Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,20

wasn’t because I was scared.

Marketing tweeted until midnight (#areyouready for #StrikeDown) and by one in the morning most people had left, exhausted and wired. Monday would be for finishing touches, Tuesday morning was reserved for media behind-the-scenes and advance hype, then the opening ceremonies and preliminaries would kick off on Tuesday night.

I walked home around two, retracing my steps from almost twenty-four hours earlier. Most of the Mill District buildings were shuttered, resting before the dawn of the new week. A few aimless drunks asked for change, one woman sat at a bus stop, her hard eyes scanning the shadows, and a siren echoed in the direction of Little Mogadishu, but otherwise the city could have been mine. I’d never felt that way growing up in Chicago, where I was just one more bee in the constantly buzzing hive. Here, though, the parks breathed with you, the river flooded your veins. Minneapolis made you believe the world was within your grasp.

It was the first thing that struck me when I flew in to see Logan after we met in Las Vegas, twenty years ago. The downtown skyline seemed quaint, small enough to reach your arms around and take for your own. I’d already done my research, though. I’d learned the history of this town. Empires had begun here and I knew—from the first morning Logan and I splattered the walls of a test kitchen with juice and leaves, sweat and heat—that Strike would rise to join their ranks.

I relocated to Minneapolis within months of that trip. Logan took me to the courthouse to “make an honest man of me” and I moved into her shitty north-side apartment where she trained and slept and seemingly hadn’t vacuumed in ten years.

“The rent is dirt cheap,” she’d shrugged. “And I’m hardly ever here.”

I made sure of that over the next few years. I opened an office slash personal gym for Logan downtown where we spent twelve hours a day, developing product lines and advertising campaigns. We traveled to every fitness expo across the country, converting fans into customers, and the fan base Logan had was astounding. They waited outside studios when she did television interviews. They mobbed her at title fights. The volume of email and physical letters she received on a weekly basis put Santa to shame.

I’d never been around a true celebrity before, but Logan just laughed and said, “Honey, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

We started with energy drinks and recovery shakes. In 1999, no one wanted to hear that we used organic ingredients sourced in the heartland. No one cared about probiotics or sustainability. They wanted to see Logan—to be her—so we put her eye on the package, staring over the top of her boxing glove and hungering for the fight, and told the country they could have a piece of the legend.

For some people, though, a piece wasn’t enough. Two years after I moved to Minneapolis we got home to find a man had broken into the apartment.

Rat faced and rail-thin, I thought at first he was an addict looking for money, but the second he saw Logan, he started pleading, whining that he was her soul mate and crying about how she’d used and betrayed him.

When he lunged at Logan, she delivered a cross punch to his jaw that cracked his teeth together and sent him reeling to the floor. His expression froze in a strangled mix of pain and ecstasy. Blood began trickling out of his mouth onto the carpet.

Then he pulled out a knife and stabbed himself with it.

He didn’t die. Logan stomped on his hand and I jumped on top of him before he could hit any major arteries. The police found several pairs of Logan’s underwear, a sports bra, a set of her hand wraps, and a half-filled vial of Rohypnol—the date rape drug—on the guy after he was taken to the hospital. We didn’t have the language then that we do now. Now he would be diagnosed with Celebrity Worship syndrome on a borderline-pathological scale. Back then the cop just said I was lucky that lover-boy hadn’t gone over jealous and attacked me first, then he frowned and advised us not to eat anything in the apartment.

Logan and I had been of one mind on everything up until that point: Strike, marriage, life. I’d even agreed to living in that shitty place because it let us invest more back into the company, but I refused to let her stay there after that night.