Caged Warrior (9781423186595) Read online

  I wiped my face with a towel and thought about how I’d just inched a step closer to prime time. All the major warriors in MMA started like this, as backyard brawlers with something to prove. After all, the recipe to arrive as a big-name, big-money draw wasn’t some sort of secret; everyone knew what needed to be done to make it to the top. A fighter had to post a string of W’s, earn a local rep, become a dependable payday for the gamblers, and then score a couple of breakout wins against a few high-quality opponents—the more violent the victories, the better.

  That was the path to follow. That was the path I was on.

  Like every sport, a nonstop hunger existed in MMA for new stars. Once I was old enough to fight legally, there’s no doubt I’d get my chance under the bright lights on the big stage. I just knew it in my bones. Spill enough enemy blood, and the word gets out.

  Yep, one day I’d be a main attraction.

  Satisfied with what he’d been handed, my father turned to Weasel.

  “All right, you good.”

  “I told ya. Did I tell ya? I told ya.”

  “Shut the hell up, Weasel.”

  My dad began sifting through the thick wad of cash. I watched as he rifled past the hundreds, past the fifties, and down to the bottom of the pile where the smaller bills were buried.

  “For you,” he said handing me four twenties and two tens. Slowly, I took the money.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me, son,” my father said wiping his nose on his sleeve. I watched as he took the winnings, folded the bills in half and stuffed the fat stack of cash into his pocket. “I love you.”

  TWO

  I’m the only son of the great Damien “Demon” Daniels, a welterweight boxer who boasted a professional record of 28–2 on the day that I was born.

  By the time I turned three, his record had dropped to 28–9. After losing to the world famous Sugar Ray Leonard in his first and only title fight, my dad got TKO’d in the fifth by Thomas “the Hitman” Hearns as he was trying to climb his way back up the rankings. Then, a year later, my father got “knocked the hell out” by Marvelous Marvin Hagler and suddenly, the great Damien Demon Daniels was no longer great.

  Soon my father was being used by boxing promoters as a tune-up fighter for the next round of up-and-comers. Seven straight losses after his title shot had taken him from “potential world champion” to “tomato can.”

  And drug addict. And alcoholic. And gambling, whore-chasing, thieving, lying parolee who was constantly on probation. After his last ugly Round Two defeat at the hands of a no-name Cuban, it wasn’t long before my father was out of boxing entirely. However, a new sport was starting to emerge, and Demon Daniels, being a tough guy, felt cocky about being able to knock the block off of any ol’ street fighter that dared to get in the ring with a “genuine” professional.

  Way my father saw it, there’d be no chance a non-boxer could ever compete with a fighter who possessed hand speed, an ability to throw crisp combinations, and knockout power in both hands.

  Ten thousand dollars for the taking if my dad could claim victory in this thing no one had yet really heard of called “The Octagon.” An undersized, not-too-muscular fighter who’d stopped through Detroit while on tour across America to raise awareness for his Brazilian family’s specialized style of no-holds-barred street fighting would be his opponent.

  Royce Gracie, now famous but back then a total unknown, took my dad to the ground twenty-two seconds into their fight, and my father, witnessing his first ever wristlock—from the wrong end of witnessing a wristlock—tapped out before he’d lasted even a full minute.

  That was his introduction to mixed martial arts.

  That was also when he decided that I was going to be a world champion. But not as a boxer as he’d originally planned. Instead, he’d breed me to one day dominate the exploding new world of MMA superfighting.

  All this makes me a second-generation warrior, the first of my kind. Gen number one of MMA fighters were all crossovers who came from other schools of combat. Some came from wrestling; some, like my dad, from boxing; some from karate; and a lot—the best—came from BJJ, Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

  But I’m a purebred. I come from MMA, a sport where all the styles are meshed, mashed, and blended together in order to create the ultimate fighting machine. Conquest in the cage is what I’ve been trained to achieve since the crib, and my father swears to anyone who will listen that by the time my career is over no one will have ever done it better.

  Pound for pound, I will be the best.

  “Who’s tough?”

  “I’m tough.”

  “How tough?”

  “So tough.”

  “And why are we tough?” I asked, a look of steely determination in my gaze.

  Gemma, wearing her hair in pigtails, looked at me with big, soft eyes. “’Cause that’s the way we get out,” she answered, a large, dimpled smile on her face.

  “Gimme a kiss,” I said. My sister pecked me on the cheek. “Didya have a good day?”

  “Awesome!” she answered with a skip in her step. Gemma slipped her tiny hand into the soft part of my palm and we began walking down the sidewalk, home from Harriet Tubman Elementary School. “First, we talked about caterpillars and how they form cocoons so they can turn into butterflies. Then, we got to color all these shapes but I already knew all the names of the shapes so Miss Marsha let me trace the letters of the alphabet but I already knew that, too. Can we get a chinchilla?”

  “What?”

  “Miss Marsha says that on Friday we’re going to pet chinchillas and I’ve never petted a chinchilla before,” Gemma continued without missing a beat. I swear my sister’s tongue is like a long-distance runner that never breaks stride. “I petted a goat once. And a salamander, too. Salamanders are cold-blooded but they have moist skin. I wonder what the chinchilla’s name is. Can we get one?”

  “Nope.”

  “Pleeeeease, Doc?”

  “Nope,” I answered. “Entirely a nope.”

  “Not fair,” Gemma replied.

  My sister is the only person on the planet who gets to call me Doc. Actually, my mom used to call me that, too. Before she ran out on us a few years ago, that is. When she left, she took the only source of steady income, the only source of steady meals, the only source of steady smiles, faith, or warmth under our roof, too.

  Just one day: Poof! Diss-a-peeeer’d.

  “But why can’t we get a chinchilla, Doc? Chinchillas are nice and they’re furry and they sometimes eat lettuce and I could even brush its teeth.”

  “Doesn’t kindergarten do hamsters anymore?”

  “Now that I think of it, we need two chinchillas and a carton of ice cream. Remember that time I had a scoop of mint chip, but there weren’t enough chips so I had to complain and the owner gave me a whole bunch of extra rainbow sprinkles because he ran out of chocolate chips? I bet chinchillas would like mint chip ice cream even if it didn’t have rainbow sprinkles.”

  I’m not sure Gemma’s mouth stopped motoring the entire twenty-minute walk home down East Seven Mile, a street famous in D-town for all the wrong reasons. Gemma’s hand never left mine, not for a second. Too many monsters in the area to even count.

  We crossed the highway overpass, turned left at the graffiti-covered Dumpster, and entered through the ragged entryway of our four-story redbrick building. The apartment door, once white, hadn’t been painted in years. A short walk down stale-smelling halls and up two flights of moldy, chipped wooden stairs brought us to apartment 303A.

  Home sweet home it wasn’t.

  I unlocked the door, and we got straight to business, unzipping our coats, tossing off our backpacks, falling immediately into our regular routine of snack, homework, and then artwork for her while I prepared supper. After dinner, it would be bath, book, brush teeth, prayers, kiss, bed for Gem. Mon
day through Friday, five days a week, this was the plan, and the plan was never in question.

  I love routines. I’m a creature of routines. Routines are our way out of living a life that we share with roaches, rats, addicts, and gunfire. Fact is, when you sleep sideways on a sheetless couch and shower in a bathroom where the hot water hardly gets warm on days when it snows—and in the Motor City, it snows a lot—while your younger sister wears used sneakers that you buy at Goodwill and doesn’t even own a bicycle, well…that’ll make a person hard in all the places a heart is supposed to be soft.

  But the right routine can give us wings to fly away. Fly to a place from which we ain’t never coming back. This is why I train like an animal. Discipline is the gasoline of dreams.

  Sacrifice? Don’t mind it. Pain? As they say in the gym, pain is just weakness leaving the body. Add it all up and my weekday schedule is 100 percent locked. I rise at four a.m. to do two hours worth of roadwork, and then I’m at Loco’z every day after school for three more hours, sparring, working on technique, sweating, and bleeding.

  Without fail.

  At night from nine to ten thirty p.m. I hit the kettlebell I keep underneath the kitchen table, alternating muscle group sets depending on the day of the week or the injury I’m nursing. After a late-night shower, my own prayers to a God I’m not even sure is really listening, and ice packs if needed, it’s off to bed by eleven, ’cause less than five hours’ sleep doesn’t give my body enough time to rest and rebuild itself for training the next day.

  Everything in my world revolves around routine. Including Gemma. Every day I am the one who drops her off at school, and every day I am the one who picks her up.

  Without fail.

  And every day we begin and end with the same words.

  “Who’s tough?”

  “I’m tough.”

  “How tough?”

  “So tough.”

  “And why are we tough?”

  “’Cause that’s the way we get out,” she answers.

  “Gimme a kiss,” I tell her. And she does.

  These words are the music of our relationship.

  Sad as it may sound, Gemma’s not just my only sibling; she’s my only friend. At my high school, well…I’m kind of a loner. Probably ’cause not that many other kids my age have to deal with all the stuff I have to deal with, being the main money earner, doing all the shopping, cooking, and so on. Me and them, I guess we just don’t really relate.

  “Hey, Gem, I got an idea.”

  “Chinchilla?”

  “No,” I said. “But, well…whaddya say we go get pizza?”

  She stopped, her purple crayon frozen mid-stroke.

  “You’re gonna eat pizza?” Gemma knew all too well that proteins and vegetables with limited carbs and virtually no starches were entirely my thing. One of the guys I used to train with down at Loco’z, a black belt named Ripper, introduced me to this concept called Paleolithic eating last year. Basically, it’s where a fighter eats like a caveman.

  “If it wasn’t available to them, it’s not available to you,” he told me. “In a hunter-gatherer’s world you need a hunter-gatherer’s diet.”

  I tried it. Within two weeks I saw how my body was stronger and recovered faster from both training and beatings. Gemma knows I not only work out like a crazy person, but I eat like one, too.

  But she’s a good kid. A really good kid, and sometimes when I look around and see that she’s got no mom and can’t play in the streets once the sun starts to set and doesn’t ever complain about all the toys she doesn’t have, well…she deserves a break now and then, don’t she?

  “O’ course, I love pizza,” I told her. “Matter of fact, I’m gonna have pepperoni on it, too.”

  “Oh yeah,” she answered, her eyes lighting up like a Christmas tree. “Well, I’m gonna have a chocolate sundae afterward with hot fudge.”

  “Oh really?” I said. “Then I’m gonna have a piece of cheesecake, a slice so big it’ll take me two forks just to get one bite.”

  “I’m getting a side of meatballs,” Gemma hollered. Meatballs in red spaghetti sauce was her favorite food of all time.

  “I’m having root beer.”

  “Me, too!” she replied.

  I closed the kitchen cupboard from which I had been about to snag a frying pan. “Grab your jacket. Race you to the door.”

  “Can we also play some of those games, Doc?” Gemma softly asked, a hopeful look in her eye.

  “You mean, play that machine in the restaurant where you stick dollar bills inside and try to grab a teddy bear but that clutcher thing is rigged so that no matter how many bucks you feed into the stupid game, no one ever wins?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, nodding her head up and down.

  I smiled. “Sure. And tonight,” I added as I reached for my secret can of protein powder where I kept all my extra savings after I bought the groceries and the medicine and stuff like that, “tonight I am scoring you a teddy.”

  “YAY!” she shouted.

  My hand fumbled upward for my secret cash stash. From my tippy-toes, I pulled the can off the shelf. It felt light. I opened the plastic top and looked inside.

  My eyes dropped. Immediately, Gemma knew what had happened.

  When you live with an addict, it always happened. Had happened a hundred thousand times before. Slowly, quietly, I set the can back on the shelf. Gemma began to unzip her jacket.

  Without a complaint or even a comment, Gem returned to the kitchen table and picked up her purple crayon. Me, I trudged over to the fridge in order to see what could be rustled up.

  Coupla eggs, a few tomatoes, some noodles in butter for Gemma. That’d be our dinner.

  Wouldn’t be the first time, neither.

  Deep breath, dude. Deep breath.

  Later that night I dimmed the light in Gemma’s room. Sure, I may have been sleeping on a torn-up couch in the living room of a crappy two-bedroom, one-bath apartment, but damn if she would.

  “Who’s tough?”

  “I’m tough.”

  “How tough?”

  “So tough.”

  “And why are we tough?” I asked. Her head lying softly on the pillow, she looked up at me with big, tender eyes.

  “’Cause that’s the way we get out.”

  A lump formed in my throat.

  Not wanting her to see me weak and vulnerable I lowered my eyes and double-checked her blanket to make sure she was tucked in good and warm.

  “Gimme a kiss,” I said.

  She did, and I closed the light.

  THREE

  I’ve never been inside any of those schools that you see on TV shows, the kind where most of the students are white, all of ’em got up-to-date books, and the hallways look like they just got a fresh coat of paint over the summer. My school is on Fenkell Avenue.

  You wanna see real D-town, come to Fenkell. Not at night of course. Tourists don’t last long on Fenkell once the sun sets. But come during the day, and the streets’ll be filled with all sorts of local sights: noontime hookers, broken-down, toothless old men who limp, liquor store after liquor store after liquor store. The streets of Fenkell are bad.

  Fenkell High is worse.

  Some of my classes have sixty-two kids in ’em. With one teacher. That’s when the teacher even shows up. And forget about subs; they just jam us into the cafeteria and have us wait and do nothing whenever one of our “dedicated staff members” calls in sick. Place is a complete joke. A person can buy drugs, shoot dice, score a weapon, or fence stolen property in the halls. And speaking of the halls, the things that some of our lady scholars do in the hidden corners, well…I swear, the place is more fit for demolition than education.

  What’s extra sad is that Fenkell High is being used as a combination middle and high school these days because Fenkell Midd
le was closed by the Department of Health. Asbestos in the ceiling tiles or something like that. The potential for youngsters to be poisoned forced them to cram fifty-six hundred students under one roof as a “temporary” solution.

  This is the third year of that “temporary” solution. Some schools have trophy cases and vending machines on campus; Fenkell has dried bloodstains and used condoms.

  A loud bell signaling the end of fourth period pierced the air like a state-of-emergency alert. “Hey, McCutcheon, stick around a sec, would ya?”

  Mr. Freedman was always asking me to “stick around a sec.” Guy’s my science teacher, the type of person who never misses a day of work. Man could have the flu, the mumps, tuberculosis, plus be missing a kidney, and he’d still show up the next day with a lesson plan on the inner workings of organic molecules.

  “You see this?” he asked holding out a sheet of paper. Mr. Freedman, the gray hairs starting to outnumber the black ones around his temple area, always wore a tie, always wore a watch, and always looked a person straight in the eye when he spoke to them.

  “So?”

  “A perfect score on your anatomy quiz,” he said. “A hundred percent.”

  “Lucky, I guess.”

  “Lucky?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, well, you know...”

  Fact is, anatomy’s easy for me. Like I coulda smoked that quiz if there were three times as many questions. After all, I’d been studying the human body for years. Part of the job description in my line of work and all.

  “Not luck, son. Brains.” Mr. Freedman used the eraser end of his pencil to point at my forehead. “Tell me,” he asked moving the eraser downward to point at my swollen cheek. “What happened to your face?”

  “Skateboarding.”

  “Skateboarding?”

  “Uh-huh. Skateboarding,” I said.

  He nodded, scanning me top to bottom. There was a long silence as he measured me up.

  “You coming to the auditorium tonight?”