New Piece at GOOD: The Book

"That spring, on the two-day bus ride to D.C., through the furrowed fields and dusty flats of Tennessee, then threading the rolling green hills of Virginia, Nyson finally read his book. I watched him there, holding the book to the window as the landscape flashed past in blocks of green and brown, reading the words aloud, laughing sometimes to himself with delight, sometimes racing for me along the aisle as other chaperones called for him to finally sit down, eager to tell me everything that had just happened."

An Open Letter to Jim Beam Concerning What he Stole Last Night

Dear Jim Beam,

We have long been fast friends. We have hung out nights when we just sat and enjoyed each others calm company in the cool dusk, and had wildly lucky nights when we couldn’t miss a ball on the billiards table. We have skinny-dipped at midnight, closed down Mississippi juke joints, swaggered the glittering streets of the street named after your family, Bourbon, with our necks thick with beads.

Speaking of your family, I know them well—what about that time with your strange Canadian half-breed second cousin Crown, and what of all those crisp winter nights your first cousin Jameson came out to dance away the chill? What of your stately, aged great-uncles Laguvulin, Laphroig and Macallan? What of your respectable older brothers Woodford, Jefferson, and Booker, at whose table I’ve feasted? What of your sharp, eccentric brother with the strange name, Knob, and what of your sweet, bright younger brother Mark who I have spent occasional weekends with in the mountains, and so enjoyed conversation with in the hot-tub at that party I threw on the river?

I inquire because, after our long and intimate acquaintance, last night you stole my restraint. And then I woke this morning to realize that it was worse than that—that you’d taken my dignity, too. Sir, you’d best hide from me for a while, because when I see you there will be a reckoning. I will take you to the bottom just like you’ve taken me. And then we’ll see who did what to whom, we’ll lay the blame where it rightly belongs, that I promise you.

Jim, my old best friend, you just wait.

Fighters

Every time I see it, I’m mesmerized and repelled, unable to look away. Two men, in some sort of cage or walled ring, hands balled in fists, doing the stutter-step of the fighter, the dance of opening and action, strike and counter-strike, single-leg and double, front-headlock and arm drag and guard. Men with the broken faces of fighters, with eyes struck shut, with blood streaming from broken noses, with cracked skulls and shins bruised black, breath coming in gasps, adrenaline overcoming fatigue, will overcoming sense, concussions piling on concussions as knees and elbows crack skulls and the crowds clamor for the killing blow. These Fighters know only how to offer themselves on the altar of competition, the only devotion that can sustain them.

I know these men, or knew them, so many of them that I wrestled with and against—Chael Sonnen, Evan Dunham, Uriah Faber,Randy Couture. I know what they want, what they long for, just as I know they will find no adequate achievement in the octagon, only a temporary intensity that years later will still be all they know how to care about. For them it is a way of life, of persisting; how can you care about the petty disappointments and small pleasures of normal life, the unglittering spectacle of the finally daily, when there has been the glory of a hand raised in victory? The money and fame, the impassioned legions of fans have only heightened the thrill, raised the stakes. Maim or be maimed. Win or be forgotten. Go until you have nothing left to give.

Every wrestler I speak to still wants it, to return to it; it there in their eyes, the need. They watch the best of us now on television, repelled and fascinated, wanting the ring and wanting no part of what they would sacrifice. Once you leave it you cannot leave it; but neither can you return, can you persist, unless you are willing to submit to the cost, to allow yourself to become only gladiator, faceless warrior, inhuman instrument of entertainment. And so, unable to quit, these men fight, go years under the toll of blows, even as the purses dwindle and the specter of glory is gone, the crowds rise to their feet calling not for mercy or the honor these men fight for, but only for more blood, more spectacular a spectacle, these clamoring legions who cheer the gladiator of the moment, who want real violence to rise to the heights they have seen in movies and in video games, limbs broken, blows thrown so hard a face breaks, a body is hurled through the air and crumpled to the ground. They thirst for an authenticity purchased at the price of real bodies, real blood—nothing less will suffice. Americans are the new Romans, require a Collosseum where no excess is barred, no bloodlust unsatisfied. We would throw the losers to the lions if we could.

I lack the stomach for it, but I cannot avert my eyes. Someone must watch understanding that beyond the bright and dirty lights, this is an awful spectacle. This is the offering of body and will to the god of commerce, who wants only for the bones to shatter, the flesh to crack, who cares nothing for consequences. As close to fighter as observer, I am still complicit; we all are, we desire it in our heart of hearts, to know the blood is real when so much blood is spilt on deserts and mountain passes overseas, when it is all images and words and the glib voices of newscasters and politicians speaking of casualties and losses, and we change the channel to the Hollywood movie where heroes and villains bleed digitized crimson, we play soldier on a video game console, we shoot the bullets and the bodies disappear, we raze the cities to the ground, we do not want to see or know. And then these men are really there, trying to kill for all of us from what is in them only the desire to go purely, to be blessed, and it ought to break our hearts, to draw from us no bully cheer but only sadness for the lost, for we who require such a ritual and what that says about America.