This is a true and tragic story of a guy I grew up with who was conquered twice, once in high school and then again ten years later, and who never could recover to tell about it. I had been there for the first vanquishing, during our freshman year at Green Valley High School, but I was off in Iraq, one of the many American soldiers deployed for the long haul of rebuilding that calamitous country, when he was vanquished for a second time. It wasn’t until I returned to Las Vegas two years later that I learned the story of the reclusive and inscrutable Jeremy Minigail, in the pages of an alternative weekly paper I picked up by chance at a corner pub one August Sunday waiting for the afternoon heat to pass. Without thought or hesitation I jumped in my car and headed for the house where Jeremy used to live with his mother, and where I found him still living with his mother, withdrawn from the world and taciturn in his bedroom. After Jeremy’s mother invited me in with a hero’s welcome (perhaps because she knew I had served in Iraq; but most likely because I was one of Jeremy’s few friends, and the only one, I would soon learn, who had come to visit him since his second conquering), I learned through her what had happened to him.
In an instantaneous and decisive moment he became certain that he was going to lose, and it was okay. He acquiesced to it without rage, just as he had learned as a child to accept as an unstoppable force of nature the wind which rushed through the Valley year-round and which brought him so much misery. For, he told himself, it was all out of his control. And so instead of formulating a plan to fend off the defeat which he assumed was inevitable, he rallied his thoughts toward coping with it; not toward countering the shame and the hollow illness of losing, but rather, toward escaping it, clear and total.
It’s true: The bell to commence the second round rang, his opponent stood like an injured bull across from him, bloodied and blowing hard but resigned neither to his own lassitude nor Jeremy’s superior skills, the crowd roared (as insatiable as ever), and all Jeremy could think was what disguise he would wear after the fight. That is, after he had suffered defeat in front of the uproarious crowd of people there in the flesh at the fight, and the countless multitudes who, he imagined, were as many as the sand on the seashores, watching on television from home.
Nobody, however, had expected him to lose. Not then, heading into the second round of the bout, nor ever, in reality. Above all after that first round in which Jeremy, in all thoroughness and with surgeon’s precision, dominated his foe, from pillar to post. He dodged his opponent’s charges with the agility and grace of a bullfighter, and like a bear he pounced, smothered and pawed his opponent to the precipice of defeat by TKO—technical knockout—but the bell which put an end to the first round saved his opponent, and marked like a knell the end of both Jeremy’s career as a mixed martial artist and his membership in everyday society. Although Jeremy didn’t realize it then.
He was the champion, popular among the proliferating fan base of mixed martial arts, invincible during his first 12 professional fights up to that pivotal match, and renowned throughout the world (yes, the world: mixed martial arts had blossomed that big) for the mythical condition in which he had always entered the octagon cage. “He came to each fight so well prepared,” a newspaper clipping from Jeremy’s heyday, preserved in a secret photo album by his mother, read, “that it was as if his toughest bout was not the opponent he was to face, but rather, the self-doubt and diffidence he had to surmount during the daily grind of training camp prior to fight night.”
That was correct. Jeremy had grown up heavy, borderline corpulent, awkward in every social circumstance, and with such a deflated self-esteem that we, his few childhood friends, feared back then that he might sink into the quagmire of depression. And when he trained as an adult, he would later confess, in one of the many love letters to Wendy Dos Santos returned to his address and preserved like antiques out of their envelopes by his mother, he would post that image of himself, fat and awkward, at the forefront of his mind. His workouts, conducted in the absolute solitude of his mother’s Spartan garage, where he had rebuilt himself after having his shame broadcast over the Internet in high school, were more than militant: they were tyrannical. He skipped rope, shadow-boxed, hit and kicked the heavy bag, skipped rope shadow-boxed hit and kicked the heavy bag, skipped-rope-shadow-boxed-hit-and-kicked-the-heavy-bag until he started to see black, with a unwavering and inexhaustible determination, and motivated not by glory and least of all for profit, but through fear, plain and physical. “Fear,” he would write to Wendy, “that I will once again be exposed.”
In any event, he walked into the MGM Grand Garden Arena on that night he would become convinced beyond injunction of his own defeat in tip-top shape. His physique was not just irreproachable, it was perfect, even, and he began the first round with his focus intact: cold and imperturbable, his eyes ferocious, unmoving, inhuman—“something like,” the alternative weekly newspaper would state, two years after Jeremy did in fact lose the fight and retracted into an invisible existence under his mother’s wing, “a bear wreaking vengeance for the assault of its cub.”
And he nearly won, there in the first round, if it were not for the bell which saved his opponent.
He did not know then that it was his knell. That presentiment wouldn’t come for another 30 seconds. His focus was still strong, unperturbed, impervious to any and everything outside the octagon cage, above all the crowd, and the countless multitudes who to him were like the sand of the seashore, for he knew, he would state in a letter to Wendy, that the instant he gave his thoughts over to the public surrounding him, it was over. It would be too much to bear. Because standing toe to toe in unarmed combat with another man, with nothing between them but an impartial referee and four-ounce gloves whose only purpose is to protect the knuckles of the puncher, was to him, an irreligious virgin of 28 years whose only love in life now went unrequited, the height of intimacy. In fighting Jeremy took an intense and private pleasure, and if it did not give him authentic joy it in all certainty allotted him peace. For he did not consider a fight bound by rules and a cage to be an act of bravery, as was often said, but rather, as a deceptive means to put off having to be brave in real life.
And then it happened. An echo from the caves of his past shook Jeremy as he sat on his stool—Kick his motherf--kin’ ass! a shout impregnated his focus. Kick that mutherf--ker’s ass! He looked up and to his right to see its source: two women, about Jeremy’s age, and drunk beyond recourse (save for passing out, which they would do, simultaneously, before the fight’s end), who, with their painted faces, unnatural tans, and silicone tits, looked as if they had been molded and shaped not out of the clay of the earth, but rather, out of the very fabric of our city, Las Vegas. Their belligerence was unavoidable, and while the men throughout the arena took heed to it as a pretext to stare at the girls’ surreal cleavage, projected now on the arena’s big screens, Jeremy looked because the girls were like phantoms from his past, just like the two freshman girls in his math class who, already with fake tits, had ten years earlier stood at the back of the classroom encouraging Jeremy’s assailant with birdlike screams to Kick his motherf--kin’ ass! Kick that motherf--ker’s ass!—screams that could be heard on the footage of the assault recorded on another girl’s cell-phone camcorder and broadcast on the Internet via the site YouTube the following day, the windiest recorded in Las Vegas.
That was it. That was all it took to make Jeremy mindful of the crowd, of the multitudes like the sand of the seashore watching him from their TV screens, and in that instantaneous and decisive moment he became certain that he was going to lose. It was as if he had already seen it played out over and over again on a video clip looped on YouTube. And it was okay.
He crept out into the middle of the cage with his typical stance, crouched and wide, but his focus was absent, robbed by the two profane women who were by now passed out in their seats, and he barely noticed the cold gust which seemed to overtake his body. For he was too busy thinking about the disguise he was going to wear after the fight ended. Today, he does not even remember the engagement, but his opponent connected with an overhand right to his left eye, and then an uppercut flush on his chin. His body went flaccid, and he dropped.
Silence fell over the arena in heavy drops until it was total and complete, with Jeremy lying on the ground, quiescent. He came to before the doctors converged over him, and he felt a sublime calm running warm and milky through his body. For a moment he thought himself dead, and he was happy. He would recapture that splendid feeling only when, redrawn into the safe and undisturbed privacy of his mother’s house, he lay on his back in bed and reminisced about Wendy and the secret and breathtaking little beauty mark just over her left breast. He walked out of the cage by his own power, and then he left the locker room with a fake mustache, sunglasses, and towels rolled tight under his tucked-in dress shirt to give the impression of a pot belly, complaining in a loud and ostentatious voice into the windy night outside the MGM that the fight was fixed and that that no-good bum Jeremy Minigail was a fraud.
“I couldn’t bring myself to watch that fight or any other,” Jeremy’s mom told me, displaying with all tenderness before me the clippings which documented her only son’s ephemeral but now legendary (with a couple years’ passing) career in mixed martial arts. “I succumbed to watching on the computer the one you witnessed in person in the ninth grade, and that was enough for me.”
She was obese and a bit weathered but had retained in her autumnal age the congeniality of her youth, and she continued: “You know, I shouldn’t’ve made him go to school that day. The wind had prohibited me from sleeping the night before, rattling against our windows without pause, not rhythmical like the rain does, you know, but cacophonous, so that people can’t sleep. Well, Jeremy was up, too. He said he watched from out his window the gusts uproot shrubs in the front yard, send trash cans rolling down the street like mountain boulders, and even turn a yawning from the parking lot of the apartment complex next door into a flying guillotine. It was true, too: the weatherman said the following morning that the winds exceeded 70 miles per hour. And so Jeremy asked if he could stay home from school. My gut told me to assent. I knew how the wind vexed him. But I was a fool: I listened to this here noggin of mine and it reminded me that it was mid-April, less than 45 days before the end of school, and I thought he needed to tough it out down the home stretch. Back then, you know, Jeremy wasn’t very tough: He was soft, more feminine than anything. But he accepted my judgment without cavil or complaint, and he even declined my offer for a ride to school, setting off on foot, alone, with the resigned face of someone about to encounter his evil hour. You know what I mean?
“I wouldn’t find out until later that he got beat up, in front of you and everyone else. He didn’t tell me nothing when he got home that day. Which was okay, because I’m a mother and so sooner or later God tells me everything that’s going on in my child’s life, and I knew that Jeremy had always cherished his privacy, loved it and protected it as a bear does its cub, and so I didn’t quiz him any further.
“Then the girl who recorded Jeremy getting beat up with her cell phone posted it on the Internet, on YouTube, and it absolutely scandalized him. Jeremy was more than tortured: he didn’t want go on with another day of his life. He withdrew himself from me, life, everything, and no power on heaven or Earth could get him to return to school.
“You know, as a mother there’s nothing worse than that feeling of utter impotence, when you see your child hurting—your only child—the boy you were put in charge by right of birth to protect, whom you pledged while he was feeding off your own breast to preserve even at the cost of your own life, and there is nothing you can do to assuage his pain, because no matter whom you sue—the boy who pummeled your son, the school which allowed the pummeling to occur, the girl who videotaped it on her cell phone and broadcast it across the Internet, the site on which it was posted—and no matter what kind of revenge or justice you seek, your boy is still hurting, like a wounded bird, and there’s nothing you can do.
“That’s in large part why I never watched one of his professional fights, even though everyone said he was the best, unbeatable even. I could’ve hardened my stomach to handle it, yes, and I could’ve sedated my nerves to endure it, indeed, but I knew there was nothing I could do if he were to get hurt in the ring, and that ... that ... that, you know, is just unbearable. As a mother, that is unbearable. And so I distanced myself body and spirit from all his fights.
“I had been forced to watch the one posted on YouTube. I had to see for myself just what had happened—what had caused my baby to retreat into his cocoon, not to reemerge for a solid three years. I could hardly stand it. Not just that that other boy whom Jeremy didn’t even know kept pummeling away on the back of Jeremy’s head, even though Jeremy did nothing to fight back, just kind of flopped and squirmed on the ground like a big beached fish, but that you and everyone else just watched, and some girls out of the cell-phone’s view actually encouraged it. You know, I couldn’t get over that. It wasn’t that my only son was beaten. He could’ve recovered from that. What caused his ruin was that he was violated.
“It seems people can’t fathom this in today’s world, where the cell phones and the Internets have made privacy unfashionable, something we used to hold sacred. Women bear their breasts to the world, men publish their innermost secrets for money, and no one can comprehend why Jeremy suffers.
“It wasn’t until Wendy Dos Santos started returning those beautiful letters of his that I learned what had provoked the fight. I don’t know if you already know this, but earlier that morning, before your guys’ first-period math class, Jeremy’s assailant had approached him and Wendy, who were exchanging kisses behind the portables, and he started calling Wendy names, fat jokes, crude and sexual in nature. Jeremy stood there and let it happen, too afraid when it came time to be brave to actually prove bravery. Wendy never forgave him for it, and I can’t blame her, which is why I read those returned letters without a drop of rancor.
“They had been dating since the beginning of the school year. Like Jeremy, she was on the heavy side, and shy because of it. But she, as Jeremy liked to say, had the smile of a movie star, and he adored her. They drew so close to each other during the first six months of school that she gave him the rare and immeasurable privilege of seeing the little mole above her left breast, and he made her happy with romantic stories about how one day they would quit the human race together, to which neither had ever felt a belonging, and live in their own little created world. After Jeremy failed to uphold her honor, she quit him, forever, and when he went to his first class of the day, the boy who would beat him up on video knew by then he was easy game.”
Perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps out of sheer perversion, I went on YouTube as soon as I returned home from Jeremy’s house to see if that recording from our ninth-grade math class was still up and viewable. It wasn’t. But a search under his name on the site turned up more than 20 pages of videos dedicated to Jeremy Minigail’s mixed martial arts career.