Ben Fowlkes














Retirement Party














Retirement Party

            Luke Costa lost his third straight fight in the Big Show after getting his orbital broken in the first round and having his eye swell up like a water balloon before the ref finally stopped it in the third. The Big Show cut him, because that’s what they do after three in a row, and Luke decided he’d had enough anyway. He said he was retiring, then planned a big retirement party the following Friday night down at the Silver Sands. I got there right on time and everybody was already drunk.
            “How did this happen?” I asked John Sands, who I found standing alone on the sidewalk outside the bar, squinting down at his cell phone.
            His shirt was all the way unbuttoned and the remnants of what was either Mexican food or vomit stained his collar.
            “Just, hey, I’m trying to concentrate here,” he said.
            “The email I got said seven,” I told him. “It’s like 7:05 now.”
            “This girl,” Sands said into his own chest. “This amazing girl just gave me her number. I got to put it in my phone before I forget it. God, she was fucking amazing, man.”
            I looked around and all I saw were two gutterpunks sitting in the doorway of a closed hair salon, punching away at a little toy piano and singing Pearl Jam songs in a useless plea for spare change. Past them was the ice cream shop, then another bar, then the churning gray mass of the Pacific. It was winter and the beaches were empty. Even the bums had moved in out of the wind. The gutterpunks finished up that one song about still being alive and Sands tried to applaud but with his cell phone in his hand it didn’t work. I asked Sands how long he’d been here and he gave me a wounded look.
            “Why? Where was I supposed to be?” he said.
            “I thought the party didn’t start until right now,” I said. “Were you guys all drinking somewhere before this?”
            “Look at this,” said Sands, holding out his cellphone. “I’m trying to text this girl and it says the message won’t go through. Am I typing the right number?”
            “How should I know?” I said.
            “Just look at it,” said Sands. “Tell me if it looks like a real phone number to you.”
            I pushed my way into the bar, wading through a thick cloud of people all talking in too loud voices. Everybody was there. People I hadn’t seen in months. People I’d assumed had moved away or been put in jail or simply stopped existing. They were all back from the dead, smiling at one another like they were all in on a secret together. They had the easy comfort of people who had made themselves at home hours ago.
            Luke Costa was at a booth in the back, surrounded by empty glasses and women I didn’t know. His eye was still an enormous, unseeing bulb hanging off his face. He seemed at peace with it. I walked over to his table and tried to say something about the email I’d gotten. It said seven. I was positive that it said seven. Luke nodded like he hadn’t heard me at all and then handed me a half-empty drink.
            “That’s for you,” he said over the noise.
            “What is it?” I asked.
            “Fuck you what is it,” he said. “Drink it and get us some more.”
            A gorgeous blonde watched me with a bored expression as I gulped it down. It tasted like someone might have put a cigarette out in it, but I couldn’t be sure. Only when I turned to the bar for a refill did I realize that I still had no idea what to ask for. I decided to keep it simple and just get us two whiskeys, reasoning that if Luke didn’t want one I could justify drinking both and, in this way, I might catch up with the party at an all-out sprint. Then everything would be fine, I told myself. Then the party start time thing would be a comical misunderstanding.
            As I was trying to get the bartender’s attention Brick elbowed his way in next to me. A girl in a tiger shirt complained that he’d made her spill her drink and Brick suggested that she go ahead and make a huge fucking deal about it. She went away, presumably to find a boyfriend who would only remain interested in taking action until he saw that Brick was the source of the insult.
            “You believe this bullshit?” Brick said into my ear as we huddled against the bar.
            “No kidding,” I said. “Tell me the party starts at seven, I’m going to show up at seven.”
            Brick flashed a blank look. We stared at each other like two men stranded on nearby islands, unsure whether it was worth it to try and swim across just to be stranded with someone else.
            “I’m talking about Costa and his bullshit retirement,” Brick said. “How come nobody wants to say anything about it?”
            “What’s there to say?” I asked.
            “He’s fucking 29 years old,” Brick said. “Who retires at 29?”
            I tried to explain that he was only retiring from fighting, not from working or from life in general. Brick made a face and stuck out his jaw a big, dull thing that had been thumped on by enemies and friends alike. His great strength was in not caring who hit him or why. He never seemed to think anyone needed a reason.
            “Point is,” Brick said, “what’s he going to do? Bounce at a strip club for the rest of his life?”
            “Luke?” I said. He has a college degree.”
            “Sure he does,” said Brick. “You know what his degree is in?”
    I did not. Truthfully, I didn’t even know for sure that he had one. All I knew was that Costa had attended college somewhere, at some point, for some undetermined length of time. It’s possible he had also wrestled there. You could say this about all the guys at our gym and be right at least half the time.
            “Sociology,” Brick said. “Motherfucker has a degree in sociology. Look at him, you think he’s going to go be a sociologist any time soon?”
            I looked at him, Costa the cyclops. At that very moment he was moving his lips into the blonde girl’s hair, which even from across the crowded bar looked like it probably smelled wonderful. Her lips moved and she laughed. I was filled with a terrible longing. None of this made any sense. I didn’t even like these people half the time. What did I care about being invited to their parties? What did I care about being liked by them?
            But Costa breathing his stale all-day-drinking breath on the beautiful girl’s face, still making her laugh, somehow, I couldn’t understand it. I wanted whatever he had and I knew I wouldn’t get it. I wanted no man alive to have anything that I did not have more of, and I recognized right away what a stupid feeling that was.
            “What time did you get here?” I asked Brick.
            “I don’t even know what time it is now,” he said, “so I couldn’t tell you.”
            “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
            “We were talking about something here,” Brick said. “I was talking about something that mattered.”
            The bartender came around and I paid for the whiskeys. Brick took one of them without asking as soon as she set them down. He drained half of it in one sip and then told me that the point was you didn’t just fucking quit because you lost one fight.
            “He lost three,” I said.
            “Regardless,” Brick said.
            “In a row,” I said.
            “It doesn’t matter,” Brick said. “You could lose ten in a row. If you quit just because you’re losing, all it means is that you were bullshit from the start.”
            Costa glanced over at us and made a drinking motion with his empty hand, then pointed to the hand’s emptiness with a quizzical gesture. I pointed at the whiskey in Brick’s hand. The meaning was lost on everyone but me.
            “It’s his life,” I told Brick. “If he wants to do something else, let him do something else. What’s it to you?”
            Brick winced and laughed a bitter, joyless laugh. He told me it drove him crazy that I could be such a good fighter while missing the point so thoroughly and consistently. I tried not to show how happy this made me.
            “You quit when you can’t lift your arms up anymore,” Brick said in the general direction of Costa, who gave no indication that he’d heard. Brick raised his voice.
            “You quit when nobody will pay one more goddamn cent to see you,” he said.
            Costa looked over, turning his face so that his one working eye was put to use.
            “You quit when it’s the only choice you have left,” Brick said.
            I elbowed him in the side and he didn’t seem to notice. He raised his glass to Costa, who was paying complete attention now.
            “Here’s to giving up,” Brick shouted. “Here’s to the quittingest quitter who ever quit.”
            The ice clicked against his teeth as he emptied the glass. The girls at the table were all watching him. So was Costa, who shifted his eye from me to Brick.
            I stared back with a look that said, I just got here, so what do I know? And how could I help you now, even if I wanted to?


















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