This story requires a little bit of an introduction. As has been hinted at occasionally in previous columns, when I'm not chained to the desk here at AudioShocker Central, painstakingly crafting each week's profound bursts of cultural commentary, I've also been moonlighting on various other projects, one of which was teaching an Intro to Creative Writing undergraduate summer course at a local university. Part of that process, as you might imagine, is that my students write short stories, and then I read them and comment on them, to help them learn their craft. I visited home back over Memorial Day, and had a big pile of stories with me that I needed to read and comment on over the long weekend. I, of course, didn't let any of my family members read my students' work, but my brother Nate did happen to catch the title of one of my students stories. It was called "Foot to Head," which was the best title out of all the stories that had been submitted (though I'm biased, it having been turned in not long after Nick and my Tournament Movie Tournament). Nate asked what it was about, and I told him: it was about an MMA fighter who was training to fight in the championship bout, from a reigning champ who had the clear advantage. A couple weeks later, I got a totally unanticipated email from Nate, which said "I can't quite say how it happened but in honor of you grading all your short stories I wrote you one that I hope can be a sequel / homage / better-than follow-up to one of them whose title I liked. Since I didn't read it you'll have to tell me whether it's actually better though." and contained the following story. The original was a solid tournament tale, so I wouldn't go so far as to say that Nate's is better, but after sharing it with Nick, we decided that we had to give it a home here on Audioshocker, so without further ado Culturology presents Part I of SUPER FOOT TO HEAD...

SUPER FOOT TO HEAD

so a while ago i kicked ass in a mixed martial arts competition, someone wrote about it in a short story called Foot To Head. i never read it cause i dont read about my own fights ... i fight them. but i know that storys nothing compared to the contest i went to last week, where i whipped so many people before i even got there. so check it out.

there were some other fighters but the big ticket item was me versus a guy called Mad Leroy for the division championship belt. Mad Leroy is just this mad, tough, tough, bad dude. he used to be an offensive tackle in this independent pro football league that was illegalized for being too intense, and you know how some guys get a barbed wire tattoo around their biceps, Mad Leroy just fucking wears a piece of barbed wire around his arm. theres rumors that he sharpens his knuckle bones and i still dont know if thats true, but one thing i do know is he is SERIOUSLY HARDCORE. that night i wanted to fight with him so bad.

first i had to get to the venue though. it should have been easy, they set up the octagon in the basement of a unitarian church near my neighborhood just twenty blocks from my apartment. normally i would have walked there but i took my car because it was extra hot that night plus i wanted to save my leg strength. but part of the way there my car got a flat tire, in the middle of this really bad neighborhood. my neighborhood and the church neighborhood are kind of bad but all right, but theres ten blocks in between that are seriously dark and evil, like the worst neighborhood youve ever imagined. FUUUUUUDGE, i shouted, i didnt really say FUDGE but i think my grandma is reading this short story because i told her it would be pretty hardcore. anyway, i said FUDGE, not because i was scared but because the flat tire was fucking up my being on time to the fight. i could have just driven on the flat but i once heard about a sensei who said face every challenge HEAD ON, NO HALFWAY MEASURES and i didnt want to bend the axle. i looked at my watch, which is always right because its a handcrafted old watch i got from an old japanese trainer who was a serviceman in wwii because i seriously beat down his nephew in a fight. the watch said i had exactly fifteen minutes to get to the octagon.

i jacked up my car and already i knew there was going to be trouble, because three street toughs were in an alley giving me the eye, and then the biggest one said to me hey little man, you having some car troubles there. ive got a slim build and i was wearing a baggy shirt but i was ripped underneath that, make no mistake, but they didnt know that. i knew there was going to be fighting cause of this electrical feeling i got. its like my brain came apart from my mind and started doing all these violence equations. two of the toughs started walking towards me on different sides and just as the first guy got too close to me i knew when to kick him in the abdomen so that he rolled over a garbage can and landed on some broken bottles. as part of the same move i wheeled around and hit the other guy with my open hand in his face, hard enough to give him something to think about later, by driving a bunch of his front teeth up into his soft palate. OH OH, LOOKS LIKE YOU FUDGED WITH THE WRONG MAN, i said to the third one, the smallest one, and he just turned and ran back into the alley. it was a blind alley, which he shouldve known, but cause he panicked i guess he didnt know anymore. too bad for him.

like i said before, the other guys short story about me was Foot To Head, i dont know why he named it that. maybe because of fighter energy flowing all the way up my body from my foot to my head or something. what i do know is this short story is Super Foot To Head because of the incredibly powerful way i put my foot to that guys head in the alley. imagine if you put three pounds of medium rare ground beef in a hollowed out honeydew melon and then shot it with a shotgun. IT WAS EPIC. when it was over i was just standing at the end of the alley breathing with busted up head meat dripping off my shirt, i was so much in the fighter zone. i looked at my watch, i had seven minutes left til the match. it was just the beginning.

when i walked out of the alley i could smell there was already more trouble cooking, cause there was an eighteen wheeler pulled up next to my car and two crooked truckers were boosting my cars tires and trying to siphon off my gas. i knew from the news earlier that there were a lot of crooked truckers on the streets that night as part of some crime wave so i was mentally prepared for them, though when the first one saw me he threw a tire iron at my head that busted my nose and only added to the challenge. it was a pretty bad hit, it was like watching a pigeon get hit by a car zero inches from my face. but the taste of my own blood only added to my anger and focus.

the other trucker dropped the siphon and came at me, i started out pretty good when i landed clean hits on him with my elbow and head. but then when i was blocking a punch he pulled out a sixteen inch jungle knife from nowhere and with a loud swish he SLASHED OFF the four fingers of my right hand. AAAUUUGGHH POOP FUDGE, i was yelling, and because i was so loud and in extreme pain the guy thought he could get away, but i grabbed his shirt with my left hand and even though it felt like sticking my arm in a garbage bag full of bees on fire i still hit him a couple times in his head with whats left of my right hand. his neck made a crunch sound like when you bite into a fresh piece of corn and as he crumpled to the ground i knew he was probably knocked out ... or worse.

the guy who threw the tire iron now was trying to get back into the truck to escape, unlucky for him im left handed though, i picked up one of the wheels on the ground they had been trying to boost. SUCK ON THIS, i yelled to him, as i chucked the wheel at him and hit him low, right where the gonads attach to the body. i had tried to hit the trucker in the mouth which would have made the suck on this line make sense, but i still horked it at him pretty good, there were pieces of his pelvis bone sticking out the small of his back when i went to make sure he was unconscious from the pain. one problem though, cause of the siphon there was gas everywhere and when the tire bounced the rim sparked on the pavement and VVROOOOM the car and eighteen wheeler ALL BURST UP INTO FIRE. NOOOOO, i said, but i still had to get out of there to get out of the way of the explosion.

now i was going to have to walk to the competition which meant fighting street toughs block after block. i could take them but it was going to be bad, cause now my right hand wasnt good for anything but hitting and cause i got some gasoline on me id have to watch out for fire. worst of all, my japanese watch told me i was already twenty minutes late for the match. i knew Mad Leroy didnt want to go home without a fight either so he wouldnt let the judges call a forfeit right away, still i had to get there quick or hed win the title by default. i thought about a different sensei from the one i talked about before though, he said IF YOU BLOCK MY WAY I WILL MAKE YOU PAY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES.

TO BE CONTINUED...