With each incarnation the air was hotter with crowd-sweat, more eye-watering with cigarette smoke. People were betting, fingers raised; people were crying out with deep ritualized shouts. Red won, then Blue, kicking Red in the pit of the stomach although Red kept swinging; Red won, and I sat illuminated by their flashes of pain, shock, rage and triumph — and, so often, just the dull gaze of endurance. They sometimes prayed while waiting for the verdict. Sometimes they ducked back from a blow. So often I saw the sudden mask of disappointment that falls across the loser's face (the winner raises a fist, bows); this mask was stroboscopic,* flashing each twist in this chain of violent beauty, the puncher's face merely determined, the victim's bobbing under his punches; each seemed about to cry but that was only the effect of grimacing; anyhow these faces were but workings in the molten flesh that worked itself like clay, each skull an anvil for the fisthammer or heelhammer to forge into that ultimate mask of loss as the crowd cried:
A judge passed a slip to the referee. Red had won. Then it was time for time for a new head to be bouncing back against the ropes. They hadn't even gotten to the champion fight yet, but I'd seen enough.
When I came outside it was night and I saw a canal full of rising gray water caked with raindrops. I saw girls in yellow uniforms scurrying to work in massage parlors, and a drenched old man between stopped cars (eight abreast in the rain, and motorcycles darting in between) stood selling newspapers in plastic bags. And I thought: no matter who you are or what you do, life is war.
* In 1993 this was about U.S. $24.
* Or perhaps it was just the strobelike effect of the fans cutting across the light-tubes in the smoky humidity.
On a hot and sinister night when the whores on Mission Street were yelling: What are you parking next to me for? I'm gonna smash your head in, motherfucker! and their pimps only said: You want any shiva? You want any doses? — on that night he turned down Seventeenth and it was dark and empty. Someone whistled urgently behind him in a two-toned signal. Whores and pimps called each other that way when something was up; maybe other characters did, too. It made him nervous. When he got to Capp Street there was only one whore, a demented pimpled mumbler far away down at Sixteenth, and the dark vacuum between thickened with smoky rainy zeroes and enigmas as his anxiety contemplated it. Another whistle. He began to walk toward the demented whore. At once he heard a louder whistle; and looking up he saw a man leaning out a window, regarding him, and the man put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Instantly another whistle replied from behind him, much closer than before. He looked over his shoulder but could see nothing. A half-suppressed cough came only a few steps behind. He walked quickly to Sixteenth where it was light, and the demented whore pulled up her skirt to let him enumerate the stale jellies of her flesh, but then he heard the whistle again from the darkness of a doorway just behind him; and he was getting angry now, so he strode boldly to the doorway (standing some distance away to delay and hopefully prevent the launching of any blade into his stomach) and he said: Were you calling me?
You want any doses, man? said the darkness shyly. I got me some mighty fine powder. .
He replied: Now I see. I thought it was you, but it's nobody. Isn't it amazing, to realize that? There's
