Razor Robinson

Enjoy the fight.

The doorman rips my ticket stub in half without making eye contact, swiftly moving onto the next person in line. I mutter a thanks but my eyes have already moved on too, my vision locked to the corridor that leads to the auditorium. It's barely lit save for a couple of emergency exit lamps, but the light emitting from the opposite end is brilliant and shimmering, and it creates jagged shadows on the walls and ceiling that dance to a distant thumping. After I pull away from the bustle of the crowd at the door and enter, the noise is muffled and the echo of the corridor is its own current, pulling me deeper into its chambers. My own footsteps cascade off of its walls and fill the space. A voice shrieks and I turn, seeing a young couple, no older than I am, enter behind me. They giggle and lean into each other, their details lost in the dark. It feels as though I am between worlds, within a limbo that alters those who pass through it. I know, for the first time in a long while, I’m entering your world now.

I breathe deep and continue. As I come to the end of the corridor I turn to see the auditorium in full view, and I stop to take it in. The boxing hall hasn’t been used in years, but anyone without that knowledge would see no evidence of its abandonment before tonight. Not a patch of the floor isn’t covered by a seat of some kind, fixed railing or folding chair, hundreds of them stand rigid in an unmoving black expanse - soon to be awash with faces. The place is so empty the music over the speakers is barely discernible as it echoes upon itself.

In the epicentre of it all there is the ring, illuminated from every possible angle. No facet of its design goes untouched by the spotlights that hang overhead, no player on its stage will have a way to hide from the arriving onlookers that will flank them. I trace the striking red ropes that line the perimeter and wonder which corner he will be in. The smell and the sounds converge and stir something in memory, clusters of images like photographs strewn across my mind layer over what I see. My hand in mom’s, her leading me up the stairs to the seats.

Just above the ring, sweetie. That’s the best spot, that’s where you can see their eyes.

I’m ushered on by a stone-faced woman who tells me to find a seat, and I hug the wall until I find one three rows back, nearest to the entrance. When I sit, my eyes are a little above the top rope. I watch the people pour in, one group or couple after another, filling the vacant seats. The noise builds and slowly eclipses the music. After twenty minutes, the auditorium is mostly filled. Below the noise, in between the folds of conversation and the music, there is a hum of anticipation so resonant it tinges the very air, one that's been building week on week since the fight’s announcement, something beyond spectacle and entertainment. A collective holding of breath that precedes a historic event they’re all intrinsically tied to - none more so than me. A homecoming.

After some time, the lights dim and the anticipation becomes so thick you could drown in it. From one of the side doors, a figure in a suit and bow tie emerges and heads toward the ring. There is clapping from a few, but most just wait. He climbs into the ring and holds a microphone up to his lips, giving a thumbs up to someone unseen in the rafters. The music cuts to a deafening wall of synthesisers, and the lights above begin their pre-programmed routine of flashing and rotating, casting some fitful radiance on the crowd below as they rise and clap - all of them at once now.

Ladies and gentlemen of this beautiful city, I am thrilled tonight to bring you the event you’ve all been waiting for. For years you’ve been longing for the beauty of boxing to come home, for the true meaning of entertainment to return. Well folks, tonight's the night. I’m proud to bring you this ceremony that’s been months in the making. We have the spectacle of the century and you’re here to witness it. So, without further ado, should we welcome tonight’s fighters?

They cheer. The announcer points at the corner of the hall to my right.

From Fretton County, the rocket that just won't stop rising, the menace to record holders everywhere and tonight’s belt defender; it’s Sam"The Storm" Sullivan.

From that same corner emerges a cluster of heads gathered around a hood in the middle. They pass through between rows of people and gather at the ring’s edge, where the hooded man disrobes and hops up to enter. Among the noise, boos begin to ring around the hall from the crowd. He’s the predecessor - not who they are here to see. Not who I’m here to see.

Sam Sullivan is clean cut all over, his hair cropped and oiled back to frame his jaw. His torso shows not a hint of surface fat, the muscle underneath perceptible even this far back. He’s a machine, as efficient as a German motor engine and just as heavy, and while he’s only achieved two knockouts in his fifteen official bouts, his points retention is undeniable, and he rarely comes away from a fight with more than a scratch. He laps the ring slowly, taking in the dejection and meeting it with an unconcerned expression. He knows what he’s here to do, knows the disappointment he threatens. The announcer raises the microphone again.

And now, from right here, raised in these very streets, it’s your hometown hero, who’s fought with the best the world had to offer and comes home after all these years to prove his status. One of the sports greats, the legend, the miracle-maker and tonight’s returning challenger, your very own; Duncan “Razor” Robinson.

The noise is a wall of thunder, and I swear the foundations on which the seats are moulded shake at the bedlam. From the opposite corner, the lights converge and reveal a lone figure. He’s distant, so incandescent it’s as if he’s rising out of the scene itself, an unreal tableau, but he’s there. He’s you. With your face being consigned to the minor appearance within the pages of tabloids, it’s all I can do to wonder what the recent years have enacted on you, but as you come closer into view it becomes clear. You’re a stark contrast to your opponent, possessing ragged, chestnut hair that greys on the edges, and a thin layer of excess surfacing your body, gravity doing only what it knows and pulling down the folds around your pecs, stomach, and arms. You walk with a lilt. As you circle the near edge of the ring, the coarse palate of skin that covers your face is more discernible - the scars and dents and blemishes an archive of a life led by face to fist, then of nose to substance. You smile wide, basking in their worship of you - the comeback kid - ready to prove himself again after the fall. After you climb, laboriously, into the ring you throw up your arms and the crowd responds with the same gesture.

In the years when you’d fight too far away for us to join you, before you were always too far, I remember mom scolding me as I’d turn the volume up on your entries, my thumb jamming the remote button until it felt like the living room was a part of the front row. You would smile and throw your hands up, and I’d do the same. She never did turn the volume back down.

Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to get this fight started?

I can barely hear the announcer over the cacophony.

In the red corner wearing the white shorts, Sam Sullvian, weighing 139 lbs, and boasting an unbeaten record of 15 straight victories.

Boos and jeers. The young defendant’s face is unmoved.

And in the blue corner wearing the black shorts, Razor Robinson, weighing 162 lbs, with a record of 32 victories including 27 knockouts.

People are surprised when I tell them the “Razor” moniker came someway in your career rather than in its infancy. It wasn’t until after your 14th knockout against Mickey Humbrall that the TV network started claiming your punches cut like a knife, that you bled your opponents slowly, letting the life drain from them before you delivered the conclusive blow. In the interview after when a reporter asked if you approved of their assessment you smiled.

Razor Robinson. Yeah, I like it.

Before I know it the bell rings and the two of you are approaching each other, shoulders hunched like two men caught in a snowstorm. What follows is a mangled visage of flesh lashing and ducking as two men hurl conservative jabs at each other, testing the metal of the person they dare not leave the eyes of. There’s a clear difference between the way you both hold yourselves: Sullivan an automaton whose body is a perfectly built apparatus of death, you a slinking middle-aged man, not as sharp but no slower. It's a delicate dance of violence, and within some convoluted rhythm gloves connect with skin like the beat of a drum, feet adjust and bodies twist to music no one can hear, and the floor-level crowd jostles for a good look at the ring.

Looking at you from this level, from this distance, it’s an implausible recollection of how you used to look to me. It’s tainted, too remote. It’s nothing like the sparring practices you used to take me to, where I’d clutch to the edge of the ring and gaze up at your colossal frame; dancing, dancing in the stark light, your body and all of its muscles fluctuating and shifting as you laboured to hone yourself. Afterward you’d look at me, your eyes cast down from the ring into mine, your head haloed by the illumination above you. You always said they were your favourite.

It’s like looking into your mother’s eyes.

Even later, when I only ever saw you through the TV lens, the cameras could still make out every instinctive reaction pulsate through you, the dance as natural to you as the intake of breath. I didn’t know it back then, but this nature was what eventually drew you out of our home, out of the sparring rings, and onto the TV. Mom didn’t have the words to explain why you never came back. She would just stare at the screen, bottle in hand, eyes adrift in some other domain.

He was born to fight, sweetie. We were cursed to watch.

In the sixth round, I look on as Sullivan lets off a flurry of wild jabs, forcing you to wheel back in defence and into the corner. You bob and weave to avoid his punches but many of them land, and the crowd is a conglomerate of voices pleading with you to get out of the corner. For so long you weather the slugs that piston from Sullivan, and the groans around me grow more fervent. But they never saw you train, never saw how the knife was sharpened. Your blueprint isn’t so obvious to them, but it was to me and her.

All he needs is half a second, just half a second of an opening. He’ll cut him.

Then, Sullivan takes a step to shift onto his right to deliver another body blow, and in the second he opens his arms your left glove erupts from beneath him and delivers the apparition of dark leather so fast across his face it appears unreal, an anomalous stitch in the fabric of reality. Sullivan’s head springs back on his neck violently and for a moment the noise from the crowd wanes in disbelief. Like the instant before thunder hits after lightning flashes, the delay only amplifies the barrage of sound as they realise the tides have turned. The cut has been made, and you advance out of the corner and into newly-opened territory. Sullivan is robust, recovering in seconds, but the resolve he came with is dented, and the deluge that floods his ears throws him into a retreat. The crowd calls out Razor, Razor, Razor. You begin your slow wait for the transfusion of energy to begin, a vampiric figure waiting for his prey to buckle. Sullivan manages to keep himself afloat and you at bay until the ninth round, when in an overconfident daze he attempts to sidestep across the length of the ring, hoping to circle round one of your punches and catch you with a sideswipe. You bait him, coming with a left hook that he swerves and answers with a cocking of his elbow in preparation. But he doesn’t see your right, holstered aside your thigh. You uncoil it and let fly. The moments between it connecting with his jaw and the arc of spittle that follows seem to hang suspended, as if the earth itself ordained a point in history where there was a before and after of Razor Robinson knocking out Sam Sullivan, and all within it were changed as a result. Sullivan’s body hits the ropes before rebounding off of them, his perfect physique and all its flailing appendages spilling onto the floor of the ring like loose change.

The people go insane.

In the last fight me and mom watched together, the one where you flattened Miguel Zarate in the fifth round, I leapt at the sight of his hulking body laid out and wheeled around the living room as you lifted your first championship belt. I tried to pull her from the table to join me, from the spilled bottle and the stacks of envelopes, but she wouldn't turn to look at me, thinking I couldn’t see the shimmer that coated her eyes. I realised later she knew then that you weren’t coming back; that Razor, this entertainer, this imposter inhabiting the body of the man she loved, was forever and Duncan wasn’t.

You celebrate sweetie. You enjoy it.

I understand, as I watch the people around me exalt your name and pour into the aisles, rushing you like water burst forth from a dam - just to get to their hero. I understand how it must’ve felt everytime you laid someone out, their admiration filling the air so thick with a haze you could catch a high from it. I understand why you thought she and I would never have allowed you to chase it so intensely, how a family man couldn’t possibly achieve these heights without ditching the deadweight you must've seen us as. I observe the floods of hands reaching for you, and I hear the call of your stage name. I wonder if this is where it was all supposed to lead - the years watching you practise, the money spent on pay-per-view to see your fights, the bewildered tears when I realised you'd gone without a word, the further years watching you through a screen or on the page, a new rumour on what drugs you were taking this week, the countless months in and out of hospital in between hiding the liquor bottles from mom, or the weeks by her bedside as she withered into nothing, until there was no more reason to hide the bottles. For this - a comeback fit for a hero, a comeback for my deadbeat father.

I stand just as I see the first few people breach the ropes and rush upon the ring, desperate to share in your glory. Security jumps to block their way, and the men form a protective circle to usher you from the ring and out of the hall. The place is unwieldy now, folks jump and scream and barge and whoop. Small skirmishes even break out in places. All the build up, all the anticipation, has bubbled and spilled over into complete chaos.

Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your seats.

The corner from which you emerged before the fight is swarming with bodies, so your entourage leads you out the closest way - the main exit. My heart lurches as I watch as you approach the corridor I’m seated next to, still maintaining your smile, still lapping it all up. I don't know if I’m praying that you see me or praying that you don't, but there’s nowhere I can go, and as you give another wave you turn and our eyes meet. Everything slows, as if God deemed all that came before this the undercard and stopped the turn of the earth in anticipation of the main event. I wonder, in this moment, what form of horror it must be to see eyes so familiar, carrying all the weight of betrayal behind them, all of the life you left and fought to forget, all in your finest moment. What I see in yours is what Sam Sullivan must have longed to see all night: the fear. I expect all of the years and their hurt to come flooding back all at once, for me to cry out and denounce the hometown hero in front of your worshippers, but the look in your eyes tells me it's all come for you instead. In this matchup between us, it's you that retreats, that turns to hurry down the corridor that takes you far away from this ghost you see. I watch as the outline of you is hurried off into the awaiting darkness, out of my sight.

And in this corner, your champion, Razor Robinson.