6
Portrait of a 21st Century Snuff Fighter
G. Wells Taylor
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 by G. Wells Taylor
All rights reserved.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Edited by Julia C. Moulton
Cover Design by G. Wells Taylor
More titles at GWellsTaylor.com and Smashwords.com.
****
Dedicated to Jane Goodall
For introducing me to the other apes in the jungle.
****
PART ONE:
The Soldier
****
1
Where to begin? Cassette player in skull crushing hand is on. Flesh ripping teeth, blood drinking mouth and marrow tasting tongue are tuned to the same artistic pitch, working the gentle truce together now, labia peaceful in action—coexisting licking the numbers testing one, two, three...
“That Animan, oh yeah! He sure is a monster. Course, in my own special way, so am I.”
I pause for a scratch and twitch, thinking over many vicious ways that I could tell my story. Starting me the hero fighting in the ring or scrapping in the dustbins back in Ireland. But that wouldn’t be true, and truth is the only thing that ever fought me to the final bell and won. Problem was I rarely remembered my childhood, it being a great boring collection of rubber teat sucking and the like, so many soiled diapers and cradle caps. It was boring to me: all the day in, day out tests for the body and mind. Oh yeah, I remember all those pasty birds in white coats giving me the IQ quizzes with ink blots and the pressure cuffs and the eyedropper squeezing and the like. It was no place for a young fellow, just a wee boy with nothing but a bouncy ball for protection. All alone, you might say, with a bunch of featherweight men and women in white, plastic hats and all glaring, staring and pairing—digging into the old cogger box yours truly calls his brain; but, I did all right, I guess.
I grew up calling the doctors and scientists, whitecoats; funny, I still do, when I see some little pigeon-breasted bird with pop bottle lenses and the like, I howl, “Hey, there goes a fucking whitecoat!” I guess it’s hard to shake. They worked me round the clock, you might say. The boring bastards burning the midnight oil as I dreamed and dreamed—them ciphering like Freud with Jung itch and counting the pitter-pats of my heart and the electrical lightning strokes in my brain. Shit, the times I woke up coughing, spitting wires and duct tape.
I was brought up in a big cinderblock house in the Canadian Rockies. A really big house, just rectangles and long straight halls covered in hard creamy paint I could see my reflection in. There were fifty people there whose lives revolved around me. Little ol’ me, little wee ol’ me fifty pounds on my first birthday me.
Once I talked to a whitecoat shrink about the whole thing. He said I turned out violent because of unconscious resentment for those who deprived me of love. ‘Those’ in this case being the whitecoats interested in the fibrous and gaseous natures of me more than the parts that the gods might squabble over. That surprised me, because I always felt it was a conscious choice my taste for blood, and I never laid the blame for my violent nature on my past. I was violent because I was good at it. Damn good. You might say I came out swinging—from whatever pink, fuzzy and unnamed corner of the ring I entered.
I remember at the cinderblock house they used to put me through all sorts of physical training for pumping up the old body, piling on the muscle so to speak. The program I loved the most was boxing. I loved it. Course, once I took to that, I kind of gave up on the old headwork—in a serious way. I learned anyway, having an aptitude for cogging and setting notions in their proper time and place. And I mean, I really didn’t have time for schooling. Oh, they’d sit me down with a book, but all I could think about was the way it felt slugging my fists into something soft and warm, like a man’s belly, or that jarring kind of cement feel a jaw can have when you lay into it with a haymaker.
Even the times I did read, I kind of changed the story on my own, so I guess that’s headwork in a way, but it never felt like work. I’d imagine, old Great Expectations Pip like laying into Miss Havisham, just kind of punching her three ways of Sunday, just pulling her veil down and bang, bang, bang on the cheekbones for all the cockteasing, till she can’t remember if she was getting married or what; and Jaggers the lawyer fellow with the smile and dirty hands, I could see our hero Pip knocking over his big happy teeth like tombstones. And Pip’s sister, well she needed to be put in line, as simple as that—bent over something and screaming.
Moby Dick was a favorite of mine because of all the spearing and the flesh rendering and the great boiling pots of blubber and the thick black meat smoke in the air—though he yawped our Melville did, sometimes making a sleepfest for the coggerbox with all the extra stuff flowing out of his pen. But I read that and imagined old Queequay diving in and going a real violent round with the white whale. Then, he kind of KO’s the big bastard by knocking his eyes out and punching through the backs of the bony sockets into the brain. Real bloody shot, you know—the crowds would be screaming. Oh yeah, I remember, then Queequay comes out of the water like a fisherman king, and that crippled bastard Ahab goes at him with a harpoon because he’s been cheated of his prize, and then doesn’t Queequay pick him up and sit him down hard on his ivory leg. Just, bang, in a kind of wrestler’s flying mare proctology thing. And me seeing and laughing at the look on old Ahab’s face as the ivory slides home. I knew that wasn’t the kind of thing a schoolboy should think about, but it got me reading.
So you might think yours truly was being a little short of sight by abandoning the mind for the body, especially after the great mechanization that took place at the final count for the twentieth: just digital machines and no one working like. You might say it was kind of stupid to go out into a world equipped with only a strong body and limited skills. You might think I’m a kind of a retard for giving up all that high and mighty headwork for a life using my body. Well, fuck you anyway. I’d like to hear you say that to my face.
An average man would probably splash his brains to the four winds at this point with a heavy handgun. Not me, though. I always had violence to fall back on. Now, I wasn’t always hurting someone. It was the video movie library we had there, at the Cinderblock house that got me going. Grainy black Sonny Liston honest days fights on the tapes and Blu-rays and young Cassius Clay beating on Joe Frazier’s head made me think of the punch and jab as a method of expressing my emotional subtext. I used to be content just banging around my coach a little bit, or punching the heavy bag until the sawdust poured. But there came a day that I drew first blood, and it was beautiful. Like your first lay, or one of those really rare magic sunrises when the air’s all misty and the dew shines like diamonds on the leaves. It was beautiful, and I never looked back. The scene was this:
I was about sixteen, and sick and tired of the cinderblock house in the mountains, I mean, what am I going to do up there anyway? I used to headwork a joke that I would just settle down with a nice mountain goat for the fast and furious and raise a big-balled and bearded family of billy boys. Anyway, I asked them if I could go into the city for a movie or something. They showed me movies up there, but I always had a whitecoat with me, monitoring a wire in my dick, or something. Anyway, they say no—and that’s enough for me. I wait for night and then I beat the shit out of the four big guys that were there to handle me, and the closest thing I had to equals, or friends for that matter. Anyway, something came over me, when they tried to push me back into my room because I just started swinging and kicking and breaking. I killed each and every one of them with my bare fists. I couldn’t help it once I got started, it was like hitting putty, and when they screamed it only made me smile and hit them harder. And they screamed—oh they didn’t like that at all.
Anyway, by sheer luck and violence, yours truly escaped even though they have all kinds of electric crap that could track me down or fry my ass: me running and headworking that they’d kill me now that I’ve whacked four of their whitecoat musclemen. I got away, quick-like by jumping into a big roaring river and splashing away like a salmon. There were times when I was lost in this monster frothy cloud that I thought I was done for, like my bill was paid; but, somehow I washed clear past the sharp and nasty rocks that wanted my flesh and blood. I went to a big city. It was some place with a real sissy name, something royal and you could just see the guy in pantyhose, but I was so pumped I barely remember it, and from there I went to the states, then, Mexico; and before you know it, there I was living in Argentina.
Why Argentina? Well, it wasn’t from fright or any great hatched egg from the coggerbox. You see, when I was traveling through Mexico, which was somewhere I had planned to stay, I looked for a job that didn’t require too much headwork. You see, in Mexico they still have lots of human machines who require less care and money to run than real machines, and they’re cheaper to replace. The fuckers!
So, I’m roaming those dusty streets. It’s a real nice night, and this little guy comes up. I guess I look like a fighter. I got a big square jaw, broad nose like a tuna can, and heavy low forehead. I keep my hair cut in a stiff brush and I make sure my big body is in tiptop shape, being an early bloomer with all the veins and muscles bulging. So this guy asks me if I like fights. “Señor,” he called me, can you believe it? I kind of chuckled. I tell him of course I do, and he asks me to follow him. I get this little voice in my skull saying maybe he’s a fag and he wants me, so I size him up and think if he is, he’ll be a dead fag soon. We go, and end up at this real seedy looking hotel that smelled like rosehips and whores, me knowing this since at this point in my adventures I had become acquainted with both fragrances. He leads me into the basement of the place. One hundred pesos he whined at me, and I gave it to him, having got some money in a kind of dishonest fashion that I’d rather not tell you about.
In through this door we go, and there’s a dark room full of seats, all pointed at a screen. He drops into a chair and waits for me. I figured it was going to be fuck flicks, plenty of drooling fun that I don’t go in for much. I’m there and pumping up just about to clobber the living shit out of this Mexican when the movie starts. I had my wide back to it, but swung around when I heard a bell.
First thing I notice in the movie is this big cage maybe twenty-five feet tall. There’s a couple of guys in it, both of them about the same size. One looks Chinese, and the other’s a black brother of African ancestry. I let the little Mexican’s collar drop and sat down beside him. I noticed the black guy has big steel knuckles on one fist and I see the Chinaman moving like a karate expert-type: slinking and underhanded. Well, they square off as I watch, and I begin to feel a little homesick. They always had popcorn at the cinderblock house.
The battle was fast and furious. It reminded me of Ultimate Fighting, a fun form of entertainment from the 20th Century that I’d bumped shoulders with on the way south—but this was better. This filled in all the blanks. The Chinaman kicked the shit out to the black guy. He had all his karate tricks to throw at him, and the black guy wasn’t nearly violent enough. I always figured karate was a way of letting your body do what it wanted to do. We always screw it up by headworking our way around it—spoiling the mood for blood and sport and worrying about getting kicked in the nuts. Or other people do, I have no problem getting natural, and even as I watched the guy I felt my muscles begin to twitch and jump as I think how I would react, just boom, boom, boom—sayonara!
Soon, anyway, I hear one of the black guy’s legs snap wet and sappy as a green tree branch, and one of his arms hangs crooked. So the crowd on the film goes wild when the Chinaman comes in for the knockout and then, while the crowds howling like dogs for his blood, doesn’t the black guy get a lucky swing with his good arm and knock the Chinaman down. The crowd just shrieks at that point, as the black guy drags himself over and with many heavy smacks of his steel knuckles, the Chinaman’s head is a red puddle. And I’m watching and I can’t believe it. They went right for it, no holding back, killed him. I even think I got a bit of wood I was so excited.
The film ended quickly without credits or anything. I just remember the look on the black guy’s face as he staggered to his feet and raised his arm in victory. I turned to the Mexican and asked him where the hell that fight took place, because I had this nagging suspicion that it would not wash with the black-skirted ministers of fate in the US of A. He tells me Argentina, and then damned if he doesn’t give me an address and telephone number. An Argentine phone number, that is. Anyway, I couldn’t let an opportunity like that slip by.
I got the cash together quickly in a way that I will not yet divulge and traveled on down to Argentina in an airplane that had a wonky engine on its left wing that kept cutting in out like some old guy snoring. It got me really choppy inside when it started sawing logs as we went whizzing over some of those Andes Mountains. There’s nothing walking or creeping on the planet that scares me, but I cogged that gravity would win in a toe to toe death match, especially him swinging at me with granite peaks and valleys.
Anyway, I get there, and call the number then arrange to meet this guy. This puny greased-back Argentinean that spoke good English, looks me over and says if I’d like, I could fight that very weekend. The prize is a thousand American dollars, he tells me. Great! I said, almost kind of laughing inside cause this guy was going to let me compete and he didn’t even know if I was a good fighter or not. I guess he had nothing to lose.
I pause and look out the window of the penthouse, then snap off the little cassette recorder I have been yawping my life’s story into. The clock on the wall shows me in no uncertain terms that I am out of time for the leisurely rosy ruminations of the way I was, and that I am due at the Metrodome. The limousine will be outside, I am sure, with some scotch-assed monkey shining up the hubcaps and sneaking quick drinks out of the bar in back. I can see his precious little face already, headworked into existence, on the temporal movie screen in my skull. He has dainty white hands, and lily petal cheeks. I growl incomprehensibly, but make my point with three sharp nasty smacks of fist against palm. I have to go to the Metrodome. I pitch the cassette recorder on the couch where the writer-type individual can do his thing with it.
2
Animan was about seven, seven and a half feet tall, and his body was made of great tangles of chromium tubing. It was kind of pretty the way the light glittered off him. Then I chuckle like cause all he needs is a fat guy blowing on one of his arms and he looks like a tuba. Anyway, he’s—I call him a ‘he’ cause it feels better for me—I don’t mean he had a little brass spigot between his legs or a faucet, but I’ll feel better knocking the living shit out of him if I see him as a him. I mean, I still could go real violent on a woman, real angry boy stuff like you’re not my mother, but that always leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and I prefer my violent moments with women in bed. Anyway, he’s ugly when you look past the gleam, Animan, which might be another reason I call him a him. He’s got this big steam iron head, just a big chunk of smooth iron with a pair of beady bloodshot eyes glaring out. I guess they were lights, but they had the look of real eyes the way the face was shaped. That’s why the hair on yours truly’s thick scalp prickled just a little bit.
Anyway Animan just stands there where he stopped after climbing onto the stage like his batteries had gone quits on him. I’m across from him on a wooden stool that’s got my backside screaming for some kind action. I figure I’d like to scrap with him there and then, just to get my blood flowing again.
I had other problems though, and maybe that’s why I don’t walk over and start pounding. My brains were all awash around headwork since I saw that guy before the show. He was one of the pressed suit daisies with skin like milk and nuts the size of buttonholes. He’s got big lips and wide staring eyes, anyway. Doesn’t he come up and say he knows me. I kind of go all chin-dropped and saggy, but manage to maintain my poise: all self-confident and carnivorous. He says he worked for Gemco and then he says some stuff about my past that only someone who knows me could know. I can’t place his face, being one of any in a puddle of pasty mugs, but he seems to know me. I just about let him have it right there since I had the sudden feeling he was a United Nations man or something and that he was wanting to bust yours truly and throw away the key like. Anyway he says nothing more than congratulations on the films, says he’s seen them, and I’ve proven a few of his theories. Again, I’m tempted to bust him up like a chair, but hold back. He kind of smiles then says it would be well worth my while to beat Animan, when it comes time to do all the violence and machine taking apart. He suddenly sounds like he doesn’t know me, cause I can’t imagine me letting anyone beat me. So he says he’s looking forward to the fight, and he leaves the room. My brain must have been smoking like old wires because I should have lifted him out of his shoes, but I let him walk—while I cogged over that one.
That’s an hour past say, and now I’m sitting, anyway, with my brain all frazzled by the headwork, and kind of putting together some big story like Mechano, and he’s gone before any good questions come leaking out. So I’m sitting there with my head full, and I shake it kind of, so I can get a few real good focused glares at my opponent. The robot-thing just stands there staring. A couple of whitecoats go buzzing around him with tiny blinking gadgets in their little bee-wing hands. I get a kick when they look at me, and I give them a face like you wouldn’t believe and I think they shit their pants. They turn all pale and sweaty anyway.
I look at Animan and he just stands there staring back, but I figure to call him a fuckface would be like doing the same thing to a can opener or a laptop computer and I cog that I’m above that, so I look into the crowd and start making goo-goo eyes at this tall blonde with mighty tits and a short skirt that’s letting me see her sheer silk panties—kind of dark in the middle, you know, the way we like it: snip, snip, trim, trim, yum, yum. I mouth something else about fucking, then mug a little letting the bravado of a killer work for me. I give the Animan the finger, and kind of wink at the blonde. The Animan doesn’t blink an eye. What an asshole.
Soon a guy comes up on stage. He’s a seedy little Italian bastard with a nose like a fishhook that I know as the fight promoter: Juan Matisse. I try to stay clear of him since any snuff fights he arranges are usually like against my grandfather or something. The blood flows fast, but it isn’t fierce. Easy money, but I’m past that point in my career. Where Matisse got the Animan, I don’t know, but it sure doesn’t conjure up any pretty picture, and it inspires no confidence in me. I think for a minute that this fight might be like me wrestling a refrigerator or something, but the idea sort of fades away like gas. There’s something about Animan that looks legit.
Matisse smiles with his golden teeth all around at the press, and they respond by wasting gigabytes of memory cards on him. He tap-taps the mike then starts on with his banjo voice heavily accented.
“Gracias, Gracias,” he says though with more of an accent. “I am Juan Matisse. As you know after years of wrangling and months of deal making, I personally have arranged to bring to you the match of the century. Animan, mountain of steel and technology versus Nuke, 13 Time World Champion Snuff Fighter.”
I growl at the little porkpie son of a bitch for my second billing. The hackles around my ears stands up. Dork! He goes on and on then, as much as I would have liked to end it with so many bone-crunching whacks.
“The kind builders of Animan, Gemco—a division of Specific Electric, have brought their tremendous creation to Santa Rosa for what is being billed the battle of the twenty-first century. It is hoped that Animan will lead a vanguard of advances in robotics and electronics. Specific Electric sees this rumble on the pampas as the final test for their creation. In just four nights this terrifying creation of the digital world will undergo its final option. Animan will battle Nuke, world champion snuff fighter. Santa Rosa will be the grounds for the world’s greatest battle, where man will combat technology. Is it possible for a mere machine to overcome its creators? Is it possible for a weak creature of flesh and blood to overpower five hundred pounds of circuits, steel and hydraulics? Is this the end for mankind?”
I get kind of pissed off at this point. I figure he’s going at my reputation a bit here, what with the lie about me being one of Animan’s creators, and the crack about weak flesh and blood. I stand up quick and smash my stool into little pieces. I throw what’s left of it at the press and make my way to the mike. Juan Matisse beat a hasty and lily-livered retreat.
“I’ll push that frying pan he calls a face into the last century!” I kind of get crowded now, all the press moving in like a bunch of oiled faggots. But I get kind of carried away. “I’ll make him wish he’d been made into hubcaps, or bathroom fixtures!”
Now, the crowd starts moving around and kind of oohing a lot about something, and not taking any more pictures or listening to me or anything. I see a couple of Matisse’s bodyguards giving me the cruel eye and the pouty lips and iron chins. I reach out and tear an ear off one of them. That bastard goes into his coat for a big heavy gun. I easily take the gun and bust his cheekbones with it. Well, the whole show goes wild at this point. I keep punching and punching and punching. Always it felt good, the hard fist cracks on the jaws and the warm putty punches in the bellies. I guess I’m a real showman at heart, because soon the cameras are on me again. I fold a bodyguard in two and pitch him onto the howling horde of media fuckers and they go back as a mass into a plate glass window. Its one of those big heavy convention center jobs so it goes bang and comes down in a bloodthirsty curtain.
Well, before you know it a platoon of soldiers comes in, and after about an hour of real violence and a half hour at the police station, I’m walking home to my penthouse having just paid my bail to the sergeant. There’s blood all over me at this point. My jacket’s been torn to smithereens and my ass is hanging out of my jeans. I feel a tender spot on my skull, my eyes jump wince-like, the skin around them wrinkling like prunes. Someone has knocked a patch of fur off with a table leg. I think I put him in a coma for his pains. As I’m walking and kind of reliving the whole violent episode in my head, I remember that when the fight was going strong, I started looking around for that Animan to see if I can spar a little. Seems he chickenshit disappeared just after the fight started which gives me a pleasing squirt in the guts because I figured he didn’t have the belly for the close work. Anyway, I walk into the lobby of my apartment building and ask the sleepy little gook bastard behind the counter for any mail. There was a postcard from Warren McVicars, an Irish cop I met from New York City. He paid big money to meet me and have a little spar. I even broke his forearm for him. The postcard was from a whorehouse in Singapore, so I guessed he made good on his promise to go to the Vatican. He’s my buddy now—like I need a buddy. Just then someone taps me light on the shoulder. I come around quick with a fist cocked being still full of the swinging hot blood. It’s the blonde I saw at the press conference. Her tits are parked under my pecks as I give here eyes the once over. Nice and bright and blue, like morning sky through a dewdrop.
“I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Nuke.” She smiled with tall white cocksucking teeth. “I asked around and one of the promoters gave me your address.” Then she gave me a little Bambi frown, looking at my wounded hide. “Oh, dear, you’re hurt.”
“Shit no, this is nothing, baby—er, what will I call you.” I’m figuring from her eyes that she won’t let me go on calling her ‘baby.’
“Veronica,” she said and smiled again. “Veronica Ramsey.”
I just go quiet a minute listening to the pretty sound the name made inside my head. “Veronica...” I listen to it again. “That’s pretty.” I hear myself saying, like I’m Don Juan or Johnny Depp or some shit.
“Thank you, Mr. Nuke. Do you have a first name?” Her eyes batted long lashes at me.
“Nuke’s fine.” I smile now, starting to get a major nose full of this broad’s hormones. “Nuke.” I look down and notice she has a hand out like she wants me to shake it. I grab it, as gently as I can. She only winces a little.
“Pleased to meet you, Nuke.”
“Pleased to meet you, Veroncia.” I smile again, and really feel like action. “How about fucking, Veronica. Do you like it or what?”
Well, doesn’t she just haul off and smack me. I almost decked her, being still somewhat full of heat from the battle, and now a little horny. She turns away and walks out of the hotel. I watch her round ass go. It’s one of those ones that was big without being flabby—a dancer’s ass, like liquid steel. I almost fetched her back and gave her a spanking, but my arrows of vengeance misfire and something inside tells me no. Maybe it was her name that kept me back. Veronica.
I was all lit up now though, so instead of going right to my room I decided to pop into a bar and pick up a whore or something. That slap had made me a little too angry for any more Noel Coward dialogue. I wanted to dip the wick and I wasn’t going to be picky. So long as I could be very rough.
3
So my right fist goes crunch up under his ribs and out comes a great big woof of air like he’s blowing out birthday candles. Then, I’m kind of enjoying that and I nearly miss his hatchet hand that happens to be whistling toward my bristly skull. As it was, I feel this slight shadow afterimage on my scalp, kind of like a memory you want to forget but can’t. Like he almost got me there. A left from him, I block; like its thrown at me by a baby, it has no power, and then I shove him back with a real twist and pull on his hatchet hand. I feel a faraway chicken bone kind of crack. I think he broke a finger—maybe a wrist bone—hard to say. Anyway, he goes curling away like a spinning top and smashes into the iron turnbuckle with a clang. I’m still scanning the roof out of the corner of an eye, since I saw the referee starting to drop there.
So, if you haven’t seen one, the referees are these big iron robot type jobs, about eight feet tall with legs like spiders. They dangle over the ring on cables, and pretty much do nothing else—just big dangerous chandeliers, unless there’s a clinch. They watch for that, fighters tangling it up—getting in close for a breather or some nasty flesh work. He started to drop the second we grappled there, and so you have to move fast. The referee’s only job is to break up clinches, and none too gently. I’ve seen them do it. They move fast, and they can pull the arm off a man like a wing off a paper airplane. Anyway, I learned just watching what they could do. Close fighting is discouraged by the network bosses on account of the cameras being unable to pick up the action, and close up wrestling fights don’t sell. They learned that a long time ago when Judo masters took over the old days Ultimate Fighting and turned it into a yawn and snore and chokeholds and who fucking cares. They changed the rules back then, before the referees were installed, and said you couldn’t clinch for more than ten seconds—so that’s the end of those popping weasel little wrestlers with their glass jaws and double-jointed spines—just bang, bang, bang and down they go.
And that’s changed even more now because another incentive against the chin-to-chin, nipple to nipple scrapping is the backers will pay extra for real photogenic deathblows. And I’ve been known to pick up bonuses from time to time. They like the real crazy stuff, muscles pumped for action, head back screaming like an Indian. You see, in this game you just can’t pay a man enough to take a fall.
So this mug comes off the cables doubled over, as fast as he can come with a couple of broken ribs. He’s about six-six, weighs in at 250 in his scanties, and with his hatchet outreaches me by maybe a foot. I kind of see the spotlight gleam along the hatchet blade. He’s got it back and really cocked for a stump splitter. His other mitt’s out to mess up my defense. A normal man would die just about then, being indisposed with the hand and the hatchet and being all shaky in the knees from having perused this monster’s bio—spent his teenage years in an American pen for killing his mommy and daddy with a kitchen knife—but not yours truly. I fake a charge at him, and then stop just out of his chopping range. I can do it faster than anybody in the ring today. I’ve got good eyes, and legs like steel pistons right? So he takes the bait and swings at the place I should be, and I watch a second then leap in and jam my shoulder up under his arm.
I catch him by the wrist and really put the squeeze on like I’m going to loosen the skin and peel it. I bend his elbow over my shoulder and pump it down with all my strength. It snaps loud and proud. A big red bolt of blood shoots out, cause I’ve pulled so hard the bones have snapped into slivers and cut through the muscle and skin—really wild stuff! He shrieks in my ear, which I hadn’t accounted for, but can live with, and the crowd goes through the roof. He screeches a little more as I keep hold of the wrist and I kind of spin away from him like we’re waltzing. The big bastard’s tough though, because he gives me a hard punch in the mouth. I was off guard, and being the showman again. I’m suddenly dropping to a knee the same moment the hatchet’s dropping out of his useless hand. I’m a little dazed—not really hurt, but dazed because I didn’t expect the package—you let a 250 pound man punch you in the mouth when you don’t expect it and we’ll trade notes.
Small price to pay, but I kind of curse myself for letting it happen. He deserved to get that lick in, I give him that, but my instincts are on red alert now, having had a brush with overconfidence. I let my reflexes take over and I wrap my legs through his and drop to the mat. He goes down like a Sequoia. He’s on the floor and spewing blood, and I’m looking right at his hatchet blade just lying there useless. I smile kind of devious-like, smelling victory, and never knowing when the cameras have a tight shot on me. I snap it up, smiling like a clown and look at my opponent. I’ve got him pinned in a scissor hold, like they used to in the flashy asshole days of wrestling—with guys in swimming trunks and go-go boots. I quick like a bunny give him the blade of the hatchet over the eyes. There’s a loud wooden thunk! sound, and the crowd just about pees itself. I’ve done my job though and the blade only dropped a quarter inch—just enough to draw some blood. I pull it free and the blood jumps out. I let him go, but he’s down and dazed and eyes full of blood and all. His face is one big bloody smear and it peers around like a sleepy old man’s.
The crowd’s chanting my name now, and I’m up with the hatchet over my head. I’m giving them the big chest and shoulder muscle routine, and I try to grin like a demon, and I let some blood drool out of my mouth like I’ve had a hard go of it and I’m going to enjoy letting some air into this guy’s head. “Nuke! Nuke! Nuke!” The crowd keeps chanting, and I take it all in like a star and for a bit of show allow my left leg a bit of a shake, like I’m tired or something. They scream even more, because they’d hate to see me pass out now, before I’ve carved this boy up into fish sticks. I see my opponent; he’s looking for his corner, crawling across the hard concrete pouring blood. The crowd’s going into a real frenzy as I stalk over, yeah, I stalk over like a great big rabid wolf. For a second I’m embarrassed and angry because I see the bastard’s crying like a baby—so I think to go right for it, no more glory. Just a quick hit—kabang—before he shits himself.
I look into the white-enamel eyes of the crowd. They smile like savages, and their mouths are so many evil round yawps into hell. I look down at him—this man, this crybaby, this mommy’s boy—he’s bleeding and sniveling at my feet. I’m hoping he doesn’t beg or anything because that will get my blood pressure up and that usually makes me go wild and I lose all my artistic poise and purpose. I hear the big black mouths scream my name. I heft the hatchet and split his skull neat and true from front to back. His brains spill out on the floor like a big creamy wave or like old oatmeal, then the blood and all. I smile for us both then. Why not, he would have loved to do the same to me. Damn it, the feeling was great. I swing the hatchet around over my head causing a drooling curtain of blood all around.
I bow real low, and the band starts to play. I bow again, and climb out of the ring, feeling real excellent like I could dance all evening, or do sexy gymnastics with that special someone till the sun comes up and the lubricants run out.
4
“Anyway, I pause for reflection, it being part of the last week of my ordinary life, before I go into the annals of what would be called civilized history. I’ve got to say that life as a snuff fighter is not what you would refer to as easy, or in terms that could be found in a thesaurus beside the word cakewalk. No. A fellow has to know what’s going on his own head before he tries it. Not to say there’s a lot of headwork, because there isn’t. But, I’m referring to the non-difficult type thinking that one would acquaint with moments of headwork were that individual in a job where that were required. It being not so much headwork, as soulwork. That’s more like it. That’s what I mean: soulwork. Forget that other part.”
I pause here and look at this pasty little novelist type chap that would look at home in a whitecoat. He sits quietly like a good little bird. He’s still sporting the shiner I gave him when I became upset about a crack he made directed at my syntax. True, he caught me off guard, because I was not all together sure at the time what my syntax was; but I figured he was not being paid to criticize yours truly. The only reason I’m talking to the scribe is because some book company paid four million dollars for the privilege. I’m tempted at times to just punch the shit out of this guy and run him through his scanner, stuff him into his computer and email him home. But, I have been good. Besides he wasn’t really a bad guy, just too busy with the headwork for his own good. Fucking writer.
“I’m beginning to understand you, Mr. Nuke.” His voice comes out like a sugar cube. “You have felt your career was a natural calling—a spiritual duty.”
“Yeah!” I tell him, trying to sound confident. He knows shit about me, it’s obvious, but I hate being shown up by these little birds full of headwork because I get mad and injure most of them. “Yeah, it is something that could be called natural to my instinctive nature. Or in other words, it is me, and I have to be it.”
“It’s almost a karmic thing, a divine calling...” He takes a noisy slurp from his whisky. That’s because I snapped off his front tooth when trying to explain my feelings about my mother, or father for that matter, neither which I actually knew, but who I know had to be somewhere, but for some reason forgot to get in touch with yours truly for the past years of his life. I’m not really upset about it, I just don’t like these tiny men with glasses and pens and paper, and the big questions and the probing stares digging for dangerous feelings about it.
“Yes,” I say, seeing an opportunity to show off my own acquaintance with the headwork business. “A divine right, a notion of those kings in what would once be called the empire of Britain, which if you think about it is incorrect since the king in charge of an empire is an emperor by rights. You ask any Chinaman.” This little tidbit I picked up from Premiere Dong, a Chinaman wrestler and former Asian porn star that I knew about a year before. We had a bit of a chat at a big fighter’s meet and sure enough he starts yakking it up about the emperor of China, like I cared, but I must have done a little headwork about it because I managed to do the two and two with the facts. Mind you, he did go on and on about it, almost until my ears started to bleed. I just remembered that chat and kept it in mind when I was set to fight him about a month later. Premiere Dong died horribly.
Anyway, this writer looks at me again, and his eyes go all sheepdog and drippy. “Perhaps if we were to concentrate upon your early days. If we could focus on how you felt in the cinderblock house that you called home.”
Okay, well, I almost warn him then not to start any chinwag about how I felt back then. At least I want to tell him to put on his football pads because I might try to kick a field goal with his private parts once I start pouring out the little angry bits of the start of my life’s calling. I guess I just shrugged instead, and kind of chuckled thinking about the way he looked last time he regained consciousness—stupid, like some chimpanzee with a gut full of moonshine. “Sure,” I say, and start talking.
5
There was this nurse there, Lois, who used to show me her pussy. I don’t know how she managed—there usually being a big digital gigabyte camera on or up my ass most of the whole time, but somehow she found a way to give me a peek. I guess you could say that Lois was my first love that being my first in the early romantic days when I still believed in love. I was six or seven at the time, and when I wasn’t boxing or reading and thinking about boxing, I was sleeping and dreaming about boxing or dreaming about reading about it—type of thing. Well, in she walked one night, clickety-clack on the high heels—different from the other gum-soled nightingales who whispered around the linoleum like Cinderella’s mice, but Lois walks over and up goes the skirt—boom-boom there it is. All lovely and brown and pink in the nightlight, the labia folded away like butterfly wings.
I took a real deep ponderous look at it, almost approaching headwork—since it was new to me at a lad my age, then reached out an inquisitive paw having been somewhat schooled in the art of hard knocking up by a feisty old janitor who pushed his smelly equipment cart up and down the halls of the cinderblock house.
“They like it hard and fast,” he used to say, and me being but a young fellow with little headwork in the noggin; well, I believed him. “If they don’t scream, you aren’t doing your job.” He’d glib over a spitball of tobacco—his teeth as yellow as pee. Anyway, out goes my mitt all stiff muscle fingers, and Lois slaps it. Now, I ball up a fist, and I’m about to go at her for this infraction when she says “Look, don’t touch.” Well, I guess I was still naive about love at the time and being big on the first experiences decided to compromise and do a close inspection with the eyeballs. I still get this monstrous desire to do like the janitor said, and take her down on the bed and lift the skirt and do the dirty deed—slithering in there like some vicious anaconda getting out of the rain and me weighing in already at about one-fifty, and what with having all the working equipment and so forth—but, I go softy and just look and take it all in.
It never went any further, even though I tried from time to time. But she was always quick with that tricky hard little hand, and being still a boy, I was open to influences like mommy-types of pain. So I gawked whenever she came in. Just took it in. Seems to me I could draw her pussy from memory, I stared at it so many times. So it went on for about two years, her coming late at night sometimes, and showing me the wonderland cat smiling toothlessly under her skirt. She’d stand there for about ten, fifteen minutes then drop her skirt hem back over her thighs and away she goes—clickety-clack.
Now, I’d be left there with this great throbbing dingledangle between my legs with no place to go, but to do a little five-finger discount at the sperm bank, basically caramelizing my bedding, comforter and all—things looking sometimes like I spilled a can of shellac. Sad but unconquered, yours truly stuck literally in a gooey toss and turn for the night. Then, one day she stopped coming around all together, and I didn’t see either of her smiles for a month. So I asked the janitor who was like a guru to me, and he said she ran off with the Director’s son. I only knew directors back then as the guys who called “Roll’em!” just before the sea comes flashing in and kills the Romans or the gangsters go bang, bang, bang with their big black guns.
When I heard that Lois had spirited herself away, I imagined her in a movie one day, maybe one about her nights with a young fellow like myself, but I realized that I had a deep weepy feeling in me that I could not shake no matter how hard I hit the punching bag; so I started sparring with the coach, and the lovely whuff sounds he’d make took all thoughts of Lois and the tribulations of love from my head. Despite this, I managed to hold onto my romantic notions.
Then I fell in love with my war teacher. I always called her my war teacher, because the history she talked about was really just a record of what bunch of mean motherfuckers won that time. She always tried to confuse me with long talkabouts on the political this and that of it, but I saw that was like a bunch of meetings between fight promoters and managers. My favorite stuff was about the Romans because they knew all about what it was to be a man with a flare for violence. The Romans knocked down the old world and kicked until its brains were out. I had to hand it to them.
My favorite guy was Hannibal who was as tough as they come, and the only reason I liked him so much is that the odds favored the Romans in a head to head smack-down. And Hannibal ran them right to the bell, pissed as he was about all the raping they did to Africa. Anyway, I would always picture myself as this guy Hannibal, tougher than tough, roaring into battle on the thick gray back of an elephant with a long axe in each hand just smacking and whacking the Romans out of my way like stalks of garlic. I was fond of the Europeans too, because they were no strangers to the slash and spew and sever, especially in the early days when there were lots of angry guys claiming to be king. They seemed to keep kicking ass for the whole time they were around, but they got kind of dirty in the end with knife-in-the-back work and the odd bit of hemlock in the tea.
Oh, that reminds me of Socrates, who seemed like a real boring bit of headwork and the father of whitecoats until you read and read, and hoping on all hope you finally find a bit about him fighting in war and killing and stuff for Greece, which when I did find it, increased my respect for the man and his yawping enormously.
So, one day I tell this war teacher, Mrs. Sonadhi, she was East Indian or something prone to headscarves and silky hip-to-hip wraparounds, if she could tell me more about this guy Cromwell, a round-headed bastard that kicked the shit out of a king. She says sure, tomorrow, but I give her the long dogface and say I want to hear some more now please. She tells me she has to get a textbook from her office, and would it be okay if she showed it to me there, and I told her seeing it there would be just fine too. As we walked down the hall I just kept looking at her long dress thing, all kind of covered in flowers and shapes as it shimmered over the round and curvy parts of her without giving up any of the contours of the camel toe or swollen pouty vents. Her face is really pretty too, with big dark almond eyes—and I’m getting wood, like bad.
Into the office we go, and she says to have a seat. I shut the door and lock it and she says I don’t have to lock it, then looks really terrified sort of like something in my face is giving away the secret that’s raging between my legs. So anyway I jumped her quick with as much speed as I had in my big body—which has always been a lot. I tear a big chunk off her dress thing and stuff it in her mouth, cause I can tell she’s a little upset and so she won’t distract me with any talking about doing the right thing and dating first; and then I unwrap her body and bend it over the desk. She had a great frame, really wonderful tits with super dark nipples and this bush between her legs that was black and a little scary—real haunted forest kind of thing. But I get over it quick and fuck her on the desk, her the whole time going Ugh, and Uff, being unable to make any of the screams that the janitor told me about, but giving clues that I was doing a good job of it just the same. So, I give it to her quick and hard, and soon I just pull up my pantaloons and leave her there kind of draped over her desk winded and crumpled like her dress.
I was locked in my room for the next five weeks, and I never saw my war teacher again even though I loved her. I guessed that she must have gone somewhere to have a baby or something as some of the books and movies foretold, and so I figured that this was the way of love, just thrusting feelings and nothing more.
If I were to writer-like put that interlude into a novel of my life, I would do so under the title: “Bereft from Birth.” Meaning that I am not stupid and can therefore, after the fact, understand the suffering of my war teacher, the understanding of which does not take away the incident, nor does it undermine the exhilarating feeling yours truly gets when cogging it up out of the wheels and chains that could be referred to as my brain and going over it again in all its sweaty, salty glory. Whew! I know that in the eternal scheme of the university reality that we all inhabit, this would be a good versus evil issue. I could bring all sorts of evidence to bear for my good nature or the fact that the intent of the act was anything but nasty, but I will not insult the judges with such a plea. A good reason does not undo it, and I am certain that everyone concerned has learned something from this unsavory little incident, yours truly being among the happy pupils.
Anyway, the headline could read: Love Conquers Everything but Nuke. I was never one of those petunia sniffing little dandy boys about love, penning the drooling bits of rosary for my sweetheart’s kiss. I have always taken the janitor’s good advice on the matter. Fuck them fast and hard, the message and lesson for me being: make sure they like it fast and hard first, and this being primary among my reasons for throwing a question of such directness in Veronica Ramsey’s lap.
Anyway, after all of that ugly love business, yours truly got down to more reasonable attempts of the wooing and kissing and lovebird stuff. I found that, once I got myself on the great outdoor side of life, I could with a few dollars, find the women who enjoyed my sometimes overburdening and often deleterious administrations. I was never the type to get too hung up about the close, confidant and advisor sort of relations because I can get extremely violent talking about what makes Nuke tick and that can have nasty side effects upon anyone else in the room—especially if that individual is of the fairer sex and wanting to hang onto her good looks and all. Not that a male would be any safer in the fat chewing department, having done my share of nose jobs on whitecoated fellows with notebooks and questions, but that would be ridiculous when applied to relationships because with a man-type individual based on gender alone, I would not have such whispered confidence. So, no one ever learns much about me, and I just find out about tensile strength and flexibility and friction burns. It fits much better in my hard-knocking life than the drooly bits of love leer and permanent erectile soul.
Furthermore, I am bored by ideas like love and pretty pansy-time, real-type joke-shows with someone out working the day long and thinking the cozy headwork about sweetie at home with the sniveling brats when in fact said sweetie has packed the kids off babysitter-like and is presently doing the love gobble on some happy postman’s unwomanhood. Then the poor savant comes home with the roses and the pretty dress in beribboned package and finds his lovely bride playing the sodomist’s doggy with jolly milkman. So and so poor worker boy then guns down everyone in the room and himself, not to mention a neighbor who’s looking over the fence.
Love conquers all. But it doesn’t conquer Nuke.
6
So I’m reading this in the evening, and the little writer fellow sits across from me on the edge of one of my comfy chairs ready to jackrabbit out of the room, really digging his toes into the carpet like. I yawp a primitive growl from time to time, crowning him with a tiara of sweaty pearls when he sees the bristles stand up on my head. I liked the book so far really, all the busy wordwork, though I couldn’t help but add something headwork of my own like about me punching out old Lois for not letting me scratch and sniff, and all that, and for good measure since she did give old Nukie a smack. I’m thinking maybe I should rewrite that part with me looking more victorious and streetwise. Or maybe with a scene of me parading around with forearms soaked in her blood, and I mention this to my writer buddy.
He kind of drops down and hunkered in like a sprinter in the blocks and I can imagine him sprying out of the room, cause he knows this to be one of my loaded questions. I’m in a good mood though, and not too forceful just then, and I can take criticism like a hit with a hammer. I’m all iron and steel sort of thing since I seem so conscientious and brave and wise and bold in the book so far. But I decide to give him a scare anyway, so I snag his little Kentucky Fried arm between my first finger and bratwurst thumb and just roll his flesh a little, like I’m going to do the big crush.