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!