Bobby waits three hours to see George. In the beginning, he is in the back of the line and then without moving more than five feet he is in the middle and then, still hardly moving, the end of the line is too far to see. Bobby missed the rain but the ungroomed fields behind the parking lot did not and his foot sits firmly in an inch of mud. He lifts it when he notices—his shoe pops free with a noise like a plunger—but he has nowhere else to put it and after hovering on one leg for a minute Bobby places it back into the shoe-shaped hole in the mud.
Thirty minutes later and Bobby is on the concrete of the parking lot. The line explodes horizontally in the spacious lot. Looking at the line, one tight strand ahead and one tight strand behind and then the big unruly mess on the parking lot, reminds Bobby of a video he saw where a snake swallowed a cat whole. He is part of the cat but he keeps his feet planted, tight in line, like he is with the head of the snake. He stands like this for almost an hour. The sun comes up towards the end of this and wastes no time heating things up. The concrete does not help this. In a matter of minutes his forehead and neck are slick with sweat. The plastic logo of his shirt sticks to his belly. He thinks of Arizona, which he does not want to think of, but then the heat wipes even that from his mind and he is not capable of thinking anything at all, except how hot it is. Twenty minutes later, on the grass again and shaded by trees and cooled slightly by a breeze, Bobby comes back to himself. He wipes his forehead with his right arm and then again with his left. This does nothing to stop the uncomfortable feeling of having stepped fully clothed out of the bath. It makes it worse actually, spreading the moisture to his arms which are now wet and shining. The man in front of Bobby, a fat man in a gray shirt, sweats even more than Bobby does. The back of his shirt is splotched and looks like one of those ink tests they gave him back in Arizona.
“What do you see?” the shrink asked.
He saw two hairy pussies and the devil, but he only said he saw a goat when she asked because he knew what these tests were about. Still, the next day he was given pills that made him feel like he was sitting in his own head, slouched against his skull and watching the world from the holes cut out for his eyes. The next time they did the test, he just said he saw clouds.
Forty more minutes and Bobby sees the booths now. Twenty of them. Some of the men are just five feet tall. Some are true, honest-to-God giants. But they are all the same: the same model, different sizes. Big heads resting on misshapen fists, elbows pressed down on stacks of unused photographs. Their fans have been devoured by the line—by George’s insatiable ego. Bobby could laugh looking at them, but it is not his place to laugh. Because they are there and he is here, and there is so obviously better than here. There, they are paid for this humiliation, while here, Bobby pays $14.50 for the pleasure (The price is $16.50 but Bobby saves two dollars because he is given the senior rate for men older than sixty-five, and while Bobby is just forty-eight, he does not correct the man because wo dollars is two dollars).
Twenty minutes later, having not moved an inch, Bobby is angry. The heat, maybe, has made him mad. Or maybe it is more than that. Bobby only knows that he is sick of waiting and also sick of moving. He is sick of it all and decides that from this point forward the line will move at his pace, and not George’s pace. When the line finally does move, Bobby does not.
“The fuck is wrong with you,” someone screams.
The threat of violence, its familiarity, calms Bobby and his clarity returns. He must make it to George, he reminds himself. He can’t jeopardize that, even if he is mad. So he turns. He lets them, the yellers, see his face. This is usually enough and it is enough this time too. It is ten minutes—the gap in the line big enough to drive a truck through—before Bobby closes it.
Bobby is happy and in his happiness imagines seeing George. He pictures George’s face crinkling into a smile. He pictures his immediate recognition.
“It’s the Badass,” says George as he pulls Bobby out of the line and brings him to the front. George jokes with him and screams his name like he’s Jimmy Lennon Jr., shouts, “Badassssss Bobby Bedros.” They play-fight and strike the pose the fans always want, with their fists on each other’s chins, and then Bobby sits with him, and the two of them sign autographs. Whenever someone doesn’t know Bobby, which is rare, George says, “Trust me kid. You want this guy’s autograph.” George is genuine when he says, “Best I ever fought.”
But Bobby is mad again when the line stops moving because George is eating lunch. This information ripples through the line, and when it gets to Bobby, he decides he will sock George, no matter how he greets him. A right hook on the chin. George tumbling backward off his chair and onto his ass. George looking like an idiot.
One more hour before Bobby enters the main pavilion. At the door, the line is tamed by security guards and he is herded with the rest between two red velvet ropes. The ropes bend and twist at odd angles and Bobby assumes this maze must lead to George, though he still cannot see him. The main pavilion is brutally cold. The air conditioning weaponizes the sweat slicking every orifice of his body and after just a minute Bobby begins to shiver. The sea of people and the artificial cold and the sweat and the lead weight of anticipation in his throat all bring to mind a fight and Bobby starts bouncing on his heels like he is ready to make a walkout. The last time he did this—not fight; but complete an actual walkout—was against George and it was on pay-per-view. It was nine years ago. Bobby does not recall much of it now because there is not much to recall what with George taking care of him in less than a minute. What Bobby does recall is the ungodly force of the machine behind George and the euphoria it brought when its powers were put behind him. Bobby was washed then, had lost four of his last seven fights and his left eye no longer cooperated with his right. The tremors, though nothing compared to what they were to become, had started. But George decided he couldn’t tolerate the blemish on his record and this meant Bobby had to be resurrected. The machine was somehow able to find five men that Bobby could beat—three of them that he could even knock out—and managed to convince the world, and in some moments convince even Bobby, that he had a chance to beat George. Bobby was paid $450,000 to be knocked out and George was paid $8,000,000 to knock him out. Bobby held onto the money for a year. He lost most of it investing in a bar and the rest just disappeared, he is not sure how. In their next fights Bobby was paid just $1200 and George was paid $13,000,000 because Bobby went up to heavyweight and fought an active duty cop in Akron, Ohio and George went up to middleweight and fought the champ in Caesar’s Palace. Bobby cannot remember if he won this next fight—there were dozens of them, fat out of shape cops and no one kept track—but he knows George won the belt because everyone knows George won the belt.
Bobby rounds a corner and a gap forms in the line and there in the gap is George. His hair is thick and his jaw is strong and his eyes are still blue and he stares right at Bobby with them and recognizes nothing. The gap closes and Bobby sees only the shining back of a bald man’s head. George has not changed since Bobby last saw him, which was just a year ago, on the television. Bobby was in the nuthouse then because of what he did in the car, which was actually nothing at all. Bobby just sat in it. In his own driveway. It was hot, yes but the heat felt nice at first and then when it didn’t feel nice he stayed because he wanted to see how long he could endure it and when he couldn’t endure it any longer there was nothing he could do about it because at that point he was jelly. That’s all it was. They wanted to make it something more but it wasn’t. He even said, “If I wanted to kill myself there are easier ways than slow cooking.” And they all agreed with him, one of them even laughed, but they still put him in the nuthouse. And in the nuthouse they decided what he could watch and someone decided he could watch George dancing. George wore some kind of Vegas showgirl outfit, sequins and diamonds, and did a spanish dance, shaking his hips back and forth. Then at the end of the show George lost to this kid, who Bobby could not tell was a boy or a girl, and started to cry. George, still crying, was interviewed and, crying even more, said how hard dancing was and how it was harder even than boxing.
“You’re up next,” a security guard says. “Just one photo with George. No autographs. Keep it quick. One minute per person.”
George is just a foot away. Only the velvet rope separates the two.
“Go,” the security guard says and lifts the velvet rope for Bobby.
Bobby sees recognition from George only when they shake hands—George knows what profession makes hands like these—but the recognition is really just unconcealed pity followed by concealed pity.
George says, “You here for an autograph champ?”
No, Bobby shakes his head.
“Then what brings you here?”
The reason he is here is because when he was 21 years old he lost twice by split decision. Not to George. He remembers their names (Pat McArty and Laurence Telon) but nobody else does. They were scrubs and his perfect 10-0 record became a very imperfect 10-2 record and those losses (which were not really losses, not to anyone who watched them, but nobody ever watched them) lost him everything. Those losses scared away the machine which was just starting to show interest in him.
“How about one for me then?” George says. He hands Bobby a pen and a photograph.
Bobby puts the photograph on the table and takes the pen.
George, Bobby wants to make clear, is not on the right side of the table because of his skill or his talent because Bobby was more skilled and more talented than George. Bobby even proved this to George when they fought, when it mattered, when they were both in their primes. In 1995, he was 18-2 and George was 19-0 and Bobby was thought to be washed already because of those two losses (that were not actual losses) and George came out the first round thinking that Bobby was whoever they told him Bobby was. He actually caught Bobby cold and sent him to a knee for an eight count. And George confirmed his opinion of Bobby with that punch which was funny because that punch let Bobby know he would win because that punch was nothing even though it was George’s best. From that punch on Bobby walked through George’s punches and hammered his massive head like a speed bag. It was the seventh round when Bobby realized that George had realized the gap between the two. Bobby doubled up on his jab and then slipped the counter right and then turned George’s head around with a counter-right of his own and put him down for a nine count. George conceded after that. He ran. He made a deal that he would give up trying to win if Bobby would just spare him another one of those punches and that was exactly what happened and when the decision was read the judges couldn’t even rob Bobby. He won by a unanimous decision.
The photo is smeared with ink because the tremor is worse when Bobby is angry and even worse when he is pressured and he is both of these things at this moment.
“All done with that?” George asks. He tries to take the picture but Bobby clutches it in his fist.
“I beat you,” Bobby says.
George stares at him quizzically, smiling and nodding and Bobby knows he doesn’t understand. He slows down and pushes each word out carefully.
“I beat you,” Bobby says
George gets it this time. “Sure did,” he says. “Hell of a fight. You were a hell of a fighter.”
The pity is too clear and this makes Bobby even angrier which makes his brain even heavier and now he can’t see the rest of the words he wanted to say. And now, too because of the anger, the words he does say come out glued together. He speaks in one thick guttural slur that he knows George doesn’t understand because even Bobby can’t understand it.
But George still nods his head and says, “Absolutely champ.”
Bobby decides to just sock him but George must sense it because the guards grab Bobby before he can. They are stronger and bigger than him and they press his arms to his body and lift him by the elbows like he’s a baby and they are really good at this, at not making a scene, because they keep his heels just on the ground so it looks like he is walking, but when they get him alone and there is no one left to upset they drop him onto the grass and onto his ass and when he stands and tries to get back inside they knock him hard on the chin and back onto his ass where he stays.
