I HAVE ALLUDED BEFORE TO THOSE WHO think fight-dwellers to be toothless cretins and backwater voyeurs, who take us to be sadistic thrill-seekers atrocity-hopping our way across the Midwest, who think we’ve grown so cold and hard that nothing but raw violence will penetrate our thick-headed daze. Who think us the perfect enemies of the polis. I will not object on every front; I won’t plead innocent on every charge. Fighters are not, it is true, on the side of civilization, and nor, by extension, are we. Fighters on the side of civilization are called soldiers, and soldiers do not fight only with those who freely consent, or pull back when a bell sounds, which may or may not have something to do with why the man who came closest to destroying MMA was a war hero popular among the people. But what I find very strange is that these very same detractors—war hero included—describe the sport of boxing in the most elevated terms: It is poetry, it is ballet, it is chess. Boxing, they say, has a history.
I consider it a strange concept of history which omits the fact that boxing is an eighteenth-century invention, and that in order to invent it the British banned, in the ring, wrestling and kicking, which is to say they elevated boxing from a mixture of martial arts. And a strange conception too that passes over pankration, the ancient Greek mix of grappling and fistfighting known to scholars of sport, and with which Theseus successfully slew the Minotaur. History begins wherever you start searching for it. If you look hard enough at the King James Bible, for example, pausing in the thirty-second chapter of the book called Genesis, you may find Jacob, who is being subjected to some obscure sacramental test, grappling, in the sporting sense, with a physical manifestation of God.
And yet I won’t disagree with this impulse, this drive to wipe clean the historical record. Spectacles shouldn’t have makers, nor miracles first-movers, and it seems to me that a fighter in his purest form has no history. Perhaps then we must imagine the sport sprung fully formed around 1990, as the haters will have it, and simply accept this inevitable prejudice against the new. But all this about our being bloodthirsty—“Isn’t that like dog-fighting?” a Baltimore heiress once asked me when I tried to explain the concept of mixed martial arts—well, let us be judged by what we see. When heads are bowed, do you see the great sweep of belief converging upon a Midwestern dinner table, or do you see pork chops getting cold? When a hearse passes, do you see the American dead connected in long bars of black, or an inefficient mode of postmortem transport? And look, now, at a young fighter flying through the air, picked up and slammed down by the brother to whom he taught this very throw, now registering the shock of the fall, now curling into fetal position, now clenching his jaw to avoid crying out in pain. Do you see an entire enmitical fraternal history winnowed to a single act? Do you see dog-fighting?
I speak, obviously, of the time Erik tried in earnest to leave. The decisive impetus was Erik’s parents; who, upon seeing their sons locked in anger, all Erik’s relationships in a state of degradation, and having heard, like the rest of us, daily promises of a move to Milwaukee that did not come to pass, sat down their son for a gentle intervention.
“You have to do something,” his mother said.
“You can come visit every weekend,” said his father, who had, due to Keoni’s persistence and Erik’s success, finally come to see the inherent nobility in his sons’ vocation.
Erik was not ungrateful for the push. The next night he packed his television and a duffel bag into Wes’s car, and Wes drove him northwest toward Milwaukee, five hours away, simply because Erik asked. Wes was not a member of Hard Drive, and existed apart from the team’s collective psychology; in Wes’s reading of the situation, Erik was a victim of their pathetic, insidious jealousy.
Erik found he had, after a long summer of verbally distancing himself from Cedar Rapids, the courage to break free, though not without a good deal of fear. He passed the drive posting messages on the Internet to tell the fighters how much he loved them; how they were his true brothers. “You all own a piece of me the way I look at it,” he wrote, “I love you,” and as Wes approached the Wisconsin state line, “Can’t help but burst into tears.” The fighters wished him well and teased him. “Quit cryin’, pussy,” wrote Lonnie. Erik did not want to arrive. Wes dropped him off at an anonymous apartment building in a Hispanic neighborhood, across the street from a closed brick bar and a soon-to-be-evicted storefront church with the words camino de santidad scrawled on paper and taped to the door.
Now, as you have begun to see, each promoter has his petty kingdom. But not all kingdoms are created equal, and to walk into the world of Duke Roufus, who was tapped into the vast glittering network of the Big Shows, was rather different than standing shoulder to shoulder with a couple of tawdry St. Louis drag racers. Duke Roufus had stars in every weight class, a gleaming capacious gym, a minor press corps that hung on his every whispered word. The moment Erik moved to Milwaukee the fightwear he could not formerly afford began arriving at his new home in boxes: twelve shirts, fifteen hats, to be given away by him as by some Winsconsinite Evita apportioning gold to a grateful peasantry. Now there was a machine in place to project his image across the nation, a team of top-tier coaches with prepared notes on his next opponent, a lineup of sponsors happy to pay for a spot on the shorts someone had sent him unbidden.
I did not venture myself to Milwaukee, and not only because I had academic obligations in Iowa. The very thought of Wisconsin was singularly distasteful to me. I was born in a place called Baraboo, and resided there until the age of sixteen. I hold no particular ill will to the place beyond the fact that it is my place of origin; and no person ought to return to the place from which she sprung, unless she wants to risk being stuck in time. What happens when you go home? You see your cohort—all the rooted fearful fools with whom you were educated. You see your parents, and the room in which you spent lonely nights as an adolescent, and the distant suburbs in which you are expected to live. You drop into the matrix that tried to create you, until you left it, and found your true set of contemporaries, the people with whom you choose to commune. My people are not Jane Banks or Peter Smith of twenty-first-century Baraboo, but Simone Weil of Depression-era Paris, and Georges Bataille of midcentury Reims—the people who sustained me during the long period of study that preceded my time as a taker of space. Should I ever decide to spawn a nuclear family and enjoy their dull companionship between bouts of desk-ridden drudgery—to live, that is, in what Sartre called “Bad Faith”—I shall return with all due haste to Baraboo. But until then, I resist the temptation, lest the comfort and simplicity of a conformist life suck me back into its maw.
Thus it was that Erik and I spoke on the phone, developing a sort of patter, a back-and-forth by which I took space from afar. “How are you doing?” I would ask, and elicit the invariable response: “Just livin’ the dream.”
Milwaukee was not a fighterly city; it was merely where Duke happened to land, and Duke was on the grid, one of many such men who mostly peopled places like Vegas, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Seoul. Such men, I had discovered, could live anywhere; what mattered was that they had one another’s numbers and the power to pluck fighters they favored from the backcountry, raise them up to Pay-Per-View. It was less that Erik had arrived at some physical space than that, in coming to Milwaukee, he signaled some readiness to belong in the world of the Big Shows, not merely to show up and go home.
It was much on his mind in those weeks, how readily the people of the grid dropped you right back into the hovel in which they found you, should you lose twice. That particular fate was made clear by the countless fighters who had fought in Big Shows, lost, and come back down to, say, a high school gym in downtown Davenport. These were the leftovers, the class of men who went to The Paddlewheel to tell over and over the story of their One Big Fight. Some of these men had gotten as far as Erik only to find that their bodies were too fragile to handle the force of a truly studied striker, or to find that they lacked the intelligence to transition from boxing to Muay Thai to jiu-jitsu to wrestling with the fleetness befitting an artist of martial collage. Sometimes they hadn’t even lost; they’d gotten hurt, or gotten hurt and then addicted to Vicodin, and in the interim the men who ran things ceased to care.
Erik did have one recurring injury, an ache in his elbow that called to him when he was tired and hungry. In the long history of Hard Drive, and all the boys Keoni ushered into the circle, there had been a single glaring mistake. His name was Joe Vedepo, and he did not play with the gentle scrupulousness of the others; when he had another man by the arm, even in practice, he would pull until it hurt. In this way he tore the fragile tissue in Erik’s left elbow; and Keoni, incensed, banned Vedepo from the gym for life. This was what happened when people who did not belong in the gym were permitted to play. It was also a story about how to leave Valhalla, forever, and transform a bunch of brothers with whom you shared a tattoo into strangers.
Erik had lost exactly once in his career, back in March, to a wrestler in Ohio who held him down for three rounds. He could not, then, lose in Las Vegas in November, a mere two months away. And so he was training four or five times a day: a run, a boxing session, jiu-jitsu, weight-training, and another run. Yet there seemed, he complained to me, much time left over in a city he did not know. All of that time was spent with the roommate Duke had selected for him, Anthony “Showtime” Pettis, Milwaukee’s most celebrated fighter and a twenty-three-year-old half-Mexican half-Puerto Rican man who did not want to spend his Saturday nights watching Pumping Iron on repeat.
Milwaukee was not yet a place where Erik had an audience, but a place where Pettis had limitless spacetakers constantly jockeying for fighterly proximity. Often these men would follow Pettis to a bar he owned with Duke, a bar they called Showtime, as part of Pettis’s ambitious branding strategy. At Showtime, I am given to understand, Pettis would converse with girls in Spanish while Erik sat idly by, tolerating Pettis’s shadows and their questions about him. Very early in the morning—so went their routine—Erik and Pettis would return home with whichever Hispanic girl Pettis chose for the provision of nocturnal intimacies, and the friend of that girl, who would provide parallel services to Erik.
Erik took all of this to be constitutive of adult life, having had no experience away from the fraternal nest of Hard Drive, and he is far from the first man to venture to a new place and mold himself to the given shape of things. The apartment they shared was a one-bedroom, and so these intimacies tended to be somewhat exposed, with Erik on the couch and Pettis in a loft that itself afforded no privacy. It went on this way, night after night, until one particular evening when it finally occurred to Erik that he and Pettis were not of the same world.
One September Saturday night, a week and a half into Erik’s move, Pettis and Erik departed from Showtime and returned home with the requisite two girls. Following this party was Pettis’s uncle, a Hispanic forty-year-old man in a T-shirt, sneakers, and low-slung jeans. He was thickly accented and always around, making the most of his fortuitous blood relation. He smelled of drugstore musk. Erik treated him with a distant courtesy he thought owed to anyone over thirty.
I hesitate to relate the following Pettis-instigated vulgarities, and do so only because Erik related this story to me not once but three times, as if retelling it helped explain something he was not otherwise prepared to articulate. The men gathered in the kitchenette, while the girls—shy, silent, grateful to have been selected—waited in the living area. It was Pettis’s desire that both he and Erik be intimate with both girls. His exact words, I believe, were: “Let’s bang them, then switch.”
Erik led his assigned paramour to the couch, taking it as given that Pettis would disappear into his room and Pettis’s uncle would show himself out. The girl he had been assigned peeled off her vestments one by one until she was completely bare-skinned, visible in the weak light of the window above the couch. Erik could hear Pettis and his uncle laughing, though by the time he realized that they were laughing because they were watching from the dark kitchen, he too had disrobed entirely.
He found this extremely uncomfortable, but the thing was already in motion, and the girl didn’t seem to find the situation unusual. That he was being watched merely made him feel pressured to do precisely as Pettis had instructed, and so he dutifully performed the act Pettis expected him to perform.
“He’s drilling her!” Pettis reported, laughing.
Erik turned his face away from the kitchen, back toward the couch. Something smelled odd. Like musk. He turned his face back toward the kitchen to see Pettis’s uncle, pants unzipped, standing before him. He had exposed himself inches from the girl’s mouth. The girl screamed. Erik jumped up.
“What the fuck?” Erik shouted.
Pettis laughed and playfully shoved his uncle. “What the fuck, Reynaldo?” To Erik, he turned, slightly conciliatory. “You guys can take the bedroom,” he said.
For Erik this particular incident could not simply be assimilated into the rhythm of his new life. Some line had been crossed, and he wanted to talk about it. “I am just a farmboy from Iowa,” he told me soon afterward, which was not, strictly speaking, true. “I’m used to getting to know girls. In Cedar Rapids it’s like, hey, wanna go on a date, wanna go see a movie?”
Following this experience, Erik stopped padding after Pettis night after night, though he had no car and feared the neighborhood; Pettis’s brother had told him casually of a man recently stabbed to death on the block’s southeast corner. This left Erik isolated and awake. In his new life there was no one with whom merely to be. Alone, he listened for the first time to the worried chatter in his own head.
Now were you to ask the average person what stands in the way of fighterly excellence, what is most likely to short-circuit a fighterly career before it launches, well, he might say a weak chin or a lack of intelligence or insufficient discipline. The spacetaker knows otherwise. The fighter’s greatest enemy is homesickness, and you cannot spend more than a week in any fight camp without watching weak men wilt for want of their own beds. It strikes the aspiring fighters on the reality television shows—at least one will drop out because he misses his mother. It robs fight camps of half their new members, which is why no one will take an aspirant seriously until he stays put for a month. And it was, in September of 2010, very near taking down Erik. He could see that this was coming, was, indeed, expected of him by his brother and his team.
Erik had been in Milwaukee for thirteen days. He closed the door to his room. He flipped the television on and off, fought the urge to eat forbidden carbs, picked up laundry off the floor, went outside to sit on the steps, came inside to sit on his bed, turned on TV once again. Were he home he would have been somewhere with Rocky and Jared and KayLee, the casino maybe, laughing about a favorite line from a movie they knew by heart. He picked up his phone and thought about asking his father for a ride home. Instead he texted the team with an altogether new hostility.
Over the next week he texted the team hundreds of times a day, calling them stoners and losers; he told them, to their amazement, that they owed him money; he threatened violent retribution for various offenses. He had heard that Rocky had said something rude to Wes, for which he told Rocky he would “beat his ass.” He also accused Rocky of hitting on KayLee, at which point Rocky told Erik he was going to get a restraining order, at which point Erik questioned Rocky’s manliness. Erik accused Jared of being jealous. He told Keoni that Keoni owed him money for a burrito, which Keoni claimed was the one time Erik had paid for anything in the thousands of times they had eaten out together. And so on, for days.
I did not see why Erik’s absence should prevent me from enjoying the other fighters’ company on Friday nights at Rocky’s house, and so it was that I watched these sentiments received in Cedar Rapids. That particular evening, the remainder of the team declined to watch Pumping Iron. “I don’t want to talk about Erik,” Rocky kept saying by way of bringing up the subject of Erik, “but I will say that he is one injury away from being nothing.” It was again recalled that Erik had called Lennox a traitor. The subject would move briefly to food, but even then it would swerve back to Erik, and Rocky would say Erik was one injury away from being nothing, and a new slew of anecdotes would be unleashed. Everyone was standing, leaning against Rocky’s countertops or hovering around a fresh pizza.
“Man that cereal’s fuckin’ good!” said Jared, digging into a bowl of Rocky’s Kashi granola. He had to stay away from the pizza because of an upcoming fight.
“Isn’t it?” said Rocky. “I eat that cereal every morning with a fuckin’ banana.”
“I could kill that whole box,” said Steve. “At Matt’s house I used to go apeshit on their fridge when I got high, then I’d come back the next day with fuckin’ bags of groceries to replace everything.”
“Erik would do the same thing, right?” Rocky joked, and everyone laughed at the idea that Erik would ever pay anyone back.
“He’d pay ’em back someway, right?” joked Rocky. “He’d teach ’em how to do some shit or something?”
Everyone laughed.
“They owe him actually, right?”
“We should have just refused to give him rides,” said Jared, “just left him somewhere.”
“Wes would have picked him up,” said Rocky.
“I really think if I had a chance to talk to Wes,” said Rocky, “I could make him see things the way they are.”
“I don’t know,” said Keoni, “Wes is pretty smart. I think Wes just likes to have a good time.”
“What’s he get out of that shit?”
“He gets a jockstrap.”
Keoni, citing the toilet papering of his backyard, believed it to be probable that Erik suffered from a chemical imbalance beyond his control. Jared strenuously agreed with this hypothesis, as did Rocky. They turned to the Internet. Did he suffer multiple personality disorder? Was he bipolar? By 11:00 PM they’d lighted upon their diagnosis: sociopath. The Internet offered thirteen warning signs. It was Keoni’s earnest opinion that Erik exhibited all thirteen.
“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” Keoni texted Erik, “but you exhibit thirteen classic signs of sociopathy.”
When Erik had left, Keoni predicted that he wouldn’t last two weeks away from home. In fact Erik was to last three. That Friday night he called his father in an all-out panic. He said that he didn’t feel like himself, was afraid of what he might do, and was terrified that he had lost all motivation to fight. The chatter in his head was growing louder, he could not sleep, and he was thinking of checking himself into a mental hospital. Erik’s father drove five hours there, five hours back, bearing an anxious Erik in the cab of his truck.
•
Months before his departure for Milwaukee, that day we first met in his apartment, Erik, by way of introduction, I suppose, imparted his philosophy. “You gotta be crazy about it,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Pumping Iron. With Arnold Schwarzenegger. You’ve never seen it? Arnold Schwarzenegger used to be Mr. Olympia. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the best body builder in the world. Best in the world. Two weeks before a competition his father died, and his mom called and said, ‘Your father died, you have to come out here for the funeral.’ And Arnold Schwarzenegger said, cold as hell, he said, ‘I can’t. I’m doing this, I gotta worry about this right now.’ He hung up on her. She tried calling back, he didn’t pick up the phone. Put it completely out of his mind. It’s the people who make sacrifices like that, the crazy ones, the ones who are dedicated. Great fighters are great because they sacrifice.”
I suppose many will find these sentiments immoral. But would you truly have, in the final accounting, an artist of bodily transformation pack his toothbrush and truck off to an Austrian funeral? Though none of us would want to live in a universe peopled primarily by Schwarzeneggers and Eriks; though we actively seek to ostracize the will to destroy unchosen bonds of familial duty; nor, I think, would we want to live without such sentiment, or without genius, such as it is. The price of engagement with the eternal is perhaps heavier than we like to admit in the bright light of day. By all means, we say, sacrifice health and money and stability and carbs; rehearse your lonely tragic dance in the cheap hotel room by the train tracks; succumb to your artisanal narcissism, until the moment it makes us uncomfortable because a progenitor’s corpse is involved. I say the world needs genius, and genius is jealous.
Now for every city dweller there is the city itself and then the city that is properly yours—the few blocks you regularly walk and the few stores you properly patronize. Erik’s personal Cedar Rapids, given the proud obsessive narrowness of his own focus, was smaller than most. The places that were places in which to be were Wes’s house, Rocky’s house, Hard Drive, and perhaps in the cab of his father’s pickup. He drove his father’s truck, that Friday afternoon, through the city he had only managed to half-leave. There on the side of the split highway was his pizza place, and there the Blockbuster from which his brother rented the video with which he discovered MMA, and there the high school from which he dropped out, and the convention center at which he fought before he was discovered. And then habit, as much as anything else, has him driving past the blocks of hospital, past the homeless shelter, past the rundown homes with toys in the yard and tall grass creeping through wrought-iron fences, to the place “where dreams o e true.”
Erik walked into Valhalla as if nothing had passed between any of them, and everyone tacitly assented to live by this fiction. Most of them said something mundane by way of welcome; they were not surprised to see him because they didn’t believe he had the strength to stay away. Rolling in pairs, arms snaking through legs, heads bowed in that tiny heaving room, they soon became deeply entangled such that I could not tell without effort whose limbs were whose. They seemed one capsized organism struggling to right itself. Beside me a fighter slick with sweat wriggled onto another man’s back, nearly slipping off but steadying himself by twining his legs round his partner’s wet waist. When Keoni blew the whistle one fighter flicked sweat from his belly button onto another, who retaliated by wringing out his shoulder-length hair on the stomach from which the sweat was flicked. The room was misty, the low afternoon light through the long windows overbearing, and a few fighters crouched low to catch their breath. Erik and Keoni were distracted as the men paired up for sparring, and then they were the only two men unpartnered, and no one was watching, but everyone was.
Keoni approaches Erik, both of them so similarly complected that the boundaries between their bodies blur, though Erik is shadowed about the collarbone, under the ribs. Erik weaves and strikes, but Keoni easily dodges each jab and comes inside his brother’s arms, hugging Erik, holding him for a long time, as if to wait for the others to cast glances in their direction, as if to stretch this brief moment of struggle into a long show of impotence. When Erik breaks free, Keoni charges, head low, to sweep Erik and lay him flat, but Erik is too fast to be swept. He twines his arm around the neck of Keoni’s bent body, such that Keoni is stuck bowing as Erik stands erect. What happens next is so quick as to be invisible: Erik releases the neck slightly, threads his arm in between Keoni’s legs, and hoists his brother like a suitcase soon to be lofted up onto a high shelf. Keoni is five feet off the mat, perpendicular to Erik, suspended there, expressionless, waiting for his brother to have his long victorious moment and slide him gently back to the mat.
Fighters are not soldiers; they are not on the side of family, or country, or civic pride. And if they are self-conscious pursuers of ecstatic bliss, they cannot even be said to be on the side of the self. The self is always the thing you’re fleeing, and if your self seems mired in a history, maybe that’s got to go too. Everything about this room and the people in it is too close, too constitutive, too historical. And were Erik to place Keoni down feet first with the gentle care expected of him, Erik would not be told that he was never again welcome at Valhalla, and he would not leave, tomorrow, for Milwaukee, and he would not there stay. In the history of Hard Drive, there had been one man who successfully left the team behind, and his name was Joe Vedepo. Erik lacked the fortitude to keep himself in Milwaukee when he knew his fellow team members would welcome him back; he also knew well how to make himself forever unwelcome, and thus make Milwaukee possible.
Erik slammed Keoni onto the mat. We felt the windows shake, the floor tremor, and heard Keoni moan, curled up on the floor, something in his shoulder torn. We closed in around his bent body, all except Erik, who walked away, grabbed a kettle bell, and stared out the window into the street.
I said nothing to him the night he finally broke all ties with home, but silently pledged to be by his side for each and every of his fights, no matter where or when.