Story 4, and an awesome story

Been busy with travel and hanging out with old friends. Last night we were sitting around my parents house watching the padres game, which was tied in the bottom of the 13th inning. I turned to my friend Austin and said "I have a feeling this game is going long. Let's drive down to the stadium and I bet it'll still be going on." So four of us got in a car and made the hour long drive to the stadium, we sneak in, and run to seats on the third base line (it was the 16th inning, almost nobody left in the stadium). I rush to the front row, sit down, and then a split second later I stand up screaming in joy because Padres catcher, Nick Hundley, hits a towering fly ball. We hug and high five each other as the ball sails out for a walk off homerun. Padres win. We only saw one pitch but all agreed it was the best BB game we had ever been to.

Enjoy this story. It's one I've tried to revise so much that it's to the point that i have to post it now or I never will.

The narrator is a stylized version of myself I've been toying with using as the narrator for a series of interconnected short stories. The events are mostly fictional. To my knowledge there aren't underground fight clubs in Provo.

Story #4 Reasons for Leaving Utah.

My last winter in Utah, I rented out a small upstairs office in quaint downtown Provo with two tall windows. The windows looked east across University Avenue to the brown-yellow brick of a six-storey building. On top of the building a crumbly façade read “Knight Building, 1902”. Extended families of pigeons roosted there and instead of writing a master’s thesis, I spent my afternoons looking out those tall windows and watching the birds fly lazy ovals and then, in unison, settle again. I would watch them until the windows of the Knight Building sent back at me the fierce orange of a reflected sunset and it hurt my eyes to look. Then I would remember my deadlines and slog out some poem. I was 26. That last winter I wrote a lot of poems about pigeons.

The overhead lights in that office were harsh-bright and I never liked to stay long after the refracted sunset. I would get lonely and then chide myself for feeling so lonely when I had a wonderful girlfriend and three fun-as-hell roommates waiting for me at my apartment complex. Too blessed to feel lonely, I’d think to myself, and then I’d get in my car and make the short drive home.

One late weeknight that winter, thoughtful, having just come from poems about pigeons, I pulled into the underground parking structure of my Provo apartment complex. There was a loose circle of people blocking me, hoodies and fleeces and some wrapped in blankets congregated in the wide middle lane of that covered space. It was a concrete pad, one floor under the apartments, with parking spots on either side and ramps leading out to the north and south. On winter Sunday nights it was a place people in the complex often gathered to say a group prayer. This wasn’t a Sunday. Seeing me, the circle broke open to let me through and I parked in a stall beyond it and got out. My girlfriend walked to me from the loose circle and met me by the driver’s side door. She put her right hand on the side of my stomach and let her momentum carry her, hips first, into me. I was real heavy then and she liked to use her small body to test how hard it was to move me. She spoke into my eyes. She looked excited and flushed, like someone who has just come in from a long time in the cold.

“there’s going to be a fight”

“Like a fight, fight?”

This was BYU. We were religious kids or timid ones or both. We never fought. We used that concrete space for group prayer.

“I think it’s more like a boxing match. Jason set it up.”

“Who’s doing the fighting?”

“This kinda nerdy kid named Jon and that one kid you always call the German”

“OK? So what are they fighting over?”

“Me, silly. No, just kidding. I don’t really know. I don’t think it’s anything but friendly. They’ll have boxing gloves on. Is your camera still in the back? Jason asked me if I would take some photos.”

This whole time her hand was resting on the outside of my stomach and her hips were up against me. I opened the car door for her and she reached in and got my digital SLR from the backseat. Then she turned to me and curtsied.

“You’ll excuse me, sir, if I stand with my girls. They get lonesome for me.”

“No worries.”

She made me smile. She turned to leave. I touched her and she turned back. “Hey. You look beautiful. Like you’ve just come in from a long time in the cold.”

“Thanks baaaaaaby.” She said, then quick turned and catwalked away towards her roommates, exaggerating her hips for me and modeling the camera to them with a sweep of her hand over it. I couldn’t see her face but I knew she was smiling.

I walked over and stood in an empty spot of the thickening circle, near my roommates. Jason was already there, in the middle, with a microphone made out of tinfoil. He was introducing the fighters. I knew Jason. He was new to the apartments, but he was a legacy. His family owned one of the units and his older brothers, as they attended BYU, had lived there previously. He had just moved in for winter semester, fresh from being the most popular kid in high school. He played rugby now, and had a loud smile.

Jason introduced the kid I called the German. He called him the German too. The kid came down the stairs in a black tank top with wristbands on his biceps. He had red boxing gloves and he was holding the edges of a German flag draped around his shoulders. He was short, five foot something, with close cut dirty blonde hair and all his baby fat. I remember thinking how determined he looked to fight, like there was no fooling around in him. Usually he just walked around like a wannabe badass, ready to mad dog you in the hallway when you weren’t looking, but never to your face. He always wore fresh sneakers and low cut jeans and kept his hair buzzed and he talked way too much about who his parents knew and pranks he had supposedly orchestrated and hot tubs he had supposedly been in with girls. But the thing was he always told the same stories. Plus, he was always talking about his German heritage, not the Nazis overtly, but you could tell he admired their stereotyped coldness and stoicism. So I called him “the German” sarcastically, to mock just how far he was physically from the chiseled Aryan stereotype. As much as he acted proud of the nickname, I think a part of him knew it was mockery and that just made him angrier. It turned your insides a bit to think about it.

But now he just shuffled around the circle, trying to dance on his feet but he wasn’t nimble enough. So he went and carefully draped his flag over the windshield of his hatchback, then stood in a corner away against a concrete wall and stared at the ground, talking to himself and punching his fists together. Then when Jon started coming down the opposite stairs he turned and stared at him and moved out into the circle to meet him.

Jon came down the stairs in a blue t-shirt, black gloves, and a flag of Guatemala draped around his shoulders. He was dark skinned, and just as pudgy as the German, but taller. I barely knew him, because he was so shy. But I knew he wasn’t athletic, and I knew he played a ton of World of Warcraft and I knew that he was probably doing this just because Jason had befriended him and convinced him. Jason had that kind of charisma. I imagine Jon was lonely for the attention. You could tell he loved it as he hammed around the now crowded circle, smiling and growling at everyone through a cheap mouthpiece. If he any fear or any idea how seriously the German was taking this exhibition, he didn’t show it. I should have said something to him. The German was small but he had so much anger in him. Instead, I just smiled along with Jon and the rest in the circle and the air charged a bit because we knew now that the fight was going to happen.

The motive was apparently trumped up from nationalism. That was the hook Jason gave the crowd at least. Jason brought Jon to the center of the concrete circle where the German was waiting. The fighters touched gloves. Jon was still smiling. The German looked angry and proud and round without angles. We cheered. And then they fought.

The German’s style was to lean his head way back out of harm’s way and punch upward with his palms out. There was no weight behind his punches because he didn’t turn his hips and drive his body behind them. He just punched upward with his head back so it looked like he was trying to block a falling rock or plug a leak in a dam above his head. Jon liked to slap the German’s gloves out of the way, or punch at them in a palms out stalemate, and then rush grunting in and hug the German. At least he leaned into his body punches. But he didn’t know where to punch and soon the outsides of the German’s arms were red, but nothing else.
They moved and grunted and people smiled at them and my girlfriend was opposite the circle from me taking pictures and my roommates and I chuckled at their lack of coordination and Jason was rushing in constantly like a referee to unclench them and urge them to open up and it was a cold night and their faces were red from rubbing and their breath came up white and fogged above them in the air.

Once they separated and the German actually leaned into his leak-plug of a punch and it caught Jon in the throat. Jon took quick steps back and circled a bit stunned that he had been hurt and after that the German must have sensed blood because he started pressing. Jon kept clenching, but the air in that circle was charged again with danger.

Then the German paused for a second. Aware now of danger, Jon moved in to clench. The German wound up and threw a perfect right hook. It was a miracle coincidence of clumsy physics. His feet set squarely on the balls of his toes, he twisted and moved his weight flawlessly behind the punch. To see something so beautiful come from such a clumsy man was a shock. I was shocked by it, then horrified when it landed flush two finger widths to the right center of Jon’s chin.

Jon was close to me, very close but I was too stunned we all were to catch him as he fell, like fluid, with no attempt to brace himself. He fell on his right side and the outside of his right leg hit first, then his right shoulder then the wave force of his fall snapped his limp head into the concrete like a stretched rubber band released against skin. I was right there and the sound was horrible. Like coconuts. Everyone heard it.

I swore, then I knelt down and turned him on his back, supporting his neck. I looked up and saw the German standing there above us, gloating, with the light behind him, breathing hard face set hard in the horrible embodiment of his mock stereotype. I made eye contact and there was so much rage in me. Then his hardness was gone and he rushed to Jason, shouting at him to take the boxing gloves off but Jason wasn’t listening paralyzed mouth-open mouthing “o shit o shit” over and over again. And half the crowd seemed to melt backwards, the collective wish to get the hell out of there and the other half came forward in shocked concern making a new and tighter circle with Jon and I in the middle. Somebody asked me what to do. I dunno why they asked me. I must have been the oldest. I just said “911”. There was nothing I could do. Jon was paling there shallow breathing on the concrete with dots of blood cooling on the spot where his right ear had first made contact with the ground.

I stood up and a nursing student roommate of my girlfriend took my place beside Jon. When I stood up I could see some of the eyes in the circle looking at Jon but most of them looking at me. I looked away and saw the German alone near his car outside the circle, kicking the tires and swinging his arms around as if he could throw the boxing gloves off with the twirl-force. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so horrible. Then the German made a strange keening cry from deep inside and rushed up the concrete stairs crying, gloves still on. He left his flag limp and wrinkled on the windshield of his parked hatchback.

A night earlier that winter. Up the canyon with my girlfriend. Stopped at the parking lot by Nun’s park, near the river:

“Tell me a dream you had, any dream”.

Her voice is always deeper after we make out. My mouth is hot. The muscles in my face are loose from the kissing and I can feel a spot of pain on my lower lip where her canine caught me. I’m stretched out on my back across my reclined seat and angling into hers. My head is up against the outside of her left arm and the leather of her seat. She has my right hand palm up in her lap and she is absentmindedly massaging my forearm with both thumbs. There is the tinted moonroof above me, obscuring all but the brightest of stars. There is the smell of her arm and the yellow hue of her soft blouse. There is the dig of the gearshift as it presses my love-handle and with the nerves in my right elbow I can feel the delicate heat of her lap. Then there is her presence above me, the nebulous shape of her head and hair as she cranes into my vision to speak, moving like an unfocused eclipse in front of the moonroof.

“Go on,” she says, “any dream.”

“I can’t remember any dreams right now, silly.”

“Make one up then. But tell it like you really dreamt it”

“Yes Maam. Ok… I dreamed I was one of the pigeons that lives on top of the building across from my office.”

“Were you lord of the pigeons or just a worker pigeon?”

“I was the pigeon king.”

“Ooh I like this dream”

“Yeah, so let me tell it”

She scrunches up her nose at my mock impatience, a cute affectation.

“So I was this pigeon king and I was pure white and bigger than my fellow pigeons, and it was my Job to tell all the other pigeons when to take off from the roof and circle around, and then it was my job to tell them all when to fly back down again and sit on the roof.”

“And that’s it, you had no other responsibilities as the pigeon king?”

“Well the mating and such with eligible young pigeon damsels, but it wasn’t that kindof dream.”

“You mean a pigeon based wet dream?”

“Wow, you had to say it. Yeah. It wasn’t a pigeon based wet dream.”

“Ok, you may continue.”

She says that coyly and she looks at me lovingly, like a toy. Like her absolute favorite amusement.

“The thing was in this dream the pigeons weren’t even letting me do my kingly duty. They seemed to know when to go up and down before I did and everyone was just kindof in line with the program. I just sat on my royal perch, feathers all puffed out and watched while everybody did their thing. Left out mostly.”

“Did you have a pigeon queen?”

“Yeah, sure. But you weren’t listening to me either”

“Hah. My kind of dream”

There is a pause of two unhurried breaths, then a total eclipse as she cranes to kiss my eyebrow. Such a perfect child. Then she asks,

“How long had you been pigeon king?”

“I dunno. Long time. Since 1902 I think.”

There is another pause, and she tightens the grip of her thumbs on my forearm.