The Housekeeper: Love, Death, and Prizefighting

by Josh Samman

  The Housekeeper:

  Love, Death, and Prizefighting

  By Josh Samman

  Either write something worth reading, or be something worth writing.”

  -Benjamin Franklin

  For her

  & mom

  1.

  “I just want to scream, ‘Hello! My God, it's been so long. Never dreamed you'd return.’ Now here you are, and here I am."

  -Eddie Vedder

  “Crack!”

  I was woken from my daydream by the sound of a cue ball breaking a rack on the table behind me. It wasn’t so much of a daydream as it was an evening one, awake but my mind somewhere other than Pockets, the shitty pool hall we were in.

  The cigarette smoke was thick, and I wondered why we were still there. I hated the stuff, cigarette smoke. It aggravated my asthma and left me smelling like an ashtray. My bar stool was wobbling slightly, and every so often the same loud crack would send a soundwave through the building. My drinking companion for the night sat next to me as we ordered another round from the minimal beer selection.

  Matt was my roommate and had been my closest friend for years. He was an outdoorsman, a meat and potatoes kind of guy that made his living doing tree removal. We’d both grown up in Tallahassee our whole lives, and per usual, the topic of conversation was the plot of our escape; when we would leave our beloved hometown, and where we’d go when we finally got out. We were always discussing ambitions of bigger and better things, and I tried to convince him that the time was past due. I was 24 years old, and beginning to finally get a grasp on how vast the world was, what it had to offer.

  If there was one city I loved more than any, it was Tallahassee, but I felt stunted. The roots of my plant had outgrown the pot, and I yearned for more than the golden handcuffs that a cushy hometown provides. Too long I’d been inside my comfort zone, and I wanted change.

  Tallahassee had its perks. It was by many accounts a young adult’s playground. Leon County, where we lived, was named after Ponce de Leon, one of many Spanish explorers searching for the Fountain of Youth. If Ponce could see his county now, I think he’d agree it was a fitting title for the area. Nearly half the city’s population were students, 18-24 years old, and the town was well known for its nightlife. A majority of the student body at the local university, FSU, hailed from around Miami, and much of the party atmosphere on the college side of town was influenced by sexy, but materialistic South Florida culture.

  Often we saw friends get stuck spinning their wheels there. Either they were trying too hard to stick around and remain relevant with the rotation of young people coming in, or they were hanging with the same locals at the run-down hangouts like the one we were at.

  That wasn’t the case for everyone. Many stayed behind and began a nice life for themselves. Some were already starting families and settling into salaried nine to five careers. I felt destined for a different path though, and was determined to find out what it was.

  “Corona with lime please,” I called to my buddy behind the bar. “We’re heading out after this one. What do I owe you?”

  “You know you don’t owe anything. Why out so soon? It’s only midnight!” In Tallahassee, there is always time for one more.

  “I have a client in the morning.” I was doing personal training and private lessons at a gym I coached at, called Capital City Combat Club. I was a professional Mixed Martial Artist, “UFC fighting” as it was known to a casual fan, and I’d built a decent membership base of other fighters and clients looking to get in shape.

  That’s how Matt and I became attached in the first place, after he wandered in the gym one day seeking to learn how to fight. He was more of a friend now than he was a student, one of the few from the gym that I’d let seep into my personal life. We made an unlikely duo, having grown up hanging out with groups of friends that were much different. His rode pickup trucks, mine on skateboards. He was a year older than me, but I liked to big brother him.

  I’m not sure why we decided to go to Pockets that evening. It wasn’t a place we went often or enjoyed much. As a kid, it was the place my mom took me to play my first games of pool. Now it was a quick nightcap spot with cigarette-smoking locals, loose and worn out girls serving bad food and worse drinks. It was the side of town and sort of people that I was anxious to escape. It wasn’t the type of place I expected anything life changing to happen.

  I squeezed the lime in my cerveza before taking my first sip. Right as I set my bottle back on the bar I felt a pair of cold, small hands, wet with the froth of a beer, cover my eyes from behind.

  A familiar voice whispered in my ear...

  “Guess who?”

  2.

  11:11 AM

  March 14th, 1988,

  I was born in Kissimmee, Florida, on my mother’s 23rd birthday.

  My first memory as a child was one of curiosity. I was five years old, and wandered out my front door and climbed onto my neighbor’s motorcycle. It fell on top of me, and was the first of many signs that I was hell bent on self-destruction.

  We lived in Orlando, near where I was born, for years before relocating to Florida’s capital city of Tallahassee. My parents were divorced, and I stayed with my mother for the majority of my childhood, seeing my father only in bits and pieces over the years. They were so inexplicably different that I always struggled to imagine the two together. She was a tall blonde beauty, and him a short scruffy Middle Easterner.

  There were brief periods when I saw small talk and short conversations between the two as they were dropping me off at each other’s house, or meeting in the middle. He’d moved to Mobile, Alabama, around the same time we moved to Tallahassee.

  My father was Palestinian and was born in Jerusalem. He came from a large family, went to a private school his whole life, and transferred to the states at 18 years old, eventually graduating from the University of Tennessee. He grew up in a Muslim family, but somewhere along the line decided that Muhammad and Allah weren’t the doctrines for him, and began going to Christian churches shortly after moving to the states. He met my mother in a Pentecostal church in Arkansas. She joked that he’d gone there to try to pick up women.

  My mom was born in Little Rock, where she lived with her brother, Mark, and my grandmother. She’d never met her father in person and was raised instead by my grandmother’s new husband. They grew up in a small town, and there she stayed, playing in her school band and maintaining a 4.0 GPA, until at 18 she met my father, and got married that year.

  They were divorced shortly after I was born, with my dad eventually finding another woman to build a family with, and my mom venturing in an opposite direction. For as long as I could remember, she’d always dated women, and made it clear that who she was with was not any of my father’s business, and to keep her private life just that, should he ever get around to asking. I learned early that my dad equated being different with being bad.

  My dad was 5’4”, and what he lacked in height, he made up for with intensity. He was a conservative businessman, a buyer for department stores across the country. When he finally remarried, it was to another small town girl. This time it was a Southern Baptist from Lucedale, Mississippi, population 3,000. She was a nursing student, finishing up school in Mobile when they met. Frankie was her name, and where Frankie came from, everything revolved around church. My dad followed suit, and God became the theme of their household.

  My mom had changed her last name and was a social worker for various projects in the Tallahassee area. Giving back was her passion, and she returned to school at FSU to get her Masters Degree in Social Work while I was still young, allowing her to hold le
adership positions in her career. She acted as a coordinator for the local Health Department, worked for Veteran’s Affairs, and was a Director for Homeless Shelters, before finally finding her niche in fundraising, becoming the director of a food drive called Second Harvest.

  Growing up, I was an overly competitive kid, the one too concerned with winning to enjoy the game. If someone ever beat me in anything, I’d want to play them over and over until I’d won. I wanted the last word in every quibble, ever the combatant, and my mom told me I would grow up to be an attorney.

  I was enrolled in our school’s gifted program early, and took interests in things that many kids my age weren’t into. I read at home as much as I did at school, and learned how to play chess. I was fascinated by tales of King Arthur and Camelot, enthralled with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Star Wars was the first time I remember seeing good and evil reduced to something as simple as a red or blue lightsaber. My favorite color was red, and I wondered if that made me a bad guy.

  I enjoyed times when I was challenged at school and had a healthy appetite for knowledge. My mom encouraged journal keeping from a young age. Eventually, I found a passion for athletics, which went hand in hand with my unhealthy competitive nature.

  Running was the first form of competition I was introduced to. It felt beautiful, an instinctual thing that consisted only of being in the moment, making sure the person behind you didn’t get ahead, and that the person in front of you was caught up with. It was also my first introduction to excess. I remember an occasion where the Phys Ed teacher offered an incentive for children to exercise on their own. “The 25 Mile Club,” was the name of it, a challenge to kids to run over the semester. Parents would clock a distance in their neighborhood and verify their children’s progress, should they partake in the challenge.

  By the end of the semester, 20 or so children in the school had completed it. I’d decided I was going to run around my neighborhood until I’d reached 150 miles, making my own pointless club. I felt the urge to reach above others, over things as trivial as a few extra ribbons.

  Besides jogging around my neighborhood, which I never grew out of, and being a nerd, I wanted to be in the military, to my mother’s dismay. My uncle was in the army and used to take me to the shooting range to piss his sister off. If there was one thing she detested most, it was violence. As a child, I was not allowed to have toy guns, wasn’t allowed to play football, and I damn sure wasn’t allowed to watch anything with fighting.

  She was adamant about it, but powerless as to what I did when I went to my dad’s. Imagine his frustration, coming to pick me up and hearing from me all the manly shit my mom wouldn’t let me do. My early memories of spending time with him are watching old Bruce Lee Kung Fu flicks and Clint Eastwood westerns, or playing fighting games that he bought for me on the Nintendo. Back and forth I would go between my two parents with conflicting ideologies, a confusing time for a young child.

  I was nine years old when I returned home from one of these trips to my dad’s that my mom sat me down on the couch to talk. I remember feeling frightened, that maybe I’d done something wrong and was getting disciplined.

  We sat there for a moment in silence while I wondered what was going on. Her behavior was not the normal excited and jovial mother she usually was when I’d return home from a weekend away.

  The lights were dim, yet bright enough for me to see her bluish green eyes were wet. I’d never seen my mom cry, and began to feel alarmed. She finally found the courage she was looking for.

  “I have to tell you something honey, but I need you to know first that everything is going to be okay, no matter what.”

  3.

  I played along, trying to guess who it was that had snuck up behind me. A girl, I just didn’t know which one.

  “Umm.. Give me a hint.”

  She let out a subtle giggle that I hadn’t heard in years, and I was overcome by a flood of memories.

  “Your worst nightmare,” a playful whisper, and she took her hands off my eyes. I turned around. It was who I thought it was, and while she sounded the same, she didn’t look it.

  She was sporting an unusually pale complexion, wearing a thin Led Zeppelin t-shirt and jeans, the smell of cigarettes on her breath. She wasn’t the girl I remembered, but my heartbeat rose as she stood in front of me and gave me a long embrace.

  She sat to my right, doing her best to pick up where she left off years ago.

  “Where have you been?” I asked her. My chest fluttered as I found eye contact.

  “Don’t act like you don’t know where I’ve been.” She was the only girl I knew without any social media accounts, and we’d been left to rumors for years.

  “I’ve heard some things. How are you now?”

  “Right now, with you, I’m doing good.” Coy, with a weak attempt at charm, avoiding particulars. I understood but insisted.

  “Besides this moment here and now, how are you?”

  “I’m hanging in there.” She interrupted our conversation and hailed the bartender for a drink.

  “Whiskey soda?” I cut in. My dad had always warned me about girls that liked whiskey.

  “You remembered,” she smiled. I probably remembered a lot more than she thought.

  She had her best friend, Anna, with her, who took a seat to the left of Matt. Anna was a wholesome girl, with a bold personality. They began a conversation of their own, and we decided to stick around a bit longer to catch up.

  “We are going to go to the lady’s room, don’t run out on us while we’re gone.” They walked away, and Matt looked at me with a goofy smile. “So much for going home early, eh?”

  “One more drink.” He sensed something and was anxious to ask questions. The bartender began to chat it up, and the girls came back before he had the chance.

  One drink turned into five, as we revisited old memories and stories from earlier in life. It became closing time, and a crossroads.

  “We gonna take this to the house or what?” Matt said, trying to convince all three of us.

  I looked at her to gauge her response. I wasn’t sure, myself.

  “How far do you live?” she replied.

  I don’t know if it was intoxication or nostalgia that lured me in. I knew I hadn’t seen her in too long, and wasn’t sure when I would again.

  4.

  Early Spring, 1998

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” my mom said again.

  I sat there, curious, as I awaited what would be my first bit of real bad news in my life.

  “Everything is going to be fine Josh, but what I need to tell you..” She paused again. “Is that I have breast cancer.” She gazed me down, trying to get a glimpse into what I felt as she broke the news.

  I wasn’t old enough to have a grasp on the meaning. I didn’t know what cancer did to people, or what it meant for us, but I knew that she looked nervous.

  “Does that mean your hair is going to fall out?” I asked. My response garnered a look of relief from her, happy that I was worried about something as silly as her hair. I was young, but I understood the concept of terminal illnesses. I just didn’t know what else to say at the time.

  Being with my mom was my favorite thing as a kid, singing and dancing for her as she watched, smiling. I wondered for a second what life would be like without her. The thought frightened me, and I tried not to think about it again.

  “Yes honey, my hair is probably going to fall out,” she let out with a laugh of relief, still doing her best to hold back tears. In reality, the two of us would later buzz her hair off before it had a chance to fall out. She didn’t tell me that then, though.

  “I love you, sweetheart. Everything is going to be alright.”

  “I love you too.” I struggled to show affection at that age. I thought it was too mushy to tell your mom you loved her, but I remember saying it that night. I believed her when she said everything was going to be alright.

  One of her friends sat me down as the time for tr
eatment drew near, talking to me more candidly than my mom was willing to.

  “Your mom is going to be very sick,” she said. “At times she may not seem or look like the same person you’re used to, but you need to be strong for her.”

  Tall order for a nine year old. At the time, I just sat and nodded, trying to take it in. It was the first time I’d been presented with any sort of heaviness, feeling the weight of a situation in a way children aren’t used to.

  “We are praying for you.” I began to hear it often. It never gave me the comfort I think it was intended to. At this point in my life, even at nine, I had my suspicions about God. The more I went to Sunday school, the more I began to think that these stories in the bible weren’t any different than the fairy tales I’d just grown out of hearing. Jonah and the Whale, Jack and the Beanstalk, Noah and the Ark, Alice in Wonderland, they might as well all have been the same. I tried to talk to Jesus, but I never heard anything back. I didn’t know what everyone was praying for.

  “God won’t give you anything you can’t handle,” they said. The thought of someone controlling all of our destinies scared me. I struggled with the concept of an omnipotent being giving a person an illness, only to require everyone to pray for it to go away. I did my best to be strong for my mom like her friend told me to, and sometimes wondered if I should be praying too. The whole concept was puzzling, and I was a skeptic from the beginning.

  5.

  “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

  - Martin Buber

  We stumbled out of Pockets more inebriated than we’d planned, but my house was less than a mile away. They decided against leaving Anna’s car, and followed us home in theirs.

  Matt got in the passenger seat and didn’t waste time asking questions. He’d seen me with dozens of girls, and picked up on differences in behavior over the last hours. He had a knack for reading me and knew when something had my attention.