Totaled

by Stacey Grice

  Diana was an interesting woman. She struck me as someone who was probably on the debate team in high school. Always an answer for everything. Always a rebuttal. And a rebuttal for your rebuttal. She would make a brilliant lawyer, but insists that the law bores her to tears and she never had the money for college anyway. Could’ve fooled me. The way she spoke was so articulate and perfect, like she had written each statement ahead of time and rehearsed saying it beforehand. She was confident but not arrogant. She also demonstrated how body language could completely change the way that someone reads and responds to you, regardless of the words you were saying. It was fascinating and extremely intimidating. I had a lot to learn, but she assured me that I wasn’t a lost cause. I needed to be honest, but charismatic enough to smoothly deflect from anything that would cross the boundary of too personal for public knowledge.

  I left the meeting feeling somewhat confident that I was prepared to handle this interview, but as I rose from bed, I questioned everything. Was all of this even worth it?

  Yes.

  Yes, it was.

  It had to be. Without all of this, I would have nothing else.

  I needed to treat this interview like it was a fight. I trained, prepared, rested, and now I was going to need to show up and produce a win.

  Bree and I talked briefly about the interview the night before and while she offered to go with me, I resisted. She had enough on her mind and the truth of the matter was that I wasn’t sure how it would all go down. The lack of control I had over the situation made me feel weak and vulnerable and I didn’t want her to see that.

  She adamantly insisted on me not being alone, so Pat agreed to go with me and while I was hesitant at first, I eventually accepted. I guessed that I needed some support and I trusted Pat with my life. What I didn’t expect was for Mick to answer Pat’s hotel room door when I knocked.

  “What the hell? What are you doing here?” I instantly relaxed a little at the sight of him and went in for the one-armed man hug.

  “I’m here for you, ya putz! You wouldn’t answer any of my calls so I finally tracked down this old coot and learned what the hell happened. Y’all have had quite a rollercoaster of shit go down this past week, huh? Anyway, I ain’t got nuthin’ better to do and figured you could use a wing man or whatever,” he joked, patting me on the back as we walked further into the room. “This Vince Johns character is a real asshole. You’ll at least need a good laugh when it’s all over and done with.”

  I chuckled at Mick’s easygoing attitude and welcomed it. I was already more at ease. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I had to change my number and it’s all been pretty hectic. I didn’t think to message you.” I hung my head, ashamed that I had completely forgotten about such an important person in my life. “Thanks for coming all this way. I guess we should go and get this all over with.”

  Pat, Mick, and I rode together in the back of the car that Chris had secured for us for the twenty minute drive through downtown Atlanta, which was chaotic and busy. We ended up in a parking garage at the base of a gigantic building that housed Vince Johns’ office.

  Mick pushed the button in the elevator for the 23rd floor and turned to face me. “Is your agent gonna be here with you?”

  “No. I actually insisted that he not be here. This is something I need to do on my own. They have prepared me well, I hope.” I had never felt such a lack of confidence before.

  “Well, we can either go in with ya or wait outside. Whatever you want. But just remember, yer in charge a this whole show. You can leave whenever you want. You don’t hafta sit there and take any shit off this piss ant reporter.”

  “Thanks, Mick. I think I’ll go in alone and see how it goes. I appreciate it though.”

  “No problem. We’ll be right outside if ya need us.” The elevator chime dinged and the doors slid open, but Mick and Pat hesitated before walking out. Mick turned to me again, gesturing to Pat. “You’re like a son, to both of us, Drew Dougherty, and we’re proud of ya no matter what.” He patted me on the back and headed out of the elevator, me smiling while following behind him.

  A receptionist greeted us, offering us water or coffee while we waited to be escorted back into the offices. When she told me that Mr. Johns was ready for me a few minutes later, I nodded to Pat and Mick and followed her into a room that looked eerily similar to the conference room that I had “practiced” in the day before. It was strangely comforting to me.

  The room was empty, so I took a seat in the chair at the end of the oval table, facing the door. Soon after, a man walked in. Well, he was a man, but he looked like he couldn’t be any older than me.

  “Good morning, Drew. Thank you for agreeing to come meet me.” He entered awkwardly, fumbling around a stack of disorganized paperwork. He dropped his pens twice in the ten feet between the door and me. I stood to shake his hand but he sat down in the chair closest to me to my left, which I found odd. He also didn’t offer his hand. He had yet to even make eye contact with me.

  “Please allow me to just get set up before we begin. You don’t mind if I tape the interview, do you? Your publicist already agreed to my terms, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Right? I can record this, right?” He spoke so fast that I couldn’t even get a word in to answer. And he still hadn’t looked at my face. I expected a cocky suit and was dumbfounded at the awkward, disorganized Poindexter in front of me.

  “Yes. It’s fine. You can record it.”

  He nodded his head and continued to “set up,” spreading out his pile of mess into what appeared to be completely random stacks of papers. He spread out his pens, at least ten of them all the same brand and color, and fidgeted at them for a few seconds before he moved on to fiddling with the piles of papers. I observed him in action, trying to wrap my head around what exactly was so intimidating about this guy. He was taller than average, but still inches below my 6′4″ height, maybe 160 pounds at most, with shaggy jet black hair that hung in haphazard waves almost to his shoulders. He wore the thickest coke-bottle glasses that I had ever seen and had a poor excuse for a mustache coming in, like a sixteen-year-old’s peach fuzz, but dark and wiry. When he spoke to me, I could see that his teeth were crooked and it was obvious that he was conscious of it because he spoke in such a way that his lips barely revealed his teeth while talking.

  “Do you need to pee or anything?”

  The question caught me off guard. “Excuse me?”

  “Pee. Do you need to pee? Or get a drink? Or whatever. I would like to get started and once I begin the interview, I don’t like to be interrupted.”

  “Oh. No, I think I’m good. Fire away,” I said, still taken back by his bizarre question.

  He leaned in towards his tape recorder. “June 28th, 2013, at 10:16 am. Vince Johns interviewing Drew Dougherty, also known as Brian Andrew Dougherty. Atlanta, Georgia. Drew, is it true that you and your professional team have agreed to do this interview without any monetary exchange taking place?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Is it also true that you and your professional team have agreed that there will be no restrictions on the nature or content of the questions asked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah? I need you to state that…”

  “Yes, that’s right. Ask me whatever you want.” Shit. I was already getting flustered.

  “Excellent. We will start with the simple stuff. Where and when were you born?”

  “Phoenix, Arizona, on September 21st, 1989.”

  “Where do you reside now?”

  It was starting to bother the ever loving shit out of me that he still hadn’t looked me in the eyes.

  “Fernandina Beach, Florida.”

  “Why did you move to Florida?”

  Why the fuck won’t he look at me? He’s not even doing anything. He isn’t writing stuff down or flipping through his papers. He isn’t reading off any questions from anywhere. His eyes are darting left and right, all over the room, but he won’t look at me.
/>   “I guess I just needed a change.”

  “Why Fernandina Beach? It wasn’t to train. Not at Murphy’s Gym. Pat Murphy, from what I can find, is a standup guy, but somewhat of a nobody in this business. No one even knew of him until you came along, I suppose.”

  “His gym was recommended to me by a friend and I needed a fresh start,” I answered confidently. “I’m extremely pleased with the training I’ve received so far and will continue to work with him and his team for the foreseeable future.”

  “I see. What is your primary source of income?”

  “That’s really none of your business.”

  “My apologies. I just mean, do you have a full time employer? How do you earn your money to pay for training, travel expenses, etc.? You aren’t sponsored at this point and new to the scene, so it’s a valid question.”

  “I have no other job. This is my full time job. I have some money, family money, I guess you could call it, which allows me to live modestly and pay for my training expenses.”

  “You consider living in an oceanfront house living modestly?”

  “Well, since I’m merely renting it at this point, yes, I do.”

  He reached over to grab some sort of spreadsheet, handing it to me instead of looking at it. I glanced at him for explanation, but he continued to stare off into nowhere as he asked his next series of questions.

  “In your fight last Saturday with Stefan Purifoy, you were victorious by knockout at the two minutes and forty-seven seconds mark of the third round.” I noticed Johns appearing to bite the skin around his fingernails in between each question. It was disgusting.

  “Is that a question?”

  He took his fingers away from his mouth; his cuticles were all chewed and red. “No. It is a factual statement. My question is, how did you come to be Purifoy’s opponent that night when it was originally Angel Gonzales on the ticket?” Fingers back into the mouth.

  “Gonzales apparently ran into some trouble and was removed from the fight. My coach made some calls to the powers that be, scoring me the fight.” I touched the back of my neck and confirmed the feeling that I was starting to sweat around my collar. I couldn’t get over the nail biting tic.

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “Look, this interview is supposed to be about me. I’m not going to even pretend to know what got Gonzales removed from the ticket. But I’m appreciative for whatever it was, because it resulted in my introductory appearance and eventual victory.” Johns paused and shifted in his chair, his fingertips now tapping lightly on the desktop.

  “So you have no comment about the hearsay that Gonzales failed his drug test?”

  “That is correct. I have no comment on that subject. Let’s move on.” I was frustrated that he was even asking me about that. What was he probing me for?

  Johns continued the interview by spouting off numerous statistics on my fight with Purifoy without looking at the spreadsheet once. The number of strikes landed, how many of those were categorized as significant, scoring from all three judges for each round, even the time that I got myself into the guillotine hold that nearly choked me out and how many seconds it took for me to find my way out of it. It was like Vince Johns, the supposed aggressive and ruthless sports reporter, was MIA and a gangly, awkward Rain Man had taken his place. I couldn’t help but be impressed. When he said the numbers, he still stared off at the wall in front of him, but his hand kept gesturing to the spreadsheet of stats, like he was daring me to glance down at the numbers and find an error or something.

  When he paused for a few seconds, I spoke. “I’m sorry, was there a question in there somewhere?”

  “No. I haven’t asked it yet. I’m just trying to point out to you that had you not ended the fight with a win by knockout, you likely would’ve won by decision if the trend of match continued. You were winning.”

  How the hell did this guy still have any nail beds? I was so fucking distracted by his chewing and gnawing that I could hardly process the conversation. Was that his plan or could he not help the weird chewing thing?”

  “Okay,” I replied curtly. “Good to know.”

  “How did you get out of the guillotine hold?”

  Here we go.

  “I felt myself getting choked out, struggling to breathe, and I started to picture my father.”

  “What do you mean? Pictured your father? What difference would that make?”

  “I pictured my father’s face over me, choking me, as he had tried to do multiple times during my adolescence, and I got out of it. I wasn’t about to let him best me again.”

  “Your father tried to choke you?” He stopped biting his nail beds and stilled completely, staring off to the left of his body, away from where I was seated.

  “Amongst other things, yes. I didn’t exactly have a peaceful childhood.”

  “Would you care to elaborate on that?”

  Not really.

  Chris, Arlene, and Diana had warned me in my preparation meeting to not elaborate. Their words danced around in my head. “Don’t give him more material than he needs. Answer direct questions, but don’t fill in the blanks. Just like a courtroom. Pretend you’re being persecuted, because you sort of are.”

  “What would you like to know, exactly?”

  “I just want you to try to allow the reader of this interview to get to know you better, and knowing where you came from and the experiences that helped shape you into who you are today.” I noticed that he didn’t put his fingertips back into his mouth this time. He seemed to reign in the off-putting tic to really be able to listen to my response.

  “Look, Vince. I’ll answer anything you ask me, but I’m not going to sit here and spout out my autobiography. People pretend that they want to know all of the details, but they really don’t. They think that they can handle hearing about growing up in a bar instead of a home. They believe they want to picture me as young as five years old walking into the bathroom of the pub to see my own father, pants down, standing behind a woman who was not my mother. They don’t want to know that I was beaten that night during one of his many drunken stupors because he thought it was my fault that I saw that. You can write about the beatings, the many times that I ‘fell down’ and had to go to the hospital for stitches or fractured bones. You can even include a picture at the bottom of the article of all of the circular scars on my skin from cigarettes being extinguished on my back instead of an ashtray. You want me to go on?” I challenged. “It doesn’t get any prettier.”

  “I…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “It’s okay. I’m not offended. I just don’t want you or anyone else to get the wrong idea about me. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. The last thing I want is for people to sorry for me, or for me to advance anywhere in life riding on the coattails of someone’s pity. I intend to earn every step that I’m able to climb on this journey.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone? Why didn’t your mother ever help you?” His voice seemed softer now, empathetic or maybe just cautious.

  “My mother was a saint!” I pounded my fist on the desk, making Johns flinch and immediately bring his hand up his mouth to be gnawed on. Recognizing that I needed to calm myself down, I took a deep breath and continued. “She helped me more than I was ever even aware of. She’s the reason I’m alive. She’s the reason I have anything. She worked nights as a nurse and wasn’t around for most of it, thankfully. As for telling anyone, people wouldn’t have believed me anyway. The system of laws in place to protect women and children from domestic violence were, and still are, a fucking joke. Plus, we had nothing. We had no one to turn to. There was no place to run away and live happily ever after.”

  I paused and took a couple deep breaths to try to compose myself. I knew that this would be intense, but I underestimated how emotional I would get. It never occurred to me that people would blame my mother or see fault in her for not getting me out of that situation.

  “Anyway, once I got big enough to fight ba
ck instead of being his punching bag, he turned his fists to my mother. It’s me who’s at fault for that. I should’ve protected her.”

  Vince reached into one of his unorganized piles of papers and pulled out a newspaper article, handing it to me. He still didn’t look at my face. “This is an article from The Arizona Tribune from the day after your father died. Can you explain the events that occurred on that night?”

  I glanced at the newspaper page, confronted with an image of my childhood home surrounded with police tape, and I felt immediately sick when faced with the memory of that night again.

  “The short version is that I came home after a session at the gym to find him beating my mother to death. I tried to intervene and things got out of hand.”

  “Out of hand?” He was perfectly still, staring off into space, waiting for me to proceed.

  “Yeah. I would say the fact that he’s dead would suggest that things got out of hand. I tried to protect my Mom, he fought me, I fought back, and he succumbed to his injuries.”

  “And your mom?”

  “She died a few days later.”

  “I’m sorry,” Johns said quickly, out of obligation.

  “No you’re not,” I lashed out. “You’re not even looking me in the eyes.”

  “Oh…sorry. I’m not very good at eye contact.” His face turned and his eyes darted in my direction, but didn’t stay fixed on my face. I could tell he was uncomfortable as hell but trying his best.