Suckerpunch: (2011) (10 page)

She put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, man. No dancing tonight, then.”

“Come on. It’s that bad?”

Marcela sipped her water and wiped the residue of her lip gloss off the rim with her napkin. “You try too hard. You’re always pushing and pulling and squeezing. Sometimes you just have to relax and be patient.”

“I tend to lose my patience pretty quickly when someone is elbowing me in the face.”

“It’s different when you can punch and kick each other. But not that different.”

“Do you compete down in Brazil?”

She said, “Yes, of course, and other places. Wherever we go.”

“MMA or just jiu jitsu?”

“Just
jiu jitsu? Please.”

Like I’d asked Sinatra, ‘You only sing?’ I said, “Are you any good?”

“I’ve won more than lost.”

“That could mean anything. Two and one?”

Marcela sighed. “Five-time national champion and undefeated in three weight classes. I got my black belt when I was thirteen.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“No, no,” she said. “Woody, you can’t say that. It’s disrespectful.”

I liked how she pronounced it.
Woo-dee.
I apologized and said, “Do you have a nickname? For when you compete?”

“Not for that. My family calls me Cela sometimes.”

“What does that mean?”

“Mean? It’s part of my name. Marcela. Cela.” She held her hands together, then separated them. “See?”

“Right, yes.”

“The ones with meaning, that’s for you boys. You all want to be superheroes with secret identities. You should fight with capes on.”

“Easy to choke somebody that way.”

“Not for you,” she said and hid behind her shoulder. She was a rascal.

Stephanie returned, and we scrambled to figure out what to order. To buy us time she refilled my water and got Marcela a Diet Coke. We both decided on grilled chicken salads, and Stephanie did a good job of making it seem like that was worth all the time it took.

When she was gone, Marcela said, “Why did you pick Woodshed for your name?”

“I didn’t. Someone else gave it to me. You can’t pick your own nickname.”

She sipped her drink with a frown. She freed the straw long enough to ask, “Why not?” Then was right back at it.

“I don’t know. It’s tacky. Like a smart person going around telling everyone to call him Einstein. It’s not spontaneous. Everyone will end up calling him Whinestein or something.”

“So at the gym, the loud guy—”

“Roth,” I said.

“His nickname is Cut Snake, he told me. Which means crazy, right?”

“Right. Australians are . . . unique.”

“He didn’t pick that for himself?”

“He says his mom’s called him that since he was a baby.”

Marcela said, “It’s a good name for him.”

“The best one I’ve heard so far is Adrian’s, a guy from Greece who trains with us sometimes. Over there they call him
Akoniti,
which means ‘no duster’ in Greek, from the old pancration days. They used it to describe a fight that was over so fast it didn’t raise any dust from the arena floor.”

“I like that one,” Marcela said.

I was going to add something about how I hoped he hadn’t earned it in the bedroom, but I drank water instead.

She said, “So who gave you Woodshed? And why a building?”

I told her the story, then explained, “There’s a phrase when you really give someone a good whipping. People say you took them out to the woodshed. For a beating.”

Marcela frowned.

“The guy said I took the other fighter to the woodshed and beat him with it.”

She nodded, probably so I would stop talking. She said, “Okay, so you’re a building where beatings happen.”

“Kind of. Maybe.”

Our food arrived, and we spent some time arranging our napkins and sampling the salads with small bites that wouldn’t leave anything on our faces. We both wiped after each nibble just in case.

Marcela said, “Did I hear one of the fighters introduced as a goat?”

“
The
Goat,” I said around a mouthful that almost ended up in the booth behind Marcela. I kept it in and withered under her disapproval. I got some water down and wiped my face. “The Goat. It’s an acronym for Greatest of All Time.”

“Of all
time?”
she asked. “Is he?”

“I’ve never seen him fight. He lost his last two, I think. And he’s just a jiu jitsu guy, so he can’t be that good.”

Her mouth fell open. “I am going to kick your face.” She reached across the table and put a crouton in my water.

I gulped it down and crunched with a smile.

The place was filling up. Every half hour the staff would pick one of the people out of the crowd and put them in a sedan chair and carry them around the dance floor so they could act like an emperor or empress. Some of them did a good job, holding a hand out and gazing above the plebeians. Others clung to the arms and gave out high fives like free bread.

The music and people were making it so we had to lean over the table to hear each other, Marcela talking with her hands and almost smacking me in the face more than once. Each time she stopped what she was saying to put a hand on my cheek and apologize until she finally said, “Here, hold my hands on the table. It’s the only way.”

I laid my hands palms up on the table, and she dropped hers in, little hand-shaped cookies, and I closed around them lightly and waited.

“I can’t do it.” She laughed. “I need them free to talk.”

“That’s why I’m not letting them go,” I said.

“Oh, you like your women to be quiet?”

“How would I know?”

She closed one eye and freed a hand to point at me. “You are going to be trouble, boy.”

I tried to do a who-me? face, but I don’t have one.

Marcela turned my hands over and ran her fingers over my knuckles. She inspected a scar on my left hand near the base of my middle finger that looked like someone had smashed two front teeth into it. “Why did you pick fighting?” I opened my mouth and she said, “And don’t give me the nonsense about fighting picking you.”

I closed my mouth.

She said, “You seem pretty smart, so that’s why I ask.”

“Who said fighters can’t be smart?”

“You’ve met my cousins?”

I said, “Jairo has his head on right.”

“Psh. That one, maybe he’s wise, but I don’t know about smart. Someone looks at him cross-eyed and he’s got his shirt off, ready to go.”

“He’s Brazilian.”

She didn’t have an argument for that.

“You know, it used to be some of the best fighters were also the smartest guys around. Socrates was a soldier in the Athenian army. He treated battles like arguments, no retreating.”

“Let me guess: he died in battle.”

“No,” I said, “he was imprisoned and given a death sentence. He drank poison.”

Marcela lifted her glass. “To Socrates.”

“You want me to apologize for being a fighter, but I’m not going to. Fighting is fun. It’s honest. You can’t hide from yourself in a fight. You should know that from your jiu jitsu.”

“No, that is grace and strength. And there are rules.”

“MMA has rules.”

“Ah, but that’s not where you started. They talk at the gym, and I listen. You’re just like Jairo and the others, fighting since you were little for no good reason.”

“I had a good reason,” I said.

“What, did they take your cookies? Pull your hair and say you stink?”

I almost let it slide. But she was testing me, pushing me to see if I’d push back. In my experience, the best way to gain the advantage in an argument is to tell the truth; it throws people off. I said, “No. They tossed me in an empty pool when I was eleven. Then they threw another kid in. He was fifteen. Guess who climbed out?”

Marcela eased a cherry tomato into her mouth and chewed it a few times. She pointed her fork at me and said, “You’re joking with me.”

“Nope.”

“Somebody put you in a pool.”

“An empty pool,” I said. “A full pool would have been more dangerous. I have a tendency to sink.”

“Who put you in?”

“There was a gang of Hispanic kids who hung around the school. They were a chapter of the San Chucos gang, called themselves the Thirteen Bulls. Smoking, trying to look tough, selling drugs. Graffiti. They found an abandoned house a few blocks away and turned it into their hangout, and it had a pool in the backyard. I think they skated in it for a while, but that got boring. One day I was on my way home, and they grabbed me and tossed me in.”

“Before they grabbed you, did you know they did that there? The fighting?”

“Sure.”

“Stupid, why didn’t you go another way?”

“They didn’t own the street. I walked that way before they showed up.”

Marcela looked at the ceiling and made an appeal in Portuguese.

While she was distracted, I picked a piece of lettuce out from between my teeth.

Marcela said, “You know what I think? I think you wanted them to grab you.”

Shit.

“You probably strolled by, stopped to tie your shoe. Hey, I think maybe you rang the doorbell.”

“That’s ridiculous.” The electricity in the house had been shut off.

“No,
you
are. Why didn’t you go home and watch TV?”

“Believe it or not, that pool was safer than my house.”

“Okay. I believe that,” she said. “But still, go to the library. Play fútbol.”

“I’m not saying I didn’t have choices. I didn’t make the smartest ones, but that doesn’t mean I deserved to get jumped. I just went about my usual business, and one day they decided to interfere. Three of them grabbed me off the sidewalk and took me around back and dropped me in the pool. There were probably thirty or forty kids standing around the edge, yelling and spitting and flicking butts at me.

“They shoved each other around to see who would fall in. Finally one kid did, the fifteen-year-old, taller than me with some fat on him. He stood as far away from me as he could and started hitting me in the head, big looping things that slapped more than punched, you know?”

Marcela nodded. She had her glass in front of her but wasn’t drinking.

“I remember thinking, ‘This guy hates getting hit. And he thinks he’s whipping me, but I’m standing here taking it. Is this how kids hit?’ I barely felt it. It took me a while to realize I could fight back—this wasn’t some drunk who’d throw me out the window if I tried. So I did. And, man, I never saw that kid again after that day. I think his family moved to Ohio.”

Marcela said, “But you went back.”

I shrugged. “I just kept walking home. Some days they grabbed me. Some days they didn’t.”

“Which days did you like better?”

I looked at her and knew I had lost the argument. I didn’t care. “The pool.”

Marcela mumbled and attacked her salad for a while. When it didn’t fight back enough, she straightened and shook her head. “So, what, you beat up the whole gang? One by one?”

“If I say yes can we change the subject?”

“No.”

I said, “I didn’t fight anyone from the gang after the first time. Well, there might have been a few. They had more fun watching me against other kids they brought in.”