Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (10 page)

S
ometimes I wonder if I could have saved my relationship with Emma if I'd been able to shit when she was around.

Don't laugh. I am serious, here.

Because I am shy about it. And with reason. I stink. I make a lot of noise. I am able, on my worst days, to clear out entire public restrooms, make them as uninhabitable as Chernobyl.

Not that I often use public restrooms. Only as a matter of absolute last resort, when the one thing standing between me and soiled underwear is the industrial neutrality of a public bathroom stall. And even then I'll fight it, as long as the fight seems winnable. A lot of people don't realize one can battle most any bowel movement into stasis. As with many things, it's a mental game. There's almost never any real danger of shitting yourself; there is only the question of how much discomfort you can tolerate. And I can tolerate a lot.

If I found myself searching for Emma even as we sat side by side at a bar, if I found myself missing her, somehow, even in the midst of coitus, then part of that was her fault, certainly, part of that was her peculiar way of hiding in plain sight, the way her face set itself in neutral, an impenetrable expression of absolute containment, a vault of self.

But might that distance also be my fault, in part? Did I lie by omission to avoid her displeasure? Did I censor and groom myself out of desperation to have her, and did she intuit that the me I presented was an ill-fitting flesh suit, a character from one of my books who defied the laws of both his own nature and nature at large, a character who, for example, seemed never to need to take a dump?

Before the island we spent weeks together, rarely leaving each other's sight; thus few or no opportunities for me to use the bathroom. Add to this the fact that eating, and eating well, was among her favorite ways to pass time and satisfy a multitude of appetites: for sustenance, for ambience, for companionship, for aesthetics. We ate pâtés and terrines and galantines, great steaming bowls of mussels, duck confit dripping salty globules of fat, rare hanger steaks plump with warm blood, spit-roasted pork loins. Preceded by whiskies and bourbons, accompanied by wines red and white, followed with cordials. And the desserts: chocolate peanut butter tortes, champagne-infused sorbets, stomach-rupturing blocks of bread pudding.

All this, and me too shy to use the toilet.

I agonized. I cramped and bloated and hobbled about with a body so full of intestinal gas—gas that I could rarely vent, even on the sly, because the irony of course was that the longer I held a shit, and the more it built up after every expensive fat-laden meal, the worse it smelled—that I worried, a couple of times, that I might actually burst somewhere inside myself. I lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling while she slept beside me, and suppressed groans while violent cramps rippled through my gut.

So really when I stop to think about it, I realize that my not taking a shit when I needed to, when you unpack that and extrapolate it, is really a kind of betrayal of self. Do you follow? No less than, say, pretending to like a movie because you think it will please a person you want desperately to please. Or else sitting calmly and smiling at a dinner party when someone's acted in a way that makes you want to flip tables and throw glassware. To smile through a movie you loathe, or to refrain from breaking things, is a betrayal of self.

And when you try to
live
there, to live in a place where you're betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you're betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of your self begins slowly and inexorably to erode. Until you realize one day out of the clear blue that you have no idea who your self is, anymore.

This was what I was doing every time I had to take a shit around Emma and chose not to. Chipping away at myself, assuming a persona that looked like me but was not. I know it sounds ridiculous. I know. But it's the truth. And every time she went to work or yoga and I would steal upstairs, secure in the knowledge that she'd be gone long enough both for me to shit and for the stink to dissipate before she returned, there was a shame in my relief. At first I thought it was just some weird infantile Freudian thing, like the shame we all supposedly learn to feel very early in life about our shit itself, over the very fact of it. But I came gradually to understand that that was not the nature of my particular shame. No. The shame I felt was deeper and broader and more complex and, frankly, more grown-up. It was the shame of one who has betrayed himself repeatedly, and knows he has, even if he won't admit it to himself. But how could he admit it to himself, with no self to confess to?

And so because I did not recognize the source and nature of my shame, I couldn't talk about it, and certainly not with Emma. But neither could she talk to me about what she no doubt realized, at least subconsciously, and was affected by: a strong if ineffable sense that the me she dealt with on a daily basis, went to sleep with at night, wrapped her arms around and allowed to penetrate her, was not the authentic me.

No doubt it sounds silly. But these things have consequences. And I think, sometimes, that one could draw a straight causal line between my reluctance to shit when Emma was around and the fact that today she is married, once more, to a man other than me.

E
ventually the caballeros grew weary of fighting me. Not because I was any good at it, really—I lost more fights than I won, though no one walked away unbloodied—but because I was dogged, and probably, in their view, a little crazy. I bit and scratched and wasn't above a nut-punch or two, and the caballeros eventually wanted no more of it. So they proposed one last fight with their biggest guy, a hulking, home-tatted
cabron
who, because he was gigantic, and because I never found out his name, and because our fight had all the elements of a champions' duel straight out of Homer, I came to think of as Ajax.

Which, I suppose, made me Hector by default.

The challenge came one hot morning when the local drunk (a genuine distinction on an island full of drinkers) pounded on the door of my casita. I left Charlotte in bed and went down the stairs, found the drunk grinning at me through the aluminum bars of the security gate. He was a whip-thin, anemic man with the features of a Latino weasel and a pint of Palo Viejo always jutting out of his back pocket. I thought I recognized his scheming eyes and crooked smile, the teeth like rusted, broken knife blades. Then I placed him in a specific memory, beyond his ambient, rambling presence on the
malecón
: I'd once seen him tumble off the pier fully clothed, so drunk at nine in the morning that he couldn't swim the twenty-five yards to shore and had to be fished out by a gringo bartender setting up for lunch at Duffy's.

Bueno día,
the drunk said, grinning, grinning. He hooked his fingers around the bars. Give me rum, and I give you a message.

I don't have any rum, I lied.

I smell it on you.

It's not the rotgut you like.
Muy caro,
my friend.

This is not a problem, he said, pulling the empty pint from his pocket and tossing it in the dirt. I didn't always drink this
gasolina.
I had money when I was young.
Mi padre
the car dealer.
Mucho dinero.
All the Bacardi I wanted.

He grinned wider, revealing black gaps in his mouth where molars had gone missing.

I eyed him a moment longer, then went back up the stairs and returned with a near-empty bottle of Don Q. That's all I have, I lied again, handing it through the bars.

He twisted the cap off and downed the two fingers or so. I waited.

They say you like to fight, he said finally, his grin disappearing and reappearing in intervals as he licked rum from the corners of his mouth.

There was a pause. So? I said.

So maybe you like to fight tonight. At
la gallera.

La gallera?
I asked. You must be mistaking me for a rooster.

No no, he said. A special fight. Man-fight. Just two of you. No funny business.

I laughed. ‘Funny business?' Where did you learn English?

They say to tell you, the man continued, that you fight tonight, and there be no more after that. They leave you alone, no matter who win.

I thought for a minute. It was intriguing, I had to admit. Not because I wanted the fighting to stop—I was indifferent to that. No, I was intrigued because
they
obviously wanted the fighting to stop, and they imagined this proposal an acceptably macho way to end it and save face at the same time.

The
gallera
was a large corrugated aluminum building set beside the main drag in Isabel, like the world's biggest garden shed. The ring in the center, a ten-foot-diameter scrap of Astroturf hemmed by a short concrete wall, was surrounded by concentric circles of theatre-style seats rising up to the rafters. Big Medalla banner on the wall. A small window through which beer and roasted chicken
pinchos
were sold. Cumulus zeppelins of cigar smoke and chlorinated fluorescent light and crowds of men who never bothered to use the seats provided. This was where I found myself that evening, nine sharp, the hour when the actual cockfights always started.

Ajax stood across from me, stripped to the waist, three hundred pounds if a pound and streaming sweat just standing there. He sneered at the comparatively insignificant amount of air I displaced, and here was my chance, if I had any: hubris always makes one vulnerable, no matter how strong.

His arrogance was the only stroke in my favor, though. Everything else worked against me: the crowd; my poor physical shape after so much heroic drinking; the tiny ring, designed to house the clash of angry fowl, not a no-holds-barred match between grown men. I was giving up over a hundred pounds and had nowhere to run, let alone hide.

But things were even worse than they appeared at first blush. Because I realized quickly, after the buzzer screeched to begin the bout, that not only was Ajax massive and fierce, but he also knew how to fight. He had training. He slipped my berserker rush out of the corner, intended to surprise and intimidate, with a deft, practiced side step, and as I passed he cuffed me with a left jab, then landed a blinding right cross to the nerve center just below my ear.

I staggered, tripped over my own feet, nearly went down. The crowd, as smug as Ajax himself, and as certain of his victory, murmured approval. Ajax waited for me to clear my head and made a show of looking bored, letting his hands drop a bit.

Of course he knew how to fight. Half the island's men had spent more net time in the boxing gym than in school. While I'd been busy playing JV basketball and getting into the occasional undisciplined scrape in the neighborhood, conflicts that usually looked more like an awkward slow dance between two dudes than an actual fight, Ajax had passed his days cutting class and working the speed bag and sparring without a head guard.

I went after him again. He tried the same side step, but I anticipated it and met him at the spot. I lowered my head into his belly, felt him cough up the air in his lungs. The crowd grumbled, but as far as I was concerned the fact that no one had outlined rules meant that there were none. This wasn't a boxing match, it was a street fight.

But though Ajax was winded, I couldn't press any advantage. He was too big. I tried to wrap him up and pin him against the wall, but my arms weren't long enough to circumscribe his girth. Then I put my forearms against his hips and tried to push him backwards, but the physics wouldn't cooperate, and as I shoved at him in vain he sucked air and landed kidney and rabbit punches with impunity.

The third shot to the back of the skull dazzled me, and when I felt his arm wrap under mine to hold me in place I knew he'd recovered from the head butt to his belly, and I knew I was in trouble, and so, in desperation, I bit the loose flesh where his hip met his upper thigh.

Ajax moaned and let go of my arm. He stumbled back against the concrete barrier, looking down at his shorts to check for blood. I realized I had maybe five seconds before he got over his shock, and then it wouldn't be enough for him to simply win—he would want to levy punishment, to break parts of me, to make sure I had a limp or detached retina or some such physical reminder of him for the rest of my life.

I squared up, drew back, and threw a mighty kick at his balls, but too slow, too slow. He sidestepped once more, shockingly nimble for such a huge man. My foot caught nothing but air, and I ended up on the ground. The crowd rewarded my effort with a jeer, and as Ajax shuffle-stepped forward with murder in his eyes, it occurred to me, inanely, that with feet like those he could have been a good heavyweight prizefighter, instead of a two-bit thug on this two-bit island.

I clambered up just in time to meet his right cross again. The feeling was not unlike being hit in the side of the head with a good-sized chunk of feldspar. I went down and now Ajax had no interest in showboating. He set on me with kicks to the gut and ribs, cursing me in Spanish. Blood smeared my vision. I tried to regain my feet as the crowd, sensing the endgame, began screaming in earnest. If Ajax had been on my now-blind right side that would have been it, but I could still see out of my left eye, and managed to time a kick well enough to trap his size-14 boxing shoe in my hands. He was badly overextended, and went down easily with a strong upward thrust on his heel.

A groan of disappointment from those assembled, followed by a sudden hush. Ajax, breathless again from the impact with the turf, now lay prone and momentarily helpless, like a huge June bug stuck on its back. I straddled his chest, thought about hitting him in the throat, considered the possibility that this could kill him, then slammed an elbow into his face instead. He sputtered and raised his hands between us, weak, vain warding. I hit him again, and the bridge of his nose zagged half an inch off center.

A crushed Medalla can bounced off the back of my head. Then, between my shoulder blades, I was stung by what felt like a D battery. This last provided enough of a distraction for Ajax to gather himself and flip me over. Both of us were exhausted, and his heaving mass pinned me so tight against the turf that I could feel individual blades of plastic grass abrading my back.

And he was truly, truly angry now. He and I were the same in that regard: fatigue could not mitigate our gall. He propped himself up on one elbow and dropped a fist into my face over and over. Where his tired muscles failed to provide force, gravity compensated. Somehow my teeth were spared, but most every other feature north of my throat wound up some degree of mangled.

I'd never given up in a fight before. That's what had landed me here—the caballeros didn't want to deal with my tenacity any longer. I had what real fighters call heart. And real fighters talk about heart all the time—who has it, who doesn't, how it's more important than a snappy jab or solid footwork or good cardio. Heart. If a fighter takes a genuine beating, if he gives up in, say, round 2, and just sort of hangs on for the rest of the match, absorbing shot after shot and refusing to fight back in earnest, as though he deserves to be punished for some transgression he knows he's committed but cannot admit to, they say the other guy took his heart. The fighter himself will say this. He took my heart, he'll say, usually from the humiliating comfort of a slightly inclined hospital bed. The discussion will not touch on physical fatigue, or painful calcium deposits in the hands that hindered his punching, or a slight cold that made breathing through his nostrils difficult and necessitated opening his mouth, thereby leaving him vulnerable to a knockout punch. The conversation will start and end with that all-important intangible: heart. He just took the heart right out of me, the fighter will say, sounding awed, as though the other man had not just handed him a sound beating, but performed a genuine miracle for which there would never be a satisfying explanation.

And this is what Ajax did that night. Whatever heart Emma had left me with, Ajax beat it out of me there on the Astroturf
.
If I'd been able to stand, or speak, I would have thanked him and shaken his hand. He'd earned my gratitude. He'd done more to shape me, in just under ten minutes, than my own father had in thirty years, and I owed him a tremendous, unpayable debt. I consider myself in his debt to this day, although his share of the book from the fight must have been pretty substantial, judging by the money I saw exchanging hands in the crowd as I lay there and choked on my own blood.

And the caballeros were good to their word. Not a single fight found me after that, for the rest of my time on the island.