Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,14
Serena told me that a girl could get a hundred dollars just to fight and five hundred dollars to win. The steep difference between winner pay and loser pay was designed to weed out the dreamers and wannabes.
“Really? Five hundred?” I’d said. The next week I’d gone back alone. I wondered if Serena had known all along that I would.
I learned pretty quickly that there was more to the Slaughterhouse than just fighting. I’d had good boxing instruction at West Point, where I’d also learned some submission moves, and I’d carelessly assumed that those things alone would make me a crowd favorite. I’d been wrong.
Jack, one of the two brothers who ran things, called me into his office early on to ask two things of me. First, he wanted me to improve my kicks.
“You box great for a chick,” he’d said, “but if the guys out there just wanted to see boxing, they’d turn on the TV. They come here to see a mix of styles, street moves and Asian stuff, and kicks are especially a crowd pleaser. You’re making enough money—go find a dojo you like and learn to mix up your moves a little.”
“All right,” I’d said.
“The other thing is,” he’d said, “do a little something with your looks. Hey, don’t get hot. This place isn’t all about good fighting. It’s a spectacle. The guys out there aren’t gonna get behind you if you’re dressed like a college girl on her way to lift weights. They’d rather watch a hot girl with sloppy moves. It doesn’t matter how good your chops are—if you can’t get the crowd behind you, I can’t keep giving you fights.”
Jack and I probably never quite saw eye to eye on how I should look when I came down to the ring, but I made some changes. About once a month, I went to a small salon off Melrose, redolent with the scent of chemicals and pulsating with Eurodisco music, and I let the girls brighten and streak my hair. I got temporary tattoos, flames up my arms from wrist to elbow, a sunburst rising over my tailbone. Sometimes I thumbed black kohl thickly under my eyes to create an angry, deadened gaze.
As Jack predicted, the guys liked it. But everything I changed about my hair and body was short-term; I never did anything permanent. I suppose a shrink would say it was my way of declaring that none of this touched the essential me.
I didn’t always win. In particular I remember one girl, white like me, from somewhere out in the Central Valley. Five-foot-eleven, hard fat, staring at me with the impassive gaze of a bear looking at a wildlife photographer. That was one of my hundred-dollar nights.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to hurt the next day, win or lose, but Serena always had Vicodin.
“Come on, baby! Head kick! Kick to the head!”
Being a good fighter, it’s not any one thing. Technique is a lot, of course. But size is, too, because reach lets you hit opponents while staying out of range, and weight lets you put more force into the blows. It’s just physics: Force equals mass times velocity.
Kat threw her first hook, and I dropped low over my heels, letting her fist graze above my head. The men whistled and jeered.
Experience matters. That’s a close cousin to technique, but not the same thing, because experience also means a fighter who knows that bleeding stops, bruises heal, pain goes away. That lets you keep your head when things aren’t going your way.
Kat dug a low left hook into my ribs. I couldn’t get out of the way in time and had to absorb it. It wasn’t a very hard blow. Good. If that was all she had, it wasn’t enough.
A lot of people think anger helps. I tend to think that’s a myth. An angry fighter with no skills may throw more punches, but flailing blindly will get you knocked out fast.
Confident now from landing a blow, Kat stayed in close, trying again to hammer my ribs. Mistake. I threw both my arms around her neck, taking advantage of her proximity.
The other thing that doesn’t help as much as people think? Brains. You hear about “thinking fighters,” but those individuals are rare and very, very good. Maybe, for them, time seems to slow and they can anticipate, plan on the fly. I can’t; most of the guys I know can’t. The firstie who’d coached me and the rest of my company’s boxing