Roughhouse Friday by Jaed Coffin

Author:Jaed Coffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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I spent the rest of the night camped out in the shadows of the barroom, trying to make sense of how I’d somehow ended up the winner of a fight I’d lost, but mostly hoping to avoid any confrontation with drunk and disappointed fans who wanted to call me out. The Hooligan and his entourage had been kicked out of Marlintini’s for making a scene, but I still felt like the villain. And yet I couldn’t deny the thrill of landing my first uppercut, of smashing through the judges’ table, of being guided by that wild spirit that carried me through the final round.

As I watched the main event—which featured a heavyweight called Walter “the Showstoppah” Brown, whom Haag introduced as “two hundred pounds of bent steel and sex appeal,” and who, before the bell, kicked his legs onto the top rope so that he lay suspended horizontally, one hand under his ear, like a chubby reclining Buddha—I took stock of the Roughhouse world. On the surface, it was a circus of graceless violence, but at least here, in Marlintini’s, the hidden violence and rage and anger people felt inside them was being laid bare in the ring—free to swirl across the canvas, to bounce and careen off the red, white, and blue ropes, to stutter and flop beneath the naked glow of neon light. I still did not know why I was fighting, but even after a dubious victory, I was beginning to realize that the value of such a question was not in the answer but in the asking. Wrong-size gloves, botched scorecards, suspiciously earnest words of encouragement from Haag—the flawed, sloppy world of Roughhouse Friday was exactly the world I had, in leaving home, been searching for.

Between rounds, as the DJ played “Who Let the Dogs Out?,” the Showstoppah got on all fours and chased after the ring girl Paula like an excited puppy. But early in the final round, the Showstoppah took a soft punch to the chin and flopped to the canvas with a heavy thud. There were worse ways to make fifty bucks.

After the fight, Haag led the ring girls through a dance competition. Each girl had about a minute to dance by herself to “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Then Haag threw several dollar bills onto the canvas, so that they had to bend over to pick them up. After so much fighting, the crowd loved the performance, and the ring girls—likely drunk by now—seemed to be enjoying themselves. At least I hoped they were. I studied the faces of the women as they danced, watched their eyes as they cheered one another on. Maybe for the ring girls, too, the Roughhouse ring allowed them to forget about their lives outside Marlintini’s. Beneath the lights, even beneath the hungry gaze of lonely men who called out to them, the curse of winter disappeared.

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