Thrown by Kerry Howley

Author:Kerry Howley [Howley, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936747924
Google: mlNToAEACAAJ
Amazon: B00MSYT87M
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2014-09-22T05:00:00+00:00

Sean – Spring 2011

IN THE EARLY SPRING SEAN RODE HIS BIKE downriver, then away from the water, down busy thoroughfares, along sandy shoulders, atop cracked icy sidewalks, into the paved parking lot of his most recent place of employment, Chorus Girls. His was the only bike chained outside the strip club. “That some DUI shit?” a fellow bouncer asked. It was not a DUI, but quite the opposite, the vehicle of a man sobering up from a long intoxication, the ten-speed of a fighter back in training. Had that same bouncer been a practiced watcher of men, he might have noticed Sean’s chin tapering, his cheeks tightening like loose canvas pulled across a frame. He might have noticed a waist taking shape under Sean’s shirt.

For ten months I had awaited this physical transformation, but I had never lost faith in Sean’s future; I assumed his divorce was, like most, a temporary destabilizing force, and I knew his weight to be particularly sensitive to his psychological equilibrium. He had lost twenty pounds in the Navy not because he was made to march but because of one single incident, in which he was ordered to pick up the body of a fellow soldier who had been run over by a tank. When he picked up the body it collapsed in half, and afterward every time he sat down to a meal he was overcome with nausea, such that when he returned he was 155 pounds. Beyond fear or boredom, nausea was the feeling he most associated with war, and he loathed the feeling so much I never worried he would reenlist.

It is one thing to spacetake for a fighter on the downswing, and another for a man in his prime; but to spacetake for a fighter reborn! You can have your undefeated Anderson Silvas, your José Aldos; I had a man burning so brightly with something that his very crust was melting away, as with a planet two positions too close to the sun. The rooms he walked into changed in character and affordances, became mere tools for his fighterly use. Through Sean’s newly focused eyes the Big Shows were not a spectacle to be watched but the place where, any day now, he would be.

Of course his speech changed. The burning shot boastful words through his open mouth. “You have to do what you came here to do,” he said instructively, sitting back at his kitchen table and scratching behind the ears of his new roommate’s pitbull. “I’m not supposed to be anything else in this world but a fighter. When you have the chance to be the best in the world at something, and you don’t do anything about it, it really eats at you.” Sean leaned back, grew philosophic. “But then there is this other side of you that struggles to get its shit together. So to speak.”

We were seated in his new apartment, three rooms just above the gym and owned by Pat Miletich himself. I had read

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