“Exactly.”
We kept going for a while, throwing punches back and forth. Mainly, I worked on teaching her how to dodge and avoid. Landing one good hit to end a fight was better than flailing around and landing a series of small punches that only threw your opponent off.
It felt good to have someone else over to my place, and with the adrenaline pumping, I almost forgot for a while that I was about to leave town and say goodbye to her. In a screwed-up way, I was glad to have an occasion to show her the apartment, dump that it was. It made my time in Seattle feel a little more real and a little less like a blip in my life that I would soon forget.
“Okay, one more lesson,” I said, wiping the sweat from my forehead and throwing back a little water. “It’s about your voice.”
“What? You saying I don’t sound scary enough?”
I thought about her raspy bar voice and the way she would let loose on customers who were acting out. “No,” I chuckled, “you can sound plenty scary when you want to. This is about using your voice as a weapon when you’re fighting.”
“How do you mean?”
“At the start of any fight, as soon as you’re throwing a punch, you should scream as loud as you possibly can.”
Lilith chuckled. “What, that’s supposed to be intimidating? I’ll just look like I’m scared or something.”
I shook my head. “Not at all. A good yell will throw your opponent off. It is intimidating, but it’s also distracting and confusing. When someone is trying to dodge your blows, a scream can push things over the line and turn a missed jab into a knockout punch.”
Lilith nodded, still bouncing on her feet. “Okay, that makes sense.”
I gestured to her to go ahead.
“Here? You want me to yell here?”
“While you’re trying to punch me, yeah.”
“What about your neighbors?”
I laughed. “Let’s see. There’s a liquor store downstairs, and above me is a man who spends his evenings banging away on a drum set. I think they can both handle a little hollering.”
Lilith shrugged, then took a sip of water. “All right, Brick, whatever you say.”
For the first couple of jabs, her voice was pretty soft. It was like she was still finding a way to reach into her gut and pull it out. As I kept encouraging her and dodging her punches, though, her voice got louder and louder. When I start hollering back, letting my voice rip through the apartment, she finally hit full volume.
We kept going like that for a bit. She would holler as loud as she could, cursing me out as I caught her punches and dodged her blows. And I would holler right back, giving it everything I got as I danced a circle around her, jabbing at the air and working up a huge sweat. Lilith’s face contorted with the screams, and as my voice cracked from strain, sweat started pouring down my neck.
It felt good to yell. It felt good to jump around and let out some of what had been building up inside of me. But most of all, it felt good to have someone else around and to feel that pain together.
It might have been a twisted memory to bring with me, but I was pretty sure that when I left Seattle, I’d think back to how good it felt to spend that morning with a friend, jumping around and punching the air and screaming so loud the whole city might hear us.
It felt good to pretend I wasn’t alone.
