Page 14 - WTP VOl. XI #1

On Exploitation
1 ing condescending insults at other players. And with
One Saturday afternoon, an email arrived from a woman I hadn’t seen in nearly forty years. We’d graduated from college together. She’d married a fra- ternity brother who lived across the hall from me our senior year. The war in Vietnam separated us within months of graduation. I’d gone to graduate school, in part, to avoid the draft. He’d enlisted in the Air Force, in large part to be trained as a pilot. His roommate was drafted and shipped to Vietnam; mine went to grad school, too.
Someone she knew had stumbled across her hus- band’s name in a poem I’d published. She included the title with her email and added that she “was surprised to see his name” in a poem. I took that to mean she was upset. She’d been a widow, by then, for thirty-six years. The plane he was flying had been shot down in Vietnam.
I wrote back to say I had nothing but good memories of her husband. I apologized and pledged never to be so intrusive again. A good start, but then I added that I’d be happy to send her the book that included that poem, that I’d sign it. When she didn’t answer, I began to imagine her sending someone strong and able to beat me silly.
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During my junior year in college, another fraternity brother I’ll call Mike Rogers told me I needed to learn the self-defense of boxing. “With a smart-mouth like yours, somebody’s always going to want to kick your ass,” he said, and I had to agree.
For sure, I was a trash-talker in basketball, yammer-
a few beers in me, I lapsed into the same sort of snotty talk with strangers who struck me as preten- tious or stupid. In short, I was in love with what I saw as cleverness and wit, but Mike Rogers sensed that, though I was eager to abuse people verbally, I was also, in fact, a closet pussy.
We were alone in the recreation room of our frater- nity house. He handed me a set of padded gloves. I was taller than Rogers by three inches, but he out- weighed me by thirty-five pounds. With those gloves loosely tied on my hands, my arms and shoulders felt as skinny as a twelve-year-olds.
He showed me jabs and hooks, weight-shift and how to bob and weave and keep my arms in and hands high. “Go ahead,” he said, “try to hit me. I’ll give you a little while before I fight back.”
It seemed like an easy lesson, my friend just backing off a step or moving from side to side, gloves up and absorbing all of my half-hearted punches, all of them right-handed. “You have a left hand,” he said, pointing out the obvious. I threw another right, discouraged, beginning to prepare a short speech full of promises to practice keeping my mouth shut.
He deflected that punch and said, “You ready to block now?” I nodded, trying to mimic what I’d just seen him do. I didn’t even see the first hook. I hadn’t thought about anybody using his left hand for any- thing but jabs and defense.
Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat. The rhythm of his punches against my head came with the sound my old comic book bubbles had used for World War II machine guns. I was suddenly afraid he wouldn’t stop until I went down, and then, holding my breath, I covered my face with my forearms and sacrificed every other part of my body.
I was pounded. I was slammed. I was hammered. There was a dog whistle trilling in my head. I took two steps back, and was thrilled when he didn’t fol- low so I could work the gloves loose and let them drop to the floor. “You can’t close your eyes like that,” he said. “You can’t hold your hands like that and expect to live.”
I wanted to say something interesting and settled for “Fuck this.” The headache he gave me lasted two full days. “Go read some more poems,” he said, his
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Gary Fincke