I saw my brother on TV more than I talked to him. There was nothing malicious or begrudging about the arrangement, just the unfortunate untangling of two grown siblings on separate self-destructive paths. I called him when I could, usually around the main holidays, and we pretended we weren’t using the same script from the last conversation.
+++++But the day after the Ediger fight, Zeb’s third pay-per-view event where he dropped the top-ranked middleweight twice in the sixth round and once for good in the seventh, I called him. Not to congratulate him, though he deserved it. It wasn’t even about the fight. It was the post-fight interview, when Zeb was asked how he’d developed his boxing persona and if it was different from his identity outside the ring.
+++++“What’s up, brother?” Zeb sounded wary, like maybe our mom had died and somehow I knew before him.
+++++“That story was bullshit.” I kept my tone casual, but Zeb felt the jab, knew I was measuring him for a knock-out. I wondered if he’d counterpunch or simply keep his hands up, waiting for me to tire myself out as older brothers generally do.
+++++“What’re you talking about, Reuben?” Zeb’s hands were definitely up. Which was fine. I’d been sober for almost two years and had plenty of focus and energy.
+++++“‘The Boxer?’ That’s where you got your ring persona from?” I scoffed. “A Simon and Garfunkel song?”
+++++“Mom thought it was a nice line.” A neat counterjab, reminding me that he still talked to her.
+++++“I’d say that, too, if it kept my meal ticket happy.” This was a cheap shot, a rabbit punch to the back of the head. Zeb would support our mother regardless of what she thought. Worse, she would love him even if he didn’t support her.
+++++Zeb was silent. Not pouting, just waiting, the conversational equivalent of a rope-a-dope, letting me punch myself out until my weariness revealed how stupid I sounded.
+++++I didn’t have a lot of time for this call, so I finally asked, “How is Mom?”
+++++“Old. Tired. Missing her younger son.” Jab, jab, uppercut. Zeb was fighting back with the same efficiency that he’d used to cut down Ediger.
+++++Before I said, “Well, she deserves it,” I realized I’d only ever thought of our mom in one of those ways. And that brought me back to reflecting on Zeb’s answer to the reporter’s question about his ring identity, his origin story. Simon and Garfunkel? Really?
+++++It actually happened during a family dinner one Saturday night when we were teenagers. Dad was unexpectedly out of work, and without a paycheck, unexpectedly sober. Mom’s secret bank account was keeping the utilities paid and the refrigerator stocked. Dinnertime was peaceful. Wherever Dad was sober, he got chatty. He wasn’t any friendlier, just more talkative.
+++++“Braves are gonna win the pennant this year. Maybe even the World Series. Best rotation in baseball, reminds me of 1996…”
+++++Nobody was really listening to the self-absorbed ass oaf. For once, there was food on the table and not on the walls or floor. Or Mom. In fact, the only one seemingly irritated by the conspicuously clean walls and floor was Derecho, Dad’s fat little pit bull.
+++++She growled obligingly whenever Dad got angry with someone, but my Dad was also the only person she’d ever bitten. He was always too drunk to remember that when he sicced her on Zeb or me, she’d wait a moment for him to step in front, then promptly bite his ass or leg and drag him away from us.
+++++Dad kept blathering on as he lathered his plate with mashed potatoes. “With Ozuna and Olson batting third and clean-up, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have the lead by the third or fourth inning of every game.” More potatoes. Nobody had even had seconds. He was on thirds. “Gotta make a few trades for middle relief, but that’s not as big of a deal as it was twenty years ago.”
+++++Mom smiled at his primitive baseball acumen. She was the daughter of a minor leaguer with zealous but limited talent and knew more about the game than he could ever fathom. She raised an eyebrow at Zeb and me when we, too, tried for an additional helping of mashed potatoes. Even at thirteen, I’d figured out who I was, so I stood down. But Zeb, two years older, had also figured out who he was, and he stood fast.
+++++“You know what we could really use, though?” My Dad jabbed the air with his spoon. Melted butter fell like yellow lava on the caldera of mashed potatoes on his plate. “Speed on the bases. That’s what we need, some jets turning singles into doubles, doubles into triples.”
+++++“No, you don’t.” Zeb had cleaned his plate and was still hungry, and my father might as well have been eating his birthright.
+++++“What’d you say?” asked my father. People did not openly contradict him. They either sincerely agreed with him publicly or disagreed privately, then had him discreetly fired, arrested, or beaten up. “What was that?” He genuinely seemed perplexed that someone else at the table had even spoken, much less dissented.
+++++“They don’t need speed on the bases,” Zeb said. “They need a better outfield, a leadoff hitter, and another starting pitcher.” He ignored my mother’s wide eyes and tilted head. “You don’t know shit about baseball, and you don’t know shit about your own team. I bet you can’t even name the other teams in their division.”
+++++“The hell you say, boy.”
+++++Some people will tell you alcohol makes a person meaner, but I never bought that perspective. Salt water doesn’t make a crocodile any meaner–it just happens to be its natural habitat. Dad was seven days sober and every bit the violent deadbeat when Zeb called bullshit on his baseball IQ that evening.
+++++“The hell I do. Tell me the other teams in their division or pass me the rest of your mashed potatoes.”
+++++“Oh, you think you can eat what you didn’t earn, do you?”
+++++“Yeah? Who paid for those potatoes, Dad? You? ‘Cause I thought you got fired. You grow them out back, maybe buy some magic seeds on the way home from the unemployment office?”
+++++“Zebulon.” His full name murmured by our mother was supposed to be a warning. Zeb ignored her and pushed his plate to the center of the table, the way a man engulfed in a bar argument might set down his hat.
+++++“We had a homework assignment last week–write a letter to one of your parents and get something off your chest. Here’s my letter.” Zeb pretended to scribble on his palm. “ ‘Dear Dad, you’re a drunk piece of shit who beats his wife and kids. I hate you, I hate the Braves, and I hate baseball, even though I know more than you. Love you when you die, Zeb.”
+++++Zeb did not actually get through his letter. He later told me the rest from a hospital bed because as soon as he got to “…you’re a drunk piece of shit,” Dad came ripping around the table like a rabid jackal and tore him out of his seat. Planted him against the wall and just started punching. My Dad had boxed Golden Gloves during his freshman year in the Air Force Academy before he got expelled for punching a wall, an officer, and the actual Air Force falcon at a football game.
+++++Zeb started laughing when he took the first two to the face, but after the blood from his nose ran into his mouth, he started coughing. Even then, in between punches and coughs, he managed to drop an expletive. At first, I thought he was just swearing, but then I realized he was calling my dad names.
+++++Punch. Dickhead. Punch. Bitch. Punch. Asshole. Punch. Motherfucker.
+++++When the punches exhausted my brother’s repertoire of profanity–but not his strength–Zeb just started over at the beginning. Eyes swollen, he couldn’t see, but he could still swear, whisper-gasps that only further enraged my father.
+++++And then, finally, Zeb had somehow done it. Outlasted the outrage. Like a dying twister flouncing back up into the clouds, my father shoved Zeb against the garbage can and staggered out of the room. We heard the couch creak as he lay down, panting like Derecho in August.
+++++My mother rose. Strode to the freezer and pulled out the entire ice bucket. Grabbed a package of frozen peas. And walked into the living room, where my father cursed as he plunged his knuckles into the ice.
+++++Like some blind, bloody phoenix, my brother rose, hauling himself up with the garbage can. I ran over but he waved me off, groping his way back to his chair. No panting, only the controlled breathing of someone warding off agony’s aftershocks.
+++++He did not sit, just stood gripping the chair and breathing. And then, exhaling like a meditating monk, he climbed onto the table and laid down on top of plates and forks and napkins. His head tilted against the ceramic bowl of mashed potatoes. He dragged his hand around the inside edge of the bowl, then started licking his fingers, proclaiming, “I’m a fighter. I’m a fighter. I’m gonna get paid for this shit.”
+++++I stood back against the red-splattered wall, aghast. It was birth and baptism, confession and confirmation, Be sealed with the bloody spirit, brutal and beautiful, a denunciation, a declaration, a depraved destiny.
+++++On the phone ten years later, I internally and begrudgingly acknowledged his self-fulfilling prophecy.
+++++“You’re winning fights, Zeb, but you know what you’re really doing, right?”
+++++“Not every match is about fighting Dad, if that’s where you’re going with this pop psychology.”
+++++“Then why didn’t you tell that reporter the truth?”
+++++“Is that why you called, Reuben? Because I lied? Because I didn’t tell the world that Dad beat us and Mom allowed it, practically sanctioned it? Because I made up some stupid origin story and referenced a Simon and Garfunkel song?“
+++++“People should know what happened. They should know why you–why we–see the world the way we do.”
+++++“Why?” Zeb demanded. “Nobody cares. And you know why? Because bad shit happens to everybody.”
+++++“It still matters, Reuben.”
+++++“Not to me it doesn’t,” he replied. “You wanna know the real answer? How I found my boxing identity, my ring persona? Because it doesn’t have anything to do with that night, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
+++++“The hell it doesn’t.”
+++++“It was my third fight.” Zeb’s voice was steadier than I’d ever heard it. “Vincent Diaz. He chopped me down twice in the third round. Absolutely brutal, the hardest I’d ever been hit until that point. After the second knockdown, I barely beat the count, but after I got up, I heard the crowd and realized something. They weren’t cheering for Diaz because he knocked me down–they were cheering for me because I got back up. Nobody gives a shit if you get knocked down. They want to see you get up. And when you do…” His voice trailed off in unexpected ecstasy.
+++++“Paul Simon couldn’t have written it any better,” I said. I was angry, but I didn’t know why or at whom.
+++++“You can joke, Reuben, but people don’t pay to see me fight–they pay to see me get up. They don’t see me, they see what they wish they could do in their own lives.”
+++++“You’re gonna get yourself killed, Zeb. No way you can keep taking all these beatings.”
+++++“So what? Like there’s so much to live for?” he scoffed. “People are paying–paying– money to see me get up. More money than I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And you can make fun of me, but when you hang up the phone, take a look around: what are people watching you do again?”
+++++“That’s a pretty shitty cheap shot.”
+++++“Dad beat us both, Reuben,” he said. “Violence was our inheritance. We just decided to spend it differently.”
+++++“Fuck off, Rueben.”
+++++I hung up, sat back, and looked around. Concrete and steel ignored me, but the plastic chair dug into my spine.
+++++“You done?”
I didn’t answer.
+++++“Are you done?” This time, it was a baton digging into my spine, not the chair. “If you’re done, time to head back.”
+++++“We got disconnected,” I said. “I need to call him back. It’s my brother.”
+++++The guard held my arm as he jammed the nightstick into my ribs, forcing me to stand. “Ain’t no disconnection. I saw you hang up. Walk.” He wasn’t exactly an asshole, he just didn’t tolerate dissent.
+++++I briefly contemplated making a grab for the baton. Not to hurt him, maybe just thump him a couple times. I wanted the fight, but I didn’t want what would come after. I’d heard that lifers were better behaved than other inmates, that they were even a stabilizing force in many prisons, but I wasn’t there yet.
+++++“Warden said congrats on your two years.” The guard stretched and cracked his neck like he was expecting me to jump him.
+++++“So?” I replied. “What’s that mean?”
+++++“You done two years. Means you’re eligible for a job, if you want. You can make signs or furniture, that’s all we got right now. Pays thirty cents an hour.”
+++++“What an opportunity.” I stared down the slab of the cellblock.
+++++“Yup,” he grunted. “Pretty exciting for me, too…eight hours of watching you make shit.”

[Image Credit : Photo by Maxim Kostenko on Unsplash]

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Kiyoshi Hirawa

Kiyoshi Hirawa is a poet and writer whose work focuses on trauma, resiliency, hope, and providing a voice for the unheard, ignored, and overlooked.

Latest posts by Kiyoshi Hirawa (see all)

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