6. Bloody Boxing
Last night as I sat in the bar with May and others, the television mounted above our heads began to show something I can only tentatively describe as bare-knuckle boxing. I realized this because I looked across the table in the middle of a sentence to find May staring upward with his eyes wide and his mouth open, while on the screen two muscled men locked their legs around each other and pressed their foreheads together.
By the third round we were all watching. One of the boxers had a wound along his hairline; it looked as though a bit of his scalp had pulled off and was flapping as he moved. I’ve never seen anyone bleed the way he did. He dripped blood all over his opponent’s face and in long trails over the mat. His white-blonde hair turned pink, and then pinker. He bled so much he made a little pool around the two of them, smeared in broad red strokes. He poured his blood onto the ground.
And all I could think to myself as I watched him, jaw-dropped, was “Oh god, I hope they make the boxers take STD tests.”
