Thrown

Sometimes you’re watching legit living legends of MMA lore and sometimes half-drunk cornfield-born farmboy brawlers, but there is always an octagon, always a fence, always a path down which only fighters may walk. There is music upon their entrance. There are hard-bodied fans and fat announcers, rolling cartfuls of cold beer, laser lights that shine from ceiling to canvas. Always ring girls. Let’s talk about the ring girls, please, the way they never seem to get anywhere, the way they set off, gleaming teeth and quivering thighs, only to end up back in the same cageside seat from which they alight. Round one arrives. Round two arrives. The ring girl spins in place. I used to think a ring girl’s job was to be an idea of a ring girl, that is, to nest comfortably inside the memory of every other ring girl the spectators had seen, not to draw attention to herself but to the concept “ring girl” with which myriad personal qualities of her own—perhaps she has synesthetic tendencies, a deep appreciation for the late works of Schopenhauer, an engineering degree from Iowa State—would doubtless conflict. But then I found myself at a big fight out East, and the fighters were really hot on this one particular ring girl, “Britney,” who, truth be told, was especially ogle-worthy as she strode across the cage. The spectators lusted for Britney by name, and this willingness to individuate forced me to reassess my position on the subject of ring girls, their function.

In the summer of 2010, when Sean was thirty pounds overweight and I was already his most persistent and devoted spacetaker, I was convinced that a successful fight had something to do not with the ring girl specifically—that would be absurd—but the chemical reaction made possible by a ring girl, an announcer, a beer cart, an audience, and who knows what else. That somehow the spectacle transformed the space; that we were watching, in action, a Theater of Cruelty, and just as Artaud would have predicted, the show sunk more often than it soared.

I myself am not a fighter, not a fan, not a shadow or a groupie or a worried wife. I am that species of fighterly accoutrement known as “spacetaker,” which is to say that when the fighters leave the cage, where they are self-sufficient, for the street, where they are not, I am that which separates your goodly fighter from the common thug. As hipsters have glasses, and priests collars, and cops mustaches, fighters have us. And just as the mustache does not at shift’s end quit the cop, we belong to the fighter and not the fight. Most of what fighters do, after all, is not within the purview of the octagon, and they need their entourage as much if not more on a slow Sunday afternoon when the quiet is too much to face. There is in some of them the same want that keeps cargo-shorted frat boys traveling in packs the moment they leave home, that effortfully cheerful desperation to drown out mind-traffic with the shuffle and shout of other men.

The story is this: I showed up, a spectator, to a fight in Des Moines. Moments previous I had been at a conference on phenomenology, where a balding professor stunningly wrong about Husserlian intentionality dominated the postconference cocktail hour.

“Does anyone have a cigarette?” I asked a group of skirt-suited, fading, gray-complected women, not because I wanted one but because I longed for an excuse to exit. None of them moved. I am not myself a smoker but have always preferred the company of the nicotine-inclined, and I took the aggressive health of these academics to be unseemly dogmatism.

Having nothing to do in Des Moines beyond explore Husserl with nonsmokers who did not understand him, I walked the conference center hallways. I found myself at a hotel, and then a restaurant, and then ambling along a glass corridor, one story up from downtown Des Moines. A group of young men who had fragranced themselves such that I was sure their evening had some immediate purpose passed me, and upon following them through an ever more complicated labyrinth of hallways, I landed at their destination. A framed sign standing before two closed doors read “Midwest Cage Championship.” This interested me only in that it appeared to be the honest kind of butchery in which the theory-mangling, logic-maiming academics I had just abandoned would never partake.

Inside the room the lights were dim but for a great spotlight lofted above an octagonal dais, lined on all sides with a six-foot chain-link fence. A hundred male Iowans gathered in the dark on benches. Through the fence I saw that one man was beneath another like a mechanic under a truck, and the man on top had a full set of angel’s wings tattooed down the length of his back. Inked feathers rippled as he punched the face of the man lodged under his stomach. A red stream dribbled down the other man’s forehead, onto the canvas, where their conjoined writhings smeared the blood like the stroke of a brush. Seconds later a single hand fluttered out from beneath the wing. His fingertips touched the canvas with extreme delicacy, as if to tap a bell and summon a concierge. There was no one to inform me that this meant he had given up, so I assumed some sort of grotesque exhibition had merely run its course.

“I suppose this gives us a new perspective on angels,” I remarked to my nearest, cologne-soaked neighbor, “or perhaps a very old perspective, given their not unthreatening depiction in the Old Testament.” He stared at me and walked off, though I still think the point astute. When he returned, it was to a different part of the bench.

I watched a second fight, a third. Sometimes the men were standing exchanging shots as if in a streetfight, and sometimes they leaned against the cage clutching and clawing at one another, and sometimes they rolled about the middle of the canvas like hugging children tumbling down a hill. They tore at one another with kicks and strikes, knees and elbows. Instead of turning away from the heaviest blows, some long-suppressed part of me began focusing on the mark each left behind. I felt then that I should leave, but I did not leave, and a gloriously cut, hairless man walked out to great cheers from the crowd. His name was Kevin “The Fire” Burns and he was, I gathered from the raucous reception, a celebrated fighter from Des Moines. Twenty seconds into the fight I realized that I was not at all interested in Kevin “The Fire” Burns, but rather the misshapen man he was dismantling. That man’s name was Sean Huffman, and there was not a single moment in the fifteen minute fight when he could be said to be effectively staving off The Fire’s jabs to his face.

For three long and bloody rounds I watched Sean play fat slobberknocker to another man’s catlike technical prowess. Jab after jab Sean ate, and with each precisely timed shot to his own mouth Sean’s smile grew, as if The Fire were carving that smile into him. All the while, watching, I had the oddest feeling of a cloudiness momentarily departing. It was as if someone had oil-slicked my synapses, such that thoughts could whip and whistle their way across my mind without the friction I’d come to experience as thought itself. I felt an immense affection for the spectacle before me, but it was as if the affection were not emanating from anywhere, because I had dissolved into a kind of mist and expanded to envelop the entire space that held these hundred men.

It was the last fight of the night, and after the loss Sean lay bleeding flat and still across a row of metal folding chairs. I jumped up from the last seat I’d ever pay for, shuffled past some legs in the cheap section, snuck under a divider, lied to security, and strode over to his outstretched body to watch a doctor—well, someone with a needle and thread—stitch pieces of Sean’s brow back together. I was too moved to speak, or even to introduce myself. It was weeks later, after I hunted him down in his own city, that I finally asked, “Did it hurt?”

He thought about this for a long while—I could tell he was thinking hard even though he could not, at that time, knit his stitched-up brows together in a gesture that would suggest an outward manifestation of thinking—and said, “Not entirely.”

He thought then to move past the subject, but I was not satisfied.

“Well what does it feel like?”

Again he thought long and hard and let the silence linger.

“It feels,” he said, “like waking up.”

•

Understand that I was very excited by the spectacle, and not until my ride home, as I began to settle back into my bones and feel the limiting contours of perception close back in like the nursery curtains that stifled the views of my youth, did it occur to me that I had, for the first time in my life, found a way out of this, my own skin. My experience echoed precisely descriptions handed down to us in the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Artaud, in which a disturbing ritual—often violent—rendered each of their senses many times more acute, as if the dull blunt body were momentarily transformed into a tuning fork, alive, as Schopenhauer put it, “to sensations fine and fleeting.” Some have called the feeling ecstasy. I believed in this spectacle-provoked plenitude of sensation as one believes in Pangaea and plundering Huns, but until that night in Des Moines I associated that state with antediluvian rites not accessible to modern man. Around midnight on an Iowa highway surrounded by that deep darkness only cornfields can conjure, I thought, “This exhibition, whatever it may be, has ushered ecstatic experience back into the world.”

From that moment onward, the only phenomenological project that could possibly hold interest to me was as follows: capture and describe that particular state of being to which one Sean Huffman had taken me.

And so naturally I began to show up places where Sean might show up—the gym where he trained, the bar where he bounced, the rented basement where he lived, the restaurants where he consumed foods perhaps not entirely aligned with the professed goals of an aspiring fighter. I hope it doesn’t sound immodest to say that Sean found this attention entirely agreeable, and that, in general, members of the fighter class do not mind my presence in even the most intimate surroundings. This is not to say that they long for my companionship. It is to say that they forget, with startling regularity, that I am there at all. And when something requires that they take notice, such as an irrepressible urge I might have to press a philosophical point, they react to the point itself and not to me. They don’t ask about my fine hunting dog, or my well-cut cowboy boots, or my position on the Irish question. My first name is Kit. No fighter has ever asked for my last.

I remember well that first real conversation with Sean, wherein we lunched on satisfactory dive-bar burgers and I told him I thought his performance an extraordinary physical analogue to phenomenological inquiry. He cocked his head, arched an eyebrow, and said, in a way that seemed quietly pleased with my observation, “You’re insane.” He stirred his soda with a straw. “I just like to feel things.”

We talked about backwoods Tennessee, about Davenport’s rise and fall as a center of fighterly activity, about his years in the war. Every time I would speak he would stare a moment, take it in, before responding. Finally, he plucked a single french fry from my plate, which I hoped to be a gesture of impending intimacy, and thus an invitation to many more fights.

Ever since that night in Des Moines I’d felt trapped, ordered about by some base biological needs. “Eat this,” my body said, “sleep now,” but in the course of that fight I had spent a few brief moments—less than a minute, probably—away from this insistent yawp, and I was less given to respond. That Sean had no impending fights we might together anticipate was thus something of an ongoing disappointment, but on the other hand, this lull meant I had Sean mostly to myself.

Picture us: strolling along the Mississippi, past stretches of chain-link fence that start and stop for the ghosts of buildings no longer standing, past schools of ducks riding the waves in between stray pieces of Styrofoam. We pass a skate park recently carved out along the water’s edge, where a bottle rolls noisily down the half-pipe, and three boys, two with skateboards on hand and one with his board tilted underfoot, stop and stare for a long while at my companion’s half-cratered nose and mat-gnarled ears. How much more fascinated still would they be, could they see through to the sutures on the still-raw tissue between his tibia and femur, the scar tissue from a concussion, the three fused phalanges in his right hand, cracked while punching someone in the face. Sean doesn’t notice the boys at all. Risk-averse Sean looks down at the Styrofoam-speckled water and says, “You know people swim in that? Crazy.”

Or picture us, if you will, at The Paddlewheel, the bar where the city’s fighters gather for a drink and reminisce about the old days of hard-charging Davenport glory, when a drink would have been out of the question. These are men who migrated to the Midwest because a legendary Croatian named Pat Miletich (“The Croatian Sensation”) called them all up from California and Florida and, in Sean’s case, rural Tennessee, but that was years ago, and none of them has even seen Miletich in a long while. There are fighters around the pool table and fighters pointing plastic guns toward a screen and fighters gathered around Sean, whom everyone adores. It’s the calm, I think, that he brings to any quorum, the way his very presence drains anxiety from the room.

“Sean and I beat the fuck out of each other the other day,” says a manic fighter named Brandon, “Was that not the funnest sparring session ever?”

“It was like back when we used to throw down,” says Sean, “Throw. Down.”

“Everyone used to throw up afterward,” someone says wistfully.

“I would throw up and lay down,” says Sean, “and someone would be like, ‘Pat, Sean’s laying down!,’ and I’d have to get up again.”

From the pool table we hear the crack of colliding balls chased by a string of profanities.

“When you fighting next?” asks Brandon, and Sean touches the place where his brow stitches once were, and says, with no little exasperation, “When someone offers me a fight.”

June came and still we did not have one. I grew frustrated, longed for some fastidious fighting bureaucracy to oversee the entire regime, a jiu-jitsu dictatorship that would set Sean on his path with incremental pay raises and perhaps a pension. But alas, each promotion is an isolated kingdom, and one waits upon some rogue matchmaker’s decision for every caged encounter. Often the kingdom would crumble after a single event, its begetter having discovered that, despite all the twenties changing hands at the door, there are too many capaciously muscled people demanding payment to make the endeavor profitable. In this way one could acquire many meaningless “championship” belts for tournaments even the winner barely recalled. Perhaps at the Big Shows you might be offered a three-fight contract, but these were not the Big Shows. The fights on which we waited were local affairs of questionable legality, which enshrouded them, to my mind, in a kind of liminal grace.

Weekdays Sean and I coexisted deep in a weather-worn house, beyond someone else’s living room and kitchen, down a flight of stairs, past a washing machine, through an army-issue blanket tacked to wood paneling and skimming a fissured concrete floor, in the corner where Sean slept—the last, tiniest, most impregnable Russian doll. I liked to sit on the mattress next to some dirty laundry, stare through the single frosted window, and enjoy the deep calm that springs from a certain obliviousness to that which is most at hand.

You will ask questions. They are the wrong questions, the unfighterly questions, but I asked them myself, so I might as well give you the answers. How did Sean survive, for instance, without fight checks with which to pay rent? I asked Sean about this once, early on, and he looked at me and shrugged, as if I’d asked him why the sun was just then setting over the river. “Someone,” he said, “will always have a ditch for you to dig.” I never did see him dig a ditch, but there were days we spent loading tiny boxes of snack cakes onto a truck, and days he disappeared into a short-lived construction gig. Sometimes he bounced at a Davenport bar, but this was a fraught enterprise for any fighter, given that a certain kind of man made brave by drink will want to test his skills against the cauliflower-eared man standing sentry. Sean, for his part, had absolutely no desire to challenge a man outside of the cage; he was even less likely than myself, I believe—taking into account that in the third grade I pushed one Sally Mills off a swing in St. Paul—to provoke hostilities.

This was the summer when I learned both whom to follow and whom to avoid, the latter being almost exclusively the province of those men known as “shadows,” for there is nothing more irritating to the devoted fighter than the nonfighters who so desperately wish to be among them. They wear the expensive branded fightwear fighters cannot rightly afford, inform the proximate womenfolk of their supposed fighter status, and harangue actual fighters with suspect stories of their warrior instincts. So on a Saturday night Sean will be bouncing at that Davenport bar, standing by the door, quiet. And someone will notice Sean’s gnarled ears, because Sean’s gnarled ears attract soi-disant “fighters” as the bulbous red jowls of a prairie chicken attract other prairie chickens. And Sean will try to look away, turn toward the door, play with his stamp. But eventually someone will spot him through the dim bar light, and the shadow will say, “You fight?”

And Sean will say, “Yeah,” still avoiding eye contact but already knee-deep in the quicksand of this man’s need.

“Miletich?”

“Yep.”

“Yeah,” the shadow will say, “I used to train there. Before I started working for Monte,” Monte being a cigar-smoking, smoking-jacketed promoter named Monte Cox, the ostentatious use of first names being a signal of inclusion meant to impress Sean, who is not impressed, but will now capitulate to the social pressure to make eye contact and reconcile himself to hearing the story of this man’s One Big Fight.

“I trained nine years in Jeet Kune Do,” the man will say, and Sean will pretend to look at an ID and gently stamp the manicured hand of an attractive woman, who will turn her body to sidle past, and the man, sensing Sean’s impatience, will barrel toward the inevitable downfall, the reason he never made it to the Big Shows or did make it but never got a second fight. Sometimes it’s an injury and sometimes it’s an injury followed by an addiction to Vicodin and sometimes it’s neither. Often this conversation will end with a warning—Never fall in love with a stripper from Anamosa—and out of a sense of mountain-country politesse Sean will feel compelled to say, “Thank you.”

Let this be their one defense: so much intrafighter conversation takes shadow-disdain as its subject that their absence might occasion unwanted silence. I cannot bear their nervous energy, the ugly way their want hangs out, their unfighterly readiness to slug a stranger. Which brings me to a day in July, when I was sitting at The Paddlewheel watching Sean eat a Reuben and he got, somehow, on the subject of Thanksgiving.

“This whole country is based on a scam, just white people coming and taking things,” Sean said with minimal inflection, as if explaining the inner workings of an engine. “The Indians said, ‘Well OK, this is how you eat, this is how you survive,’ and white people said ‘Yeah, great,’ and wiped them out. When you’re a kid everything is so clean and simple because you don’t yet understand the bullshit involved in absolutely everything.”

“Look away,” I said as a known shadow waltzed toward us, his toddler daughter beside him.

Sean, while no fan of shadows, was unfailingly polite, and found a good deal of amusement in my horror of them.

“Hey Mike,” he said, welcoming the shadow into our space, “I have to go to the bathroom. Talk to her.”

Sean got up, winked at me, and turned to the back of the bar.

“If you’re into fighters,” the shadow said, “I could probably hook you up with some people.” I shuddered. But presently, to my relief, his young daughter began screaming across the room, and he rolled his eyes and went to her.

“Have you ever seen 1000 Ways to Die?” Sean asked me when he returned. “There is this one episode where a woman swallowed a live fish and asphyxiated.”

His phone began to buzz. He ignored it.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Just some guy who wants to talk about St. Louis.”

“St. Louis?”

“Yeah, for my fight in August.”

He sipped his Coke, looked at the shadow’s still-screaming little girl, now clinging to the shooting game with her head flung back in the thrall of her child-screams.

“You have a fight in August in St. Louis?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, glancing at me, finishing off some fries, “Forgot to tell you I guess.”

I watch and I write. My reasoning is this: If it is our job to diminish, what little we can, the space that remains between the fighter and the universe, is it not also our job to diminish the endless length of time that remains between a fighter’s prime and eternity? Although I believe that a successful fighting spectacle exists in a space inaccessible to any written text—indeed, that any such spectacle is unalterably diminished by expression—so too I believe that nothing can extend the fight’s temporal existence, however feebly, but a faithfully observed written record. And as I began to amass an account of each slow strike, I realized that I must also write of the world that strike would disrupt. So does one impossible task beget another, and another, until I’d produced an object even smaller than myself against an infinite expanse no man could hope to fill.

Kerry Howley

THROWN

HAMISH HAMILTON

Contents

THE BEGINNING