14
Dopamine Reward
Instead of going to class, he went to the cafeteria, which was empty, and sat alone beneath the ranks of foreign flags hanging from the ceiling. Probation meant that he would remain in school but was on thin ice and would have to behave himself or risk further disciplinary action. He fit the page back in his notebook. ATP becomes ADP leaving you with one free phosphate. He resolved to fail everything. He was going to study nothing but one thing: his mother’s illness. No more math or English. Maybe they’d kick him out. Maybe they’d hold him back.
At the end of second period, his peers started pouring down from upstairs and lining up to eat. The cafeteria gate went up. Kids rushed in to get to the burritos wrapped in foil.
Through the window, he saw Molly outside in the sun, her long reddish-blonde hair hanging down her back. She was with a big guy dressed in a plaid shirt and slouchy blue jeans like a farm boy—a shot-putter on the track team, Corey thought. They were standing together in a haze of sunlight by the granite apple of knowledge, arms around each other’s waists.
Corey went out and hailed them. “Are you cutting?”
The shot-putter turned and squinted. He had reddish whiskers on his chin. Molly shook her head. Out of self-consciousness, perhaps, she didn’t give Corey the warmest welcome. After an awkward minute, he said, “See ya,” and went back inside the modern school with its dark glass windows.
When school let out, he walked all the way to Houghs Neck. He drifted outside the Manet Tavern and wandered through the churchyard, looking at the setting sun.
He was carrying a tire, which he had picked up on the roadside.
Thinking he was alone, he put it against the fence of a baseball backstop and started hitting it.
When a passerby came down the road, past Sacred Heart, in the dusk, he stopped, ashamed, and flung it in the woods as if he were practicing the discus.
When the passerby was gone, he retrieved the tire and started hitting it again.
Sometime later, he started walking again without any plan of going home—or anywhere. Misty night was rolling in from the ocean, suffused with the glow of streetlights on widely spaced masts—old masts of old ships. The blacktop road was empty. Dark trees mantled the town. The fog smelled metallic. His knuckles were white-hot and bleeding. He had a bruise, which moved like a button under his skin. The rubber had left black vulcanized streaks on his knuckles.
As he was cutting through a gas station, a pickup truck shot by him and stopped. Corey recognized the Knaack Box in the back.
“Tom?”
“Get in,” Tom said. “I’ll give you a lift.”
The truck smelled faintly like Egg McMuffin sandwich wrappers, McDonald’s coffee drying in a cup—food-on-Styrofoam smells—vanilla air freshener, and cigars.
“Thanks for picking me up.”
The truck began dinging.
“Your door isn’t shut. Ya gotta shut it.”
Corey reclosed his door. They were zipping into the fog, behind the lances of Tom’s headlights. The ball field blipped by. Something heavy, hard and sharp was in the footwell: a circular saw. The guard had slid up from the blade and a tooth was biting Corey’s ankle.
“I haven’t seen you in forever. How you been?”
“I’m at Home Depot the other day and this guy I know tells me there’s this kid dropping my name all over town who’s fucking off at work.”
“That was me.”
“I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said some kid is lying on his time card, giving people attitude. When he said it was you, I told him he had to be making a mistake.”
“I’ve been fucking up.”
“I heard about you and Dunbar. I said, that’s not the kid I know. What’s the story with you?”
Corey shook his head.
Tom made a series of right turns and they zoomed back the other way. They seemed to be driving out of the fog into civilization—although a temporarily uninhabited one. Their headlights picked out houses, then a playground. Here they actually saw a family—a mom in a Boston Red Sox hat, a dad with a Nerf football, two kids running for a pass on a black ball field. They sped by the statue of Christ in robes—young, pensive, bearded, longhaired. The Ford ate up the distance to the seawall, glowing in a snowy pool of streetlight, the bay flat and black beyond it.
“You only got one reputation. Somebody trusts you,” Tom said, pulling up at Corey’s house.
Corey looked out the window and wept. He dried his face.
“I’ve been having trouble with my father.”
“That’s too bad. What kinda trouble?”
“He’s a punk. He disrespects me.”
Tom remained silent.
“He disrespects my mother.”
“What do you mean, he disrespects her?”
“He took her car and she fell.”
“She fell?”
“My mom has a disease. It’s called Lou Gehrig’s. She’s getting paralyzed, and she can’t drive, so she asked my piece-of-shit father to drive her, and what’s he do? He drops her at work and steals her car for a week. So she takes the T and falls, and when I step to him about it, the guy tells me I’m a piece of shit, I’m a little punk from Quincy. You think that’s right?”
“No. I don’t understand why he’d do that. He shouldn’t do that. Some people are assholes. I didn’t know your mom was sick. Is she going to the doctor?”
“Yes, she does.”
“Is there anything they can do for her?”
“Not really. Once you’ve got it, that’s it.”
“What is it a disease of? Is it like some kind of cancer?”
“It’s neurological. It starts in the brain and starts paralyzing all the nerves that go to your muscles so you can’t move, but you can still feel everything; you can still think; you can still see. You know everything that’s happening to you, and you get weaker and weaker until you can’t do anything. Right now she can’t pick anything up with her left hand. She’s having trouble walking. She’s got a cane. If somebody bumps her, they could knock her over, and here she is taking the T to work, because that scumbag won’t drive her.”
“What’s your father’s problem? What is he, like your stepdad or something? You didn’t used to have him around the house, did you?”
“I probably talked to him four times my whole life until this year. We never lived together. Then my mom gets sick and, boom, he just moves in and starts acting like a fucking psycho. He takes her car. He shows no concern for what he’s doing. He’s a burden in our house. He’s a fucking stranger.”
“My father was a stranger.”
“Did you hate him?”
“I didn’t know him enough to hate him, Corey. He wasn’t around. I just got in a lot of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“We vandalized some guy’s warehouse one time—me and my brothers and my brothers’ friends.”
They were silent.
“I realize that nothing I’ve said is an excuse for fucking off.”
For the moment, Tom seemed to have talked to his limit on the topic. “Don’t worry about it. Life goes on.”
“I’m going to apologize to the guy I was working for.”
“Who were you working for?”
“Some guy named Blecic. We were renovating a house.”
“Didja learn anything?”
“A little drywalling with Dunbar.”
“Drywall is good to know.”
“They had me cut around some pipes. I learned to cut straight. Dunbar was always letting me do his work. It was good because I learned.”
“There’s people ya gotta stay away from.”
“I know now.”
“I had a guy on my site who came in high. I took one look at him and said, ‘You’re going home.’ ”
“I acted like a little punk. I’m not blaming anybody.”
“The problem with guys like Dunbar is they get you in trouble. My brothers’ friends were like that. I was the youngest and they took off on me. The security guard who was guarding the warehouse grabbed me.”
“Fair-weather friends.”
“You lie down with—what is it? dogs?—ya get up with fleas.”
“I’ve got a few fleas on me.”
“Yeah. Get ’em off ya,” Tom said. “Put a flea collar on. Haha!”
“How’s Molly? We’ve barely talked since I saw her play Duxbury.”
“She’s been working hard. At the beginning of the season, her coach told her she was too slow. I think he saw her size and he had some kind of a hang-up about it. He made her do laps around the court or something. That’s what she told me. And he was supposedly always making comments about her weighing too much.”
“What a jackass.”
“He gave her, like, a complex at the start of the season. She was quiet after practice. So finally I asked her what was wrong and she told me. I told her, ‘Don’t worry about what he tells you. You know what you can do. Don’t let this guy get under your skin.’ So, she kinda went out there and showed him. She brought home this rope ladder thing and put it in the street in front of the house and did these foot-speed drills. Whatever the guy told her, she did it double. It paid off. He’s played her every game, and she’s been having a good season.”
“God bless Molly! How did everything go with college? Did she get in?”
“Yeah, UMass is taking her. The coach gave her a recommendation. They’re giving her an athletic scholarship.”
“I’m happy!”
“The thing about her is that she works hard.”
“You’ve got reason to be proud. Like father like daughter.”
“I gotta start making it to her games.”
It was after eight and Tom rose early for work, so they parted. Corey climbed out of the Ford and marched up the steps of his mother’s house. The truck hooked a U-turn and zoomed away behind him. He went straight to his room and threw his newsboy hat in the closet and never wore it again.
That weekend, he helped a pair of local guys fix up their backyard. The guys, who were putting in a fence, disagreed about when and how to put it together. They argued about everything, including what Corey should be doing. He dug out stones and moved them to the edge of the property while they argued. “You’re fine,” they told him, “he’s the problem,” pointing at each other. They bought him a Snapple and a sub both days and, on Sunday, paid him in cash, saying, “This is thanks to all your hard work and the goodness of our hearts.”
First thing Monday, he took his money and his notebook and his mother’s car to school. The notebook contained his driving directions. As soon as the bell rang, he gassed the car at Hess and headed south on Yankee Division Highway.
As he drove it began to rain. The highway traveled under red granite cliffs in the gray rain. A semi humming next to him sent up fountains from its tires. He passed a Speedway gas station and a sign South to Fall River. His wipers and turn signal thumped and clicked as he took the exit. The area had strip malls with lesser-known stores, and there was an incompletely built nature to the place—the pavement gave way to dirt and trees. He passed a sign for Slice of Greek Pizza and a knee-high New England stone wall, overhung by trees. The grass rose like rain falling upward from the earth.
He drove into an office park of sheet-metal buildings and saw the sign for Mixed Martial Arts by a windowless shed. The parking lot was filled with pickup trucks carrying bikes and fishing poles in the back and bumper stickers saying Fighting’s Not a Crime and This Is Sparta.
He parked, jumped over a puddle, and ran inside, wiping water off his head. The first thing that hit him was the smell of feet. The air was hot. There were grappling mats on the floor, Zebra mats on the walls, a row of heavy kicking bags, long as a person is tall, still subtly swinging. An uppercut bag like a plum bob. Title grappling gloves, Ringside boxing gloves, Team Aggression kicking shields, Everlast hand wraps, Fairtex shin pads spilling out of homemade wooden shelves. A squat rack, barbells, and kettlebells. A spit bucket covered in dried blood. An icebox with a sign: Water $1. Trophies on the counter, banners on the wall: UFC MGM Grand, Ericsson Globe Arena, Key Arena, Bell Centre, USF Sun Dome—with endorsements: Wild Wing, Sprawl, Lexani, Training Mask, Revgear, Venum, Headrush, Instaloan, TRX, Versaclimber, Torque, Dethrone Royalty, Alienware, Muscle Pharm, Kill It Clothing, Hayabusa, Jitz, Contract Killer, Pain Inc.
There was a cage in the back of the room and several guys were lying sprawled around it with their backs against the mesh, sweat-drenched, in a state of exhaustion. Their skin was reddened, chafed and bruised. One had a healing black eye. Their knees and elbows and the bottoms of their feet were blackened by the dirty canvas. They sat in their fatigue, picking up water bottles between their boxing mitts and aiming the water into their mouths.
Corey asked if he had come to the right place to train.
“Yeah, but you gotta come back later. The regular class won’t start until—when does it start? Five? Come back at five. Eddie should be here.”
He went to the Slice of Greek to wait. The drizzle was keeping up outside. He got a slice of pizza. As he ate, he recalled that, when he had come home flush with optimism after talking to Tom, he’d encountered Leonard sitting on their futon, reading a yellow hardcover mathematics text in his fedora and boxer shorts. Corey had knocked on his mother’s bedroom door to ask if there was anything for him to eat. Behind him, Leonard had turned a page and said: “What’s the matter? You’re a big-time drug dealer. You can’t afford to buy yourself dinner?”
What Corey hadn’t known was that, while he’d been talking to Tom, his mother had been talking to Leonard—about money. She’d somehow let slip she was out two hundred fifty dollars—the amount she’d lost bailing Corey out of his entanglement with Anthony the hairdresser. The whole story had come out about Corey’s abortive drug-dealing experiment. Leonard had said, “I’m not surprised.” Gloria hadn’t wanted to tell him, but now that she had, she hoped he would “step up,” as she put it, “and show Corey a little guidance.”
“I’m supposed to help your son?”
“Suit yourself, Leonard. He’s your son too,” Gloria had said, and gone to her room on her unsteady legs.
Corey had heard the details of this exchange from his mother after the fact.
At the time, when Leonard accosted him about paying for his own dinner, Corey had replied, “I don’t know what you heard, but I don’t want to talk to you about this.”
Through the door, his mother said there was chicken for him in the freezer. Corey turned his back on his father and returned to the kitchen. He was microwaving a precooked chicken patty when Leonard appeared in the doorway, holding handcuffs.
“Do you want to get arrested?”
Corey backed away. “What are you doing?”
“You’re going to be wearing these at the rate you’re going.”
Leonard hung around watching Corey while the chicken cooked. The timer dinged and Corey took his steaming chicken patty out of the microwave and put ketchup on it and took it to his room. Leonard followed him. Corey shut his door on him and sat at his desk to eat. He could hear Leonard outside his door. Outside his door, Leonard flicked the handcuffs and made the bracelet spin around and ratchet into the locking mechanism. Corey heard Leonard moving all around their house, ratcheting the handcuffs, slowly pushing the steel bracelet through the locking mechanism click by click by click.
He went back at five and met the coach, Eddie, instantly identifiable, circling around the mat, explaining technique to early arrivals to the grappling class. “Oh, you want to train?” He excused himself from his students—“Let me take care of this”—and took Corey aside so they could talk.
Lean and heavy-boned rather than stocky, Eddie’s torso had a boardlike flatness. With his muscular neck and clean-cut head, he looked like a swimmer. But his ears, absent the usual cartilage whorls, stuck out like a monkey’s or bat’s ears on either side of his buzzed head. The bridge of his nose was thickened and his forehead and cheekbones had knobby prominences like bumps on a mace, as if his whole head had become a hitting tool. It was hard to tell his age. He was a professional fighter. He could have been anywhere from twenty to forty. He asked Corey if he had any experience with martial arts, boxing or wrestling. Corey said no: just a street fight he had lost.
Eddie said then maybe he’d like to try a class. He sent him to get a pair of shorts from the locker room. Corey came out, barefoot, dressed in a borrowed pair of Venum board shorts.
On the mat, the class was paired up, one student on his back, another kneeling between his legs. Most were male, but some were women. Some women were paired with men. Everyone was in the guard.
The guard, Eddie explained, was the defining position of Brazilian jiujitsu, a grappling system developed by the Gracie clan in the early twentieth century, based on traditional jiujitsu, which Japanese travelers brought to South America. The founder of the art, Hélio Gracie, a physically frail youth, pioneered an approach to combat based on conserving energy through efficient movement with the goal of outlasting an opponent and wearing him down. The guard was where you might wind up after being pinned on your back by a bigger, stronger adversary. You wrapped your legs around his waist like a woman with whom he was having sex. This position of apparent weakness, in Hélio’s method, became one of strength. You pulled the top man in, broke his posture, sucked him in, thwarting, smothering, fatiguing, unbalancing, sweeping him over, trapping him in chokes and joint-lock submissions with your legs.
Eddie demonstrated. He locked his legs around Corey’s waist, gripped his wrists so he couldn’t use his hands, and pulled him in. Corey fell face-first on the wall of the coach’s abdomen. Then Eddie shoved his head away, spun on his back, threw a leg across his face and put him in an armlock that straightened out his elbow to the breaking point.
“That’s an arm bar.”
Eddie let him spend the rest of the class having his body bent and stretched in weird ways by his partners.
Midway through the night, he was matched up with another novice—a guy named Troy who worked at the Finish Line, a sneaker store in South Shore Plaza. Troy tried to bully him, Corey got sore, and the two of them started wrestling in anger.
“Whoa!” people said. “White-belt fight!”
They were head-locking each other. Someone told them to calm down. They didn’t listen. Troy twisted and threw Corey on the mat. He fell in Corey’s guard. Out of nowhere, Corey shoved Troy’s head away, threw a leg over his shoulder, put him in an arm bar and made him tap.
“I can’t believe he got me. I’m stronger than he is.”
“Troy, you can’t leave the arm in there for him.”
Corey went home, speeding on the wide nighttime highway going north, listening to Aerosmith’s “Big Ten-Inch Record” on WAAF. That night he couldn’t sleep. He got out of bed and borrowed his mother’s laptop. He looked up Brazilian jiujitsu online and sat in the dark watching videos of submissions.
The next day in school, he invited a hockey player out into the hallway to wrestle around. The jock was muscular and strong but had no idea what he was doing and Corey submitted him easily.
He went back to Bestway. “You’re back,” said Eddie—“Go on, get out there”—and sent him out on the mat for class. This time he had his own shorts. They didn’t talk business until after training. “Did you like it?” Eddie asked. That seemed to be all Eddie wanted to hear, that someone might love what he loved and share its infinite value. There was not so much concern over money. Corey would pay tomorrow or the day after or soon. He’d have to sign a waiver. Since he was sixteen, a parent would have to sign it for him.
This was conveyed in Eddie’s unique way: He talked in rapid run-on bursts in which you couldn’t tell the individual words apart but could get the general sense of what he meant. Everything was vague, everything but athletic technique. In his obsession with martial arts, Eddie was so fixated on an alternate world, a quasi-mathematical system, that, combined with his relative silence, which could read as shyness, he seemed—almost—like a gamer geek. Maybe he was shy. He didn’t like talking. He was from Brockton and his accent was a rural twist on the East Coast Boston sound of dropped r’s.
So Corey began going to BJJ class. He gave Eddie a down payment of fifty dollars, all the cash he had saved, and a permission slip signed in his mother’s shaky handwriting. Within a week, he was staying late to roll with purple belts who cared more about what they called flowing—noncompetitively chaining techniques together, almost a form of partner meditation—than getting up for work in the morning. They would have stayed all night exchanging techniques; they all had Eddie’s bug.
Corey flipped a page in his notebook and began keeping track of what he was learning, which he illustrated with human figures locked in combat. There were innumerable techniques and limitless combinations. To master a single thing, you had to embed it in muscle memory by drilling it ten thousand times—or one hundred times a day for about three years. Scoring on somebody, tapping them out, brought an addictive rush of power thanks to the dopamine reward system, a feature of brain neurology that keeps the chess player playing chess and the cocaine addict snorting cocaine—a phenomenon he had read about in physiology, though it was not a topic that Mrs. Clark assigned.
Instead of doing homework, he lay on his room floor at night and did arm bars on invisible Troys. Holding his textbook over himself like an enemy, he reread the chapters on nerves and muscles.
Around the house, his mother saw him perpetually reviewing what he was learning at the gym, twisting on the floor, as if he had a special kind of palsy. Corey announced that he was training in an art that was mathematical and infinite. He said, “When I can afford it, I’m going to go for another month.”
His mother called him over and gave him her credit card.
“No, Mom. I don’t think it’s responsible of me under the circumstances.”
“Corey, I want you to.”
Finally he accepted. He told his mother, “I’m going to pay you back.”
By the end of April, the trees had started blooming in the rain—millions of yellow-green buds arrayed in three-dimensional space throughout the armature of the dark wet branches under the gray spring sky—and the landscape seemed to shrink, screened off by foliage. Sunrise featured new and intensely beautiful violets and pinks, as if the sun were shining through a piece of watermelon candy. Early one morning, Corey went to his old job site and found the house had been completely refurbished. He wandered through, looking for the boss. The interior walls had been plastered and painted, the floors carpeted and tiled. The kitchen ceiling, which Corey had degreased, had been torn out and replaced, just as Dunbar had said it would be, and was now a brand-new plane of low-gloss white.
Around back, he found the boss meeting with a group of older men in clean mackinaws and sweatshirts, holding coffee cups in hands that wore wedding rings, looking at blueprints.
“Could I speak with you a second?” Blecic turned and Corey put out his hand. “I made a mistake.”
“I don’t have anything for you.”
“I’m just here to apologize.”
The fearsome set of Blecic’s strong features relaxed. He didn’t offer Corey his job back but talked with him a little, in a guiding way, about life and work. In his youth, he said, he had served in the army in the former Yugoslavia. Mountain training had been arduous. Wearing a pack and holding a rifle, he could do knee bends with another soldier, similarly accoutered, on his shoulders. When he got to the United States, he had worked at a meatpacking plant for a year—heavy, repetitive lifting. “I lose fifty pounds. I am your size.” Then he had started his own construction company, doing all the work himself—plumbing, electrical, even finish carpentry—“beautiful, like antique.” He’d built his own house, where he still exercised with gymnastic equipment as in his army days.
Corey said he was proud to know him. They shook hands and that was that.
The rain began letting up at the end of April. Corey sought jobs on Craigslist. He cleaned a homeowner’s grill; reorganized a basement rec room, which was full of hockey sticks, beanbag chairs, sleeping bags, and toys; and disassembled Ikea furniture.
He was too preoccupied with his new obsession to visit Adrian. They talked once by phone before the end of the month, and he told Adrian excitedly that he was taking martial arts.