On therapy

Dr. Scalioni looked at me through a layer of skin that barely disgusied his contempt.  I was convinced, and am still convinced to this day, that Dr. Scalioni held all of his patients in contempt. 

I went to see Dr. Scalioni on Tuesdays.  His office was in a brownstone on a tree-lined street, and in the winter, the sky shone in a deep red behind the houses as the city of New Haven slumped into twilight.

I began to see Dr. Scalioni because I learned that the Universe would someday become inhospitable to life.  This was a traumatic moment for me. 

My first meeting with Scalioni went something like this:

“So, Mr. Fishman, what brings you here?”

“Well, as I understand it, the Universe is getting colder, which means someday we’re all going to freeze to death.”

Scalioni’s eyes brightened in a manner designed to signify “encouragement.” “Really?” he said, leaning closer to examine his subject, “tell me about that.”

It was pretty much downhill from there.  Over time, Scalioni and I grew to hate each other – I hated him because he could not stop the Universe from freezing, and he hated me because I exposed him as a fraud. 

The universe is expanding, and the molecules that make up the universe are stretching further and further apart.  The amount of energy in the universe is winding down, like a clock that has unwound, but there is no one to wind it up again.  This means that the universe is getting colder. Someday, the universe will be nothing more than a sea of dead atoms shooting further and further into the black.  Life of any kind, even the most extreme kind, will no longer exist.  When life is no more, no one will be lef to marvel at the universe. 

Needless to say, I was disturbed by this.  This is how my first meeting with Dr. Scalioni began:

“So,” said Scalioni, “what brings you here?”

“I know the universe will end and I’m scared.”

“I see.”

“I’m really flipping out.”

“Tell me about that.”

Dr. Scalioni had thick belly and a scragly white beard.  He looked like Santa Clause, if Santa Clause were a sex offender, or perhaps just a dirty old man. I was sitting in Sr. Scalioni’s chair now, talking about my problems.  I did this every Tuesday at 4:00. 

Scalioni’s office was in a brownstone not far from campus.  Inside it was full of books and a strange yellow light that filled the room and made the doctor look even creepier than he already was.  Behind his head was a large clock that was there to remind you how much time you had left.  This much I’ll give Scalioni: he always called time, but he never seemed comfortable with it. 

The beginning of my sessions with Scalioni always begin this way: I would sit down in the leather chair in his study, and he would sit in a chair directly across from me.  Before he sat down, he would grab his foot and pull it under his rear-end so that when he sat down, he was sitting on one leg and it looked like a foot was growing out of his butt.  It was one of Scalioni’s many eccentricities. 

On this particular day, Scalioni was looking at me reproachfully.  He didn’t look reproachful often – I think they are taught not to look that was in psychology school – but it happened on occasion. 

“I havn’t seen you in a while,” said Scalioni. 

“I know,” I said.  It was true.  “I went to see the Pope.”

This is true.  Over spring break I’d gone to see the Pope.  He lives in Kansas with his mother, Fran, in a small town called [] which is [xxy] miled away from Wichita.  [

On violence: Part I

The other day I was talking to a kid who was recently married and had just had a baby.  He was short and stocky and, like many Colombians, wore braces on his teeth.  The one thing I noticed about him was his eyes: they were blank, almost unseeing, even though he was staring right at me, as if I was not entirely there.  He ran a restaurant in Cali with his brother and was in the middle of making plans to go to Disney World. 

At some point while we were talking, it came out that his father was Henry Loaiza-Ceballos, a/k/a "The Scorpion," a/k/a the Cali Cartel's "Minister of War."  In an incredibly relative way, the Cali Cartel was a less violent organization than the one based in Medellin, which is astounding to think about when you consider Loaiza's crimes. 

Loaiza's signature achievement was probably the Trujillo massacre, which was actually a series of killings that took place between 1988 and 1994 in the town of Trujillo, in southwestern Colombia.  While no one was ever officially charged with the murders, it is believed that Loaiza, along with a Colombian paramilitary organization, organized the murders some 245 and 342 people, many of whom were cut up with chainsaws.  When a local priest tried to alert the authorities, his decapitated body was found floating in the Cacua river the next day.

On hitting

"A fighter's appetite and tolerance for hitting is elemental…Mastering the craft means fashioning a style that takes maximum advantage of one's root capacity for hitting and minimizing one's root capacity for being hit." Carlo Rotella, Cut Time

Embracing pain, for a flabby veal-chop like myself, has not been easy.  Truthfully, I hate it.  

Pooping

I poop some five times a day and wonder whether this is normal. I think not, this pooping, inasmuch as it takes an aweful amount of time.  I cannot imagine our ancestors getting on with so much defecation: such time spent would have left us vulnerable to wild animals and opportunistic enemies.  And yet here I am.  Pooping.  

Hit man

If boxing is about anything, it is about pain; both the intentional infliction of pain upon another human being, and the self-imposed pain that boxers must bear in order to mete out punishment on others.  

"The primacy of hurt supercharges even the smallest detail…and produces the distinctive ozone crackle of bad intentions that attracts some people to boxing and repels many others." Carlo Rotella, Cut Time 

On Mike Tyson

"Bracketed in the sequence of heavyweight all-timers by two media dreamboats—a champion who made boxing seem like political theater and one who makes boxing seem like non-consensual sex—[Larry] Holmes has been overshadowed." Carlo Rotella, Cut Time 

The Tao of Larry Holmes

"Listen, if I die today, there are gonna be a lot of crying people for about a week, then they gon' go on with their life. If I die today, and they having a fight in Madison Square Garden tonight, they ring the bell ten times and they keep right on goddamn fighting." 

-- Larry Holmes as interviewed by Carlo Rotella in Cut Time 

First Impressions

Symptoms are better today. The persistant aching in my skull has been reduced to a dull thumping. I felt good enough to explore the city, which is quite nice—though perhaps not as charming as one might hope. 

The one thing that I have noticed are the number of street performers.  There does not seem to be much of a begging class here: no gangs of soiled children roving the streets, no one-armed panhandlers, no skeletal dogs picking through the trash.

A bad night

This is the day I woke up next to a Mexican stripper with a sore back and a bottle of tequila sitting on my nightstand.  The stripper is breathing. The bottle is empty. 

On the Cruelty of Children

And so let us speak, for a moment, about the cruelty of children.

Children are cruel. 90 pages of shit. Children jab at each other with all the same lances, sharpened, new, antlers, full speed, no mercy, armed with the weapons of physical and psychological torture, children can and will use these weapons to form alliances and launch attacks against enemies real and imaged, their only flaw is their inability to process the consequences of their actions, for they do not have the means, cognitive or experiential, with which to make sense of cruelty or pain; without a full understanding of consequences, children gleefully engage in blood sport whose value is judged by the entertainment it brings to the torturers. The depths to which children can go are only circumcribed by a fear of punishment, thus crimes that can go undetected will continue apace. But the force that one child can inflict on another is often mitigated by the group that flanks him, disappating the most hurtful jabs because the tribe will protect its own. The tribe member will survice with his psyche in tact because he has people around him to tell him that he is okay. He is protected, and the statements made for the purposes of inflciting pain and distress can be easily erased with a proper change-of-subject.

The lone child is defenseless. He has no group to fall back on – no means of reinforcement to find acceptance after the knife has been slipped.  He has few options. He can join a group and save himself; he can become hypersensitive or he can become a iceberg. 

I begin training

I am not comfortable with comfort.  Comfort is distinctly discomforting; indeed, when life looks like easy street there is danger at your door.  

Youth

Lately I have become obsessed with living forever. This obsession is borne out of a fear of dying, and more specifically of getting old, which is itself a means of dying. I have since concluded, with my head if not my heart, that dying is the flipside of living, and that you must make peace with this if you are to bury your obsessions, which is probably for the best. Extreme relativism tells me that neurosis is no worse than contentment, though I guess if you were to ask me (go ahead, ask) whether I would prefer to be content or neurotic, I would choose the former. Though perhaps we can get out of this lack of judgement by noting that the neurotic, beset by fear, focuses too much on death and not enough on living, and inasmuch as we are alive, we should acknowledge this fact. If this is the case, then we should face death squarely, allow it to wash over us, and push back against it as firmly and honestly as we can. Confronting death does not mean that we are unafraid – we have been programmed to fear death and all its cousins. 

On skipping

I did not train today. Jesus woke me up at five o'clock in the morning and said: "Get up, nigga. Up!" But I just waved him away. I saw him staring at me out of the corner of my eye, starting at me, but I didn't care. I needed to sleep. I've begun feeling sick -- likely the product of too much booze, cigars and shitty food. I almost got into a fight in a casino and I didn't have the heart for it. Normally a fight jazzes me, buit let this one feeling flaccid and uninterested. So I'm getting a little sick so I did my jobs and then I came home and vegged out. I tried to eat a little better. Jesus is pissed at me though. We were supposed to fucking train today. 

On bullfighting

Bullfighters still look like this

Went to the bullfights today.  What can be said about bullfighting that hasn't said before?  Here is something that has been said before: JFK carried a poem around in his wallet that goes like this:

Bullfight critics, ranked in rows

Crowd the enormous plaza full.

But only one is there who knows,

And he’s the man who fights the bull.

It is a testament to the fundamental conservatism of European aristocracy that the matador has not changed one bit since 1726 -- that is, while virtually every other sport has evolved its traditions to fit the scientific and stylistic modalities of the era, the matador has remained exactly the same.  And while some might consider this “a rich testament to the greatness of the tradition,” or perhaps more privately, “the ethnically-tinged tenacity of a proud people,” others might characterize it as “totally fucking stupid,” inasmuch as bloodlust has moved on to bigger and better things; see Nascar, MMA, rugby and cable news.  

But in the end, I come out more in favor of the bullfight than against it.  It is a spectacle, a Roman colisium whose people have grown uncomfortable with fighting each other to the death, and while I wish we could find a solution to this discomfort (some call it the NFL — but its just note the same thing), bulls will do (would prefer they be packs of wild gorillas, but that’s just me).  You see, the problem with the bull is that he is not capable of acting strategically, and this defect is so easily exploited by his handlers that the fight is essentially over before it begins.  

The human trick is simple: when a bull gets into a ring, he wants to kill someone — anyone.  This single-minded focus is too easily broken upon into a series of moving parts: men with moving capes, men mounted on armored horse and men sneaking through the center of the ring with short lances.  That's the bulls' problem — he's too stupid to focus, and in his lack of focus, he tires.  The bull sees only trees where the wild forest grows.  Big picture: he's going to die in a rigged fight.  The ONLY logical thing to do in this situation is to focus on the weakest link, and take him out.

It is a gory enterprise — but I have made peace with it this way: I want to go out like the bull: take it to the man in the funny pants.  Moreover, inasmuch as fighting bulls are bred for their ferocity, it stands to reason that they are slowly evolving to develop a kind of super-bovine intelligence that will, someday, make them more ferocious so that they will be able to act more efficiently.  Some bulls have already developed this talent.  You can see them here and here.  

On to last night’s bullfights.  

Don Fernando

Don Fernando enjoys his work

I will not spend much time on the first matador except to say that Don Fernando was very handsome and balletic.  He is an exceptionally flamboyant man, whose requisite bravado was often mixed in with a light step that has led some writers to conclude he is gay—a trait that doesn’t seem like it would be that big of a deal in bullfighting.  Put it this way — I don’t think the bull cares if you’re gay one way or the other.  Moreover, if you told me all matadors were gay, I would not think twice about it.  As their uniforms imply, the matador is not so much a man as he is a figment of a man, the man that a 13 year old boy might imagine a man to be, if that 13 year old boy lived in 18^th Century Spain, was extremely comfortable with his sexuality, and had spent a great deal of time watching birds of paradise.

Don Fernando was a Colombian and a very graceful matador.  He drew his bull in closer perhaps than any of the others, and he would on occasion spank its hide with a kind of boyish glee (he was, after all, 25) as he wove the animal tighter and tighter into his orbit  He was good, and the home crowd loved him.  

But when it came time to deliver the coup de grace, Don Fernando faltered.  The end of a bull fight is capped by the forceful thrust of the matador’s sword, the estocada, into the bulls back so that it punctures the heart and kills the creature almost instantly.  This is a rare feat, but the downward thrust usually injures the bull enough so that it tires quickly, falls to its knees, and yeilds to an official who comes out and severs the animal’s brain stem.  

Don Fernando tried the estocada not once, not twice, but three times, and so the line between art and cruelty became uncomfortably blurry. The matador beat his chest and pulled at his beautiful hair—a rather public display of humiliation for a man who had until then cativated the crowd.  Don Fernando gathered his hat and cape and trapsed across the ring, head bowed, seemingly oblivious to the flowers and hats that the Colombians had thrown into the ring out of respect for their countryman.  

Pedro Rodriguez

Mr. Rodriguez, all puffed up

Pedro was a handsome Spanaird whose simian features were a good approximation for the manner with which he conducted his fight.  much more handsome and,I think, to every one's great satisfaction, chose to develop such an intimacy with the bull that he would stop its charge with a single, outstretched had. He also had the habit of brushing his well-coiffed hair our of his eyes which made it look as if he were tyring to make himself pretty, which, for reasons difficult to explain, was strangely endearing.

For you see, Pedro has a serious Tom Jones thing going on in his pants.  I'm not going to give measurements here but let's just stay that it was anatomically distinct enough for the old lady in front of me to say something about it, comparing it to a "pickle," but quote: "not like any pickle I've seen before."

Nor did it lay there, inert and unmindful of its largeness; rather, as the fight wore on, Pedro's manhood responded as a kind of barometer into the man's soul.  At one point, Pedro's member shrank back to its original Diggler-lie proportions, leading many to wonder whether he had lost his confidence.  This was not to be, however, for Pedro soon thereafter kicked off his shoes so that his feet could feel the warm sand, mixed with snot and sweat and blood, and this seemed to help him recenter his mo-jo.  The crowd grew silent, and Don Pedro unsheathed his sword.

The matator approached the bull—slowly, for he still had an anaconda in his pants --  and on the second charge, Pedro killed the bull. Or maybe not.  No soon had the doctor cut the cranial nerve but the bull was up again—and he was pissed.  He trotted around for a while, looking for a matador to kill—and when he couldn't get a bead on one, the other luchdors closed in an finished the job.

Pablo Hermoso

Pablo occasionally kissed the bulls before he killed them

Finally, the greatest matador of the night, the aptly named "Pablo Hermoso" came into the ring. I gotta tell you, there are bullfights and then there are bullfights.  Pablo's deal was that he did it all from a horse—a very brave horse that didn't mind getting chased all over the ring by a pissed off bull that would, and did, on several occasions, hit the horse with its horns.  How they trained these horses to stay so game is beyond me, but Don Pablo was an expert rider, and shoved lance after lance into this thing, even at one point reaching down and kissing the bull on the face as the animal was rushing after them to kill them.

Then when it came time to kill the bull, El Hermoso rode right up to it and delivered a killing blow—the kind that kills almost instantly.  This is rare in bullfighting, requiring equal parts strength, balls, and luck.  Within seconds the bull was dead, and the crowd went nuts.

A good performance (as determined by the president of the Bolivarian Bullfighting Assoc.) results on one of the bull's ears being removed and tossed into the crowd.  An excellent performance results in two ears being removed.  A transcendent performance removes the ears and the tail, and that is what was removed last night.  A tail had not been removed in that colesim for more than 60 years.

So that was the bullfight.  Ole!

I arrive

I arrived in Bolivariana last night.  God the altitude is awful. Some ungodly number of meters, don't ask me how many feet.  I have yet to venture outside of my flat for fear of fainting. There is approximately 30% less oxygen in the air here as compared to sea level, and I am missing every molecule.  The Indians and Spainards liked it because the temperature never gets above 75 degrees—though this was in the days before air conditioning—and I am beginning to wonder whether such benefits have long since outlived their usefulness.  I shall write again tomorrow, perhaps when my cerebral hemmorage is complete. 

Depression

Yesterday was my birthday. My wife threw me a surprise party. I was genuinely surprised, and it was a great party. But I woke up this morning I was terribly depressed. I don't know why. In fact, I was so depressed I could barely get out of bed. I can barely type this. What is wrong with me?


Dr. Scalioni looked at me through a layer of skin that barely disgusied his contempt.  I was convinced, and am still convinced to this day, that Dr. Scalioni held all of his patients in contempt. 
I went to see Dr. Scalioni on Tuesdays.  His office was in a brownstone on a tree-lined street, and in the winter, the sky shone in a deep red behind the houses as the city of New Haven slumped into twilight.
I began to see Dr. Scalioni because I learned that the Universe would someday become inhospitable to life.  This was a traumatic moment for me. 
My first meeting with Scalioni went something like this:
“So, Mr. Fishman, what brings you here?”“Well, as I understand it, the Universe is getting colder, which means someday we’re all going to freeze to death.”Scalioni’s eyes brightened in a manner designed to signify “encouragement.” “Really?” he said, leaning closer to examine his subject, “tell me about that.”
It was pretty much downhill from there.  Over time, Scalioni and I grew to hate each other – I hated him because he could not stop the Universe from freezing, and he hated me because I exposed him as a fraud. 
The universe is expanding, and the molecules that make up the universe are stretching further and further apart.  The amount of energy in the universe is winding down, like a clock that has unwound, but there is no one to wind it up again.  This means that the universe is getting colder. Someday, the universe will be nothing more than a sea of dead atoms shooting further and further into the black.  Life of any kind, even the most extreme kind, will no longer exist.  When life is no more, no one will be lef to marvel at the universe. 
Needless to say, I was disturbed by this.  This is how my first meeting with Dr. Scalioni began:
“So,” said Scalioni, “what brings you here?”“I know the universe will end and I’m scared.”“I see.”“I’m really flipping out.”“Tell me about that.”


Dr. Scalioni had thick belly and a scragly white beard.  He looked like Santa Clause, if Santa Clause were a sex offender, or perhaps just a dirty old man. I was sitting in Sr. Scalioni’s chair now, talking about my problems.  I did this every Tuesday at 4:00. 
Scalioni’s office was in a brownstone not far from campus.  Inside it was full of books and a strange yellow light that filled the room and made the doctor look even creepier than he already was.  Behind his head was a large clock that was there to remind you how much time you had left.  This much I’ll give Scalioni: he always called time, but he never seemed comfortable with it. 
The beginning of my sessions with Scalioni always begin this way: I would sit down in the leather chair in his study, and he would sit in a chair directly across from me.  Before he sat down, he would grab his foot and pull it under his rear-end so that when he sat down, he was sitting on one leg and it looked like a foot was growing out of his butt.  It was one of Scalioni’s many eccentricities. 
On this particular day, Scalioni was looking at me reproachfully.  He didn’t look reproachful often – I think they are taught not to look that was in psychology school – but it happened on occasion. 
“I havn’t seen you in a while,” said Scalioni.  “I know,” I said.  It was true.  “I went to see the Pope.”
This is true.  Over spring break I’d gone to see the Pope.  He lives in Kansas with his mother, Fran, in a small town called [] which is [xxy] miled away from Wichita.  [

On humiliation

I will not lie this is a difficult moment for me. I have a rather hazy memory of getting my ass kicked last night by two little prick lacrosse players who think they're that cat's fucking pajamas because they can suck an olive out of a tender asshole faster than a goddamn Hoover vacuum cleaner (join a fraternity, you'll understand).

I am an ibex

Most of the night is a total blank. I recall leaving the bar and cracking my knuckles, and I remember bar patrons gathering around a picture window that offered a ringside seat to the fight that was about to happen outside. I remember strutting back and forth in the street and shouting something about the "mother of all goat fucks." And then I remember finding, at that very moment, my power animal. I chose the ibex, the fiersome-horned and yet flight of foot rodent whose temperment I believed epitomized my ferocity and my gift of flight. . 


"I am an ibex!" I said to anyone who would listen. "I'm a fucking ibex!"


Not that I would have expected the patrons to make the connection, inasmuch as I didn't really make it myself until later on, but an ibex and a goat are pretty much the same thing, and so by repeatedly promising a "goat fuck" I was, at best, predicting that I would, at some point, fuck my self. 


At some point I had to reflect dimly upon what started this whole thing, but the more I reflected the more the crowd grew -- and the more it grew I began to wonder whether the fight itself was the product of their aspirations, rather than my own -- at the very least I could not identify a single reason why I would want to fight these two douche bags; but then again, it seemed that by the time the first blow was struck, we were not fighting for our own reasons anymore. 


It was, for a moment, exhilirating to be fighting for blood and nothing else. The lacrosse kids came out of the bar looking happy and reasonably confident that this fight would confirm all of the lodestars around which we had built our lives -- I was a man of average height and weight, a bald spot forming somewhere in the back of my head where I couldn't see it. If I wanted to see youthfull me, I needed look only in the mirror at the proper angle...there he is. Me at 21, breaking a bottle of bear across a fat irishman's head. 

The difference between the lacrosse kids and me is that they are too young to be possessed of self doubt. They have fear because they don't want to get hit, but once they realize getting hit isn't that bad, they're going to bring the wrath of all their douchery to bear upon me. 


The inherent unfairness of two people beating up one seems lost in street fighting -- there is not much of a code among hyenas. And so as the fight began it largely involved one of the scroutes trying to awkwardly hold me down while the other wound up to hit me. This did not work with quite the same effect they'd imagined, as I'd developed a "slippery fish" technique in my second semester of middle school. 


But what I did do was miraculous. Whilst one of the lacrosse players was trying to drag me down by my arm, I looped around with my right fist and clocked the other twin clean in the jaw. I then watched his head snap backwards like a pez dispenser so that it crashed into the picture window with a thundrous clap. The clap, followed by a collective "oooohhh," of the people inside, was music to my ears, which went nicely with the stars in my eyes after the lacrosse players began attacking me in earnest. It was all over in about two minutes. Their complete victory was, in the end, sullied somewhat by that one, ruthless shot that might have knocked him out had the window been made of brick instead of glass. 

The job

The mafia has moved on

The mafia has gone international so I spend a lot of time overseas, particularly in one country in Latin America where we have some "business interests." For my own safety I can't really say which country it is, so let's call it "Bolivaria."

About our business interests. The rule of thumb is: if its profitable, we're involved. Obviously the mafia made a killing in booze and extortion back in the day, but that stuff has gone the way of legitimate businessmen. We used to make money off of really boring things like, believe it or not, olive oil – but these things don't generate the kind of revenue that support the Don's lifestyle. No, we're into much bigger things now, like oil oil, as in petroleum, as well as smaller-ticket items like weapons trafficking auto parts. Add to this a touch of bond trading, real estate construction and loansharking and you got yourself a pretty decent business. You also got a mafia business that is often pretty hard to distinguish from real business, which is just the way we like it.

But the guys who run the show don't let us little guys touch that stuff. I'm a soldier, which means I'm the guy who handles the petty disputes and day-to-day stuff that our associates dream up to make my life miserable. I'm not the guy who whacks people, I'm the guy who gets to tell an associate that his kid just got whacked, and that I'm really sorry. 

So that's the job, more or less. Like I said, its not pretty. 

Diary of a Mafia Soldier

I am a mafioso.

Before we begin, let us be clear that I do not lead a glamourous life. I do not do glamorous things. I am the guy who tells other mafiosos about how best to clean the blood stains off of a pair of wool pants. Not that there's a lot of blood to clean. These days the mafia have moved on to different schemes: stocks, bonds, IPOs, construction projects, currency manipulation. You almost might mistake us for legitimate businessmen, which of course we are not. 

But the truth is, I'm just a fix-it man. I'm not a Don or even one of the Don's friends. I'm just a regular guy with a stressful job. So welcome to the diary of a mafia soldier.