WHAT YOU SEE

You descend the steps to the basement, where these fights are held. You're excited because it's your first time at a fight. After you've heard so much about them. The cellar smells damp and hot. The walls and floor are bare. It is a small space under a harsh light.

People stand all along the walls, and you squeeze in among them, then turn and watch the room, anxious.

You watch him enter the arena. A good, shapely man, with an honest smile. A gleam of confidence in his eyes reveals the shameless pleasure he feels in anticipating the violence to come.

Then I enter. His rival, for this fight, but not his equal. Some air or attitude about me transforms me in the fight scene into "that guy you'd just love to see get slugged right in the belly." I'm cocky and pushy. The way I'm dressed, my posture, everything about me seems to emphasize my bare belly. And it makes me look nothing but vulnerable. Everybody in the basement but me seems to know how this "fight" is going to turn out.

I lunge for my opponent in a quick sneak attack before the start of the fight. It's probably my only chance to beat a man as experienced and strong and ruthless as my opponent. But it makes me look like a cheater. And now you and everyone else there watching feels I deserve the beating I'm about to take; feels the natural order won't be upheld until he punches my belly till I drop. You can all drink the lust of your most animal pleasure in watching me get my stomach punched. There is no taint of guilty feeling.

And anyway my opponent doesn't even bother to defend himself; he simply lets my feeble blows glance off his steady frame.

Then he raises a fist and steps menacingly toward me, and I throw up my arms in a cowardly plea for mercy, begging him not to hit me. He slowly lowers the fist that was cocked at my face. But while I'm still arms-up he suddenly whomps me with a pounding uppercut punch in my belly.

I go completely to pieces. I let out a soft-bellied OOUPH! that echoes in the room, and my body slowly folds into itself. Tragic mouth. Belly aching. Staggering away from him, turning. Loud suffering. Weak and winded.

Then I drop to my knees, helpless. Shocked, obliterated, destroyed by a bellypunch. What a wimp! And in front of all these girls.

But there is no submission in this fight. So it will go on until he is bored with showing off for the lovely ladies. Till he wearies of having my belly for his punching bag.

And this is what you came to see, what all of you came to witness: a man in throes. But it can't end too soon. No, you won't let me escape with just a one-punch humiliation. For you, it has to drill much deeper, much darker.

The girls in the audience all naturally picked their favorite in this fight before it began. And so they encourage him (and subtly direct him at the same time).

"Oooh, that hurt him! Right in his stummik!"

"Slug him again. Give him a punch in the belly!"

He'd beat my belly till I fell to my knees, then he'd stand back and let the girls goad me. They purred and insinuated and mocked me, to shame me to get up and get back into the fight. And get punched again.

So there I am, down on my knees again and sucking air after he whomped me with another "belly-slammer." That's what some girl on the other side of the room keeps calling them, keeps telling him to give me again.

“Uh, right in the belly,” the same girl, and she's laughing at me.

I moan and shake my knees out straight and I stand. My opponent gets in on the abuse. "I was hoping you'd get back up. So I can give you another sock in the stummik." That gets a laugh.

Getting dropped to the floor by a fist in your soft belly is a humiliating scene for a man. But standing up and taking it just wasn't an option for me. He'd hit my belly some wicked knuckle-chops, and they'd just leave me breathless. It was like my whole body shut down, and I'd just stand there with my arms frozen, and he'd take advantage of that and slam another fist into my belly. Free shot. Oh, my belly!

He'd call me a pot-bellied wimp, and pull me up and punch me another one, right in my belly.

He shoves me and I stagger back to the wall, right beside you. Three girls scatter from the spot just in time, and turn and watch as I flop back against the wall, then rebound off it, belly-first, right into a ferocious punch that belts me full in the belly.

I clutch my stomach and bend far forward. My knees cave and I plunge down. My shoulder takes the fall, and I roll onto my back and lie prone, knuckles to the canvas above my head in a speechless gesture of full submission.

He takes his congratulatory kisses and smiles from the girls in the crowd, then leaves, smiling. Eventually, my diaphragm unseizes and I can draw a full breath. I crawl to the bottom of the steps, and then up them and out of the basement.