Feels like Drowning

A fighter chooses family over career

The first time I rolled with Russell at his jui jitsu gym I learned what it felt like to drown. He tried to teach me while his forearms squeezed my throat closed and my lungs burned. "Relax, breathe, don’t fight every hold. Fight the dangerous pressure, not the painful one,"

Russel had the lanky limbs of a cardio obsessed giraffe and enough cauliflower in his ears to feed a family of four. He slept during the day, taught and trained at night, and in between took enough odd jobs to keep the gym lights on and pay for medical insurance.

He figured out I was going to quit before I could tell him. The last fight of my career ended with Russell an inch away from dislocating my shoulder in a nasty kimura. We slouched on the curb outside his gym and watched the usual drunks stumble out of Olive Garden while the night air iced my aching joints.

"The booking agent told me you weren't on the card for Friday," Russell spat a mouthful of neon blue gatorade onto the concrete. "You might wanna give her a call and see who screwed up,"

"And beg her to let me drive out to east beyond wheresville for another warehouse fight?" The adrenaline of the fight leeched out into the darkness, but I fought to keep the anger close to my chest. "Almost torqued my arm off that last round. You always do that blue belt shit, man."

"Oh c'mon-- you let me have that. Last tournament I saw you yawn while turning a two stripe black into a pretzel. You took Enzo to points and suddenly I’m too much for you?"

"Enzo. All you do is talk about Enzo! Those points didn’t me anything but a broken nose and a night in the dog house." Karen hadn't even bothered trying to hide my injury from my soon-to-be father-in-law -- just marched me straight through his nightly bourbon and Fox News into the kitchen for a bag of ice. She fussed around playing nursemaid and the whole time I could feel Frank's eyes digging into me, calculating how many cars I had to sell at his dealership to pay for that room he rents us upstairs. How many new parents on the hunt for a minivan would talk to a salesman with a plaster nose and a black eye?

Russell picked off a scab on his shin and watched a thin line of blood ooze down his leg. "You were two points off a national champ," and got up and closed the gym door behind him.

He might have known everything about jui jitsu, but he'd never be able to make Enzo sweat. Not even on his best night if Enzo had the flu and two broken arms. But Russell had grit, and also didn't have the love of his life and the light of his soul waiting around for him to grow up.

So I drove home that night, burned my gi in the trashcan, and started memorizing Ford manuals during my bus commute. By the time I hit showroom manager, Karen had gotten pregnant and we moved out. The added distance and responsibility didn't make Frank like me any more.

"Finished running the quarterly numbers," I poked my head into Frank's glass walled office. "Guess how many we sold during that last push?"

"Twenty five," He meticulously nudged the family portrait on the back wall a half a degree east, then a quarter of a degree west. "Didn't think you'd manage to get us past thirty, not with those rate hikes,"

"Try forty. Stalking leads down at PebbleRidge brought in a few more clients that I thought,"

Frank's ears perked, and for the faintest instant the canyons carved around his slate grey eyes softened with... well, certainly not love. Maybe appreciation; the kind you'd show an aging golden retriever who'd performed some trivial trick for your wife's new book club. "Forty. Hrmph. You've always had a way of talking smart people into doing dumb things. You finish confirming vendors for tomorrow? Then what the hell are you doing here?"