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Moments with John Paul Leon – Second

23 May 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Art by John Paul Leon

Not long after that, their mom died, and we had no words for that kind of thing. Both brothers were weathering it pretty well, but I could only imagine what was going on inside. We would go there and hang out, talk about the grittier comics coming out, and the new “graphic novels” that made everything sound more serious. This was the time of Frank Miller’s Ronin and of comics like Grimjack. We were getting into the more adult-oriented comics with the occasional nudity and the cranked up violence.

From Grimjack, JP enjoyed Timothy Truman’s art as much as I did. It was a moody patchwork of good days and bad. Not everything Truman did was good. Some of it was clumsy. But I could always forgive that because it was just too cool. There was an edge to the way he made guns and heroes that seemed to come from the badass late 1970s. Truman depicted people that were not to be screwed with. JP had the 9th issue of Grimjack before I did. We were going over that one, looking at the art and talking about what was working about it. JP and Alex always had tons of great comics.

JP’s room was peculiar, because it was like a grotto you pass before reaching the front door. It was contained inside the wall and iron gate, so it was not like it was out in the front yard. But it was a strange design to have a bedroom outside the actual house. And it had a sliding glass door, which I thought was awesome, but I now wonder what it could have done for privacy.

We’d horse around, as always, making fun of characters from old TV shows and movies, impersonating Captain Kirk. When I see Kirk perform his fighting stance, I see JP doing the same thing. The two brothers were just naturally funny.

I was always saying the stupidest things. I would act like a drunk with absolutely zero stage presence, but they would laugh anyway. There was that time when the four of us were talking about art in general, and JP or Alex were talking about Michelangelo and about how incredible an artist he was, and I was declaring that comic book artists were better. Both JP and Alex reacted, asking me if I was crazy. I shrugged and said, “Well, I like Michael Golden better than Michelangelo.”

At some point, Alex would stop hanging out as much. Now in high school, he was driving, and his priorities were dating and growing up, and soon getting a job. Their dad was a real estate agent, and eventually Alex would follow in his footsteps. He had no more time for comics or art. Alex was no longer there for the games and the good times. He was always out somewhere.

Not once did I ever talk to them about their mom and how they felt, because we were too busy pursuing our boyish interests, but I always wondered if Alex’s quest into an early adulthood were his way of coping with everything. I missed hanging out with him, but we at least still had JP.

My brother and I had moved on to other games, and we eventually started playing Middle-Earth Role Playing, which we felt was the ultimate role-playing experience, because not only were we playing in the official world of The Lord of the Rings, the game came with an elaborate set of rules to resolve critical damage on heroes and foes. One hit had the potential of annihilating anyone, which was different from AD&D, since in that game, you accumulated hit points that served as a cushion from impending death.

We introduced JP to the game, hoping to get him excited about it too. In that first adventure with him, orcs came out of a tower, and in the pell-mell that resulted, the excellent elf archer lost his hand to a scimitar swipe from an orc. These details were actually rolled on a chart that gave us the conclusions. JP was dazzled by that level of detail, but though he really liked MERP, he never did get into it, still preferring AD&D.

Around this time, JP and I came up with the idea of making a comic book together. I could never finish any of my stories when working alone, and he claimed that he couldn’t either. It may be true that JP hadn’t really finished an actual comic book story, but when Alex was still drawing, the two brothers were so prolific, they came a lot closer than I ever did. On my part, I had no discipline. They might have had more discipline, but what really drove them was the simple love for drawing.

In their work, JP and Alex didn’t just draw covers and pinups; they drew actual comic book pages. Doing the actual stories was always the hardest part. But they were so into their heroes and stories, they even drew full-page commercials about their comics that were made to show up in their other comics — like in-house ads you’d find in DC and Marvel comics. There was Criterion, which looked like a movie poster, a montage of characters at various distances, all staring at the viewer or looking forlorn. They would come up with compelling titles, sometimes for characters and stories that never went beyond those titles. I remember JP telling me of a story called “From Alpha to Omega,” and he said that he didn’t really have a clear idea about where it would go, but that was okay because a title like that could fit any story. It was always a laugh. For JP and Alex, their brand of creativity was laced with humor, and to my way of looking at things, it was uncommon. Humor was one part of creativity that I enjoyed but could not replicate.

Anyway, JP and I were set on doing a comic book together about how violent hockey was going to get in the future, where death was an expected part of the game’s entertainment. I went to his house, and we did some drawings together to get the ideas out. We were trying to determine how we were going to parcel the drawing chores. We both made examples of pencils, and then we would trade pencil drawings and each would ink over the other’s work. Hands down, JP was the better penciller, and I was the more accomplished inker, mostly because JP had not done any inking at the time. We would write the story together. It was supposed to be a three-part miniseries. We plotted the whole story, and by the end of that first day, the first issue had been scripted with everything but the dialogue. It was a project we would never continue. I don’t remember why. I think I lost interest. The thing about JP is that he was enthused about it, even if it were not his favorite thing. He would have kept going with it if I had maintained my course.

When I finally finished a 32-page comic called MoonGoddess during my first year of college, I showed it to him. He was complimentary, as always, pointing out what he liked about it. There was a moment when the strong, silent antihero said, “Death entices me,” and JP was pointing at it and repeating the quote. He liked my lettering because I was using a technical pen to make a double line for every letter stroke. All the art, I did with a brush. It was clunky work, but I have such a fond memory of it. Before that, I only ever finished an 8-page war story called “Tunnel Rat.” I knew the great difficulty of ever finishing anything in comics, because making comics was hard work. It involved wearing many hats.

Around the time I was finishing these shorter works, JP was working on Circle of Iron. This story became a 200-page epic. It was based on his AD&D characters in the World of Greyhawk, where his barbarian fighter set about to conquer that world. JP was in high school when he accomplished this incredible feat. He did what so very few of us could do, as teenagers or at any age! He actually finished something. The book clearly showed that his drawing ability had sharpened over the years. He didn’t skimp on anything. All his free time was devoted to that 200-page book. So many Saturdays could have been spent playing or going out to meet his friends. But he stayed at home to do the work. He let me borrow that incredible accomplishment in the bound photocopies that his dad had made for him, and I was engrossed with his story, carefully studying the panels. It was all done in pencil, and that belief that finishing such a large book was impossible had been debunked by JP.

Art by John Paul Leon (a rare fantasy drawing from JP’s professional work)

Art by John Paul Leon (another professional work reminiscent of D&D)

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Moments with John Paul Leon – First

16 May 2021 by Rey Armenteros

JP Leon, Alex Armenteros, & Alex Leon

We would get together and play with Star Wars figures, talk about movies like Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, and just have fun. We were cousins by marriage. JP and Alex’s mother was first cousins with our stepfather. Our stepfather had just married our mom, and he told us that we were going to meet two other boys just like us. They grew up in New York City and hadn’t been in Miami long. That Sunday evening, at my stepdad’s parent’s house, they came over, toys in hand, instantly warming up to us. We recognized right away that JP and Alex were different. Their ideas, their style of playing, the sense of humor all came together to form something special.

For a brief eight or nine months, we lived in the same apartment building. We were on the fifth floor and they were on the second floor. And yet, even in such close proximity, we only got together twice during this era. Once was for Alex’s birthday where our parents got him a Shogun Warriors mini-figure made of die-cast metal, called Poseidon. Getting together with them, no matter the reason, was always the best time!

And it got even better the day we learned about their passion for comics. We were into comics too. The problem was that they were into DC, and we were into Marvel. That might have been the first time we didn’t see eye-to-eye. I started the argument by saying DC sucked. A couple of years back, I used to read my school friends’ DC comics before I became a comic book collector. I actually liked Green Lantern, The Legion of Superheroes, and Batman. But that was then. It all changes when you take something seriously, consider yourself a serious comic book collector, and draw boundaries based on the one or two things you really liked. I guess it was the same for them, because they thought Marvel sucked.

Well, we managed to convince each other to check out the other’s comics. JP and Alex were the ones that got me into Teen Titans and Omega Men. I got them into X-Men.

Like me, they were drawing their own comics. They were showing me and telling me the stories. JP had his group of superheroes, and Alex had his own. I don’t know that they ever mixed the stories. I was looking at their drawings and recognizing that they were both talented. My brother is also named Alex. He was the only one that didn’t draw in our group. And his interest in comics was not like ours. JP and Alex had dreams of making it into comics, like I did. Every time we’d get together after that, we’d draw or go on and on about the comics that had just come out, showing specific panels from favorite comics where the good parts were happening, going into the backstory, referring to pieces of creative lore about which artist created what and which artist was better than whom.

The next big thing that happened was Dungeons & Dragons. It was an amazing coincidence! Alex and I received the D&D Basic Set on the same Christmas that JP and Alex did. We were on the phone going on about it, and in a matter of days, we were at their house going through our first adventure. As a new Dungeon Master, I had no idea what I was doing. The first character death was probably JP’s thief. It was great for a laugh.

We only got together once in a while, and we were as avid about D&D as we were about comics. My brother and I played every weekend, and they played just as much. The next time we played D&D the four of us, Alex Leon was the Dungeon Master. We played this ninja-like adventure module called “The Veiled Society.” We were playing in Alex’s room, and it was decorated with fantasy posters. The Star Wars toys were probably still there, but they would soon be gone. Days later, I would be telling them about my own Arabian assassin, Darkoth, based on one of those posters, which had these ninja-like figures garbed like warriors from the Arabian Nights.

JP and Alex were getting official D&D modules, and they were passing them onto us after they had finished them. They were soon moving on to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and we did the same not long after. On the phone, we’d talk about these adventures. JP and Alex played their AD&D straight, bringing in serious death, just like us, but they would spice it up with humor.

When they started their World of Greyhawk campaign, they were really playing at a higher level than we were. A large part of that, I think, is because Alex was becoming a really good Dungeon Master, allowing for things to just happen when they needed to instead of railroading the characters into what the DM wanted them to do, like I tended to do. The few times the four of us played together, he was the DM, and I witnessed his skills firsthand. He’d make creative almost quirky situations for the characters. They told me about an adventure where they used a crossbow to shoot a rope so that they could climb a wall. They ended up shooting a guard who was holding onto the wall for dear life, as JP’s characters were trying to climb up. The trouble was that if they shot off all his hit points, he’d collapse, taking the heroes with him.

Alex maneuvered through these situations, and JP injected his characters with the same sense of humor he placed in his superhero comics. All the D&D and comic book stories were relayed in exacting detail as we talked about these personal war stories. In his comics, JP had an arrogant superhero called Lance. He grew up rich and was used to ordering people around. He was the type of guy that would hold up his hand to stop traffic as he was crossing the street. One day, he did that to a carload of bank robbers that had pulled a job, and they ran him over. JP’s halfling character would come up with crazy phrases like, “You’ll smoke a turd in hell for that!”

Comics and D&D was that time before we started caring about stuff, like how we dressed and what kind of music we liked. I was the oldest by a year. The two Alex’s were also a year apart. And JP was the youngest by about a year. During my first year of high school, their family invited us to go to Sanibel Island. They went to the same resort every year on Memorial Day Weekend.

That first time at Sanibel, the four of us hardly left the pool. If we weren’t playing King of the Mountain, practically drowning each other and then getting miffed about it, we were conducting the world championship match of ping-pong, poolside. When it rained, we were indoors, drawing on paper menus, collaborating on sketches of our superheroes. I think I have six of those papers somewhere in my mom’s house in Miami.

We would scout outside the resort, and we were playing out our adventure in our heads as we were walking down the empty streets of a nearby community. My brother said he knew a way back to the resort and that he would beat us there with his shortcut. He disappeared through some foliage. We let him go, but when I noticed a car turn the corner a couple blocks behind us, I yelled to our group that the dark lord’s minions had finally caught up with us. We started running. Then we heard a police siren, and we froze. It was the wrong car to be running from. And the deputy sheriff started questioning us without getting out of the car. Why were we running from his car? We were just playing, like pretending. Who was that other boy who was lurking around the shrubs? We explained it was my brother. He told me, “You know, your brother looked mighty suspicious?” He let us go, and JP and Alex later told my brother that he looked mighty suspicious. That was an ongoing joke for the next couple of years. We would be playing D&D, talking about marching order, and JP would tell Alex, “You get in the front; I don’t want you behind me — you look mighty suspicious.”

The next time we went to Sanibel, I pulled the same thing when we were walking towards some woods on our first night back. I pointed and yelled that there was a man with a bloody hatchet coming out of the woods, and the four of us were running back to the bungalows. I never did learn my lesson.

Much of the time in the swimming pool, we were relaying the stories we were building in our minds with the intention of making them into comic books. When it rained, we were indoors drawing our characters; we were explaining who was who and what their powers were and what they had done. One of JP’s main heroes was Aneron, whose hands could detach from his forearms on long cables made of “aneronian” steel.

Alex and I didn’t go a third time, and I remember talking to JP over the phone telling him that this catastrophe was due to the Evil Magic of Miami. My incongruous expression didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why did I refer to it like that? I don’t know. I think the problem was more complicated than that, and I was finding any expression to just deal with it without it referring to what was really happening. My parents might soon be getting a divorce, and I didn’t want to invite that subject with JP and Alex. It was an adult problem, and it was beyond the realm of kids. But JP would mention the Evil of Miami for the next couple of years for anything that went wrong. We were still cousins, even if our stepdad was no longer with my mom.

Art by John Paul Leon

Art by John Paul Leon

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A Social Platform by Another Name

13 December 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The truth? They really had me going. It was that site, the one that acted like a forum for people to support your every whim. It works like many others nowadays where you heart a bunch of stuff, whether you like the thing you’re hearting or not. It wasn’t important. What many of these participants were going for was popularity by getting the most hearts. This place was called Raslr (misspelled like that because it was being genuine). At least, that was the idea behind it.

The way it works is you open an account, and it’s yours. You call it whatever you want. You take whatever optimistic or sardonic attitude you want to instill in it, and you hopefully give it your own flavor. Then you start uploading your entries. You can write stuff about it, or share some image. You could do whatever you want.

It was going like that for a while, and I enjoyed this particular internet circle because of all the outlandish imagery you were getting from some of the fellow clients. They were no holds barred about it. They were sharing as it was occurring to them, like there was no tomorrow.

But then, Raslr came down with new rules. It was something familiar to many of us who had lived with that sort of thing years ago. It was an idea that had dropped off our social awareness. We used to call it censorship. But Raslr was calling it something else. I don’t remember the words they used, but it all sounded false. The people rebelled. I was rooting for the outspoken spirits, but I was doing it from the sidelines. I had no real time to get involved.

Some people were saying, “Come on, it’s just tits.” And it’s funny how that kind of declaration served either side well. Read the above quotation with the idea that the new rules should not bother censoring them, and then read it again with the idea that it should not be a big deal because you weren’t really going to miss them. They meant two different things to the opposing parties.

The reality about Raslr is that it had already fallen into disfavor before they even went into this reactionary quagmire. They were considered a social slum in most decent online circles. I didn’t care when I had gotten onboard because I had nothing else going, and I actually liked the content I was finding there. But the writing was on the wall months before the rules ever turned up.

This new proposal was doing Raslr’s waning image no good. They even gave everybody a deadline. On their list of images disallowed to the community, the words Raslr chose for one of these new rules were: “No women presenting nipples.” And the rebels had a field day with this piece of verbal ridiculousness. They fired off entries on the site displaying female hands unveiling male nipples. Women uncovering a tray of Venus pastries shaped like the offending body part. Even famous paintings of reclining nudes that were in no way considered erotic in this day and age. The members were providing a sounding board for how grounded Raslr’s sensibilities appeared — which was to say, not at all grounded.

And there were those that just countered Raslr by bringing more salacious pictures of women presenting nipples as their mouths were fellating some guy. Or a naked Venus in an old painting spreading her nakedness all over a bed, ass in the air while cherubs held a large ring that produced soap bubbles from the draft in her backdoor. It was telling Raslr, “Oh, you mean like this?”

Raslr tried to sound quirky in their retorts to these responses, trying to keep the layer of cool their board members deemed appropriate for this sort of thing. 

What a turnaround! I was in awe of what was happening. How could an apparently progressive entity be supporting such limitations in their platform? Raslr had been a place to find all such things without any censorship. It was the cool place, even if it were a social slum. Their new position on the matter, and the coming deadline for when they were going to crack down made people go supernova. Nipples were now brought on a grid of multiple images that catalogued varieties of contour and texture, making me reflect on just about every possibility.

The community members resisting these changes were also getting out signed petitions against this sort of thing, this censorship. A few of them even appealed to Raslr, declaring their livelihoods depended on the content they were posting on Raslr.

I knew it was soon going to be over. The rebels were going to lose this fight. There were bigger forces at work here. It had to do with policies that did not actually originate with Raslr but with a monster corporation, which was just then enforcing limits on the content viewed on its devices. (This well-known corporation will remain unnamed.)

I thought about all the things I was going to miss most from Raslr — the lurid satanic images of witches and goats, and the Japanese form of bondage that has some specific name I can’t think of right now. With this gone, I would have no real reason to go back to Raslr.

What was next? They were burning witches in hundreds of posts — a comment on what Raslr was going to do in two short days. Now, satanic images of women fornicating with mules. Then, labia stretched across a horizon of gruesome mountains populated by bug-like goblins. Hills becoming breasts, and penises were at every druidic formation, where the massive stones were no longer monoliths.

I was the one being led into these insinuations, and now that Raslr was closing the gates, I knew the inspiration was going to end. The signed petitions and the vocal denouncements made a lot of noise but did nothing, and I was left waiting on the sidelines wanting more witches.

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Down to the Judges (first published in Northwest Indiana Literary Journal)

06 December 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I tell people I was there, watching the fight. The massive screen was blaring through the windows, past the cheers inside. It was a triple event. I was at a birthday party that happened to be on Mexican Independence Day, and that night was the high-profile bout on pay-per-view. My neighbor had just installed the pool, and he was living it up this birthday, granting this pool party for all his close associates and loved ones. I was meeting more of his family members than I had met at the last party, and we danced to mariachis celebrating his birthday and the birth of Mexico as a modern nation. It was really overwhelming, and I was there.

Then it was time for the rematch! I stayed in the pool area with a couple of others while everybody else went inside for the main event. I could see them through the sliding glass door screaming at the set. My neighbor’s son and I were having a deep conversation about life and his time in Mexico. He was talking about his long journey, when his father was filling out the paperwork to bring him to the US. We were talking about life and the rules you had to follow in life and how oftentimes the very laws that are crucial to our lives come down to paid professionals that either know your case or don’t. Holy shit! this was sobering me up even with all the hollering in the background.

So, I was technically in the patio, and I did not see a single jab or bodyblow. I could see the video colors of the screen flashing through the silhouettes of the spectators, and about everybody there swore I watched the rematch, as they were coming out once the fight was over, hooting and lauding the unexpected results. It went the full twelve rounds. It had gone down to the judges and their scores. Everybody swore they were going to give it to Triple G, like they did it last time when again they went through twelve rounds and no knockout, but it didn’t happen that way. Canelo, the Mexican boxer, had covered Triple G with bodyblows, and the judges reacted. A welcome result for Mexican Independence!

They were explaining it to me as they were filtering back into the pool area. Canelo was a counterblow fighter. He waited for you to come to him and then reacted to you. Triple G was an attacker. That is how he won over the judges when they went to twelve rounds last time. This time, Canelo stunned the audience with a reverse in his strategy, and this is the part I found fascinating! He was on the attack. Triple G, as it was described to me, looked confused. Canelo got more punches in, including a battery of body blows. The judges had no other recourse but to recognize who was on top in the fight.

Why find such things fascinating when I don’t even like boxing? It wasn’t just about psyching the other guy out. It was about coming up with a winning strategy and being one step in front of the other guy. Imagine if Triple G resorted to a different strategy. Canelo’s plan would have gone out the window. But what if he was sure Triple G would do the same thing again because it was something that worked last time, and why fix a good thing? That might have been what cemented the change of strategy for Canelo. He would have had to not only think about doing it differently, but I imagine his training would have to reflect this too, and the real psych out would be the one of him trying to psych himself out, trying to become a different fighter, going through different routines.

Maybe Triple G wasn’t thinking at all; he just went with whatever was natural to him, uncompromising attacks. What if that was all he knew? I do believe the real winning move would be in deciding what kind of fighter Triple G was going to be in this second match. Canelo would have had to recognize on what level Triple G was playing and if Triple G was also switching his strategy according to what Canelo might be thinking of doing.

I am thinking of a little kid’s game of having the other kid guess which hand has the marble. After going through one round, if the one holding the marble were trying to be clever by keeping it in the same hand, the savvy kid would know it. If the kid chose a different hand thinking that the other kid expected him to be clever and keep the marble in the same hand, the kid that would know that about his opponent would guess correctly. The point was that you had to guess at what level the kid was playing.

Then again, it could have been nothing more than something as simple as Canelo using Triple G’s strategy because that was what worked in the first bout. It could also be that there aren’t that many strategies to choose from in boxing. There is the type of fighter that plays defensive, the type that favors coming in low or high, and the one that likes to keep his distance or clench to deliver the little kidney jabs. How many other possibilities are there? When you put accomplished fighters in the ring, they are going to bring their ultimate strategy, and maybe there is no choice in the matter because you have to pick the thing you’re best at, and everyone will know it, even the people like me that don’t know boxing, who are informed by the propaganda machine for such an event that educates the audience so that they have something in which to sink their teeth. I am sure it is something like that.

As we were getting back in the swimming pool, I was picking up the talk and able to describe what I saw of the fight. I didn’t even know what the two boxers looked like, and I was absorbing the excitement and letting the alcohol do much of the talking for me. I was so excited, who would have questioned me?

On Monday, they were asking me if I saw the fight when I was picking up my cup of coffee to start the day, and I was not lying when I said it was amazing, spouting off the mechanics behind the results as if I had known both men’s careers since before the first match. I was keeping my conversation rather long, giving a full summary, almost overcompensating for missing every little thing about it.

But I was there. I have no doubt about it. I was there, and I saw nothing. It is like calling a witness to the stand who was present during an incident but who was actually at an angle that would have given the witness no information whatsoever, and yet they call him anyway, and he states his observations, and they take them seriously. Or it is like the witness that was not there at all? They have a name for such people that know not a thing about the incident but deliver probable causes to an event. They are called expert witnesses.

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The Enticement of Blood over Elegance

08 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The fight was coming on. We were talking about it poolside, with beers and party snacks. I was not one who followed boxing. I didn’t care for it, but as with anything else, it was something I could get into if everybody else did. This match was highly-publicized, and this one house in the middle of our little neighborhood was just one of the millions throughout America having a similar home event.

But I wanted to talk anyway, and though I didn’t have anything to say about boxing, I brought up MMA. These days, it was different than in the days when I was watching it. So, I subtly brought up those old days. The Mixed Martial Arts institution had gone through some big changes. When I was living in Asia, I was watching the Japanese version of the sport, which was called Pride. In it, you had contenders from all over the world, showing off talents that came from different disciplines of martial arts. That was the part of it I loved; you could never really predict what was going to happen because there were too many variables. It made the matches unpredictable, which meant to me that they were exciting!

But not everyone agreed. The guy that was listening to my reminiscences of Pride was saying how things were cleaned up nowadays. You could now see that it is more elegant in its present incarnation than in what was going on before. Now, it’s respectable.

But I wouldn’t be too interested in it now precisely for that reason. I wasn’t looking for elegance and respectability. I mean, do you want to see guys beating on each other or not? People who are not into boxing consider boxing brutal — a cruel sport! The old MMA was far worse, but why split hairs on what is elegant and what is not brutal? Is it less brutal now? If so, then by how much? If you don’t want broken limbs and a profusion of blood, then watch boxing.

In Asia, I couldn’t understand what they were saying in the Pride matches because they were not translated into English, but what did you need to know when two guys were duking it out? I had my favorites. From the pictures of the flags, I knew what nationality they represented. There were all types from various parts of the world, and I only identified them by country and description, since I never learned their names. There was the short Brazilian guy who looked like a thug and the Croatian cop (shown in uniform when the stats came up) who was good with high kicks. Eventually, I got to know who was the champion, a Russian, an undefeated, stoic-looking man who was dumpy-looking compared to some of the more muscular contenders. Anything goes! Now, they have weight divisions and all the other regulations, but in those days, a giant can go against an average man, a bodybuilder could go up against an obese mountain.

If you go further back to when the whole thing started, you had American ninjas against judo black belts against green berets against kick-boxers. Fingers got broken. Arms were snapped. Right there on TV! Completely legal and solicited by a multi-million dollar corporation. It was great fun for the boys that remembered the schoolyard fights, the pitting of one superhero against another in the comic books, always wondering who was going to win.

I remember Gracie. The Gracies were a staple in MMA. They were the most famous martial arts family in the world. The bout was uneven. The massive man in nothing but tiny briefs was a muscle house, and he was on top of average-size Gracie, who was still clad in his Jiu jitsu gi, like a little boy showing off his uniform, though I don’t know how he kept it on for so long, as the big guy was grabbing and yanking on it, moving Gracie under him, trying to get him in a proper choke hold. Gracie was doing nothing but squirming his way out of it again and again. Gracie’s face was suspended by that one horrified expression, and meanwhile the big guy was pounding on his face, giving him body blows, pushing for that opening he needed to choke Gracie out. This was going on for fifteen whole minutes — interminable — exactly like that! With the guy on top of Gracie, manipulating him! Gracie was under the guy, making his way across the mat, and the guy was delivering blow after blow, trying to weaken him enough to get the grab to choke him out. It was almost unnoticeable, but when Gracie repositioned his leg to go across the man’s chest, it simply looked like a desperate defensive move, and then it shifted. Using his leg and arms, Gracie choked the guy out, and we went crazy! How could he do that? It was amazing. After all that, Gracie won!

That was the type of factors I was talking about. Anything could happen. This brand of competition was far more real to young men in those days than boxing could ever be. It was not about elegance; it was about spectacle. The brutality proved which type of bout was the true inheritor of the Roman circuses, made for the blood-thirsty masses that were not required to know a thing about the various martial arts involved. By contrast, you had to know about boxing to appreciate it, like you had to intimately know about baseball to be a fan. I do recall that along with all the other types of fighters, boxers tried MMA, and they just couldn’t compete.

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The Butterfly

01 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The guy was here, but not permanently. He still had his Florida plates, even after half a year. Was he biding his time, seeing how it was going to turn out for him here? Was he just hedging his bets? I didn’t really care. He was the crooner at the crafts shindig at June’s house, the guy who sounded like he was duplicating the Jazz Singer, what one of the attendants referred to as a lounge lizard, singing old songs even memory itself no longer remembers, all washed out. I met the guy that once, found out he was from my neck of the woods, and I wished him some good luck in making it out here. Then, I bumped into him in the mall a few months later, but we pretended not to know each other. Maybe I looked familiar to him, but I passed him by. I just didn’t want to get into it. Now, I see the guy’s car parked in front of June’s house every morning, still with the same license plate, as if he had one foot turned toward the exit, just in case. Was he living there?

I wanted to ask Carl about him, but Carl was another strange case. He was the friendliest guy in the neighborhood, the guy who knew everybody, the guy who would go out of his way to introduce you to everybody. We were just moved in last year, hardly knew anybody in the neighborhood, and Carl was there to make things right. But he was the type that was too accommodating. I started wondering about him. I mean, he was retired, so the puzzle fit together. He had all the time in the world for you. I knew one thing: people that smile so much come in few varieties. I thought I recognized his smile. It was the type that proposed a certain sociable veneer because he needed it more than anything else in his life. Maybe he was lonely. Being retired could do that to you. But he was healthy and strong. He went to places to get things done for other people, often at minimal cost, even for free. These favors were for old friends he had; these people were all over A_____. The town of A_____ had some lifers that supported each other. It was a tiny city in California that was almost surrounded by the more prosperous C_____. I was just getting to learn about our little city, but you can’t quote me on any of it. I no longer care for local histories.

Carl saw me outside my open garage one morning, cleaning out some boxes. He swung by, and I asked him about the other Miami guy, the lounge singer. He said, “Oh him. He’s still trying to make it out here, but he’s just not making friends. He’s too picky. I was telling him if he wanted to make money, he could, but he had to learn to bend a little. This lady, Jacky, I know who’s well-connected with the city — she was really helping him out, introducing him to the right people, people with connections. She got him a gig with the city. But he wouldn’t listen to her suggestions. If somebody who’s helping you tells you that it might be better to change your music, wouldn’t you think about maybe working with the person, especially since she got you an ad for the show in the paper? That’s big. But he doesn’t want to see it that way. I’ve talked to him about it. He says his music is his, he was going to express himself the way he saw fit. He said it was his art, and that nobody was going to tell him how to do it. Wouldn’t you at least try?”

It’s easy to ask those questions. In all my interactions with Carl, he had always played it off like he was an artist, but not the right type if he believed everything he just said. I don’t know anything about that watered down jazz they used to play in hotel lounges, but an artist who can be made to bend is an artist that can be made to be broken. You have to have spine, or you end up cracked in the middle when people like these well-placed women and men are done with you. You sit there in the dark, looking out a window, wondering if you had done it your way, would it have been different. I don’t agree with him at all, but I was making like I was too busy huffing boxes to give him a proper answer.

Carl lived at June’s, with June and her husband, and I don’t know what their story was. At first, I thought they were related, but they’re not. Why was he living there for so long? I later gathered they needed him to take care of their wheelchair-bound daughter, and that would make sense. I asked him a couple of times, but for as talkative as Carl usually is, he just clammed up and answered with grunts or one-word sentences. It was obviously a touchy subject. I didn’t want to sound too inquisitive, so I left it at that. This other day he showed up at my door unannounced, stopping me from my work in the studio to ask me if I wanted to go out for a cup of coffee, I was thinking of ways of getting rid of him, wondering if I should even open the door. Every time he asked me if I wanted to go out for a cup of coffee, I had always told Carl I was too busy, but he figured I’d change my mind today. I wouldn’t. But I let him in the house, even asked him if he wanted something to drink. We were sitting there at the couch, when one of us edges toward the subject of religion. I didn’t know he was church-going. Twenty years ago, the way the world was heading, you’d think Christianity would be something from the past, but it is stronger than ever now. As forward-moving as my generation sounded back then, we’re going back to what we were, what we had grown up with and had rebelled against, what was familiar. In no uncertain terms, I was telling Carl, I had had it with Christianity, that the only reason my wife takes our daughter to church is so that she could improve her Korean at a Korean Sunday school. If my daughter turned out Christian, I wasn’t going to prevent it, but I certainly was not going to take that path myself. When we were at the door shaking hands and wishing each other a great day, I sensed something in him, as if he sensed something new in me, something that he couldn’t quite work with.

When I first met Carl, I caved in one morning and told him I’d go with him to Starbucks to meet some of his old friends. Carl was trying to introduce me to everyone in those first days in A_____. I did appreciate his enthusiasm, but he was so damn talkative. If the guy was retired, he must have been in his sixties, but he was acting like someone fresh out of high school, recounting all of his great exploits. I thought we were going to talk art, because that was how he had framed the whole thing: “Let’s talk about art!” But he was talking about everything he ever did in his life, regardless if it were not really art, and he never once asked me about where I was coming from. For all he knew, I was a serial killer who dressed in nice shirts and neckties. He didn’t care, as long as he had a pair of ears to get it all and a mouth that only flapped complimentary responses. He needed that like a student going through counseling needed the support. This was not the mind of a man that was in a good place in life. This was someone who didn’t feel good about himself. He had to prove it to others to prove it to himself. He had nothing going, he was always eager to hang out with anyone he could bump into. If you were a retiree, I thought that was the worst place to be because you had nowhere else to go from there. He liked me back then. I could tell. He was always talking to me about everything he did, showing me pictures of school walls he had painted murals on, soccer teams he was coaching, going into June’s house to fetch me some figurine he made back in 1972. That day at the coffee shop with all the other retirees, they were talking about politics, and there were even a couple of reactionary gentlemen espousing the need for the clown who was hijacking the White House at the time. This was not the kind of talk I wanted to get into. When I finally made my goodbyes and I was walking to my car, I promised myself something: I would never step foot in that coffee chain with Carl, even if my life depended on it.

But everybody knew him. When we had our locks changed, the locksmith talked about Carl. When I spoke with someone about his truck, Carl was there to recommend someone for repairs. In essence, Carl was a useful man to have around. He was connected. So, my life may have to depend on it one day, and that was one bridge you probably shouldn’t burn.

Since that religious conversation in my living room, Carl has backed off. He’s still as friendly as ever, but he doesn’t offer anymore personal exploits. He keeps the conversation to the moment: weather and morning plans. I was a great sounding board when he was ripping up the chords of his stories under his air guitar, but that stopped the day I gave him a taste of my opinionated possibilities. Nobody wants to hear what you really have to say. Once they do, they relegate it to not wanting to bend. Although there are others that use what they have to say as a cover for something else, which is what I have always suspected about him. There’s something about him that rubbed me the wrong way since the beginning.

The day we first met him was the Fourth of July when the whole street was cordoned off so the neighborhood families could pop off their fireworks and not worry about outsider cars parking in the neighborhood to see the professional explosions in both cities of C_____ and A_____. He was the neighborhood artist. He was telling us that he was leaving soon, was going to live in Europe. I thought this must have been exciting for him. I wasn’t sure, but he must have been drunk. The next time I bumped into him, I asked him about Europe, and he said that it had to be pushed back. Later, he said he didn’t know when it was going to happen. I stopped asking. After that, it was Thailand, because he owns some land out there, he says. He has a good friend there. He was going to live there for six months. He never went. But every time there was an event, he was the village drunk, slurring his greetings at everyone. I was learning that the friends he had in other countries were all female, and he never made it out to any of those places, even with his apparently romantic aspirations. Then, there was the Korean woman, and she was going back to Korea. And he was going to follow. That was the plan, but it never happened. At the next event, he was drunk again.

It seems like he thrives to chase women around, and he drinks to forget. I don’t think he’s a sexual miscreant or anything like that, but I do think he acts like an adolescent chasing skirts and hollering about his prospects. In Thailand, they call such people butterflies, off after the next flower. He was no more an artist or big traveler than I was a town planner. But he bends backwards to make amends with these women, and from the sounds of it, they don’t want him.

And for a minute, I put myself in his shoes, a guy maybe trying too hard to make something right, somebody with nowhere else to go. Wasn’t I in such a position not too long ago? Or was that sense of the familiar coming back at me because I have a feeling that is where I am going to be heading, because the characteristics that make him that way run parallel to my own?

Really, he just talks too much. Is that a crime? He needs people around him. He has to feel like he’s in the thick of it. He does not talk at all about his personal life. I know he has kids. He never talks about them. He never talks about a past wife or significant other. I just assume he’s divorced. He needs a woman. He’s searching, and he’s hungry for it. His aura confirms this picture. He completes this picture with the body language and the side glances, a piece of commentary that just comes out. But an aura can go deeper, exposing colors beyond that of the visual spectrum to expose feelings, regrets, desires, calculations.

There is a good reason why I can detect it all. How am I able to know so much about someone I hardly ever talk to? Because I was there. Therefore, I am projecting my lesser self onto the structure of his person, not only the way he carries himself but the supernatural odors he’s metaphorically emitting. Could I be wrong about him? There’s a good chance that I am not. We readily recognize those qualities in others that we have successfully hidden in ourselves. If I were not married in this stage in my life, I would be just like him, but less obvious, I believe. He’s tearing up the neighborhood with his friendliness, cuing in everybody on his insecurities and all the rest of the ugly stuff, and I don’t think he even so much as suspects.

But like I said, I could be seeing this because I was there. It could be that many of our neighbors don’t know this about him because they were never that hungry for the same things. They might just think he’s a little strange.

And maybe he’s just being neighborly. That is what it’s supposed to be on the surface. I wish he finds that girl he needs to find and moves on already. He might get busy finally, doing something productive rather than hawking people all the time.

I’m being hard on him. I’ll wipe away every oblique thought I’ve had of the guy and put my trust in him. Outside the bad feeling he gave me at first, he had never given me reason to doubt his intentions. And so, these crossed comments against him are saying more about me than about him. The only thing I can criticize him about is the response to the crooner. Carl having introduced himself to me as an artist, he made me believe that he was one, on some level. And an intrepid artist should know better than to endorse selling out. You can choose to sell out on your own by doing work you think others would like (by bending to public approval), even if in your heart, you do not care for such a direction. I know I have tried that course several times in my life and every single time with the result of failure. But you can never criticize another artist for not doing it. That would just mean you are deeper in the machinery of the flock mentality than the average citizen. Like I’m excusing Carl for every other thing, I am going to excuse him for this, because just like I conclude that he is not a freak or a desperate pervert, I now know beyond all doubt he is not an artist.

When I see the car there with the Florida plate in front of June’s house, I think of the Miami guy. He’s not going to make it out here. He won’t bend. And that means he won’t break because of others, although this is no guarantee against coming to pieces all by yourself.

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A Familiar Setting

25 September 2020 by Rey Armenteros

 

In another dream, I was checking into a hotel. My friend was leaving town, and he was helping me out. He took care of the paperwork before heading out on a flight to his home. I had brought some of my most important things, getting cozy in this new space with all the prospects with what I was about to do.

A town leaning up into the higher sides of a mountain comes back to me dream after dream. I seem to visit this place once every few years. It looks a little different every time, but it always feels like a resort of some kind, someplace to go to after taking a long journey.

Last night, I was checked in, as if it were a continuation of that other dream from one or more weeks ago. But instead of sleeping there, I was going to a friend’s party that was not too far away. The backyard was like a park, and the darkness of the early night hid what I felt were precipices that might have been behind everything or perhaps in another direction. We were standing around, holding our drinks. I was conscious of not straying too far into the darkness for fear of falling. I was already barefoot, since they had invited me to stay there for the night. An art installation was the centerpiece to this get-together. It was a space that you walked into. I was told to check it out, so I did. The small building was a square. It was the size of a modest dining room. Where the table would be was the main piece of art. It was like a column coming out of the floor that stopped short of chest high and then acted more like a pedestal for a bell that floated above it. That made the space into an angular donut that you had to walk around instead of through. I walked around it and took a look at the ground to find circles at regular intervals. It was glass, and I was stepping on it. I felt the need to exit, but there was still all of the other art that ran like a passage left of the room installation I was now walking around. But someone noticed the blood on my feet, and they insisted I walked out. That room I was just experiencing was the work of a famous artist. He was not just any artist but someone important to me. That is to say, I was not necessarily his biggest fan, but I knew of him in the circles of art that interested me, and I respected him. I think in our world, he was Anders Nilsen, but he could have easily been Dash Shaw. I slept in the room that my friends gave me, and when I woke up, it was still night time. This was another art space I was inhabiting, and it made me think of the square space with the broken glass. I don’t know what else I did. It was something interesting enough for me to note that this was a dream and that I had to hurry up and write this down. And by the time I did, this last part and whatever else went with it, was no longer making tracks in my thoughts.

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Slabs Under the Surface

04 September 2020 by Rey Armenteros

My father was in my dreams, and he was alive, but the rest of the family was dying. We were talking about this in his apartment unit. It was a space I had never been to before, but it felt familiar. The walls were bare of things. They were slabs of concrete coming together in corners, everything looking the same. It wasn’t somber, though it should have been. The entry room was the largest, and it had their bed with his wife in it, and she had passed on. My sister was going to die next. It was as if this was the way it was supposed to be. He didn’t feel good about any of this, but we were able to have a pleasant conversation anyway. I wonder now if he were trying to tell me something.

When I came to this morning, it would be back to the opposite way of things, how he was the one that was dead and all the others still alive. This is the first time I remember dreaming of my father in recent years. It might be the first time since his death. I don’t remember a single other thing that happened. I was struck by the layout of the place. That bed in the first room was strange and yet I knew it once, when we were small and getting picked up by him on Sundays to spend our allotted time with him. Diagonal to this first space was another one that was filled out like a dining room. The kitchen was around the corner of the wall, and when you turned that corner, a couple of smaller rooms followed, likely a bathroom and some manner of closet.

So, this is what my sleeping mind identifies as a studio, but it was not my grandmother’s, which is what reason would have told me it was. In my woken mind, I remember the layout of the earliest efficiency, and it was just a room with a place for kitchen appliances next to a tiny bathroom. The second space was after my dad had married his third wife, with whom he would have his second family with. For some reason, I remember the high windows, as if we were halfway underground. It was like a bunker, and he would lay in my grandmother’s cot and watch Mexican wrestling. Getting suddenly inspired, he would start twisting and pinning us to the bed, too rough for a five- and three-year-old. Actually, he hadn’t been remarried yet, but that was coming soon. And this was something that I had mentioned to my daughter the other day, how rough my father was when he was playing around, sending me surges of energy that stayed with me through the nights to finally visit me in this incantation of made-up situations around loved ones. How much charge did it get from memories, and how much is it charging the train of my thoughts for the remainder of the day?

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Earlier this Year

31 July 2020 by Rey Armenteros

It has been raining so much in the past several months, I no longer pine for the calming murmur and the cool coziness. I’m frankly sick of it. We spent our first ten years here wondering if it ever rained in Southern California. I came to the conclusion that it was a desert in disguise. This whole area felt like a beachside paradise, but make no mistake — arid wasteland is what it was. No matter how much water you pump from the Colorado, if you fail to maintain this place, it will relapse to its lifeless origins. Just like an aging actor dependent on plastic surgeons. What else?

When I came up with these conclusions, I thought everybody was on the same page as me. I was firing up analogies I felt only succeeded in identifying one place on the face of the Earth. But with all these rains we’ve been having, I now bring it up again, asking neighbors and coworkers what the hell happened to all that dry weather? And they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I’m referring to the fact that suddenly we have all this rain — I mean real rain! Like the Miami rain I had grown up with, downpours, endless showers that spilled their abundance into gutters that were not quick enough to collect it all, forcing cars to suddenly hit the breaks so that they wouldn’t release a wall of water when hitting one of these broad puddles. To them — my neighbors and coworkers — it’s as if there were rain here all along.

I was questioning my own recollections, wondering if my point of view of having lived in only places that had a healthy dose of rain throughout the year had shifted my outlook. But I don’t think so. What’s ten years of barely having rain in a place when rain is inconsistent? The natives don’t recognize lapses of ten years because they are used to such pauses. It seems that it comes and goes every few years. Where I was wrong is that I concluded that this place had no other type of weather. What I was not aware of is that we likely arrived when it stopped raining for a spell of so many years, and now things are back to normal. The actual climate here is not temperate or subtropical or anything that sounds familiar; it is simply “unpredictable.”

I’ve always loved the rain, and that might have been because I was never a homeowner. Now that I am, with such spells of days filled with wet misery, I add every possible damage to the house to my growing mob of anxiety. And unpredictable is the type of climate that helps me surf through every worry.

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Lola

12 June 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Being original is going against expectations. I was working at changing everything about me. You know how people react to things. The obvious answers to situations were what you didn’t want. So you worked at the opposite. You don’t want to be a type, but being the person that goes against the grain just becomes another type.

Ultimately, what was I going to make of myself in this memoir piece that came from source materials so old, I had long lost any strain of visceral connection with it? I was trying to pick her up, but she was a mother, and I wasn’t sure if I was interested in going in that direction. None of this was made up, and even so, this was not really my story. What I mean by this is that it was something that happened thanks to the mother, me, and the baby, along with a bunch of other people that were falling in and out of our conversations. These other people would be called minor characters in a work of non-memoir, but that was a reductive way of looking at the affects each one created for us. So, in a sense, I was not the author because there were too many things to it that did not have their origin in me. Truly, I had no interest in playing with her kid, but it was that thing that we are expected to do when an infant is present. That means that I didn’t even have the power of volition in this, which makes me less of a source.

If I were writing this script, I’d make the mother upset. He’s horsing around too much, and the playing with her kid is getting prolonged. That would make the story more interesting. In the real event, everybody was being polite, the mother looking on with a stiff smile, probably waiting for it to be over already. She never struck me as the patient type. Actually, I never got to know her because relations were cut off soon after this. There is no chance we could ever meet again today. But still, I have to play it safe and come up with a name for her that feels like her real name, but it has to be a name that is different enough so that she wouldn’t’ recognize it in the event she stumbled on my writing, happened to remember my name, and then recognized herself in this little anecdote that was growing to be more and more meaningless. If I were coming up for a name for her, it was going to be Adeline. Her name was actually striking, and in the time we went on those couple of dates, it really meant something. It was after it was over that it meant everything that was bad. And honestly, I am going to have to embellish those ugly parts with some better details. So for this recounting, I name her Adeline because that is a name that doesn’t mean anything to me yet, and so it can grow with what it could mean in this retelling.

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