“FOUR EGGS,” I INSTRUCTED THE WAITER at the finest restaurant in The Palms Casino Resort.
“Egg salad?” He was in a starched suit, pouring water into a delicately lipped glass.
“No, four hard-boiled eggs.”
“Four eggs.”
The waiter returned with four eggs huddled in the slight depression of a sizable dinner plate, as if to further diminish the sad feast through a trick of scale. Each egg had been shelled, which was, I supposed, the benefit of ordering hard-boiled eggs at the finest restaurant in The Palms. Erik was a few flights up in his hotel room, showering after a workout with Duke, but he had asked that his meal be ready when he descended, and I feared displeasing him.
Though Duke, Pettis, and Erik’s manager could be found dispersed among the card tables and slot machines, not a single member of Hard Drive had ventured with us to Las Vegas. Following the momentous schism between him and his brother, Erik had been “banned for life” from the gym and its environs. That Keoni framed this as a measure he was taking for the safety of his fellow fighters may have masked his quite reasonable anger behind a show of enlightened concern, but then again it was true that Rob and DJ were openly afraid of rolling with the team’s most volatile member.
Banished, Erik returned to Milwaukee, to his warm, fast-talking Italian-American coach, to his potential as one of the youngest men in the most prestigious promotion open to men who weighed in at 155 pounds. From their offices in Vegas, connected people continued to call him in Milwaukee, and it was as if he had never made the mistake of going home. Would he like to be in the official UFC video game? They would fly him out to L.A., take measurements, and then boys everywhere would fight their friends in the avatarical form of Erik “New Breed” Koch. Pettis was asked to be a judge for the “Miss Wisconsin USA” pageant and in declining the offer, sent Erik in his stead. Erik met, at the event, the manager of a Jersey Shore cast member. Would Erik like to be on an episode of DJ Pauly D’s upcoming reality spin-off show? He said he very much would like that. He was unattached, alone, free to make commitments to as-yet-theoretical reality shows as he pleased.
Erik at last arrived at the restaurant, sat across from me without a word, unrolled from the napkin his knife and fork, and began the surgical egg procedure with which I was, by then, familiar. I would have liked to discuss our surroundings, as it was my first encounter with a professionally run promotion and I had many astute observations on the subject, but he ate with an air of sacral solemnity I did not wish to desecrate by speaking. It was my twenty-ninth birthday and I had not told a soul in the world.
You may think that a starving man on rations, faced with the few calories he is allowed, would proceed with survivalist immediacy to incorporate whatever was laid before him. But the rationed man is all precision—he sees, in his allowance, fine nutritious distinctions you do not—and so when Erik finally raised his knife to halve his egg, he did so with great deliberation. With his knife he hollowed the half-yolk from its white skin and deposited the caloric yellow mass onto his plate, where it sat uneaten like a pat of butter. He scraped offending yellow flecks from the egg’s gelatinous walls. He slid the flat of the knife against the plate, shedding shavings of yolk onto the porcelain, put his knife down, and placed the white in his mouth. He approached the second half of the first egg. This would be Erik’s last watery wisp of permitted food before weigh-ins; he would not eat again for thirty-five hours. Erik’s frame had already cratered into a landscape of shadows and white skin stretched tight over bone.
It would not have occurred to most 180-pound fighters that they might, through force of will, gain admission to the 145-pound weight class. Certainly the Californian Cisco Rivera, a full two inches shorter than Erik, would not be losing a fifth of his body weight. Erik had, back in Cedar Rapids, informed me that he could lose thirty-five pounds, weigh in, binge like a feral labrador, and feel ready to fight a day later simply because he was twenty-two years old. Self-starvation was the biggest challenge of his chosen vocation, every prefight diet was more painful than the last, and two years hence, Erik said, the drop would be impossible. His ability to boomerang from 180 to 145 back up to 160 would diminish unalterably with age; he would be impelled to fight amongst a slightly more substantial group of men, the “lightweights,” which included his roommate Pettis, and so was something neither of them deigned discuss. Thus it was that one of the youngest fighters in the promotion saw only days slipping away. Two years he had in which to get a title shot and win the opportunity to fight the invincible Brazilian José Aldo, who would probably still be champion at 145. This was, of course, absurd, given that Erik was nowhere near title contention. But thoughts of the title pushed Erik through the long days of his weary yolk-scraping existence.
After the eggs, Erik opened his eyes a little wider, and we took the casino elevator up to his room.
“This is what you got?” I asked.
“This is Whole Foods peanut butter, they make it in a machine there,” Erik said. I had been talking about the branded T-shirts and laptop bags and hats, but did not interrupt him as his focus shifted back to food. He pulled a plastic tub out of the shelf under his bedside table, where it lay next to bananas and a loaf of bread.
“This is chocolate peanut butter from the machine. This granola,” he said, holding a plastic bag of cereal, “is sick.” He replaced the granola and seized on a bag of chips. “Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles. These are the shit.”
I eagerly assented to their excellence, as if I were quite familiar with them. I very much wanted Erik to feel buoyed by the fact of my company, and had been watching for signs of annoyance ever since one October night at Rocky’s, where I had continued to pass Friday nights even after Erik decamped for Milwaukee. The abandonment of Jared and Rocky, Keoni told the team that night, was in no way a departure from Erik’s usual approach toward long-term relationships. Erik had had a succession of best friends he’d cut off suddenly and without explanation, inventing supposed slights he would never forgive. It was part of a pattern, Keoni insisted, integral to his personality, and quite likely attributable to his sociopathy as diagnosed by the Internet. “Anyone who doesn’t expect to be dropped like that,” Keoni said, with what I took to be special attention to me, “is being naive.”
The thought that Erik might at any moment terminate our relationship so thoroughly haunted me during our trip that even now I associate casinos with insecurity. Should he decide to stop answering my calls and requesting my presence, I would have wasted five months on a man of no use to my project, a project of importance not only to me but to future students of descriptive phenomenology. And I simply could not abide the idea that some other spacetaker—someone larger, and more given to Midwestern colloquialisms—would take the space I had so carefully reserved for myself by Erik’s side. That someone else would be sent to order his eggs, someone else privileged with the knowledge that the old Vedepo-induced injury in his elbow hurt more intensely as he grew more slim; this was enough to make my stomach turn, which was in itself a silver lining, because it allowed me to share, on that trip, something of Erik’s distance from the possibility of food.
I had arrived in Las Vegas the day previous, anxious to see the American city considered most fighterly, but underfed Erik did not want to see the Cirque du Soleil or the Hoover Dam; he wanted to go to Walmart, and so to Walmart we went. Outside, on the mountain-edged expanse of pavement cooking in desert sun, Erik was all angles and shadows, bounceless, frail, a dusting of hair over his shaven head. Walmart fluorescence added a yellow cast to his white skin, turned olive those undereye pockets of gloom. Raccoon-eyed and ravenous, Erik slothed through each aisle, his gallon jug of the day’s permitted water consumption hanging low at his side, dragging him down, slowing his advance. He needed baby oil, he’d said before we left. But then I followed him into the hardware aisle, walled in by dozens of varieties of sandpaper, and we did not appear to be progressing toward the aisle marked “baby” at the far end of the store. He hitched up his jeans with his free hand as he walked; they slipped again down his sharp hips. He was walking away from the baby section and toward the chip aisle, where he stood for a moment staring at the Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles. While he described the slow throb of his esophagus I imagined the whole pipeline glowing as in some educational film about the digestive tract. He picked up the Ruffles and made it halfway to the register before remembering the oil for which he had come.
“What,” Erik asked the taxi driver on the way back to The Palms, “is the best buffet in Las Vegas?”
Back in Milwaukee, Erik told me, the Hyundai Elantra Keoni lent him was papered with oil-stained wrappers—Burrito Supreme, 100% Beef, BK Stacker—remnants of forbidden foods vicariously enjoyed.
“I’m buying you a burrito,” he’d say to Pettis. “Eat it. I want to smell it.”
The fast food Erik purchased friends ate slowly, wafting ground-beef-steam toward their skeletal driver, leaving the paper crumpled and the scent hovering. This seemed to me deranged culinary masochism, but Erik insisted that he could not possibly starve himself so effectively were he to take his mind for a moment off of food. And in this, Vegas was cooperative, for to the starving man Vegas offers comforts one does not necessarily associate with the city. At the Rio Resort and Casino, for instance, if you can see past the seamlessly linked rooms for poker and keno and slots, past a singing girl in sequins, a stream of light, a wisp of smoke, if you can see past plastic neon-lit flames leaping over paisley carpet and the “future Chippendale fan” pink onesie featured in the giftshop window, past the spiraling staircase up to the heavily curtained Italian restaurant meant to evoke fine dining but suffering in that regard from its direct adjacency to Wetzel’s Pretzels, if you can gaze beyond the gargantuan goggle-eyed head hanging from the Masquerade Room, or if, you are, like Erik, quite literally starving, you will notice that this city is not merely a purveyor of monetary risk but a purveyor of food. You will notice that this food is marketed chiefly through the promise of quantity, specifically through the provision of casino buffets. It is these buffets that interest Erik, their promise, their hideous abundance. For $39.99 one can in fact purchase an all-day pass to many buffets, a package known as a “buffet of buffets,” inclusive of seven—as in wonders of the world or deadly sins, but pertinent to only one sin, that of gluttony—in-themselves-perfectly-adequate self-serve experiences: Le Village Buffet, the Emperor’s Buffet, Spice Market Buffet, Flamingo’s Paradise Garden Buffet, Lago Buffet, Harrah’s Buffet, and the “world’s most acclaimed buffet,” the Carnival World Buffet at the Rio.
“The best buffet in Las Vegas,” said the taxi driver, “is the Rio Buffet.”
Erik smiled and leaned back into the pleather. He had never been to the Rio Buffet but nevertheless qualified as a Rio Buffet expert, having taken the virtual tour but more importantly having spent many hours visualizing his sublime deliverance from self-deprivation. In the twenty-four hours between weigh-ins and the fight, Erik would gain twenty pounds, and he took great pleasure in imagining of what those pounds would consist. The Rio Buffet, he informed me, offered 300 distinct dishes, seventy varieties of pie, an array of “bars,” including a sushi bar, a taco bar, and a stir-fry bar. He knew its small army of friendly spoon-holding servers, its fifty yards of curving black countertop, its unaccountable progression from sausage pizza to cocktail shrimp to scrambled eggs to lentil soup to crab legs to fried fish to sushi to green salad to gravy-slathered pork chops to honeyed ham to flank steak to barbeque ribs to burritos to tacos to waffles to spring rolls to dumplings to sweet-and-sour pork to eggs benedict to bacon to one giant vat of ketchup to croissants to cubed mango to green bean salad to seven kinds of lettuce to the gelato-and-pastries bar whose delights are too many to enumerate, but which Erik would attempt to enumerate if given the chance.
The Rio was only one part of the plan, which also included spaghetti and meat sauce and an entire loaf of garlic bread from Battista’s, subs from the local Jimmy John’s and twenty-four German chocolate cupcakes being mailed overnight from Milwaukee by a pair of baking groupie sisters who had arranged for a courier to hand cupcakes to Erik the moment he stepped off the scale.
“I am a fighter,” Erik told the taxi driver. “I am planning what to eat before the fight.”
“You shouldn’t overeat,” said the driver.
“Anderson Silva eats two Big Macs before every fight,” said Erik. “It doesn’t matter that much.”
The conversation paused as traffic crawled past the MGM Grand, hulking and soot-stained in the midmorning light.
“Have you tried the NASCAR six-pound burrito?” Erik asked. The NASCAR Café’s six-pound, two-foot burrito was also part of the plan.
In the hotel room that night, watching The Food Network and fiddling with his phone, Erik shivered, skeletal, in his hoodie.
“Let’s go to Rio,” he said, heavy-lidded, grim. “I mean just to see it.”
It was 10:00 PM. Had it been Sean making the suggestion, I would have voiced a preference to take in a late film at the casino’s movie theater, but I did not want to risk being on the wrong side of Erik’s Manichean inclinations.
Erik and I left the room, descended in an elevator with Erik’s picture hanging in it—“Tickets on Sale Wednesday”—passed a young crowd at the blackjack tables and a not-at-all young crowd at the slot machines, exited into the pedestrianless abyss that was the space between off-strip Vegas casinos, and walked to the Rio. Beyond the Mahjong and Keno tables, the poker tournament competitors in cowboy hats, Erik pointed to a sign: “the Carnival World Buffet.” We passed through swinging doors into a vast shellacked cafeteria.
“It’s closed,” I said.
The food had been vacated. What was left was all fluorescent light, clean steel, and frosted glass. The only person in the room was a man behind the counter, wearing what looked to be a gas mask and pouring steam out of a tube. Erik attempted to penetrate the mask by shouting.
“I am a fighter,” he said, pointing to himself. “I want to come here tomorrow.”
The man in the mask nodded a quick, deferential, non-English-speaking nod.
Affixed to all fifty feet of the gleaming counter were black plaques etched in white. Erik began at the north end of the room.
“Pizza,” he read off the plaque, and paused, staring at the aluminum heater and readjusting his grip on his jug of water. A light on the far end of the room flickered.
“Shrimp scampi.”
I walked into the expanse of rag-wiped tables and sat down to endure Erik’s fantasy with what I think to be commendable patience.
“Poached eggs,” said Erik. His face had regained its yellow pallor and seemed to recede into his hoodie. “Scrambled eggs.”
Twenty minutes later Erik reached the gelato. The steam-cleaner had left.
“Let’s go,” said Erik, and we padded back through the casino, where at 11:00 PM on a Tuesday night only the committed or addicted remained.
Erik spent the next morning resisting the intake of liquid. It was then that I recognized perhaps the only salutary psychological side effect of self-starvation, for Erik was about to weigh in beside his opponent, and he had not, as far as I could tell, thought about his opponent at all. He had seen Cisco by the blackjack tables a while back, and briefly in line at the in-house movie theater, and the moment Cisco left his field of vision was the moment Erik’s thoughts returned to the Rio Buffet or gourmet granola or a single chocolate cupcake, though he was even beyond that now, because now he was dreaming of water. The thirst, Erik said, was worse even than the hunger. It made his teeth ache. Desiccated by forced dehydration, Erik’s skin had taken on a new solidity; pinched, it would pause before flattening back into itself. His ligaments had turned brittle. His elbow hurt. He sneaked, at some point, a sip of Crystal Light, but the powder at its base stuck to his teeth in his dry mouth and made his teeth hurt so intensely he regretted the transgression. He slathered himself in baby oil and stepped into the sauna and sweat, tensing hard as if he might will a few more drops of water from each straining muscle, until the sauna scale read 145.5. At his last fight, Erik had been so weak at this weight that Keoni had had to physically support him on the walk from the sauna to the scale.
In a packed hotel conference room later that afternoon Erik watched Cisco play with the chains around his neck. There were reporters present from legitimate media organizations, which itself distinguished this entire endeavor from any fight I had yet experienced, and they came flanked by cameramen. The fighters were surrounded by teams of coaches in matching T-shirts; all were supported by sponsors more eminent than their local tattoo parlors. The fight would air on Pay-Per-View, and whoever won the main event would win fifty times what he might at one of the marginally legal fights in which I had taken space with Sean.
Cisco and Erik both stared out past photographers crouching and clicking around the dais. When he heard his name called Erik stepped onto the scale, which scrolled up to 146, the maximum allowed weight. His face went slack and his lips parted slightly. He flexed both arms. It was a less than convincing show of strength, a bizarre accumulation of protrusions popping under a translucent sheet of skin on his arms and abs. When he flexed, his two tattoos, “HD” for Hard Drive on the left and “Z” for Zombie Nation Army on the right, gleamed black and clean. He was nauseated and shivering with cold.
Erik stepped off the scale and posed for some shots with Cisco, who stood two inches shorter than Erik. Cisco was thin but not very, fully capable of fighting at 135 should he find within himself half of Erik’s willpower. They faced one another with fists raised, and Erik equalized their heights by forcing his head forward so his neck shot horizontally from his shoulders. He had started doing this a few fights ago, he had informed me, and someone said that he looked “like an alien.” Now he was doing it every fight, and shaving his head to augment the effect.
“He looks like an alien,” I heard one of a dozen sportswriters tell the gentleman sitting next to him.
Erik stepped off the stage, and a girl in French braids handed him a large Tupperware container containing twenty-four German Chocolate cupcakes.
Off-scale, backstage, I watched Erik slump against a wall and rip the top off a small plastic bottle of cherry Pedialyte: “Helps Kids Feel Better Fast.” He downed it quick as a shot and opened another, and another. Twenty other fighters were drinking the same thing. Smiling teddy bears stared from between their thick fingers, then gathered on the floor in a growing mass of crushed plastic.
Erik ripped open a black duffel bag, inside which he had packed food and drinks that he knew from experience his shriveled stomach would not immediately return: cornbread, a single banana, V8, and a small turkey sandwich. He forced a large square hunk of cornbread into the round of his mouth and closed his eyes. Other fighters were staring. No one else had courier-delivered cupcakes or a canvas bag full of cornbread.
“Can I get some of that?” someone asked.
“Yeah man,” Erik said, and tore off a generous piece. He shoved more moist cornbread in his mouth. His eyes went glassy as he splayed himself against the wall, a great goofy smile spreading across his face, and began to twirl a cupcake in his hand, peeling the foil wrap gently from the chocolate.
Erik said he felt dizzy, though one could tell from his weak smile that it was a pleasing, diaphanous drunk sugar-high kind of dizzy. It took him a moment to notice, when we skipped onto an elevator about to close, that the elevator was packed tight with Cisco and Cisco’s five-man Hispanic entourage. Erik came to consciousness in an awkward silence as we together ascended the fourth, the sixth, the eighth floor. He stared at the floor and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. One of Cisco’s men leaned against the poster of Erik.
A small voice came from the back of the pack.
“Let’s jump him!”
Everyone laughed.
Erik had stocked the refrigerator in his room with small turkey sandwiches. He would incorporate food slowly, permitting himself only one every hour, along with a smattering of Ruffles, though chips are not an accepted part of the prefight diet. He popped onto the bed and watched, for the first time in weeks, something other than The Food Channel.
“Ruffles?” Wes asked. He had arrived just in time for weigh-ins.
“Yeah, Ken says it’s cool.”
Ken was Erik’s conditioning coach back in Cedar Rapids, and it seemed highly unlikely that he had made any actual judgment on the Ruffles.
Pettis swept into the room. Duke came in behind him.
“What’s with the chips?” Duke asked.
“Anderson Silva eats two Big Macs before ev—”
“Calm down, you ain’t gotta justify it,” said Pettis.
Erik’s manager walked in, followed by a large pony-tailed man carrying a leather bag.
“Doctor’s here!” said the manager.
“Hey,” said Erik, who was engrossed in another sandwich.
I thought perhaps the doctor had come for some sort of post-weigh-in physical, but instead of examining Erik he pulled out a fluid-filled bag attached to a tube and scanned the room, lips pursed, for a place to hang it. He settled on the large piece of hotel art hanging above Erik’s head, stood on his toes, and jolted it into position until the bag hung perilously from the corner of the frame.
“Can’t find your vein,” said the doctor as he stabbed Erik.
A minute later: “They’re so small.”
A minute later, to the manager, “Do we have any smaller needles?”
When the IV was finally in, the doctor gone, Erik watched Everybody Loves Raymond with rapt attention. His eyebrows kept rising, as if everything were slightly new to him. The colors. The fully internalized presence of other people. The way their voices travel through space. Erik’s exposed abdominal muscles were disappearing under a blanket of skin. His transformation was that of a wilted houseplant newly watered, stiffening back into life, and like a houseplant in revival it was a change only slightly too slow to see. For the first time in days, he was following the back-and-forth of rapid-fire conversation. This episode of Everybody Loves Raymond was funny. It was the funniest thing he had ever seen. When he laughed the knobs reappeared in muscle, then receded back under the swell. He ripped off a piece of turkey club with his teeth.
“What happened with that girl?” Erik asked Wes during a commercial. Wes was playing with his phone on an armchair.
“Didn’t work out,” said Wes. “She was, you know, an older woman.”
“How old?” I asked.
“Like, almost twenty-six.”
Erik’s phone rang, and he ignored it.
“When are we going to the Rio?” Wes asked.
Erik didn’t look away from the screen. “I think that’s a bad idea.”
Erik’s right arm lay palm-up on the bed, so as not to disturb the IV. In the window that ran the length of the room, evening was shading into night and lights were beginning to glow on the Strip.
“I read on the Internet,” Erik said, “that people get food poisoning there.”
•
Reporters wanted to talk to Erik. Not many, as Erik was relatively unknown—a less familiar presence than even Jesse Lennox or Josh Neer—but some. One of these reporters was a fighter herself, and in her Erik took great platonic interest, as if they shared something intimate I myself could never know. Erik introduced me as we stood beside the octagon of the lush Tapout gym. “She’s a writer,” he added.
She had a list of questions on a sheet of paper, and after every one Erik said “Good question” though they were by no means particularly distinguished lines of inquiry, and in any case would only lead to a writeup on an MMA website with which I was not familiar. The entire errand seemed to me unnecessary.
She reached the end of her list, and turned to me. “Who do you write for?” she asked.
I felt Erik’s gaze upon me, as if I were being tested—as if, confronted by a “writer” whose intentions he understood, my presence in his life was suddenly inexplicable. There was a long, uncomfortable pause. I could hear a man grunting as he lifted weights in another room. Who did I write for? I had recently written a paper for one Richard Knowles, who had awarded that paper a “D” and threatened to fail me for the course.
“Well, it’s complicated,” I said, glancing at Erik, who looked somewhere between skeptical and annoyed by this answer. I panicked. “I write for the Cedar Rapids Gazette.”
Erik smiled in that bright-eyed, surprised way one smiles when one has solved a problem.
“So you’re going to write about this fight for them?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, greatly displeased by this development, “I do plan to.”
It was more than a little alarming that Erik would now expect a writeup in the sports section of his regional newspaper, but I put my hypothetical association with print journalism out of my mind as we dealt with a succession of actual reporters.
“I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have any way of making money,” Erik told someone on the radio. “I just decided to train six or seven hours a day,” he told someone from another MMA site. “Most people won’t do that.”
Erik did not particularly want to talk about his fluidity, his striking, his record; he wanted to talk about everything he had given up, all the possible lives he had rejected. He did not have a “back-out plan” he insisted over and over until I could see row-boats burning in his wake. Had he been able he would have told you from which particular sacrifice every piece of him emerged—the narrowest hinge of his hand, the curve of his neck, systole and diastole. How impressive Erik was before the microphone! Even when he could feel his stomach curdling and his eye-sheen shriveling his words were smooth and full. Often the question of from where Erik Koch had come—he was described to himself by interviewers as having “burst out of nowhere,” which was an invitation to an origin story—involved a kind of generational inevitability. He was the “new breed” because he was well-rounded, and he was well-rounded because he hadn’t trained as a wrestler or a kickboxer but as a mixed martial artist, and this was possible because he had come of age in a different world than that of his older opponents. Sometimes he had started training at ten, sometimes eleven, sometimes sixteen or seventeen, but always he was “just a kid” and always MMA was a thing he’d latched onto, hard and of his own accord. It had been there to pull from the air like oxygen and like oxygen his body just knew how to absorb it, break it down, become the thing he’d found. “My brother taught me,” is not a story about sacrifice, which is perhaps why the brother remained an anonymous figure around which conversations danced.
In Cedar Rapids that evening, Keoni and Beau and Lonnie and a dozen other members of Team Hard Drive make their way to a viewing party at an establishment that sponsors Erik, known to the fighters as Cici’s but formally and fittingly “Cici’s Pizza Buffet.” The fighters bring their kids, mittens hanging by strings from their sleeves, and let them loose to play arcade games in the back of the restaurant. The adults drink Coke out of tall plastic cups and ignore the fights before Erik’s fight, making fun of the one guy they always make fun of and only going quiet when Keoni has something to say. The pictures flickering across the screen are familiar; they know the cast by name. There is the octagon, cerulean blue and crosshatched by red beams of light. There are the ring girls and the long camera shots that follow them around the ring; there is the kiss they blow to the camera as they twirl and sit back down. There are the referees the camera stops and acknowledges—Herb Dean, Big John McCarthy, Steve Mazzagatti—and the top tier ticketholders it humors, platinum-haired women in diamonds and glittering tanks on the arms of hairless, polished, elaborately tattooed men. There is Stephan Bonnar’s boyishly jacked inflection carrying the viewers through each hit—oh and a straight right drops him; Michaels is all over him with some vicious ground and pound; he landed that left hook earlier; smiled and answered with a laser straight right hand, right down the middle; armbar, it’s on! There is Bruce Buffer’s voice, operatic in scope, hailing the arrival of each fighter into the sacred space with oceans-deep rich rolling swells of sound that rise gently and dip hard with the demands of the ritual welcome. This is the second time they will see Erik at the Palms, and the fourth time they will see him fight live on national television, but still when he pops onscreen it seems to Keoni as if his brother has walked onto the set of some old sitcom they’d watched together as kids, has disappeared from his bedroom and reemerged in this flat and glittering world.
Erik has his own warm-up room and Duke and Pettis are there, gently there, minimizing their presence as Erik hops and swings at imaginary opponents and as the fights tick by. Nothing is articulated here. There is a television in the warm-up room but no audio; hits happen soundlessly, chased by the low boom of the crowd outside. Duke slides cracked red mitts on his hands and stands in front of Erik, who thrusts his shins into them; thwap. Pettis sits on a metal bench and stares at the screen, worrying his knuckles, crack crack, sucking on the lace of his hoodie.
Erik’s is the ninth of eleven fights tonight, which means he is a “contender” but not yet a “champion,” and the pressure implied in this distinction is considerable. He is wearing white shorts that crink and whistle as he walks and although he looks hydrated and healthy it is hard to imagine this slight white figure—“Powder” people will call him from the stands; “he should get a tattoo of a tan,” someone will tweet—conjuring the kind of power it takes to throw any man to the ground.
Everything is waiting. He waits for Pettis to put on some pads so he can punch them and he waits for the seventh fight to end and the eighth fight to end and he waits for the room-rocking thump-thump of his entrance music and waits for Duke and Pettis to gather behind him with his banner and waits for Pettis to slather Vaseline on his face and then he is in the cage, finally in the cage, only now he is hopping around and waiting for Cisco the Californian, who evidently has many more fans in Vegas than does Erik, and he waits for the cry of Cisco’s crowd to move up through his feet to the tips of his fingernails and something is gathering and then finally Steve Mazzagatti, a man Erik has watched from a couch in Iowa referee fights for years and years, says “Let’s get it on,” and Erik begins to sway.
He and Cisco step forward and backward, forward and backward, rocking in hypnotic rhythm, a low kick here, a missed uppercut there, and Erik leans low and right and swings his left shin high into Cisco’s head and the head whips out of rhythm and Cisco drops like a dead man and Erik lunges onto Cisco and Steve Mazzagatti jumps in between them because Erik Koch is the winner and the champion and millions of people are watching and the whole room is standing and grown men are moaning and as I look at my hands wet with my tears Erik flexes every muscle in his body—hands fisted, arms low—and screams.