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Memento Mori

Kevin Brown

    My father took the Golden Gloves in ’76 and took the bottle in ’77. Through outside circumstances and inside make-up, he soon stopped doing one and never stopped doing the other. Now, whenever he was in the bottle, in his mind he was in the ring.
    He set up a 90 lb. Everlast heavy bag in the garage. Every night he’d wrap his hands in tattered hand wraps and take a bottle of Jose Cuervo out there. He’d pop the canvas, lifting the bag with each shot. It dropped heavy on its chain and the rafters would groan, dust flaking down around him. The dishes inside rattled. Picture frames cocked on their nails. Sometimes, Mom and I heard him talking to himself. Other times, we heard him crying. He’d come in, stumbling and glazed in sweat. His eyes raw, he’d go to bed without speaking.
    Mom never said a word.
    One morning, back when girls still had cooties, I woke up and he was sitting on the edge of my bed. It was early, still dark, but I could feel his weight, his presence.
    “Dad?”
    He sat for a second, not speaking.
    Then: “I love you and your mom, you know that,” he said. “But I really could’ve been something.”
    He shifted. So dark he could have been a ghost.
    “38-4-1 amateur record,” he said, and I could tell he was crying. “I was the man in the Corps.” He sat and swallowed over and over. “Saw Joe Frazier train for the ‘Thrilla in Manilla.’ Best fighter I ever seen.” He exhaled hard. When he spoke, his voice shook. “I had it here,” he put his fist to my chin. “Had it and the war took it away.” He exhaled hard and rolled his neck. “I was younger than you when I started.” He popped his knuckles. “You’re already behind,” he said. “Time we get to getting.”
    He opened the door and stood, a silhouette in the hall light. He looked down. “I really could’ve been something,” he said. “In the garage in five minutes.” He shut the door and everything went black.

    That morning on, he had me working out every day. Before light, when I should be asleep, he had me running two miles. Eating road, he called it. When I should be watching Saturday morning cartoons, he had me hitting the heavy bag 500, 750, 1,000 times with each hand. Instead of Fruit Loops, my breakfast was 12-20 egg whites. Lunch was grilled chicken breasts. Dinner: salmon and a protein shake. He signed me up for a youth boxing tournament and started pushing harder. Speed bag work, skipping rope, crunches to exhaustion. We’d spar and I’d go to sleep at night, my face knotted and sore. My nose bleeding from so many body shots. Skin burned from the gloves.
    “If you can hang with me,” he said, “you’ll destroy them.” After a while, I could feel myself changing. Getting stronger, faster, balanced. The lungs deeper. The body morphing into a machine.
    One morning, a couple of months before the tournament, I stood in the garage, rolling my shoulders to loosen up. He came in carrying a bowl of water and an unopened bottle of vodka. He opened the bottle, hit it hard, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Better than aspirin,” he said, as if to himself.
    He set the bowl down.
    Biting the cap off a permanent marker, he stepped in front of the bag and squeaked the tip across the canvas. “I’m so glad this day’s here,” he said. He tossed the marker away, turned, and faced me. Under the Everlast logo, in large capital letters, was:
    MEMENTO MORI.
    “Strip down to your underwear,” he said.
    I stared.
    “Underwear,” he said.
    I peeled my clothes off while he strung up two ropes tied into mini nooses from the rafters. He grabbed the bag, tapped his finger under the words and said, “Time to learn what this means.”
    Outside the wind barreled into the garage door, making the tools on the wall hooks tremble. He stripped off his shirt. Except for a bulging gut, his skin was paper-thin. His shoulders were taut and wide and capped. Every muscle symmetrical. Every fiber and sinew conditioned to perfection.
    A long scar that looked like a fossilized centipede wound from below his waistline to the left oblique, rounding off in a tip of purple-puckered flesh. I’d seen the scar my whole life, knew it was from the war, but it was never talked about it.
    He cleared his throat. “In the war,” he said, “platoon leader told us the one thing that’ll get you killed quick is fear of death.” He said, “Fear is hesitation. Hesitation is how you lose.”
    He popped his jaw, rolled his neck side-to-side. “They told us to remember one phrase: memento mori—remember you will die. Accept it. You don’t die in Nam, you’ll die of stomach cancer. VC don’t snipe you in the jungle, there’s a car crash waiting for you somewhere.”
    He took a long drink.
    “One night near Khe Sanh, Charlie bayonet carved me up good.” He traced the scar up his side. “But I got him better.” He raised one knee in the air, stomped his foot hard, and I jumped. He smiled and said, “Head sounded like a pumpkin dropped from a rooftop.” His body was vibrating. “Know why I’m alive and he’s not?”
    “Stitches?” I said, and his face cinched. He shook his head.
    “Fear.” He patted the bag. “He had it.” He spun it. “I didn’t.”
    He told me that to not be afraid of death, you have to learn how to die. “Learn to die, you’re free of fear.”
    He took a drink and said to grab the loops of ropes. “No matter what,” he said, “do not,” he told me, “let go.”
    He took a rag from his back pocket, held it in front of my mouth, and said, “Bite.”
    My bones felt hollow. Plastic. I almost puked, gagging on the rag, and my heart was swatting my breastbone.
    His hand flat, he touched his palm to the surface of the water in the bowl. “Combat’s an art,” he said, “like making love.” He lowered. “And like sex, at the core, it’s really only instinct,” he said, and slapped my chest. The sound like a hardcover book slammed on a tabletop.
    I screamed, bit hard into the rag.
    He palmed the water again. Said, “To procreate, our bodies give us the urge to mate.”
    He popped me in the kidney and I screamed louder.
    “To eat, we developed opposable thumbs. What keeps us from crawling on our bellies swiping beetles with our tongues.”
    He touched his palm to the water.
    “To protect ourselves,” he said, and slapped my thigh, “we fight.”
    My eyes were slits of bubbled tears, the light bent in prismatic waves.
    “You gotta reach inside,” he said, wetting his hand again. “Excavate that instinct.” His voice distant, he said it’s not buried that deep. Every time someone cuts us off at an intersection and gives you a hateful stare, some of that instinct’s unearthed. “Somebody thinks you looked at them wrong and comes at you, they’re digging.”
    He lowered, swung, and caught me in the stomach. My knees went out, but I hung onto the ropes.
    “I know this hurts,” he said. “Like a motherfuck. But imagine doing this once a day for two months.” He dipped his hand in the water and said, “You’ll be hard as dug diamond.”
    All my nerves throbbed against the inside of my skin. All over my body, his blood-pooled handprints.
    He swung again, catching me in the floating ribs. The rag dropped, my head hanging forward. Strings of spit stretched from my lips.
    And he freed my hands from the ropes and caught me before I dropped. Lifted me in his arms and sat down, holding me in his lap. Slipping in and out of consciousness, I could see the heavy bag rotating to the left:
    MORI MEMENTO...
    Back right:
    ...MEMENTO MORI...
    And I was proud because I knew he was proud of me. Could feel it seeping from his skin into mine, and I’d never loved him more. “I know it feels like I’m killing you, son,” he said, vodka on his breath as he slicked my hair back and kissed the top of my head. “But really,” he said, an echo as I went out, “I’m saving your life.”

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