He also never pressured me on the details of what I owed and to who. But this time, I had to let him in. The shit those niggas pulled by popping up at my crib, he had Gutta heated. He wanted to kill Tavarus, and I had to talk him down. Now wasn’t the time to get our hands dirty. It was too much on the line right now. He was my brother from another and anytime I felt disrespected, he wanted to immediately handle it. He kept saying that he’d let it go for now, but he was gone make Tavarus feel him. That was the thing about Gutta that most people who didn’t know him wouldn’t understand. For as hard as he was, for as gangsta he was, and for as much as he moved in the street; behind all that, he handled things in ways that always had my best interest and safety at heart. He was the most solid person I had ever had in my corner. Not just in a cage. In life.
Finally, it was time for me to make some shit shake and get myself out of debt. The night of the fight I stood in that basement with my eyes closed and got quiet inside myself.
—
The streets had been crowned me the heavyweight, the hardest hitter in my section. I’d never had a nigga come close to beating my ass. Not once in my life. Not in the streets with my bare hands, not in a cage with gloves on, not nowhere and not never. That was something I said with full confidence because it was just the truth and everybody in my hood knew it. That had been my story since I was a little kid. I was born to fight no matter how crazy that sounded to somebody who didn’t know me. When people mentioned my name it was always attached to somebody I had already laid out. Niggas was still talking about fights I had two years ago like they just happened last weekend. OGs on the block who didn’t respect nothing or nobody would nod when I walked past because they knew what my hands was capable of. Women wanted to be around me. Niggas either wanted to be me or wanted to test me and either way my name stayed in somebody’s mouth.
I was that nigga and I knew it. Anybody who knew me knew it too. And I didn’t say that thinking I was better than nobody because I came from the bottom, just the same as everybody around me. What I did know was that my hands couldn’t be touched and that was in my blood. My father passed that down to me and my brothers but thankfully they had gone different routes with their lives.
But even with all of that, tonight was different and I couldn’t shake it no matter how many times I told myself it wasn’t nothing to worry about. I knew this fight was different from everything I had done before and I knew I had everything to worry about tonight. Not just Champ. Not just the forty thousand. But Tavarus’s clock sitting over my head with one day left on it after tonight. Every fight I had ever been in I was fighting to win. Tonight I was fighting to stay alive and that wasa different kind of pressure than anything I had ever carried into a cage.
The basement was packed wall to wall and hot as hell, smelling like liquor, weed and too many bodies in a space that wasn’t meant to hold all this. Concrete floors, chain link cage, no air moving anywhere in the room, just raw energy getting louder by the minute. Dice games were going hard in the back corner, money changing hands fast, side bets on top of side bets with niggas pulling out knots and throwing numbers around like it was nothing. The crowd had that specific kind of energy that only showed up when people knew they was about to see something that wasn’t gonna be forgotten. This was not just a fight, but a moment.
Damn near every dollar in this building was on Champ. Not me. Champ.
I heard my name getting called from a few different spots in the crowd. People hyping me, women screaming, niggas posted up talking loud like they had been in my corner their whole lives. I knew exactly how that worked. You win and they was always with you from jump. You lose and they always had a feeling it wasn’t gonna go your way. I stopped letting that bother me years ago. The streets didn’t do loyalty. They did entertainment and I was tonight’s entertainment either way. I wasn’t out here fighting for none of them anyway.
I fought for Melo and Mazi. Always had and always would.
Forty thousand dollars to whoever was left standing and I needed every dollar of it and then some. My brothers were eighteen years old and I had worked too hard and given up too much to let them end up out here in these streets with me. They deserved better than what we grew up in and college was thatbetter and I was going to make sure they had everything they needed to stay there no matter what that cost me personally.
This fight was part of that cost.
Champ’s record would have scared a regular nigga off from taking this fight. He had all those damn knockouts and most of his opponents never got close to winning. In underground circles his name carried the kind of weight that made conversations get quiet when it came up. People talked about his right hand like it was in a whole different category from regular punching — like getting hit with it was something that stayed in your body after the fight was over. I had been hearing about this man for years and I set this fight up anyway because when Gutta told me the number I jumped on it before he even finished the sentence. By the time I understood what I was fully walking into I was already locked in and backing out wasn’t in my DNA. Never had been.
But I wasn’t gonna stand here and act like Champ wasn’t a real problem because he was. Every other man I’d faced I could look in their eyes during the stare-down and already see the doubt sitting in there. Already see them working to convince themselves they had a chance at winning against me. Champ didn’t have none of that when I looked at him earlier. He looked back at me like I was already handled and his body just had to catch up to what his mind had already concluded.
That didn’t sit with me as fear. It sat with me as confirmation that I had to go in that cage and not give this man a single second to breathe. I wasn’t gonna tolerate a nigga looking at me like I was an easy win. It had never been easy with me and tonight wasn’t about to be the first time. Just like he’d knocked niggas out, I had done the exact same shit, just on a smaller scale.This was about to change the game for me, and I was gonna be booking bigger fights after that.
Fear wasn’t something I carried anymore. It got taken out of me the night I stood in a parking lot at five years old and watched my father get killed. He got killed right in front of me while his killer made a call to someone named BJ afterwards, letting him know that the job was done. I lost my whole world in front of my eyes that night, then felt the whole world just keep moving afterwards like my father, Hood never existed. Like he didn’t just matter. After that nothing in this life could shake me the way that night already had. I knew what it felt like to lose something that couldn’t be replaced no matter how hard you fought for it. So no, I didn’t fear Champ. Champ was just a man and I had never met a man I couldn’t beat.
What I was going to do tonight was walk into that cage and strip that name right off him. He could be Champ going in but he wasn’t going to be Champ coming out. That was settled in my head before I ever laced up and it wasn’t changing.
Gutta was behind me working my shoulders with both hands and that nigga grip was like concrete the way it always had been. Me and Gutta had been rocking since we came into this world. Our mamas were sisters who grew up in the same house on Delmont before life took them in different directions and that made us cousins by blood but cousin was too small a word for what we actually were. I had my own brothers and I loved them more than anything but Gutta was different. We came up through the same exact trenches, same block, same losses, same everything. There wasn’t a part of my life he didn’t know about and there wasn’t a part of his I didn’t know. He was one of the only people on this earth I trusted all the way without having to think about it. I grew up believing that as long as you had realbrothers you didn’t need friends and Gutta was my brother in every way that mattered.
He started doing my corner because he believed in my hands before I did. He used to watch me fight in the streets when we were teenagers and tell me I was sitting on something real, that if I ever pointed it in the right direction it could take us both somewhere we had never been. He taught himself everything about corners from scratch because he was not going to let me do this without him. There was no conversation about it. He just decided he was going to be there and showed up and became exactly what I needed him to be. He always said fighting was going to be the thing that got us up out the hood and he held onto that even during the stretches when I wasn’t thinking about nothing but surviving the week and making sure Melo, Mazi, and my moms had what they needed.
He came around to face me now and squirted water in my mouth. I spit in the bucket and he started working vaseline on my face the way he always did before I got in to fight.
“You feel loose?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“That ain’t good enough tonight. We can’t afford to go in there anything less than ready.” He said it firm, not asking.
“Gutta I just said yeah.”
“Roll your neck then.”
I rolled it and felt it crack in two places. He went back to my face and we let the quiet sit between us the way we always did because me and Gutta didn’t need to fill silence with noise. We could read each other without saying a word and had been doingit long enough that it was just natural. What I already knew was that we both had the same thing on our minds right now. I could win this fight. I believed that in my chest. But I was about to have to earn every round of it and one wrong move, one second where my head wasn’t in the game and it could cost me everything.
Tonight that everything wasn’t just a fight.
Tonight that everything was my life.
Then I felt him stop.
That shift in his energy that I always caught right before he said something I wasn’t going to want to hear. His hands went still and his whole body changed direction before he even opened his mouth.
