Griffin
In exchange for breaking Sacramento’s champion, I got a dislocated middle finger, two hundred and seventy-three dollars, and a shitty nickname echoing down the halls of the cheap motel where I’m left to rot.
“Hey, it’s Iron Arm!”
“Holy shit, look at the size of that arm!”
“I bet he could break a watermelon with that thing.”
Yeah, you whores. It’s fucking Iron Arm. One of the bastards asked me to flex my bicep for him, for free.
For a few minutes, everything made sense.
Now, nothing does. The TV is showing a game show where people are screaming hysterically over a blender.
The host promises to turn misery into a spectacle, and he gets off on humiliating poor people.
He tells them, I’ll give you a house, but only if you dance naked on national television.
And the people at home applaud. They think it’s beautiful.
Overcoming adversity. How lovely, this poor fucker humiliating himself for money.
The host in the expensive suit is no different from the sweaty organizer in my ring.
His audience is no different from mine. At least my show has a higher risk of dental damage. More bang for your buck.
Suddenly, my hotel room door opens. The only person with permission to come in here is Marcus, and it’s him, in a polyester suit and a gold-toothed smile, who appears.
“Stumpy! News from paradise!” Marcus enters, waving a manila envelope. He sits on the edge of my bed and throws it onto my lap. “Open it.”
“What the fuck is this, Marcus?”
“It’s your next paycheck, you ungrateful fuck! Karpov called because he wants you back in the ring. Main event.”
“That’s to be expected,” I say with a shrug. “I broke the last main event.”
“Ah, but the purse... Griffin, the purse is... astronomical. I’ve never seen anything like it around here. This is big boy money.”
For a second, I wonder what I’d even buy with that kind of cash. A lifetime supply of cheap whiskey? A slightly less shitty motel room? The possibilities are dizzying.
I sit up. My body, outside the ring, aches everywhere, and I’ve already learned to ignore my own existence.
I pick up the envelope. Inside, a single sheet of paper with a few typed paragraphs. I look at the number at the bottom of the page, the fixed amount they’d pay the fighters just for stepping into the ring. It’s high. High enough to be a typo.
“This is wrong,” I say.
“No, it’s not! I checked three times! Karpov said that after your ‘spectacular performance’, he attracted an investor. Someone with real money, who wants to raise the level of the show.”
An investor sounds strange in the middle of filthy concrete.
Investors wear expensive suits and talk about spreadsheets, and their kind of betting is usually different.
Something to do with luxury, with wagers that can be made while sipping wine, with a European standard of order.
The closest big money gets to a basement fight is when it buys sports teams.
“Who?”
“I don’t know! Some rich guy, who cares?” Marcus gestures impatiently. “What matters is he wants to see quality bloodshed, and you, stumpy, you’re the goddamn head butcher now. They want a real show.”
Like the woman drowning in cockroaches on TV for five hundred dollars. The audience applauds the same shit. My eyes go back to the paper. “And who’s the other clown?”
Marcus’s smile falters. “Ah, right. The investor... he has a special request. He wants to see technique. They’re bringing in a guy from out of town. A real fighter. The guy’s a ground specialist. Jiu-jitsu, judo, that pajama bullshit.”
I stare at the paper, then at Marcus’s gold-toothed smile. Jiu-jitsu. Judo. The kind of shit that tangles you up.
“They want to see me crippled on the other side, too?”
“Come on, stumpy, don’t be pessimistic!” Marcus laughs, but his eyes don’t. He knows. “Think of the money! With just the show-up fee, we can disappear from Sacramento. Go somewhere with sun, women who don’t have STDs, and beer that doesn’t taste like piss.”
A poor fucker humiliating himself for a little money. The holy, rotten gold.
People I would have sworn had dignity get on their knees, lick, and dance in the mud for a pile of bills they won’t even count right, but as long as it’s in front of them, it’s a god with a hard-on.
The winner’s purse would be double the guaranteed amount, which is already twenty-five times my usual pay of two hundred dollars; twenty-five fights, and twenty-five broken bones.
It’s kind of stupid I didn’t see it before—of course, after fucking up Sacramento’s “best” fighter, Karpov wants me dead.
This money is for a losing fight. A fucking grappler against me, for fuck’s sake?
“They think I don’t know how to fight on the ground,” I say without thinking.
They’re right. I don’t.
I grab the crumpled pack of cigarettes from the nightstand. The warning on the box feels like a joke. This product causes death. Everything causes death, you sons of bitches.
“You know how to fight on the ground,” Marcus lies, leaning forward. “You fight anyone, anywhere. Right, champ? Are we going to get rich, or are we going to sit here watching TV?”
I look at the screen. The cockroach woman is laughing and crying at the same time. The audience applauds.
“Yeah... They want me to lose,” I say. “You know that, right? Or is old age making you stupid?”
“Griffin, for God’s sake, who cares? They pay the same either way!” He gives up on his theater about how I can beat anyone. I prefer it this way. “You tap out before he breaks something for real, and we still get paid. It’s the easiest job in the world!”
Maybe that’s it. Maybe I was built to be the sacrifice on someone else’s altar.
I light my cigarette with a lighter I stashed under the mattress.
“No,” I say, and Marcus’s smile freezes.
I crumple the proposal in my one hand. The prosthesis lies abandoned on the two-seater sofa in front of the window.
“What the hell do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I’ll fight, just not for this handout.”
Marcus’s face goes from panic to pure disbelief. He gestures at the crumpled paper in my hand as if it’s a sacred artifact I just spat on. “A handout? We don’t make this kind of money in a whole month!”
“What can I say? Quality pornography is expensive.” I stare at him. “Tell Karpov, or his fucking ghost investor, that my price for stepping in the ring just doubled.”
Marcus’s jaw drops. He nearly has a stroke right there on the edge of my bed.
“Have you gone completely insane? Griffin, they’ll laugh in our faces! They’ll tell us to go fuck ourselves and call the next loser in line!”
“There is no other loser in line who did what I did to their champion.”
Marcus stares at me.
“Griffin, this Karpov guy is an animal. And the investor... people like that don’t like being crossed. They won’t negotiate.”
I take a long drag from my cigarette.
“I’m going to be the most expensive whore in Sacramento. Double the price. Take it or leave it.”
Marcus runs his hands over his face. He knows I won’t back down. My stubbornness wins impossible fights and will probably get us both killed. I won’t be a cheap whore.
“Fine,” he relents. “Fine, goddammit. But when the men in suits show up here to pull out your fingernails, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Fingernails, huh? At least it’s more creative than a simple bullet to the head. I appreciate the effort.
I take a deep drag, holding the smoke in my lungs until it burns. If I die, Marcus can tell himself he tried. He’ll sleep soundly on his moldy mattress, dreaming of the money he almost made.
Twenty-five fights. Fifty. Fifty broken bones. One expensive whore.
The TV is still on. The woman is now crying with joy, covered in cockroaches and holding a giant cardboard check. Marcus leaves, shaking his head and fumbling in his blazer’s inner pocket for a cigarette.
Before the so-called men in suits come to rip my balls off, I decide I need a drink.
The nearest bar is a ten-square-meter dive that I (shamefully) go to sometimes. With the prosthesis back on, covered by a long wool sleeve, people don’t stare at me as much, too entertained by a dirty glass of whiskey and an out-of-tune song from a fucked-up jukebox.
The bartender has a grease stain on his shirt. I’m going to get a viral gastrointestinal infection in here. I order a whiskey. The music is a tearjerker country song about losing your dog and your wife, not necessarily in that order.
I down the first glass in one go.
“Hey.”
The voice is familiar. I order another whiskey from the bartender, who looks at me like I’m something that just crawled out of the sewer.
“I didn’t think I’d find you here,” she insists.
Now I turn. It’s the girl from last night. She doesn’t look as confident under the cheap yellow light of this bar. She’s wearing an oversized sweatshirt, and her hair is tied up messily. She looks more tired. More boring.
“Tough luck for you,” I say, taking my second glass.
She ignores my kindness. “Look, about last night... I was an idiot. I said some stupid shit.”
I shrug.
“Seriously,” she says, moving closer, sitting on the stool next to me. She smells like soap. “I didn’t mean it like that. It was stupid.”
“Okay,” I say, and take another sip. This conversation has already gone on too long.
She stays silent, watching me. I hate that.
Suddenly, the country music chokes.
“What the fuck was that?” a big guy yells from the other side of the bar. Without that annoying beat, his voice is louder. “I paid for that music!”
The bartender shrugs. He’s already buried the jukebox in a coffin. “It’s broken. It happens.”
“The hell it happens! I want to hear Johnny Cash!”
I stand up. I take my glass of whiskey and walk over to the jukebox. The girl watches me; everyone watches me. The big guy glares at me, ready to fight over fucking Johnny Cash.
The machine is just there: an old piece of junk with dead lights and a dusty glass panel.
I set my glass on the bar and hit the side of it with my hand.