard Brawler stumbled around the canvas, stiff legged and lost, lacking all grace. Roo slipped and popped and drove uppercuts and right hands through the Brawler’s defense. Between rounds, I told Roo, “You’re good. You’re way up. Just keep your distance.” But Roo wanted more than a mere victory by decision.
The last sixty seconds: Two men, brutally tired, punching blindly, out of their minds with exhaustion. They tumbled and crashed, wrestled and spun, collapsed into each other’s arms. Roo couldn’t stay away. He fought the only way he knew how: recklessly and without restraint. Every time Roo landed a punch, the crowd roared and rose to their feet, and in the last thirty seconds the whole bar was nearly on top of the ring, starving to be a part of what was happening inside it. The Brawler stumbled forward in a daze, teetered around the canvas, staring at the lights, swatting at Roo occasionally, punching at air. With ten seconds left, Roo dropped his fists, fell forward with a looping right hand. The right hand was meant to stuff the Brawler deep into the cavern that he had come out of, a right hand meant to stuff the winter back into its hole until it was time to come out again.
But the Brawler had one final offering: a short hook, thrown blindly from his waist. As Roo’s head dipped forward, the Brawler’s fist found his chin. Roo stood upright for a moment, his limp body held erect by the impact. Then, in a smooth, silent, and effortless motion, Roo fell backward in a perfect arc. His head hit the canvas, bounced once, and remained still.
The Brawler blinked several times before realizing that the fight was over. At his feet, Roo lay before him like a dead man. The ref stood over Roo, looked down at him, waved his hands. Nicole tried to enter the ring, but I held her back. Beyond Roo, the Brawler was dancing in his corner. His men were hugging each other. The crowd, Roo loyalists ten seconds earlier, had changed sides entirely. Haag held the mic but said nothing. The Wildflower cried.
It took a full twenty seconds for Roo to come to. When I hoisted him onto his stool, he was barely conscious. His eyes were glossy and loose. He leaned forward and vomited into a bucket. He puked several more times, and I sponged water on him. Nicole came into the ring, held his head in her hands. His first words: “Laysee, mate. Thass just me been laysee.” He was still half out when he rose to his feet for the decision. He smiled at the crowd and waved off their cheers. As Roo left the ring, he leaned on Nicole, and they made their way back to the hotel. I looked at my father and he looked at me, then we followed behind them.
* * *
