Stick and Jab

After college I didn’t have any money, so my friend Ben arranged for me to fight non-sanctioned MMA matches in his basement. I wrestled in high school, had some boxing experience, so most of my opponents were overmatched—junkies, clueless gym rats, fake tough guys. Usually, I would just hip toss the dude and then pound his face in. That was my signature move. The hip toss and pound. It worked right up until it didn't.

At the time, we lived in a house that used to belong to Ben's grandparents. Ben inherited the house after the cancer and a heart attack. Our friend Jimmy filmed the fights and put them on YouTube. Jimmy was my ring man, my corner consigliere. He gave me brown powder before matches to numb my flesh, to make my soul dick hard (his words, not mine). That summer, I fought white guys black guys brown guys. Tough guys soft guys fat guys short guys. One time, I fought a skinny kid who elbowed me so hard my eyeball almost popped out. For a second, I could feel it dangling there, even as I cinched my arm around the skinny kid's neck. Afterward, once they’d stuck it back in at the Urgent Care, I wondered if I’d briefly been able to see a part of myself no one else could. A hidden compartment. A soul stone.

*

Maybe I should have been more careful. I didn’t need the money that badly. I could have refinanced my loans, applied for a position at the bank. But in the basement with the rock music, with the couches pushed back and the harsh neon lights shining over the stained pavement, all those faces staring at you, it was hard not to get caught up in it. The fervor. The blood sickness. The pageantry.

“Stick and jab stick and jab.” Jimmy knew shit about mixed martial arts, but he was enthusiastic. “Bait him with the hook.” He crouched in front of me, eyes wild and intense. “Wait for your moment and then knock his ass out.”

I fought and won nine matches by August. The videos started to gain steady traction online. Ben was excited. He thought I was championship material, a fat, middle-class Conor McGregor. He started asking around, trying to see if we could get a legitimate bout with real money. His cousin sold a bit of pot and had contacts. One day the call came in. Some Russian kid, some sickle and hammer motherfucker, wanted to take a train down from the city to fight me.

“This is big time,” Ben said. “This is like a message from God.”

We were in Ben’s dead grandparents' living room, drinking vodka from their expensive tea set. Jimmy had the video camera on the table, wired to his shitty laptop. He was chopping up footage. A tiny version of me had a kid in a chokehold, our legs scrabbling on the concrete like mating insects.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy said, tapping keef onto the table, reforming it into smooth piles with his fingers. “What if he's a killer?”

“What if he’s a killer?” Ben laughed. “Shit! Our boy’s a killer.”

“I’m going to do it,” I said. I took the pipe from Jimmy and inhaled the smoke. “Make the call.”

Were we reenacting the plot of Rocky V? We might have been. All our lives we’d been watching movies, taking notes, believing we were people with real talent and skill. Now it was unclear where the screen ended and we began, whether we were really players or just actors, pretenders, spitting out our lines.

*

We expected a large crowd, so Ben's cousin let us use his house for the fight. A big two-story down by the river. We gathered outside on the lawn, clustering around a homemade ring of caution tape tied to four wooden posts. Across the water, a trio of smokestacks blew gray clouds into the approaching dusk, the smell of chemicals and cigarettes thick on the breeze.

The Russian kid was shorter than I expected, skinnier too. A series of dark tattoos ran along his neck and arms. I don't think he spoke much English. We shook hands and his palms were callused like burrs.

Ben and Ben’s cousin both nodded in approval.

“Sportsmanship,” Ben said.

“Solidarity,” said Ben’s cousin.

“Good to see you again,” I said to Ben’s cousin.

“Right,” he said.

Ben's cousin didn’t like me much. I’d briefly dated his girlfriend after he went off to the army. There had been a pregnancy thing, a scare. For a second I’d been a father, then I was nothing again. We never really recovered from that, you see, so I was nervous about the terms of the fight.  The fairness of it. And the crowd… they were older guys—friends of Ben’s cousin and the Russian. Mean and tough-eyed. Like buzzards, ready to eat your guts. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that if I fought and won I would have enough money to move out of Ben’s grandparents’ house and get a real trainer, someone to unlock my true potential, like the phoenix, wings on fire, rising above the sun.

Jimmy and Ben hustled me to my corner. Jimmy reached into his pocket and handed me the brown powder. I snorted it and felt like a jet engine was firing off in my nose.

“Three rounds,” Ben said. “Give it all you got.”

 “Stick and jab,” Jimmy whispered and pushed me into the ring.

The Russian did not come out swinging. He came out grappling, which was usually my game. I threw a cross and he shot my legs. I tried to roll him and he rolled me right back. I worked at cranking his knees, his ankles, but it was like something had rounded off his limbs, there were no handholds or places to find purchase. He wrapped me in his embrace; punched me many times in the ribs and face.

Fuck, I thought.

The bell rang and Jimmy and Ben waved me over. I sat down and spit a lot of blood into the blood bucket. Ben massaged my shoulders while Jimmy rubbed ice on my cheeks.

“Think about your heritage,” Ben said. “What you’re fighting for.”

“Okay,” I said through the mouthpiece. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Fuck that,” Jimmy said. “Don’t fucking die in there.”

Round two. The Russian didn’t waste any time. He came forward, almost smiling, and I was relieved because we weren’t pretending anymore. I knew I was fucked and he knew he was going to fuck me. It almost made it better somehow.

“Stick and jab!” Jimmy shouted. “STICK AND JAB!”

The Russian knocked me back with a combination, swept my legs, and slammed my head on the ground. My nose broke then it became very hard to breathe. All the gunk in my body seemed to exit through my nostrils in one big rush. 

The bell rang.

Over the music, the guys, the older ones, were laughing at me. I didn’t blame them. I had gotten myself into something I didn’t understand. The Russian was trained, that was clear. And what had I been doing? Well... drinking Bud Light and hitting the heavy bag we’d hung from the porch, smoking dabs and running a few miles for cardio. Watching endless kung fu movies and pay-per-view brawls.

Fucking around.

“Wait for your moment,” Jimmy said, “Then use your weight and toss him!”

Right. I still had the ace up my sleeve. The hip toss and pound. I could see it, a clear opening. Once I had him on the ground, I would simply kick, scratch, and claw until the final bell rang. The hip toss is a three-part move. Grab. Step. Throw. The Russian acquiesced to the first two. On the third, he slipped me like a bullfighter, pulled his body away, and left me grasping air. Then I was back on the ground, having my head knocked in. Bags of cement pummeled my ears, my nose, my chin. My eyelid began to swell and swell then it popped with a hiss like air being let out of a tire.

The kid was still swinging when they pulled him off me, those arms like scythes cutting through the wind, pounding invisible ribs, kicking invisible shit.

“Call an ambulance,” someone said, far off in the distance.

I blacked out.

* 

I was in the hospital for some time after that, recuperating. I had three broken ribs, a cracked orbital bone, several other not-so-minor injuries. But it wasn’t that bad. The nurses were kind and busy, overworked. They brought me books to read and talked to me about their lives; their husbands, kids, the young dogs who were still being trained to shit outdoors. The mortgage.

“And another thing?” they said. “We make jack for overtime. We have people’s lives in our hands but we get paid like gas station attendants.”

Jimmy and Ben visited, acting bashful, like we were ten years old again and they’d broken my Spider-Man game while I was at summer camp.

“The kid was a wrestling champion in the old country,” Jimmy said. “We were out of our element.”

“I told my cousin he’s a piece of shit,” Ben added. “He’s not invited to Thanksgiving this year. No way.”

I waved my hand at them. “We’re all good,” I said. “I understand.”

They showed me YouTube clips of the Russian wrestler. “Ivan the Terrible.” There he was, standing in an Olympic arena, grappling with precision, suplexing with aplomb. He was a blood-faced warrior, a goddamn axe murderer, and who was I? A child. A Care Bear. Nothing at all. 

After the hospital discharged me, my parents took me home and I ended up staying with them for a while. When I felt better, I applied for the bank and got my own place, hung up the gloves for good. It sounds cliché, but that beating gave me a new lease on life. Before I was worried about my place in the world, my legacy, whether I was a real person or not. Now, none of that matters. Every day is filled with more beauty than the one before. I want to stoop low and smell the grass; pick blooming flowers and kiss my unborn son on the head. There are no more illusions. I’m not special but that’s okay. The only way to go is forward. Chin down. Hands up. Stick and jab.

Pat Jameson is a writer based in Roanoke, VA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Maudlin House, Apocalypse Confidential, and Hex, among others. His story "Death Drive" was a finalist for the 2022 SmokeLong Quarterly Flash Fiction Award. He is a first reader for Reckon Review.