APRIL 2009

 ABOUT   ARCHIVES   AWARDS   LINKS   SUBMIT   HOME

Throwing Punches at God
By Justin Erickson, Jan 31, 2009

The bell rings and I don’t want to stand up, but I have to; I can’t let these people think I’m weak. I see the same reaction in my brother’s eyes. We have to put on a show for them. Fighting is what we do.

My brother’s right fist hits my right temple. Sparks of blue light explode behind my eyes. It was a straight shot that nearly sent me to the canvas. My hands go up, instinctively. His left slaps against my gloves. Darkness gathers from behind the lights. Vision clears just in time to dodge a haymaker. I send my fist into his belly. His tongue juts out and his blue eyes bulge. Big, sky blue eyes with a dark freckle just about the left pupil.

We share that trait: mother’s eyes. It was her last gift to us. To prove to the world and to God that she could do the impossible. Nobody would guess he and I are twins—twins with different fathers. Mom had two uteruses. Doctors said she would never have kids. She was the partying kind of woman and had a three-way with a black man and an Irishman. After six months of trying to beat our way out of her womb, doctors pulled out two babies: one black, one white. Us. We each got one kiss and one hug before she died on that table.

I sway back, avoiding his fog-gray glove. We step apart. I jab. He blocks. We dance and circle the ring. He comes with a right cross, his strong punch. I jump back. My back slides against the vinyl-covered ring rope. I bounce against it, bound off, jab, and dance away.

A knot of distended skin seeps blood from beneath his eye. Strings of spit shoot out the corner of his mouthguard with each exhale. He looks like hell. Reminds me of how he looked years ago, when he and I were between foster homes; kept together because the newspapers kept tabs on us—couldn’t separate the miracle babies. It was around the time we first discovered the bitter side of what the old chess players in the park called the “sweet science.” Back when a group of neighborhood kids, a couple of half-white Mexicans, didn’t like the idea of twin brothers having different skin. We showed them how little we cared with our middle fingers. They punctuated their points with fists, boots, and a pipe wrench.

At the hospital, we were scared that it was off to another home for us. We liked where we were at. Three hots and a cot, dogs and a yard, foster parents that didn’t slap us around or try to make us do weird “twin” things like tell them what the other was thinking. We weren’t some damned circus act! We begged our caseworker to let us stay. She just straightened out her navy blue pantsuit and shrugged. Told us it was our own fault. A week later we were moved out. The state even separated us. Guess the newspapers got bored.

I smell the stinky mix of sweat and jelly on his glove before it gets close. I dodge the jab and step into his body. We gasp for air. Our gloves linger around our bellies. Nearly an hour of boxing is torturous on the body and the mind. It does strange things to your head. A lot can go through a fighter’s mind in the split second before he’s punched.

The referee, a fat biker-looking guy with no teeth and neck tattoos, jumps between us just after the bell rings. We drag ourselves into our corners and sit.

The world is muffled. The babbling crowd in their silk shirts and pleated pants is veiled in the dim light. Cutmen have to scream into our ears as they slide the iced steel under our eyes. Across the ring I watch him, my brother, a familiar stranger, as he regulates his breathing. Deep in, deep out. Deep in, deep out.

We stare through each other. Figures move between us. The canvas shudders underfoot. A young woman in a bikini walks the ring apron. People cheer and whistle. We’re brought to our feet. The bell sounds and we leap into the center and start shuffling our feet in a wide circle.
I aim a right at his jaw.

He sways and the meaty part of his neck twitches, telling me about the hook before he even throws it. He doesn’t telegraph his punches. Never. It was intentional. Had to be. But it’s hard to recognize; he’s only done that once before.

Three years after our separation we found each other at our church: Leo’s Gym in Newark. It was a seedy back alley kind of a place and our coach, a skinny Russian name Jester made us call it “church.” He said it was because the gym was a place where “his boys” could come and punch out our anger, our general disgust for the smiling people in the booths at family restaurants, the suits and social workers who pretended to keep our best interests in mind when they took us from home to home to people who felt that not letting us write to our brothers was their way of “creating parental parameters” that would help clean us up. In the church, in front of the heavy bag, we could hit anyone. We could punch our mothers for leaving us alone, our fathers for existing only in our imaginations, classmates that laughed at our skin. In this church we could spend all day throwing punches at God or each other, whoever we thought was to blame for our problems.

I throw another right. He takes it on the chin and rolls with it. He’s done that before, too. At church. Since I was the weaker of us two, he used to roll with my punches to boost my confidence. Or so I thought.

Another right turns him toward the corner. He looks surprised as he blocks my left. The blood in my hands gets heavy with the memories of days when he would laugh at me, taunt me with his new friends, pretend to not be my brother. That grated on my heart like sandpaper more than anything.

I shove him into the corner. He throws his guard up. I slap his hands aside and land an overhand left that he feels all the way to his knees. All those years of missing him, wondering if his family wouldn’t give him my new address either. Naming all my pets his name, following around town anyone who even remotely reminded me of him and this son of a bitch had the balls to tell his friends that he was only my brother because we were once in foster care together, not blood?

My shoulders burn, hands feel like twisted lead, legs so weak the ring waves under my feet like a gray sea blotted with dirty stains. I keep throwing punches, wild and hard, like he’s nothing to me but a bag of sand hanging by a chain.

But this bag hits back. He throws three straight right hands that light the fires behind my eyes and send my brain swimming in black. Cool, calm, ocean at midnight black.

Back and forth, like a top-heavy buoy, I bob on my feet, shoulders pulled downward by an invisible force. I should be falling, but it’s like there are foggy arms around me, holding me on my feet, my head a hair’s breadth above unconsciousness. Everything is hollow and cave-like. In the distance, I hear the sound of a bell.

I come to in my corner. The cutman and the promoter are screaming at me. The cutman slips some smelling salts between his fingers and sneaks it under my nose. Air explodes in short, heavy bursts. The ammonia burns down my nose into my lungs. I’m awake now more than ever. Across the ring, staring a hole in my chest, my brother bleeds from half a dozen cuts and tears from a spot on my glove that lost its grease. I feel sick to my stomach.

I once beat a kid to death. He was my brother’s best friend. One of the kids he used to laugh at me with. The kid who declared himself my brother’s brother. He was a member of our church. A short Puerto Rican kid with a missing front tooth and a slant-browed, sinister stare that was accented by his black eyes. He and I had an undercard fight at a larger amateur event. In front of twenty-five hundred people and his family I beat him in a split decision. His real family. And his pride wouldn’t let him lose. Two nights later, while I was working the bag after the gym closed, he came at me with a switchblade. Left a nice scar along my ribs. Everything else was a dream of black and red clouds. When I came to, my brother’s best friend was on the concrete bleeding from his face and his ears, black eyes dull and lusterless. I remember it being quiet. Quiet as if he were just a baby sleeping. I even waited for him to wake up. When he didn’t, I ran.

Seeing his bleeding and tired face sends sharp chills into my stomach and along my scar. It’s not fear. It’s something else. It isn’t fear.

The bell rings.

He’s in fast. Twice with the right, once with a left. There’s more push than pop. No snap. These punches are more like shoves. When he steps into me, I shove him off and jab. Lungs burn. Not much air left. My head is pulsating cotton, thick and fuzzy. I know I don’t have enough left to knock him out, yet I have to try—I don’t have enough left to wait him out, either. I throw a weak one that loops past the side of his head. My entire body is open to him. In my mind’s eye I see him pick me apart, starting with my belly and working up to my head, his face sharp and severe, his punches small, quick, and punishing. Behind every swing is the force of regret, his hands weighted with anger at the memories; how he still blames me for our separation. So I keep myself open, purposely, because it is my fault. If I hadn’t have been so unmanageable, would’ve stopped bouncing off the walls every time we were treated to ice cream, if I hadn’t have been so furious at the world that every kid at school with a squint and a sharp tongue became a challenge I had to meet with my fists things would’ve been different.

The stability we could’ve had in a foster home was gone because I didn’t have the control I should’ve. I thought I was following his lead. Every decision I made had him in mind: fighting, the girls and the drugs—all because he was doing it, too. Only he was better at getting away with it. I just fouled things up and started the tension between us.

I flex my ribs and bite down hard on my mouth guard. He rears back his right arm, reaches inside my elbow with his off hand for leverage, pulls me toward himself and hooks his arm around my shoulder. My head rests in the meaty part of his neck and shoulder. His skin is hot and slick. I can feel his veins swelling with every heartbeat. Usually in a clench, you press your shoulder into the other guy’s face, cutting off his air while you get a few short punches into his side. This.... This is the closest thing to a hug we’ve had in years. I don’t want to let go.

And I don’t. Not even when the bell rings. I don’t think he could’ve let me go even if I wanted him to. The ref has to yank us apart and we stumble backward into our corners, never losing sight of one another. A fire springs up in my stomach. I could cross the ring, shove the chubby ref out of the way while charging over to my brother just to tell him how much I love him and miss him and how I would do anything to make it all right. Everything right again. I’d grip his knees and wash his feet with my sweat and tears if I could. Whatever it takes to make us family again.

But I want to hit him again just as badly. I’m not all to blame. He has some share in this, too. He could have taken the first step. Something about his vacant look and the naked fire behind his eyes tells me he’s thinking the same thing, feeling the same thing. One of us has to make the first move.

But, as the bell rings, we realize neither of us will do that. That’s not us. That’s not what we do.