SEAN WAS OFTEN SILENT, BUT IT WAS a particular form of silence not like other silences I had known, because it was complete, sub-textless, with no electric buzzing underneath the breathing. The fact that he never asked me about myself signaled not a lack of interest but an excess of delicacy, and it was by no means in his nature to look beyond the present moment, backward toward our origins or forward to our plans. In this way we had become quite intimate without knowing the details of one another’s lives. Three months into our partnership he still did not know, for instance, that both of my parents had expired before their thirtieth birthdays. And though I knew his wife had left him, I did not know her name. In St. Louis we would be removed from the site of his domestic woes, and it was my intention to come to know the other Sean, the Sean who trained and fought and won.
Sean’s early victories had come to him in a pure form no longer available to the aspirant fighter or ecstasy-seeking scholar. Five, six years before my arrival, you’d waltz into a strip club, walk up to the DJ, put your name and weight on a list. “OK,” a man would say, someone nominally in charge, “we’ll find you someone round about your weight class,” but you wouldn’t expect anything like parity, because there were never enough volunteers. On the list would be lithe high school wrestlers and middle-aged tough-guy drunks and men who thought fighting their one true calling. The Amsterdam Gentlemen’s Club had a cage. Admission was fifteen dollars; your compensation, as a fighter, was that you got in free. From their fold-up chairs fans leaned forward and blew cigarette smoke through the fence, behind which men fought in jeans in between beers. When the man in charge ran out of fighters he’d ask the fighters to fight again, and Sean always said yes. He never lost an amateur fight, not once. Thirty times he fought this way.
When I imagine those old fights, it’s as if the Iowans were trying to reclaim some lost rites no one bothered to pass down. Because of course it’s much harder to find an ecstatic spectacle in the otherwise dull and limited present than in the great sweep of historical time. If you were a fourteenth-century Latvian looking to leave yourself, you might mask up and dance through the streets reveling in Rabelaisian wonder, until the Catholic Church stopped you; were you a nineteenth-century Paiute Indian in the American West, you might try your hand at ritual millenarian dance, until the army stopped you; or an ancient maenad, join the other womenfolk in ripping apart a live goat in the Greek countryside, until exhaustion stopped you. It was the Iowa state legislature that laid waste to this particular spectacle, and so by the time our story starts all that I just described, from the sign-up list down to the smoking, had been decreed illegal by some undereducated legislators in Des Moines. They replaced the glorious spontaneity of old with prefight paperwork: insurance, licenses, blood tests. Not that I’m complaining, because these paper-pushers only gave credence to my conviction that I’d found the true center of ecstatic activity. It would just take a little more work to get there.
Miletich only took you on if he thought you could be the best in the world, and for a long while, Sean looked that way. In 2006 his record of combined amateur and professional fights was 37-and-1, the record of a man destined for the Big Shows. Were I a narrator given to believe that great events stem from a single cause; were I a narrator who relied on epiphanical plot points; why, I might write: And then Sean met his wife. But I am not that narrator. I will merely point out that four years from that happy time, a number of less-talented Miletich protégés from Sean’s cohort were fighting before packed audiences in Vegas, had opened gyms named after themselves, paid off mortgages by auctioning off advertising space on their shorts. Sean was still fighting at promotions that staged their events in high school gyms. He was living, alone, in a cracked concrete hole, the basement of a friend on welfare. Between 2006 and 2010 he had lost fourteen fights, as many as he had won in as much time. I met Sean in the midst of a divorce-induced depression.
So I suppose you could say I came late to the fair, but that’s not how I see it. If I had missed Sean at 155 pounds and undefeated; if I had missed Davenport in the days of purest violence; if I only saw the fearsome Pat Miletich in his gentle dotage; well, does not every human story open midscene? It only made the chase a bit more of a challenge. Perhaps I had missed the peak of spectacle-based glory, but I had come at just the moment when Sean was ready to start climbing his way back up, and wouldn’t a Kit who had come and left a decade earlier have envied the chance to see that?
St. Louis would be, in a sense, a glorious concordance for the both of us. Sean needed a new start, a postdivorce victory on which to rebuild his record and begin his inevitable ascent to the Big Shows. And for all the fights Sean had lost, for all the time he had wasted, I had frittered away at least as many life-years on bloodless scholastic exercises. It had taken me far too long to find a proper object of study. I hoped terribly that Sean was the man to bring me inside the world of ecstatic experience, that we might both finally be on the way to the truths we were seeking.
On the appointed day, I left my quaint little university town, drove the sixty miles of swaying cornfields to industrial Davenport, and showed up, as usual, at his doorstep. I then removed three Matchbox cars and a broken plastic Ferris wheel from the landlord’s couch and patiently waited as Sean readied himself in the basement. I had of course constructed a phenomenological theory about my odd reaction to the violent encounter in Des Moines, and a predictive one relating to St. Louis, but I still knew next to nothing about what lay ahead.
“Looks like this promoter has serious money,” said Sean as we turned onto the highway, toward St. Louis.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Not sure.”
He thought for a while.
“Something ‘MMA.’”
The news that the nameless St. Louis promoter was the kind with resources was something of a comfort, because over the summer I had listened as Sean and his friends told stories of the kind who did not. There was, for instance, the promoter who left Sean waiting hours for cash after a fight, who was preferable to the one who handed out checks not worth the trip to the bank to watch them bounce. There was the promoter who disappeared after the final bout, leaving fifteen befuddled fighters staring blankly at one another while janitors placed folding chairs on rolling carts. There was the promoter who appeared with the cash box only to fake a heart attack and be ferried away in an ambulance carrying said cash box; this had happened to Sean’s friend Jason, and I took the tale to be emblematic of the degenerate promoter class.
“Where are we going, exactly?” I asked as we crossed the Missouri River and, like slow clock-gongs from some faraway town, steel plates clicked under our tires.
“Dunno,” Sean said, “Brian wants us to call him when we get to St. Louis.”
“Who is Brian?”
“Just a guy.”
And yet there were dark possibilities money did nothing to dispel. He might, for instance, be the kind of promoter who would switch Sean’s opponent at the last minute, leaving him to face a 200-pound Hispanic man who goes by the moniker “Mexicutioner,” or the kind of promoter who forgets to obtain the requisite permits and is shut down by the state, or the kind to store us in a whore-and-flea-ridden crackhouse as an economical alternative to a hotel. This last misfortune had befallen a local fighter named John, as well as John’s long-suffering wife Lisa, and I, for one, was afraid. But I also was conscious that to be small and openly worried was the opposite of helpful, and so I merely breathed deeply, as a therapist of Korean descent had once told me to do in such situations, and refrained from asking the obvious questions. Our immense ignorance about what lay ahead over the next forty-eight hours might just as well lead to a succession of delightful surprises, I reasoned, and thus to worry was to betray an unprofessional propensity for negative thinking.
Of course the sources of my worry extended beyond the subject of lodging. Day and night I thought of that head-clearing expansive feeling first made known to me in Des Moines. Whatever had happened in April to rid me of myself for a few brief moments—take me away from that insistent corporeal yawp (“Eat this! Sleep now!”)—might never happen again, though I had passed my summer spacetaking on a bet that it would. My hope was that not only would I be subject to such ecstatic lightness in St. Louis, but that this time I would be prepared, would be studying the elements involved and watching as they fell into alignment. I wanted to capture it, subject it to close observation. I had taken to carrying a notebook in my bag, and jotting down anything that seemed relevant.
“Hungry?” asked Sean somewhere in Illinois. On the five-hour drive we stopped at both McDonald’s and Hardee’s. “I like life,” Sean said, in response to an accusation I did not make.
I told him that I’d read some fighters cut weight and for weeks at a time restrict themselves to 500 calories per day, the equivalent perhaps of the Santa Fe sauce on Sean’s Thickburger, and Sean cocked his head and said that a real fighter should just be able to get in the octagon and knock around people his own size. Sean had a lot of opinions about real fighters, but he also kept saying that he needed to “drop thirty pounds.”
“You said that months ago.”
“And they’ve been terrible months.”
“I wouldn’t say terrible,” I said, conscious that these were the very months Sean had spent largely in my presence.
“I don’t believe in marriage anymore,” he said a moment later, at which point I realized that we were talking about his just-finalized divorce. He told me a story about a woman he knew who slept with her wedding caterer while still in her gown and veil. “You stand in your white dress,” he said, glancing at the rearview mirror and changing lanes. “You stand in your white dress and pretend you’re a virgin and make a commitment to a God you don’t believe in. For what.”
“For what” did not seem the mystery Sean implied, given that every landmark in Illinois, every pit stop in Missouri, prompted some memory of a road trip taken with his wife. They’d visited the contiguous forty-eight states, even the eerily empty Dakotas. He had made sandwiches and she had fed him pretzels one by one while he drove them over the Badlands.
“Wife,” I wrote in my notebook. “Prefight self-pity.”
“So,” said Sean, one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding his Thickburger. “This book you’re writing about me.”
He said this with the air of someone who had caught on to a secret. At the time I had no intention of writing a book about anyone, but he seemed gratified by the idea, and it gave me pleasure to give him some. I said nothing.
“Some kind of girl book?”
“I don’t think it will be a girl book,” I said.
An hour later, we pulled up to a brick behemoth gone soot-covered around the edges, the kind of building raised long ago to manufacture something now forgotten, all boarded-up windows, walls of brick, postindustrial silence. Massive cylinders shot up into a late afternoon light too sharp for a prolonged stare. We milled around, hot and squinting, until Sean located an aperture, and together we climbed concrete steps that literally crumbled under our feet, sending bits of rock skipping down the lot. Therein was a darkness full and deep, and as I reminded myself that I was accompanied by a highly trained practitioner of the fighting arts, the dark resolved itself into a room dotted with slim bodies at work. Many yards beyond them, pinpricks of light beamed from the boarded-up windows. Someone pushed a great length of extension cord out from the reach of a standing camera.
“Huffman?” said a woman with an earpiece and a clipboard, and gestured toward a boxy steel freight elevator. “Over here.”
Sean paused, looked around, stripped to his shorts, and proceeded to act as if this were an entirely normal experience for him.
“Stand against the brick, by those pipes.”
A man poured a translucent substance onto Sean’s back, rubbed him down top to bottom. He flicked on a spotlight, and every pore on Sean’s oiled body popped into view.
“Posture up,” said the photographer. The oil man pointed a spray bottle at Sean and squirted.
“Dance.”
Squirt.
“Hop around.”
Sean’s hops were earnest but far from convincing.
“Try shadowboxing.”
He swiveled his shoulders and his slight paunch followed a moment later. White flesh lapped over the elastic band in his shorts. A machine kicked on, spit fog.
“Look mean!”
The fog helped. As Sean posed, two adolescents emerged in jeans and T-shirts, and I realized with some dismay that I was in the presence of two ring girls. Over the past months I had read intensely on the subject of spectacle, thinking it relevant to my experience in Des Moines, and I had formed opinions about the proper way agents of spectacle ought to conduct themselves. These women, I thought, ought not let us see them shorn of their costumes so soon before the event itself. It occurred to me that they would both benefit from a brief explanation of Heideggerian thrownness (the “poignant sense of having been hurled into the world without preparation or consent,” to the layman) and I considered walking over to their corner of the room. But I had also, in Sean’s bathroom the previous week, plucked from the crown of my head what may or may not have been a first gray-brown hair glinting in the frosted light of the single window, and I did not wish to be in potentially unflattering proximity to a pair of nineteen-year-olds.
“You’re done,” said the woman with the earpiece. She motioned toward a spiral staircase half-hidden by the dark, sending us upstairs for “the video component.” And it was upstairs that I first met Josh Neer, who Sean said was the fight’s biggest draw, tracing his finger along the curving edge of an abdominal muscle. Josh Neer was a hard-bodied fighter everyone seemed to know already, and destined to be an annoyance to me, because he was a startling counterpoint to my theory that fighters are an uncommonly intellectual breed. But Neer belonged in this circle of cameras, could have been winking as his open shirt flip-flapped in the wind. His face was board-flat with a high forehead and broad nose—a classic fighter face, run off the same mold in the fighter factory that also produced his spacetaker, Andy, who would pad after Neer to every stop in the promotional itinerary. Neer and Sean both had that stumpy neck fighters need, the one that keeps your head tight to your body instead of letting it stray willy-nilly like a windblown reed, but Neer got his unbreakable features from God. Nothing protrudes from that flat wall of a face—not a fine triangle of a cheekbone, not a slim beak of a nose. Two small eyes have tucked themselves safely under his brow. Whereas Sean. Sean’s flatness comes not by God but by man. Sean is soft clay crudely pressed into shape, the curves of his nose pounded into the side of his face where it waits in a protective hunch.
“P. Diddy!” said Neer, and slapped Sean’s hand. Sean didn’t know why Neer called him P. Diddy, but nor did he feel compelled to question Josh Neer’s judgment. “P. Diddy!” said Andy, and slapped Sean’s hand. Darryl Cobb, Sean’s opponent, was there too, and in the anxious silence his pectoral muscles announced themselves. He sighed and drummed the fingers of his right hand against his solidly percussive stomach. It was hard not to notice the alarming circumference of Cobb’s left bicep as he pressed it against his taut black torso, but Sean was at least pretending not to notice.
The video crew placed each fighter on a crate, against a backdrop of brick, in a space below a boom mike. I faced the video setup so as to avoid looking at a ring girl, who was leaning against a windowsill and, rather disturbingly, reading a book.
“What’s going to happen Saturday night?” a fidgeting woman asked each fighter from a director’s chair off-camera.
“First-round knockout,” said Neer.
“First-round knockout,” said Cobb.
“How do you train?” she asked Sean.
“Um,” said Sean, “I should probably train a little harder.”
“What?”
“Well, I’m a little heavy, you can see that. I should be fighting at one-fifty-five. I should eat better and train harder.”
“OK. People don’t usually say that.”
“Yeah.”
“Your opponent says he is going to knock you out.”
Sean paused to look at the camera, eyebrows raised, and provided the audience with a long moment in which to register his skepticism. The woman in the director’s chair was growing bored by the need to coax some trash-talk out of these men. Perhaps she too realized how futile this was, had sensed that fighting summons a kind of void to which words are wholly inadequate, a kind of precious prepsychological space, and that any fighter’s attempt to translate the anonymous void of the octagon into words could not help but be an embarrassment for all involved.
“He isn’t going to knock me out. I ain’t never been knocked out and it’s not going to start now.”
I hadn’t yet heard Sean use the word “ain’t,” but it felt apt in the given context.
“You guys want to run with us?” Neer asked Sean and Sean’s friend Brian when the interviews were over. Neer’s hands rested on his hips in a way that suggested his biceps were just too big to lay lifeless against his body.
Brian looked at Sean. “We’re going to kick it B-team style,” he said. Neer laughed. Andy laughed.
“Right. P. Diddy style. You’re going to get a pizza.”
This proved inaccurate; we did not get a pizza because Sean felt like sushi, which the three of us would find at a strip mall somewhere in a St. Louis satellite town. Before we left, Sean warned me not to bring up the subject of God; if I pointed us in this direction we’d be pulled along the entire arc of Brian’s conversion narrative. Sean was tolerant of religion within certain bounds: “There’s religion, and then there’s being stupid” was his stated view on the matter, but he didn’t want to have to nod politely all evening.
It was in the context of a fight that Brian and Sean first met, five years previous; minutes after they first laid eyes on one another, Brian laced both of his legs around Sean’s neck and tucked his left toes under the back of his right knee in a triangle so tight Sean tapped. It seems to me that this kind of first meeting will lead to an intense intimacy that renders future relations uncomfortable, unless one of the participants is Sean, who is incapable of the kind of nervousness necessary to sustain an awkward moment.
We packed into a wooden booth and Brian tore the paper off his chopsticks with his teeth.
“This is my last fight before Bible college,” said Brian. “I’m done with this.”
“What’s Bible college?” I asked. Sean tilted his head and looked at me in a way that suggested he did not want me to ask encouraging follow-up questions.
“Hold on,” said Brian, “I have to tell my grandma I got here safely or she won’t go to sleep.”
Brian had gone on a mission trip to Nicaragua the previous summer, and while he was helping to repair a church he taught the local wrestling team some submissions. None of the kids spoke English, but you didn’t need English to teach kids how to choke one another. “I had this kid in a Kimura,” said Brian when he returned from conversing with his grandmother, “and it was so amazing, and I realized that this was God’s plan for me. When I was a teenager I really strayed from God, from His plan for me, and that moment brought me back.”
Brian was only twenty-four, in shape, quite well respected on the regional circuit, but he carried already the self-conception of a losing, injury-laden fighter. During almost every fight, he told us, his shoulder popped out of its socket like a drawer sent off its roller. He popped it back in himself.
“My shoulder hurts,” said Brian as he put down the chopsticks and lifted a piece of tuna from the platter with his fingers. “You guys, I don’t even like sushi.” He placed the tuna back onto the platter.
At thirty-two Sean was a much older fighter than Brian but in no sense as beaten down, as chiseled away. I knew by then all of his injuries and the way they had faded into memory. After being opened Sean’s body assimilates the surgical screws and the scar tissue, and not until he presses his skin against the knurled bone underneath, like running his tongue against the pocked surface of an ice cube, does he remember quite where something split. His wounds don’t call out to be remembered. Even his self-image adjusts; his nose has always been this crooked, his ears always this gnarled. This is perhaps why Brian has reconciled himself to the B-team, while Sean continues to talk about “a serious run” or “a serious go,” pictures himself victorious at the Big Shows, and resists any job more long-term than bouncing Saturdays at a Bettendorf bar.
Sean would be fighting at 185, and arrived in St. Louis, like Brian, ten pounds over. They would be weighed-in twenty-four hours before the fight began so that they would have time to binge and rehydrate; starved, desiccated, brittle bodies are vulnerable to the kind of injuries for which no promoter wants to pay. It wasn’t unusual to be so overweight the day before weigh-ins, Sean told me; Neer and Cobb probably had ten pounds of water to lose as well. The difference seemed to lie in the fact that the following morning, six hours before weigh-ins, Neer was running laps around the hotel, while Brian and Sean were in a hotel room inhaling marijuana smoke through a hole punched in a Mountain Dew can.
Sean’s room was adjacent to Neer’s, and their two balconies were separated by a wooden divider.
“Whose shorts are these?” Sean asked.
“They’re Neer’s,” laughed Brian. “I took them off his balcony, he’s going to get so mad.”
“You took Neer’s shorts and put them on my balcony? Holy shit Brian, what the fuck.”
Sean clasped the corners of Neer’s shorts between two fingers of each hand, and placed them, with extreme primness, on Neer’s side of the divider. He twice patted a wrinkle, smoothed them out with both palms, and returned to his bong.
“You know what I’d love to do,” he said after a slow smoky exhale, “but I just have no idea how to get into it? I would love to be a mercenary. You travel all around, do whatever the fuck you want. I would totally do that.”
Brian scratched his knee. Light from the window fell in a thick stripe across the unmade bed.
As the afternoon wore on, and Brian and Sean gossiped about fighters, napped, smoked, and finally did some laps around the parking lot, the promoters were at work below them, transforming a hotel conference room into a stage set for the ceremonial weigh-ins they would broadcast over the Internet. I left Brian and Sean as they headed toward the real weigh-ins, to which I was not allowed—whereby the state of Missouri would determine each fighter’s relationship to Earth’s mass, check off some official-looking pieces of paper, and send them along—and descended to the lobby for the Potemkin weigh-ins, which would be filmed afterward.
By now several aspects of the “Fight Me MMA” situation had become clear. This promoter was quite obviously new, confused, under the impression that there was real money to be made in showcasing regional fighters to local audiences. He had hired a staff of maybe twenty people, all of whom wore their earpieces with an unnecessary ostentation, and insisted with the imperfectly arched brows of lesser tyrants that everyone badge-flash at each impromptu checkpoint. He was paying the fighters more than the going rate, paying for all the videos, paying for ring girls with uncommonly good dye jobs, paying perhaps for their matching knee-high black patent-leather boots. And he was, in the flesh, a disgrace. What I saw in Kenny Nowling, the moment he stepped into my field of vision, what I saw through his excess of exposed chest hair, his three gold chains, his product-hardened coiffure, was nothing less, and nothing more, than a shadow.
“Where’s Jessica?” he asked, panic elevating his voice to a feminine pitch. “Tell Jessica I need her. Where’s the Athletic Commissioner? Get me a water. No, Josh, stand there. Yes, that’s great, you’ll walk out last.”
“The buffet is late!” Kenny shouted at no one in particular. His brother Michael, in a Rolex, alligator-skin shoes, dark glasses, and the only suit in the room, stood beside him. These were not men to inspire confidence in the making of a spectacle. They were, it turned out, a couple of Midwestern drag-racing tycoons, men who had succeeded in one domain and thought to conquer an additional realm they neither deserved nor understood. Up until this moment I had thought myself perfectly open to whatever St. Louis might deliver, but I had all along been hoping for a spare simulacrum of those early fights in Davenport strip clubs—a simple unscripted encounter unsullied by tycoons of any kind, not to mention a “video component” and stage direction.
Some sort of minor show was already organizing itself. The ring girls were in character now, posing on a dais beside a fighter. Most of the other fighters were lined up against the wall, waiting their turn for a ceremonial weight-check. The show had started, the cameras were on, here was the ersatz thing itself. Kenny thanked a long list of people, culminating in his fiancée, Jessica, and his brother, the aforementioned Michael, at which point he started to cry real, actual tears, there beside the previously positioned bare-torsoed ring girls and a single stacked fighter and the forty or so people who had come to watch, some of whom seemed to be curious hotel guests wondering why the Sheraton was full of shirtless men.
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” Kenny said to his brother. “Come up here.”
His brother walked the two steps from his seat to the makeshift stage. A slight air of hysteria wrinkled its way through the crowd. The promoter was crying and his brother was waving and the ring girl was smiling and the fighter was flexing and everyone was stalling, because one of the twenty-four fighters was late for the photo-op. The fighter was Sean.
“Who’s missing?” asked one assistant to another.
“The Miletich fighter” was the response, delivered, I might add, with a raised eyebrow, a touch of schadenfreude, a whiff of affected wistfulness for the days in which no Miletich fighter would have delayed this absurd to-do. Implicit in those three words was the entire invented history of Davenport, all the stories told in all the bars of one man’s heroic defense of himself. This was not a mold Sean necessarily fit. (“I love fighting but I also love sleeping,” Sean had said earlier that day.) Perhaps the legend was already dead. In this crowd, mention of Miletich seemed to lead to either a foggy “Is he still alive?” look, or to the conversation Sean and Brian were having on the way back from the sauna to the conference room, where Sean would finally stand before the camera and reveal himself to be an acceptably trim 185.5.
“Robbie Lawler too? All those guys are gone?” asked Brian.
“Yeah,” said Sean.
“Wow. I can’t believe that’s all the Miletich guys you can name. Is anyone still there?”
“Me.”
•
My theory about octagons is this: There is really only one octagon, and that one flickers in and out of existence over space and time, such that the very same octagon is summoned to consciousness over and over again. The fighters all know they have something to summon; why else the little bow at the cage door, the solemn straight-faced walk-out, the open-mouthed prayer as their brows are Vaseline-slathered. “Enter the octagon,” says the announcer, and suddenly it’s there. Except when it isn’t, for the theory also accounts for the fights that failed: the octagon neglects to show up. These are the fights we all leave disappointed, depressed, feeling vaguely dirty for having witnessed whatever we had just witnessed. The cruelty without the “theater of.” We know these fights by the way they fail to bring us outside of ourselves; rather, they drive us deeper in, make us quiet and sick and wondering whether our past ecstasies have been mere illusion.
And though I would not have put it this way at the time, what I very much wanted to know in St. Louis was which were the elements that brought forth the octagon, and which that kept it away, and how one kept the elements in sync such that the integrity of the spectacle might be best protected. I would have liked a spreadsheet or a bulleted memo to this effect.
I bopped along to the music Kenny Nowling was blasting as he forced us to stand in the August heat. I believe it was some kind of rap. In addition to his musical selections Kenny wished us to admire the full-size bus he’d slapped with the logo “Fight Me MMA,” before which he stood as he addressed the fighters in the parking lot beside the arena, a few hours before the fight.
“We want you to come back and fight for us,” he said, smiling, oleaginous in the summer sun. The fighters were confused by all the ceremony; perhaps they were being buttered up for some cruel letdown, something about the lack of funds to pay them. Instead we were led to a locker room with a television that took up half the wall, the screen filled with the still-empty octagon, and a dozen lockers labeled with the fighters’ names. The lockers, upon further inspection, each contained bags bursting with swag. Their names were sewn into the sides.
For a moment the only sound to be heard in the locker room was that of zippers unzipping. Hands breaking into packages: an iPod, a mousepad, a pen, T-shirts, cologne.
“Fight for you?” Sean said, tearing plastic from the iPod, “I will hook for you.”
“I can use this pen for Bible college!” Brian said.
We were meant to stay in the room afterward, listening to the referee recite the rules. The fight would end when a man tapped the canvas in defeat, or the referee decided that one of the fighters was not adequately defending himself (whether out of exhaustion or because he had lost consciousness), or the doctor Kenny Nowling was legally obliged to employ felt an injury particularly grievous, or, alternately, the three five-minute rounds ran their course, at which point a panel of three judges would consult their notes and determine a winner. There was to be no “small joint manipulation,” which meant that one could not bend an opponent’s finger backward until he tapped, no eye-poking, groin-kicking, head-butting, skin-pinching, or hair-pulling. There was to be no “fish-hooking,” or sticking one’s finger in the other man’s mouth. Nor, as the rules have evolved thus far, is it permissible to strike a man in the back of the head, the spine, the throat. It is illegal to knee him in the head while he is on the ground. This last prohibition is controversial, and it is often noted that such a knee would be perfectly permissible in Japan.
We were meant to stay in the room and listen to a recitation of the rules, but Sean is not a man in the thrall of authority. It was six o’clock, well before any ticketholders had arrived. On the ground someone had pasted sets of blue footprints leading we knew not where. Wordlessly Sean and I followed them past the other locker room, a snack stand, a “Fight Me MMA” T-shirt kiosk, and through some double doors, where we stopped and craned our necks in unison. Terraced walls sloped up on all sides, 10,000 seats planted in them. Four prodigious flatscreen TVs—these, I surmised, for the “video component”—faced each side of the arena. The octagon waited, inert. From its far side a fireball shot into the air.
“What the hell was that?” Sean asked.
The twin fire-coughing propane tanks the promoters had apparently procured were attached to an elevated ramp, on which fighters would make their entrances. There would be revolving laser lights. There would be dry ice. I felt offended by the lack of delicacy. Sean, whether out of nervousness or disgust, fell silent and walked back to the locker room. I took a seat by the cage and stayed as the arena swelled with fans, until each terraced wall was half-stippled with faces, until all the earpieced assistants materialized, clipboards in hand, until the ring girls assumed their cross-legged pose. There are those who feel smaller in a crowd, but I felt part of an intuitive elect, each of us driven here by the impulse to gather and be given access to something I could not name.
The lights went out, and the screens flipped on; it was time to see what had become of the video. What first came across were just pictures—crisp images of men against brick, all the clean visual work you’d expect, montages of men lifting iron things. Someone was beating a tire with a sledgehammer, and then someone was punching a bag, and then someone was just standing in front of some wooden beams. It wasn’t until the sound kicked on that I woke up and began to wonder whether I had misjudged the entire enterprise. A fighter stared at the camera. Hideous noises poured from his open mouth, and from the mouth of the next fighter, and the next. The audio system was broken, distorted beyond all recognition. Thousands around me put their hands over their ears, closed their eyes. The sounds were complex variations on a long low moan, so loud as to be physically painful, the soundtrack of a bloody war waged underwater. I left myself open, put my hands at my sides, parted my own lips. Each time a man moved his face, this low prehuman music blasted out, a cry just outside the decipherable. Oh, auspicious malfunction! For five long seconds Kenny Nowling, who was standing between me and the cage, stood shocked in terror-stricken stillness. This moment had not been in the script. Then, lifting his arms over his head, he crossed and uncrossed them, until someone somewhere sucked the voices from the men so nothing at all issued from their lips, which went on parting and meeting and parting again.
Now everything seems to click, as if the final element has been righted such that a waiting spectacle might spring forth. Now the face of the announcer is beaded with sweat, the light beams spin in tandem, the beer carts creak with melancholy. The one element that does not shift, that seems incapable of shifting, is Sean, who walks out, when summoned, looking exactly as I had left him. He strolls slowly toward the octagon, eyes downcast, as if taking a solitary walk on a spring day.
The fighters of St. Louis, we are soon to discover, eschew the elegant minimalism of their Des Moines counterparts for some over-costumed vaudevillian mime. In a moment Darryl Cobb will walk out—“The Devastation Darryl Cobb”—wearing a construction vest and a camouflage balaclava, will pause at times on the ramp with his hands on his hips, as if modeling said vest on a runway, will bring men to their feet. In Sean’s case the ramp merely seems like a long way to get to the cage, and his utter lack of affect renders everything else bizarre, like a dancer stopping midperformance to have a smoke as the rest of the company swirls by. The propane tanks do not start shooting flames until he is halfway down the ramp. Sean strolls along, looking down, and does not appear to notice the balls of fire rising in his wake.
“It is very evident,” an announcer will say during the commentary added to the fight when it airs, weeks later, on local television, “that Darryl Cobb, you can see there, is a much more fit fighter than his opponent.”
Cobb stands two inches taller than Sean, hairless and hard. Deep creases line his upper body, articulate shoulder from biceps, ripple across his abdomen. Musky light bounces off his head. The ring girl rises from her seat, all teeth and confidence.
Sean’s arms, which I have heard him describe as “T. rex arms,” are so short they do not seem to serve the same animal purpose as those of Cobb, which are uncommonly long; Cobb’s biceps rise almost comically from the small of the elbow. He seems to slide through a different substance than Sean, every tap quicker, arms extending from and snapping back to his compact torso like the searching tongue of a fly-hungry frog. He jabs Sean, kicks him, jumps into and out of Sean’s reach in a single hop. And yet it is Cobb pressed against the fence, crowded by Sean, who glides toward Cobb even as he eats shot after shot. Sean moves like a fat man on hot coals, never still for a moment but each step fractions of an inch off the ground. Cobb jabs. Sean’s back is to me and he vibrates hard twice in time with the glorious unfurling of Cobb’s arms. They dance in my direction; Sean has gone red in the soft skin under both eyes. When Cobb leans into one leg and shoots the other across Sean’s white calf I hear the knock of bone against bone and feel the crowd hear it behind my back, the small parts of 3000 ears vibrating in tune. Brian pours water into Sean’s mouth and kneels close to whisper his counsel. Now there is a third slash on Sean’s face, this one on the nose, a red so deep across the bridge it’s almost black.
When the ring girl is through her second cycle, Cobb tries the same side kick. Sean catches Cobb’s ankle in his hand, and for a long moment holds him still and tilting on one leg, before yanking it hard and sending Cobb flat on the mat. Sean pounces, and now they are both on the ground facing one another, Cobb struggling from the bottom. Sean spreads his whole self prone atop Cobb’s flat body, shoving his bloody eye into the other man’s chest. Both men are soaked in sweat; as Sean holds Cobb down they slide this way and that, two jellyfish jockeying, and then all at once two black legs and one arm emerge from the bottom to spider around Sean’s back, and it seems that Sean, still on top, is a piece of meat inside a hawk’s spindly talon. Cobb twirls out, all length and grace, and Sean stumbles to his feet. I have forgotten myself entirely; if any mortal part of mine is calling out for attention, I cannot hear it.
The men, standing now, pause for a breath. Cobb throws that same kick, and this time Sean absorbs the blow while slamming his right fist into Cobb’s cheek.
Cobb backs up. He turns his head side to side theatrically, as if to shake off the punch. He smiles wide.
“You’ve got a nice right,” Cobb says.
“You’ve got a nice left,” Sean says.
“I think a lot of people,” says the TV color man, careful to steer clear of self-incrimination, “would not have expected Huffman to last this long.”
Both men are smiling now, their eyes wide as they lunge into one another. Cobb’s arms swing right up the middle, one-two, jabs that would take another man out; Sean’s face trembles slightly and he hops out of the way, swinging with great loping hooks from either side. He seems not to register kicks to his thigh, stomach, calves; Cobb grimaces more as he throws a punch than Sean does as he receives one. Sean was bleeding from the brow a moment ago, but the bleeding has stopped altogether, as if the seams on Sean’s body were something you could rip only temporarily before the flickering surface of his skin fuses back into a single unbroken sheath.
It isn’t until the third round that Sean’s skin begins finally to tear. First it’s a stream from one eye and then the next; the blood dribbles onto his chest, draws itself into a strange webbing along the front of his torso. When Cobb knuckle-digs the deep cut along the bridge of Sean’s nose blood falls thicker, in dark waves. Sean is still absorbing blow after blow, barely quivering at Cobb’s hardest, straightest jabs, but it is as if his skin is conceding where he will not; Cobb is still hard and unbroken while Sean leaks onto both of them, still smiling, still in the center of Cobb’s range. My thoughts slide by with the same whistling clarity of that night in Des Moines, but this time I feel pulled toward Sean with the painful, pathetic gratitude of a person who knows herself to be incurring a debt she’ll never discharge.
Sean huffs hard as the bell rings, as the judges judge, as Cobb’s arm is raised in predictable triumph. Cobb looks mildly pleased in victory. Sean is perfectly delighted in defeat. He walks out into the crowd, smiling hugely. “Feels good!” he says to no one. “A fuckin’ war!” In the locker room the other fighters fist-bump, slap his ass, lay large hands on his sweaty shoulders. “I got more gas at 170!” he laughs. They all congratulate him at once, their voices lost in the sweep of praise, the words “warrior” and “monster” floating up through the sweaty mob. Sean hops into the shower and sings loud happy syllables that bounce off the walls. “Where’s the doctor?” he asks Brian as he towels off. Later there will be needles, anesthetic, thread, but the doctors are nowhere to be found at the moment, and Sean is too adrenaline-drunk to feel anything; he slips back into the crowd to catch some fights, but so eager are people for a piece of Sean that he doesn’t get to watch a single one from the floor. A boy of maybe twelve walks up to him and asks for his autograph, and, having revealed Sean as generally amenable, unleashes a stream of kids with pens at the ready. A stout blonde pretends to have a question for him, kisses him on the cheek, and runs away in heels that click on the sticky arena floor. When I turn from the fights to Sean, I realize that I am standing in a line of people waiting for an audience. A man in a suit waits behind me, and as I step out of the way puts his arm on Sean’s shoulder. “I would like to invite you,” he says, “up to our skybox.”
As Sean jogs up a flight of arena stairs, I stay close so everyone knows I am of his party. A Hispanic woman in high heels blocks our passage; she holds up a camera, raises her eyebrows, and smiles shyly. Her husband snaps the picture.
“Thank you!” she gushes. “Oh, thank you!”
People crowd around Sean, shoulder up against one another to better hear his chatter. As a man places a Bud Light in his hand, Sean is as garrulous as I have ever seen him. He is telling them about Miletich, about his game plan, about his time in the Navy. He is telling them about his plans, about his comeback, about how he is going to make a go of it this time for real, about how he really is going to get into shape. I can see our future clearly now, a trimmer Sean, bigger fights, the two of us thrown together into an exalted dissolution each time he elects to take us there.
From the skybox we have a perfect view of Josh Neer pounding his fist into the face of his opponent. The shock of Cobb’s beating has only just begun to register on the soft surface of Sean’s face, which is bubbling up in odd places. As he talks a purple egg swallows more and more of his forehead. The skin under his eyes has gone bulbous and yellow. Dried blood in the moon above his right eye has clotted to black. His left ear is deformed as ever, the top half shiny and round as an eyeball. “Hey,” Sean says, taking notice of me for the first time since the fight, “did I tell you that I’m going to be a dad?”