A New Champ Emerges

I stood in my kitchen. I was very thirsty, but too lazy to open the fridge and pour myself a glass of Kool-Aid. My brother stood beside me, dumping a purple splash down the crack of his smile. He was tall and young, still a teenager. I stared at his Adam's Apple. It protruded. Stray hairs poked through the skin and stood at crooked angles. I imagined a collection of miniature pot-bellied men with great woolly beards, clad in felt green hats and snug woolen sweaters, scaling the length of his neck and firing grappling hooks at his chin. They navigated the lump with tiny pick-axes and spiked boots. I focused on the pile of cartilage as it gulped at the sugary water-treat, chugging like pistons on a sump pump. The violence of the convulsions shook the mountaineers loose. They plunged to their death. One impaled himself on a fork. My brother put down his glass and exhaled in satisfaction. A puff of cherry mist got tangled in the hairs of my nostrils.

I said “give me a drink of that.”
He has an annoying tick about germs, and replied no.
"Give me a break. I don't have typhus."
"Get your own and get fucked."

I had no respect for his neurotic dick-abouts, I also liked to spite him. I grabbed the glass and raised it. "Woooo,spring break!" I started chugging, but mid-gulp the cocksucker chopped at the drink. The glass chipped off some tooth, fell to the floor, and exploded. My fist drove into the bridge of my nose as the glass popped. Tiny shards spread across the hardwood like raindrops. I saw red.

I once read somewhere that you should kick a shark in the nose if you see its fin slicing towards you in the ocean. The shark has a sensitive nasal cavity, and it will dart in fear the instant it is struck. I do not function like this. My nose controls my temper like the flick of a bedroom switch. When disturbed, the switch flicks, light floods the room, and my rational faculties squint. At that instant, I want to chew holes through leg bones. At that instant, I would like to suffocate a baby in a potato sack filled with dog fart.

My brow crumpled and my lips pulled tight to a sphincter. Blood was shooting through unusual valves and time was blurring my surroundings into a Pollack painting. I clenched his t-shirt between my fingers and slammed him into the refrigerator. The next few seconds washed out. Sound popped and a white flicker of light appeared, like someone had turned on a television set.

I made a mistake. I slipped up. My brother is no bum. He is the owner of two hulking fists, a pair of lead grapefruits dressed in barbed wire. For the most part, they swing limp by his waist, disfigured knots mapped with a network of scars. I've caught myself staring at them during meals, retelling his bar fights in my mind. He once told me he threw a concrete block through the back window of an SUV, and didn’t recall doing so until he coincidentally strolled by his damage the next day. He can be a mean motherfucker, and he's built lean, like a Doberman. His skin is wrapped tight, with swollen veins pressing through his forearms, the blood coursing within, feeding his fists, healing wounds on knuckles that hang anxiously waiting to reduce their next eye socket to dust. He’s more than happy to pound his older brother, and that's exactly what he did. A split second after I shoved him, he uncoiled two quick blows at cobra speed. Bap bap. His fists sunk a combo deep into my jaw. It felt like I had poked my head through a glory hole and met a wrecking ball on the other side.

My father, who is a tough hunk of shit in his own right, separated us before my brother could run my face through the cheese grater any longer. He snatched us by our scruff, and there we hung.

Strung up like prize coneys in our father’s fists, we caught our breath and stared at each other. Our chests inflated, deflated. My face splashed with blood, my brother’s spotless. My eyes hung in place, but wished to roll down the hall and plunk into the toilet. We stared. A painful thought arose. “I no longer have any power over you.” My double decade reign as champ was no more. The mighty had fallen. A two second decision by technical knockout had stripped me of my championship belt. Years of King Kong terror on his dinkie car maps reduced to myth. He focused on me briefly with his ADD eyes, and then his pupils twinkled. A Kool-Aid smile that still hangs in the corridors my mind emerged and froze. My mother shouted “Merry fucking Christmas,” and my brother continued to grin at the assessment of our year’s holiest day.