Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(40)
If the color neon green had a smell, it would be composed of the odor of nervous boys jacked up on adrenaline, beer, and industrial disinfectant. And that’s exactly the scent hanging in the air of the main auditorium of the Carl Perkins Civic Center as Delia and I enter OCTAGON VALOR XTREME 16. (I added the XTREME part. It fit.) Testosterone fogs the large space, leaving an oily film on everything.
We immediately stick out for not wearing too-tight T-shirts with unimaginably ornate and bedazzled crucifixes, raptors, old-timey warrior helmets, swords, vaguely Japanese imagery, and skulls splayed across them like they were blasted there with a shotgun full of silver paint. Peppered in and around the images are words like ARMAGEDDON, VENGEANCE, VENOM, HONOR, and WARRIOR. They follow the design philosophy of “more is more.” These T-shirts tend to be paired with jeans sporting entirely too much stitching on the back pockets. I wonder if that’s so the wearer always has extra thread handy for the impromptu suturing of a fight wound.
Then there are the terrible tattoos snaking up arms: barbed wire loops around biceps, tiger and koi sleeves, pat inspirational sayings (THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER; THE MORE YOU SWEAT IN PRACTICE, THE LESS YOU BLEED IN BATTLE), and ghoulish portraits of what I can only assume are children and deceased relatives.
“This is so goofy,” Delia says, taking in the scene.
“It’s as cheesy and weird so far as I was hoping it would be,” I say.
“I can’t believe Lawson thrives in this culture.”
“I mean, I can. He seems really into honor and such.”
“Is honor something you can be into?”
“Why not?”
“It sounds weird. The knights were very into honor.”
“Sounds fine to me.”
Delia shrugs. “I guess. But it kinda sounds like the knights dabbled in honor.”
“Like they would do some honor on the weekends?”
“You have an honor boat you take out on Sundays to go waterskiing.”
As we make our way to seats as close to the octagon as we can find, I scan the crowd for the guys I saw in the YouTube video, who I thought were Lawson’s brothers.
“I do kind of love this,” Delia says. “I’m excited for the gratuitous violence we’re about to witness.”
“Oh, that’s the part I thought you would like the best,” I say.
“I’m really responding most of all to the general cheesiness.”
We’re not the only girls in attendance, but men heavily outnumber women. Our fellow attendees treat us with a mix of exaggerated chivalry—like we’re maidens at a joust—and the expected catcalls. It’s nicer than what I anticipated, which was only catcalls.
“Are you so excited to see Lawson fight?” Delia asks.
I’m careful to inject studied nonchalance into my voice, lest Delia get the wrong idea. “Yeah, it’ll be cool. He does such great work with boards, it’ll be exciting to see what he can do with a rib cage.”
“I hear roundhouse kicks are doing amazing things with the human face these days.”
“Speaking of, I’m gonna let him know we made it.”
Me: Yo dude, we’re here.
Lawson: You came!!!!
Me: I said I would, doofus!!!
Lawson: People don’t always do stuff they say.
Me: I’m big on promises. Are you psyched?
Lawson: Little nervous. The guy I was gonna fight had to drop out with an injury, so they subbed in a new guy who’s got a better record and might be harder to beat.
Me: Aww you’ll do great.
I nearly say “I’ve seen you fight,” but no need for that right now.
Lawson: I gotta go do some stretching and warm up. I’m glad you came! I’ll look for you!
Me: Cool. We’ll talk after? When you’ve won?
Lawson: For sure.
The fifty-something, pasty, wilted-corncob-looking guy sitting next to Delia has slipped in to engage her in conversation. Delia emits some pheromone that attracts weirdos. There was this dude at school who liked her, and she told him jokingly that she’d go to a dance with him if he’d pee his gym shorts on purpose during PE, and he did and got sent home. (She didn’t go to the dance with him.) “No,” Delia says to the guy, who has a face even a mother would admit, in all candor, was not her best work, and whose gray goatee looks like a bedraggled mouse humping his chin. “I’m saying that if I were to eat something at any time of the day, I would eat it at breakfast. A salad is something I will not eat, no matter what time of day it is. Therefore, I will not eat it for breakfast. Pizza is something I will eat. Therefore, I’ll eat it for breakfast.” Delia casts a rescue me look in my direction.
“You and your friend can come to Buffalo Wild Wings with us after. Our treat,” Corncob says, nodding at Delia and me and then back at his son (?) and/or friend (?), who looks like a sub sandwich that was dipped in Elmer’s Glue and then propped up in front of a fan through which someone had tossed handfuls of hair clippings.
“We are literally in high school for like two more weeks,” Delia says.
Corncob shrugs and gives a grunt that somehow says, The only time I’ve ever willingly read something was to look up age-of-consent laws.
“Also we’re a super-specific kind of vegetarian where we don’t eat any kind of animal’s wings,” I say. “No bird, bat, cockroach. No kind of wings.”