I had felt tense lately, perhaps because of this headache with a six-month history, perhaps because of a sizable cut on the inside of my upper lip. I didn’t recall how it got there. The cut was opposite my upper gums, and it stung me when I ate, when I drank, when I smiled. It made being happy hard, like my own mouth refused to grin because it hurt too much. Did that sound like complaining? I didn’t mean to complain. I just thought the cut was in an odd place, a place that had odd consequences. But I knew it would heal; I wasn’t as sure about this damn headache.
The hummingbird flew away and I glimpsed a colossal creature emerge from above the waterfall, a few hundred yards away from where I sat. She had shelled green scales, a wingless back, and clawless hands like car-sized flippers. Her face held a pair of sunken emerald eyes, a great pitcher of a mouth, and a smattering of pink and white spots across her bald forehead. This was it; this was the closest I had ever been to a dragon.
The dragon crashed down from the waterfall and slithered on the top of the river. She displaced the blue water and the white snow around her. The dragon appeared headed back where I had come from, back along the river, away from the cold. She passed me by, and I followed.
Six
It was just before midday, and what did I want? I wanted to reach The Mount, but I had followed the waterfall dragon in the opposite direction. I rested on a pile of hard rocks on a mountainside, deciding whether to continue my pursuit. The mountain sloped down several hundred feet into a valley where a bright-blue river ran between white-tipped shorelines. Atop the river, at its widest part perhaps half a mile in the distance, lay the dragon.
I liked dragons. They fascinated me. Dragons had appeared in all types of cultures all over the world. Sometimes they were friendly; sometimes they were savage. The savage ones were the sum of all fears: they destroyed cities, spit fire, reigned over the food chain. These dragons created deep connections with people; they served as reminders of what to avoid to survive. But even the friendly ones were usually enormous, sky-blotting creatures, scaly and snakelike and at home in the water. And they could fly.
This wasn’t a typical dragon, though. She had neither the serpentine torso nor the enveloping wingspan. In fact, this dragon had no wings at all attached to her shiny, broad, and scaly back. The massive creature sprawled her green oval body across the entire blue river, her belly down in the water and her hand-flippers just reaching the swaths of rocks along either shore. And she really did sprawl, as if she were a person plopping down chest first on her bed after a long day, limbs arranged haphazardly. The dragon served as a stage for black-and-white birds too, birds that flew around and dotted her green back like fluttering flowers on a windy hill.
For some reason, she had paused. Her pitcher of a mouth now slumped forward into the water, her neck following it down from the arch of her rounded, wingless shoulders.
The wing thing bothered me. I didn’t understand; if this was a dragon, why didn’t she have wings? Why couldn’t she fly? And why did she just stop there in the middle of the river? Maybe she was a false dragon. Maybe she wasn’t what I thought she was. But she carried that huge frame, had those plated scales. More importantly, what else could she be to me? I connected with the dragon more than with anything else out here. And yet, her wingless deceit confused me. I didn’t like that.
That’s when I decided to turn around and leave the dragon alone. She couldn’t tell me what she was anyway. And she moved away from my goal. What did I want out here? I wanted to reach The Mount, and the waterfall dragon couldn’t help me get there.
Seven
It was early evening, and what did I have? I had my fire that illuminated my face in front of the darkening backdrop. The fire crackled, a red-orange fury against the coming calmness of night. It soothed me; my headache subsided for now. I heated my hands, warmed my face, comforted myself on the cleared space I had made in front of the flame. I smelled the smoke of the fire, saw it rise into the sky. The sky hung above my clearing next to a stream, and I noticed how the smoke ruined the picturesque symmetry of the purple sky over the water, framed by still trees.
After leaving the dragon, I had resumed my journey on The Trail and almost arrived at The Lake. I sat near my fire and thought to myself, in part because I now had the time and comfort to do so. But what did I want to think about? I recalled how, in my graduate MFA class, writers were taught to observe. They were meant to watch, think, report back. They didn’t miss the small details. To writers, the smallest details held the biggest truths. But were people who thought that way full of shit to me? I didn’t know. Now that I had finished the program, I had time to think about that question, sort it out, come to a conclusion.
I did like discussing those questions in class whenever we had the chance to move from the craft of writing to the philosophy of writing. But I had difficulty not sounding like a pretentious prick. I had only previously talked about those things with my sister Oly, back when I was much younger.
Oly loved reading. Whenever we talked, we talked about books. I told her what I was reading, how excited I was about the action and the worlds and the heroes in Tolkien, in Rowling. Oly knew about these stories, too, but only from movies, movies that weren’t as immersive to me. But I suspected that she liked my enthusiasm. She laughed when I told her about bringing a massive edition of Lord of the Rings into grade school. She indulged me, and I came to appreciate that.
I had trouble relating to what she read, though. She read Butler, she read Malcolm X, and I was too young to really understand those works. Or maybe I was just too lazy. Like many readers, I recognized the difference between a long book, a meaningful book, and a difficult book. I knew that, sometimes, a book could be all three. At that age, though, I wanted to be transported. And I wanted company. I didn’t find anything wrong with wanting those things, and neither did my sister.
At some point, Oly and I drifted apart. Though I didn’t recall anything recent, the gap had widened with time. I paused, thought for a moment.
Then I remembered one time when I was very young, when Oly had taken me to a release party at a local bookstore. I remembered a lie; Oly lied to me about a character in the book. I didn’t even recall what book was being released or who the lie was about. After all, I was very young. But I remembered the lie, how Oly lied to me about how the character was going to turn out. She lied to me about whether the character was going to make it. When I got through the book and found out that she had lied, I didn’t take it well. I didn’t tell her or anyone else, though; I kept it inside. And while I talked to Oly off and on for years afterward, at least until I went to college, I never really trusted her after that release party.
Maybe I sounded petty just now. But I didn’t make a snap decision; like I said, the rift grew gradually. And now I’ve discovered when the rift began.
I wanted to speak with Oly more, see her, get to trust her again. Maybe a real sibling relationship was still possible. But I knew the truth: there wasn’t one right now, and I didn’t know how to fix that.
PART THREE
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY
Eight
You are not the kind of person who would be at a place like this at this time of day. You have arrived in New York City, ready to meet the Scrubb patriarch after working your way through several more recordings of Elmo. He intrigues you, and you want to stick with this. You have a knot here that needs untying. You think that Buddy Scrubb holds some answers, so you have dropped off your things at the hotel, grabbed a cab toward Times Square, and entered a dive bar that Buddy told you to meet him at around noon. You feel eager. You’re not sure if you should.
On the walls of the dive bar, you see framed black-and-white photos of the same act shown at different stages. A muscled man stands in laced boots, white shorts, and thin gloves underneath a dapper haircut, with his arms in a fighting stance, on top of a platform in front of bleachers beside several other men in oversized suits and fedoras, one of whom hoists a punching bag. In a
nother photo, two men are punching each other, their sweat soaring, faces straining, crowd cheering. In the next photo, a man – this one you know as Muhammad Ali – scowls and flexes and swipes down in the direction of yet another man, supine on the bright-white canvas, who stares up and looks awed, as if he had never seen such a thing before, as if he had just seen an eclipse for the first time.
You finally see a man – a real man – who sits beside you at the bar counter, observing you as you try to examine the framed photos behind him. He has generous height that you notice even in his seat, and he wears a grey newsboy cap on his seemingly shaven head. The man sports smooth features, roughened only by the aged ridges that appear when he speaks to you. You ask him about himself.
“Well, first and foremost, the roots of my family are in Kansas, but I migrated out here about, say, fifteen years ago or so, after I retired from the navy,” Buddy says. He has a slow, wizardly cadence, and you imagine him stroking a nonexistent beard when he speaks.
Does he recall whether he came here for boxing?
“I did, I did,” he says. “I played a lot of sports growing up but, I have to say, nothing really grabbed me until I got in the service and started boxing. I wasn’t too good, but once you put on those gloves for the first time, you know. You really do.”
You grip a cool glass of water, see that Buddy has asked for the same. You hear the clink of darker, harder, sharper drinks in front of the few denizens around you. Now you check the time – just before twelve p.m. – and ask what Buddy did when he reached adulthood.
“Well, you know, I had this urge and desire to see the world, and I was able to do that in the navy,” he says. “I had an opportunity to see different places, so I stuck with it. I made a career out of it. Moved around a lot at the beginnin’, but once I had a family I tried to stick around. Had mixed success with that.” He chuckles.
Is this when Olympia was born?
“Ya, you know, when she was born, we didn’t move around a whole lot more after that,” Buddy says. “I mean, I still did. I went off where they sent me, you understand what I’m sayin’? But they stayed put.” He sips his water, still filled with ice.
You ask whether he means Kansas.
“In Kansas, that’s right.”
But does he think that he left them to come here?
“Left? Well, yes.”
You wonder aloud again if he came here specifically for boxing.
“Wait, I’m trying to make sense of what you sayin’,” he says. He turns away toward the back of the counter. “What are you sayin’? Are you sayin’ I left my family for boxin’? That boxin’ was more important than anythin’ else or somethin’? You wrong there. I’m tellin’ you: you wrong.”
Have you gone too far again? You want to clarify, like you did with his daughter, but you’ve just met this man and you need more time. You decide to return to a more neutral topic: you ask him what he believes is special about boxing.
Buddy looks over to you again. He scrunches his cheek and places his right hand flat on the counter’s smooth glass plate. The glass plate covers hundreds of faded yellow photos of what look like trainers and promoters and fighters smiling and glad-handing at this very bar over the years, long before you and Buddy. “Look at the photos underneath here, the other photos all around you,” Buddy says. He does so himself. “There’s so much history with it. You keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open and really take in what I’m tellin’ you, and you’ll get it.”
What does he mean?
“Well, you know, I boxed early on in the service and then went away from it, but it has always been a real true love of mine, from way back then, you know,” he says. He gazes down and appears to examine the photos underneath the glass. He stops his hand near a pair of silver-haired gentlemen grinning over their beers on what looks like the very same stools where we’re seated. “I’m older now, and the fight game has changed a bit. And I know from readin’ about it, really studyin’ it, that it was even more different before in the sixties, before Ali and all that. There was the amateur game, but there was also another facet of the fight game. There was a club culture back then. People learned a lot at venues like that, at those smaller shows, and I’m not just, you know, talkin’ about the fighters. I’m talkin’ about the trainers, too. This was men teachin’ men.”
You notice that other bargoers appear to halt their conversations, perk up, glance in your direction.
“The young men, they learn from havin’ fights all the time, all the time,” he says. “They had so much more experience than fighters nowadays. A lot of the really good ones back then, they had to, you know, have about forty or fifty pro fights before people might say that they a pretty good fighter. And that’s where they had them, at these club shows. And the trainers would go to these things as well. They’d go to these things and learn, every night if they could, they’d learn the tricks from the other trainers, the veterans, and they’d take their lessons piece by piece. A little defense here, a little offense there, some footwork, all sorts of things. You’d absorb so much just bein’ around so much, you know, and you’d learn what it takes to be in the fight game. That’s what development is: no once-a-week sparrin’, once-a-month workin’ the corner bullshit. You were in the corner during fights, learnin’, all the time. And the young kids, too. They’d be sparrin’, learnin’. The fighters and trainers were developin’ together.”
But does he know what happened to the club shows?
“TV,” he says to you. You no longer hear the clatter of cups around you and Buddy. “TV killed the whole damn thing, you know what I mean?” Buddy continues. “TV came along and people could watch fights at they home. They didn’t need to come to clubs no more. Those shows no longer made any money. And that’s what this is about: money. And now, now promoters coddle kids and groom them for a television audience. They fight less and less; they don’t learn nearly as much. Not enough attention is paid to their development. Kids these days, you know, kids these days at the top just try they best to avoid losin’.”
And what about–
“And it doesn’t take much to be a pro fighter or a pro trainer anymore,” he says, cutting you off. “None of these commissions, you know, the state commissions as a whole don’t really require a whole lot to qualify for a professional match. A lot of the time, the guy just has to be at least eighteen and breathin’, and he gets licensed to box. And anybody can just walk up to USA Boxing or somethin’, and call themselves a trainer, and just pay the pittance for the application fee, and then all of a sudden they, you know, they a trainer. Forget about your background, your apprenticeships. Do you have money? Then you can be a trainer. It’s all about money.”
If the sport is so corrupt, then why–
“And the one thing,” Buddy says, ignoring your follow-up, “the one thing I stand for the most: you can only be successful in this business goin’ from the base to the berry. You don’t want to get him when he’s already grown, when he’s already been raised and formed and taught a certain way. Look at it this way: maybe you handed a good car, and maybe you shine the car hood up a little bit. Me? I’d rather build the car. A lot of these trainers, the big-time trainers, they never suffered with a young kid that lost, a young kid that didn’t get his trophy, a young kid that lost a little tournament that nobody saw, that had no money at stake, spending your own money to go to these tournaments, to take them there, just take them there, and goin’ on all these trips. And until you go through that, go through those experiences, with nothin’ on the line and everythin’ on the line at the same time, you won’t really know boxin’.”
Nine
You see yourself as the kind of person who likes to stay in shape, but not at a gym such as this. You perch on the upper level, watching all sorts of people hitting things. Your eyes overlook the squeaky, shiny hardwood floor and the bright-white walls decorated with dark photos and posters of sculpted, sweating, severe-looking men. You stand next to Buddy, grasp
the cool marigold railing, ask him if he owns the place.
“No, I just teach here,” he says. “Things worked themselves out quickly after I came to the city. It’s a small gym, but they follow my lead. In this sport, you have to win to stay relevant. I produce winners. I even got one of my fighters fighting on the undercard tonight at Madison Square Garden, just a few hours from now. I’m so proud of this kid, all these kids. I have a responsibility to ‘em, y’know? We tryin’ to achieve a goal. I develop these kids, and I live and die with ‘em. We gonna win tonight.”
Where is the undercard fighter now?
“He’s relaxin’, gettin’ his mind right,” he says. “I’ll see him closer to fight time.” Buddy peers in the direction of a small group shadowboxing near the wall-sized mirror below. The mirror appears to hold them, guide them, push them forward. But they’re really pushing themselves. They stand, pose, punch, move. Repeat. They stand firmer and firmer, pose neater and neater, punch harder and harder, move faster and faster. The fighters repeat again, and Buddy inches his cheek upward.
You ask Buddy if he moved here right after he retired from the navy.
“Yes, more or less.”
Does he remember whether that happened at the same time as his divorce?
Buddy pauses. He glances over to you. “Okay, what you askin’ me that question for?”
You hesitate. Your temples gather pellets of sweat. But you gather yourself and remind Buddy that he agreed to speak to you.
“I agreed to talk to you about me, about my life,” he says. “What has the divorce got to do with the way I live my life right now? You know, I never liked you people, the media, but something is naggin’ me to keep talking to you. What story are you chasin’?!”
The Dragon Documentaries Page 3