CHAPTER ELEVEN: SAM WASHINGTON
When Hugh was licking me I thought I might be having an aneurysm. Was it only a minute? It felt like a goddamned out of body experience that had lasted both an eternity and a mere flicker of a second. I could have lived there forever with him pressing against me. I’m still so wet that I’m self-conscious even walking back to my chair.
I take out my recorder and turn it on. “Mind giving me your name, for the record and for a sound test?”
“Hugh Maddox.”
I hold the recorder to my ear, fiddle with a couple of things, play it back, and nod. “Good to go.” I realize that I’m fanning myself with one hand like a delicate lady from a Jane Austen novel. God help me, I’m swooning. Now I know the meaning of the word.
Hugh could tell me to do anything in this moment and I would trip over myself trying to do it fast enough to please him. And I sense that he would do the same for me.
The rain picked up again, harder than before. I thanked my lucky stars. Anything that could keep me under this roof a little longer was good.
“So Hugh,” I say. “You’re a fighter. A professional.”
“I was. My last official fight was in Manhattan a couple of years ago.”
“And you’re no longer fighting?”
“No, not professionally.”
“Any plans to return to it? I know you’ve got a lot of fans out there who would love a positive answer on this.”
“Afraid not. And to those fans, I’m really sorry. There’s more to the story that you know. And by the end of it I hope you’ll understand and not judge me too harshly for it.” The brashness is slipping from his voice. I can tell that we’re headed for serious territory. It makes me want to turn off the recorder, cradle his head in my lap, and listen, which is what he obviously needs.
“Fair enough. So, what do you want to tell them? Where do you think this story starts?”
Hugh leans back and crosses his arms. He looks at the picture of himself with the new belt. No, he’s looking at Andrew. He bites his lip and I can’t tell if he’s angry or trying not to cry. There’s suddenly an emotional tension in the room that adds an almost palpable weight to everything.
“I didn’t plan on leaving,” he says. “Fighting was my life. I made it through the ranks so quickly that it made my head spin. Not just mine. I think there are some guys out there who are probably still seeing stars from the hits I dropped on them. I was a natural. I can’t even take credit for that, but if you saw me fight you know that I’m right. But where the real magic happened was that I was also willing to work harder than anyone else. When you find someone with natural ability who is also going to work everyone else into the ground, you have a terrifying specimen.”
There’s nothing boastful in his voice. I can tell that Hugh is a man without a huge macho ego. Maybe this is what happens when you know you’re the toughest. You earn the right to be sensitive and know that, no matter what anyone says, or how they might mock you, you’d still be the sensitive guy who could rip heads off, and everyone knows it.
“So you win the title, you’re at the pinnacle of it all, and then…?”
“Yeah. Sponsorships were throwing more money at me than I would ever know what to do with. That money pays for me to live here out in the middle of nowhere. I’ll never have to work again if I don’t want to.”
“Just so your listeners know, you look like a lumberjack, right down to the flannel and beard. The first time I saw Hugh, listeners, he was carrying an ax and had a pile of logs behind him.”
Hugh laughs. “Guilty as charged. I’ve learned that lumberjacking isn’t really something you do on your own. It kind of takes a whole camp to do it on any appreciable level. I guess you could call me a reclusive wood-cutting enthusiast these days.”
“Maybe that’s what you can call your memoir one day. Reclusive wood-cutting enthusiast.”
“Maybe you’ll need to ghostwrite it,” he says.
I flush and almost turn off the recorder before realizing that there’s no video and no one will be able to see my raging desire for him when this hits the air. Hopefully.
“But a better title would be something like…” Hugh pauses, again looking at something I can’t see, his eyes unfocused. “...the man who ran away from a damn tragedy he couldn’t face and was too big of a coward to tell anyone about.”
“I would read that,” I say. “I bet your fans would too. What would it be about?”
“I don’t know if you were following it,” he says, “but it took forever for mixed martial arts to get sanctioned in New York. The athletic commissions just wouldn’t allow it. McCain called it ‘Human cock fighting,’ and that was all most people thought they needed to know about it. I didn’t sweat it that much. I fought everywhere. If you were good enough to get into the professional league there were always going to be money fights for you.”
“But not everyone was good enough?”
“No, of course not. It’s one thing to be tough. Fighters...pro fighters...we’re different. We have an extra gear or cog that makes us able to do what we do. Trust me, you can’t understand it if you haven’t been in there.”
“I believe you.”
“Andrew wasn’t quite good enough for the pros yet,” he says. “But I agreed to train him with my coach, and to train with him, until he was ready. But he just wouldn’t wait. Every other weekend he was jumping into some underground fight--all in New York, so, illegal--for a few hundred bucks, thinking that this would prove something to us all. All he really needed was patience. If he just could have given it a couple more years he would have been thrashing every killer in the division, including me.”
I had never heard Andrew’s name in any of the press I had read about Hugh. Where is this going? I saw the look on Hugh’s face becoming more serious. I was starting to feel a chill and the urge to wrap my arms around him returned, stronger than ever.
“I just couldn’t get him to listen,” says Hugh. “So I had to figure out how to try and protect him. I failed. I failed him in the worst possible way.”
I’ve never heard someone sound so miserable.
He looks up. “You know what the worst part about being tough is? About being strong?”
“What is it?”
“People stop asking if you’re okay. They assume that you’re fine, no matter what’s going on. They forget that you’re human.”