“What’s the story?” Follow Beatrice up a narrow staircase. Walls graffiti tagged, holes punched through plaster to reveal corroded wires and sodden pink insulation. “Are you leading me into ruin? A snuff film crew? Black-market organ farmers?”
“It’s a traveling showcase.” She stops, glancing back at me. “Different cities, different participants. I’ve done it a few times.” A wink. “Surprised you don’t know about it.”
At the top of the stairs a girl with a pierced bellybutton stands beneath a sign reading Coat Check. Doff my jacket and hand it over. She taps the sign with a hot-pink fingernail and I notice it in fact reads Clothes Check. Beatrice and I strip, turning our shirts and jeans over to the girl. She hands me a claim chit but I’ve no idea where to stow it. Beatrice slips hers under her tongue. I do the same.
The girl positions herself before a sliding metal door. Spraypainted on the door in pink letters matching her fingernails is the word GOMORRAH.
“Pitter-patter,” says Beatrice, hopping lightly from one foot to the other, “let’s get at ’er.”
The first thing to hit you is heat: this warmth closing around your body. The second is smell: sweet and bitter at once, the scent of bodies in close contact. The way Bette said: like sweat, but deeper. As my eyes adjust I see we’re in a warehouse. Steel girders row the vaulted ceiling; small creatures, birds or mice, scuttle across rusted A-beams. Strobelights set on telescopic tripods throw kinetic pinwheels on the walls and floor. A DJ spins trance music on a pair of portable turntables.
“Welcome to the viper’s nest.” Beatrice’s lips next to my ear. “Or is it viper’s pit?”
She leads me to the clutch of naked bodies. Thirty or forty people sprawled on swaths of thick velvet. Arms and elbows, calves and knees; occasionally a head will crest, person taking a deep breath as though they’ve been trapped under water. No one speaks; no voices at all save the sporadic sigh or shuddering exhale. Beatrice is gone, her body twined with a dozen others, amalgamate now, indistinguishable.
Wade in slowly, as a swimmer immerses himself in cold surf. A hand reaches out, grabbing my calf, pulling me down; I’ll go willingly enough. Bodies press against mine, limbs hairy and smooth; breasts pushed into my face, a perfumed arm wrapped round my head urging me on; someone’s hand, cold and brittle as a talon, clamps onto my leg and delivers a nasty pinch; my lips on thighs and asses, in vaginas and mouths, the crooks of elbows, the undersides of knees; a hard cock crosses the underside of my throat, across lips, gone. A faceless stranger with a dextrous tongue, woman or man I cannot tell, performs fellatio with such wanton bravado I’m left on the verge of weeping. Men and women congregate in well-dressed groups in the warehouse shadows, silent observers. A man stands amidst the teeming surge and emits a high gibbering shriek like some jungle creature and in the plated moonlight falling through the casement windows he appears skinless and I’m thinking about my daughter standing in a green summer field, Ellie’s smiling face lit by the July sun. Peace and serenity I’m thinking. Wayne’s mangled cock I’m thinking. Pussy tits ass I’m thinking. Admit the existence of a higher power I’m thinking. Flesh I’m thinking. Flesh flesh flesh flesh …
At some point I am standing. Beatrice faces me: hands on hips, head cocked to one side, appraising me with a slight smile. She’s kicking off this unearthly glow as though her veins rush with phosphorus. Her beauty is crushing and I feel minuscule. Bodies seethe at our feet but in this moment nothing else exists. She brushes at a lock of hair fallen over her eyes and it’s ludicrous but I’m envisioning the country cottage and white picket fence, the words SAMUEL + BEATRICE encircled by a heart carved into the wood of an oak tree, all these childish insupportable fantasies. And sure, I’ve run through this script enough times to know how it turns out but before the guilt and recrimination there exists a state of grace—right … now—a fleeting span of limitless possibility and hope.
“Think it always has to be this way?”
“The viper bites,” Beatrice says. “Can’t help itself.”
She reaches for me and I pull away. Can’t bear to touch her. My body’s electric; tongues of blue static lick and pop off the ends of my fingertips. You’re gonna exit this world with regrets; it’s an absolute given. And okay, I’ve been burned before—haven’t we all? All I’m saying is, there’s that chance, right? A longshot, fine, a million to one. Still—it’s there.
Maybe. That’s as far as I’ll go. Just maybe.
LIFE IN THE FLESH
TWO MONTHS SHY of my twenty-eighth birthday I beat Johnny “The Kid” Starkley to death in Tupelo, Mississippi. A stiff right to the solar plexus sent him to the ropes, gulping for breath. I clubbed him a pair of overhand rights and a left just below the ear, where the jawbone connects. Brutal punches fired straight from the hip, subtle as a train wreck. The Kid—an apt nickname: sandalwood-smooth skin and clear green eyes, so light on his feet he seemed to float above the canvas— held his left arm out, that arm trembling, red glove bobbing like a buoy on a riotous sea. The Kid’s mouthpiece stuck to his teeth, the insides of his lips filmed with white lather, holding his left arm out as if to say, Please, I’ve had enough, but his body too stubborn, too disciplined, to buckle to the will of his mind. I hit him until his eyes glazed over like a dying animal’s, until that arm fell away, until the ref signaled for the bell. Starkley’s death hit me hard, but at the time I wouldn’t cop to it. The fight was sanctioned. Marquis of Queensbury rules—I’d done nothing wrong!
Started juicing on Ten High bourbon and Schlitz. Went from training five hours a day at Top Rank gym to closing out the Cyclone, the gin joint next door. I shed a sickening amount of weight, skin green and jaundiced, booze destroying the mitochondria in my guts. For a few months I didn’t know sobriety: sixpack for breakfast and a flask of mescal on the nightstand, brushing my teeth with apricot brandy. I saw Starkley trapped in the ropes, mouthpiece dangling out, blood filling his eyes. And, in this persistent vision, I knew he was dying, knew I was killing him, but I didn’t stop. The worst part was watching Starkley grow younger with each blow—now thirty, now twenty-five, now eighteen, finally my fists slamming into this kid, this skinny-legged, sparrow-chested child hung up between the red and blue ropes.
My manager, Moe Kundler, tried to salvage me. Stumbling back from the Cyclone I’d find AA schedules taped to the door, twelve-step brochures in the mailbox. Then Moe dropped by to find me zonked on the kitchen floor, shards of shattered bottle punched into my palms, pants filled with piss and shit. He filled a pot with water and dumped it on me. I came to sputtering, fists balled and ready to rumble. He slapped me hard and said, “Clean yourself up. I’m making the phone call.”
No way could I hack detox or the nuthatch, glimpsing Starkley in those Rorschach inkblots. I gathered up the money I’d ratholed and hightailed it. Thailand was my choice on account of an uninhibited sexual politic and stern non-extradition policy. I arrived in Bangkok twenty-five years ago, and have never left.
Yesterday Moe wired he’s sending a hardass. Time and distance have patched our old beefs. The kid arrives on the 9:40 Air Canada out of Vancouver. Late twenties, baggy board-shorts and a garish Hawaiian shirt, eyes dark behind oversize wraparounds. Workably broad across the shoulders and chest, bull necked, narrow waisted, and small hipped. Underslung jaw and a nose busted eastward. His acute-angled brow would give any cutman the screaming meemies: heavy layers of scar tissue rim the curves beneath each eyebrow, and I know if he tastes the long knuckle the sharp ridges of bone will tear those scars to shit.
“Roberto Curry?”
“Welcome to Bangkok.”
He wipes at sweat beading his forehead. “Country this hot all over?”
“Hotter,” I say. “Airport’s air conditioned.”
Don Muang airport sits atop an arrow-headed promontory, the darkened city stretching out below. To the west: the meandering strip of Ko Sanh Road contoured in stark neon. To the southwest: Patpong a bright starfish, lit tendrils spreadin
g from its central hub. Humidity’s intense: like breathing through boiled wool.
The taxi traces a route down Thanburi Road, skirting the Chao Phraya river. Oil-slicked waters dotted with coastal trawlers and derelict coalships, floating communes of tin-roofed sampans. Turn onto Ko Sanh Road. Almost every building converted into guest houses, every corner has long distance telephone booths with cooling AC, cafés screen Rush Hour II and Brokedown Palace on video. Sidewalks strung with stalls trafficking in pewter flasks and teak elephants, knock-off Reeboks, bootleg DVDs. A train of Thai women dressed in garishly colored sarongs walk down the side of the road toting various bundles on their heads: firewood, guavas in large porcelain bowls, sacks of kola nuts, stalks of plantains, volcano fish, deep-fried crickets in beaten tin pans. Their husbands walk in front of them carrying not a damn thing.
The kid pockets his sunglasses stepping from the cab. His eyelids are networked with scar tissue. So he’s a bleeder.
Blood ruins some fighters. Since the deaths of Johnny Owen and the Korean Duk Koo-Kim, both of whom were blood-blinded from cut eyelids, paranoid refs and ring docs are kiboshing fights at the first sight of red. Some fighters got tough bodies but weak skin—breathe on them hard, they cut. There’s nothing a guy can do about it, any more than a guy with a glass jaw can help being brittle. But if that claret keeps flowing—a bad cut above the eye, say, deep and wide and vein-severed, your fighter’s heart pounding merry old hell—forget it, the fight’s over even if your boy’s not really hurt. But Muay Thai matches are rarely stopped on blood, and trainers are permitted certain measures—double-strength adrenaline chloride, ferric acid—to handle the most vicious cuts. Of course, all the ferric acid in the world isn’t going to help with the detached retinas and crushed metacarpals, but that’s come what may.
We sit in a curry stall with a dining area open to the street. Green curry for me, red for the kid, plus pints of fresh guava juice. The kid axes the juice in favor of beer.
“So,” I say, “what’s your record?”
“Twenty-two and three. Two losses on stoppages.”
“Blood?”
“Blood.”
“Lose the other on a KO?”
“TKO my third fight. Soft count to some unranked tomato can.”
“Get cocky?”
“Little, maybe.”
“I can see that happening.”
The kid digs a chicken claw out of his mouth, grimaces, spits on the sidewalk.
“Ever watch Muay Thai?”
“Sure,” he says. “Bunch of skinny guys winging at each other.”
Consider telling him about the fight I watched last week, the one where the loser left with hemorrhage-thinned blood pissing from his ears. Consider telling him how Muay Thai fighters strengthen their shins by pounding sand-filled bottles against them, the sound a wooden huk-huk-huk, until their skin’s tough as boot leather. Instead I say, “How much weight you carrying?”
“Started middleweight, climbed to light heavy.”
“Any vision problems, those scars?”
“Peepers are twenty-twenty.”
“What kind of condition you in? Don’t bother bluffing, I’ll find out.”
The kid rolls up a shirt sleeve and flexes his biceps muscle, pumping the brachial vein. “And body fat less than ten percent. I’m gripped, stripped, ready to rip.”
“You’re sweating like a bastard.”
“It’s the food.”
“It’s the heat. You’ll get used to it. Training camp’s outside Chang Rai, two hours south. You’ll be doing road work on jungle paths. Sweat off ten pounds the first week—your cardio’ll skyrocket.”
The kid finishes his beer, signals for another. “Want one, coach?”
“I don’t drink.”
The kid nods as if he’d anticipated this weakness in me. A local woman stops beside our table. Three-quarters legs, decent tits but hatchet faced, wearing a miniskirt exposing the lower crescents of her can. Red silk skirt and scarf, gold hoop earrings, white frosted lipstick.
“Herro, boys.” To the kid: “Wha jo’ name?”
“I’m Tony, hon.”
She rests a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Oh, ju a stron’ boy, hah?” She sits on his lap. “Ju a strong, han’some big boy, hah?”
“Watch yourself with that one.”
The woman pouts at me. “Ju be quiet.” She wiggles her ass into the kid’s crotch. “Ju lie me, Tony?”
“Sure,” the kid says. “Me love you long time.” His hands knead her thighs. “Thass ni’,” the woman says.
I grab the fluttering brocade of the scarf and yank it off. “Adam’s apple is a dead giveaway. Now your top-quality ladymen get it surgically shaved down so’s you can barely tell. But this one here—well, she’s no top quality.”
The aggrieved he-she snatches the scarf back. “Ju a horr’ble ma’,” she says to me. The kid shoves him-her away, beating his palms on his shorts as if they’re coated in flaming oil. Got a look on his face like he ate a handful of rat turds he mistook for Raisinettes.
“Ah, Christ, no!”
“I’d be inclined to blame it on the beer goggles, kid, but you’ve only had two. Got to watch out for the scarfed ones.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before I let it bounce on my dick?”
“You didn’t seem keen on listening.”
“You’re a real peach, coach.”
AN OPEN-TOP ISUZU drops us off at the training camp shortly after 5 a.m. It is a fine, clean morning, the kind of morning that, as they say, makes you wish you got up early more often. A scarred dirt path leads through the trees alongside a fast-running stream. The path leads into a large dusty clearing fringed by tall palms and dotted with bamboo-and-tin Nissen huts. At the far end is a long-house. The sounds of men in training are audible through its open doors.
“Stow your gear,” pointing to one of the huts, “and throw on your road kit.”
The kid comes out wearing gray jogging shorts, cross-trainers, a hooded sweatshirt. I retrieve a rusted bicycle leaning against the long-house and say, “Let’s go.”
The kid starts out in a stiff-legged trot but, warming up, his strides lengthen, smooth out. The path is too narrow for us to navigate side by side so I fall in behind him on the bike. Soon a skunk-tail of perspiration darkens the back of his sweatshirt as we follow the path east into the rising sun.
“Give me that shirt.” The kid doffs the sweatshirt and drops it in the bike basket. At the 3K mark his chest is heaving, arms hanging from his shoulders. When the path finally rounds back to the camp he sprawls out in the dirt, sucking wind.
“Piss-poor conditioning, kid, but you got heart. Wind we can work on.”
“Fucking country. Can’t breathe the air.”
“You’ll get used to it. Get home, your lungs will feel double-size. Throw on your training kit and meet me in the gym.”
“Fucking country.”
He comes into the long-house wearing a pair of shorts and his ring shoes, a towel draped around his neck. The tattooed face of a dog, blue and grinning, covers one shoulder. On the other shoulder a crude imp or demon brandishes a pitchfork beneath the words Li’l Devil.
The long-house is equipped same as any North American boxing gym. In the ring, Khru Sucharit, the legendary Muay Thai trainer, instructs Bua, a rising fighter. Bua’s eighteen and has been fighting since infancy. His body is perfectly shredded, each muscle group distinct and visible beneath rough, dusky skin. He’s drilling textbook hook-kicks into punch-mitts snugged over Sucharit’s hands, transferring his weight to rock the old trainer back a step with every blow.
“Know what I see?” The kid points at Bua. “Skin and bones and arms and legs.”
“Then you’re only looking, not seeing.”
“Let me know when it’s time to snatch the pebble out of your hand, sensei.”
Set him off on the speed bag. Hand speed’s decent, and the kid’s got power: the leather bag snaps hard against its ringed-iron
mooring. He starts mugging, beating a rat-a-tat rhythm on the bag, bringing one knee up and then the other, two pistons in perfect cadence, lisping, “I’m the champeen, the greatest, the king.”
“Pop the bag.”
The kid stalks over to a tan-colored heavy bag suspended from a crossbeam and tees off. He rips a half-dozen body shots into the two-hundred-pound bag, causing it to buck on its chain. He sways at the hip in bob-and-weave style, shouldering the bag, throwing hooks and short right hands, falling in line with its rhythm before stabbing four left hooks and following with an overhand right.
The kid forces a yawn. “Okay, boss?”
“It’ll do.”
After a half-hour of rope skipping and shadowboxing I tell him to stop. Brew a pot of oolong tea and pour cups with lemon. We sit on the ring apron and watch Bua run footwork combos in front of a full-length mirror.
“Moe only sends me hardasses,” I say. “What’s your story?”
The kid wipes his face with the towel. “Moe thinks I’m a hardass?”
“You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“Well,” the kid says, “could be he thinks I don’t train hard enough.”
“Why would he think that?”
“No idea. I win fights.”
“People think you win a fight in the ring,” I tell him. “But you know where the big fights are won? Right here. In the gym and on the road.”
“I know, I know.” The kid’s heard it all before.
“Moe says you brawl like a Viking. Says you fight with your dick instead of your head.”
“He told you all this already, what you asking me for?”
I nod over at Bua. “That kid’s won over a hundred fights. Started when he was thirteen, fights twenty times a year. He’s not a crowd favorite—he’s too smart for that. He doesn’t go out to make a show. He goes out to get a job done and absorb the least punishment possible.”
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