The cage was glazed to a silky finish, paradoxical considering its barbarous appearance. Smoothing my calloused fingers over it as though it were jade, I felt a coating on the octagonal cage that had been used to tame it.

           As a small boy learning to breed rabbits for my father in the backyard of our Altoona, Pennsylvania home, I remember taming them. “97-98-99-100,” I counted to myself, as I pet their thick, shedding winter fur one hundred times to make them nicer. Despite my frail wrists burning as the repetitions exceeded the halfway mark, I persevered. “Tame rabbits would have nice babies,” I told my father. The cage though, it would always be too mean to have offspring. It had been coated, to prevent lawsuits really, so if a fighter’s skin was split-jagged and bleeding, it wasn’t the cage’s fault. Nothing was.
 

           After my debut fight, I had established an identity. My father, whose name I share, who had been nonexistent for nearly the past decade of my life, no longer subconsciously drove me to impress him. The process of training and subsequent outcome of the fight had removed him, not the way a teacher removes a student’s correct answer from the chalkboard, one swipe, but the way the waves erase a loved one’s name, slowly eroding it, until it is as smooth as a Labrador’s velvet ears, yet somehow still gritty sand.

Speaking in front of a crowd brought about bouts of palsy through my in-need-of-WD-40 jaw and down into my trapezius, before finally kicking its shoes off and calling my heart its home. Preparing days ahead of time, I carried water with me like toddlers carry blankets, making sure I was properly hydrated, I thought, so my mouth wouldn’t be dry come speech time. It never helped. From the time the first person presented their speech, until it was my turn, my mouth filled with thick phlegm, so agglutinative I couldn’t spit or swallow. Even if I drank water just prior to speaking, this gummy paste would latch onto my teeth like the parasites on a shark’s eyes. This, of course, was a precursor to stuttering words I’d read aloud hundreds of times. I could hear myself stutter, but couldn’t stop it, the helplessness of watching a wildfire. “I can fight in cages with thousands watching,” I thought, “but speaking in front of people makes my nuts recede.”

Days later, my friend Cassie invited me to watch her audition for the role of Medea, in Penn State Altoona’s production of Euripides’ play of the same name. “So audition,” I asked Cassie, “is basically a cool word for try-out?” Being a guy surrounded by sports my entire life, I knew all about try-outs. “Just come watch,” she said, “you’ll see.” Cassie has acted in Los Angeles without a qualm, and she was truly audacious, letting herself become completely vulnerable in front of people she was either competing against or complete strangers with. And she reveled in it. I watched her audition; she laughed – the uncontrollable type when you know you shouldn’t and need to hide it or excuse yourself from the room, become a serial killer – brooding, pacing, shoulders hunched, hair a tatter, blank eyes, she bawled – the type where you can’t breathe, the type more a fight with oxygen than the cause. She shook afterwards. I congratulated her with the slap on the back my coaches used to give after I took a charge on the opposing team’s biggest player. Later, in the bathroom stall, I too shook. Then cried, tears coming like a flash flood in Tucson.

Fear and insecurity bubbled to the surface of my life, again, like boiling garden-variety spaghetti sauce; thick clumps thrown, sticking, burning. My heart itched and I didn’t know how to scratch it. I entered the realm of fear when I stepped into the cage that April. The best way to confront fear, I had learned, was to knock on its door uninvited, and once in, to head straight for the kitchen, robbing it of sustenance.

I won the lead male role, Cassie’s co-lead, Medea’s husband, Jason of the Argonauts. I researched Jason the way I had anaerobic energy systems for fight training. It helped that he was a warrior. It would be my goal to be a warrior through him, in this other venue, to confront my glossophobia. Rehearsals weren’t until the start of the fall semester, about two months away, and I was taking classes full-time in State College during the summer to graduate in four years with two degrees. This provided ample time to develop ulcers.

Though my heart itched, that would soon be taken care of. My mind, though, somehow fabricated the beliefs of everyone close to me. Everybody thought my MMA (mixed martial arts) debut victory was a fluke; that because he slipped, and I capitalized with the rear naked choke, it wasn’t a legitimate win. In addition, my only consistent outlet to nerves and problems in life is through physicality. I signed on the dotted line for my second fight. I’d be back in the cage on August 19th, one week before rehearsals for Medea.

I prepared my body as Cameron, the 155lb MMA warrior, and as Jason, son of Aeson. I would prepare to slay the dragon of insecurities, and slay the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece.

My training couldn’t be as intense because of my schedule, so I took more to the weights, wanting to become the iron I grunted to lift, and to online MMA instructional videos, hoping to at least retain what I knew. I woke at six most days, trudged along sleepily to an abandoned farm, did sprints through grass that rivaled deep snow in difficulty, making sure to bring my knees as high as the bulbs on the weeds. It simulated my opponent’s face. Wet bails of hay worked great for overhead throws, which I hoped would improve my ratio of fast twitch fibers. I hoped the increase in strength I picked up from these workouts would cancel out the lack of technicality I’d bring due to lack of sparing and rolling. Essentially, the farm became my training partner. Through my screams and incoherent trash talking, the farm was a great listener.

They called my name first this time, the night of August 19th, and rightfully so. Out of respect for my elders (my opponent was 32 years old to my 22), I was fine with him entering the cage with the chip of ten years on his shoulders. I had a theory (half serious, half joking) that as a man aged, if he has worked throughout his life, he acquired a functional strength. I even went so far as to believe that on a man’s 30th birthday, he woke up quite a bit stronger than the day before, “man-strength,” I called it. Pound for pound, I knew my opponent couldn’t match my prowess in the weight-room. But my concern about his man-strength was the concern of my friends in the crowd as well.

I met him the night I arrived at the fighter-meeting gym in Columbus, Ohio. Again, I hid my fire under the beanies’ cast shadow, but I overheard him talking about his weight: “About a buck fifty-four” he said with a twinge of southern accent, a bit of an overconfident raspy bar voice. My right knuckles itched with the thought of cascading into his jaw. “Won’t know the dude I’m fightin’ til tomorrow night.” I sensed this was the man I’d struggle in hand-to-hand combat against. He looked soft muscularly.

But I’ll be damned. He came out with a burst of man-strength after my initial off-the-mark jab and aggressively marched me close to the back of the cage with a flurry of whiffed left and right hooks. Nowhere to go, I lept forward, initiated a clinch, wrapping my hands across the back of his head. I felt my head rock back from a crisp inside uppercut. I felt his strength. I tried to stay tight to him to avoid damage. He remained reckless – which had made me desperate rather than him vulnerable. I left the ground for a split second as all the force of my right knee landed into his right inner thigh’s meat. No momentum shift. I continued an out of control strength struggle with someone I couldn’t win it with. I purposely threw a telegraphed knee, left it hanging, begged him to latch on so I could pull guard. He did, put me on my back; diamonds from the cage imprinted my shaved head and neck as I withstood his man-grip, trying to remember to breathe so if I made it to round two, I could be competent. Hanging on was my only hope.

“Grind his face into the cage,” his corner-men shouted, “he doesn’t like that!” “Elbows, elbows, elbow his nose damnit,” their spit flying into the cage as my opponent used his man-strength to drag my body towards them. A chant of “Hock-en-berry, Hock-en-berry” broke out in the crowd. His name. The ground, my opponent thought, were his waters, and he wanted to take me to the deep-end where he could drown me like an anaconda would. They cheered for the aggressor, of course.

I shifted my hips, propelled my legs across his head, secured an armbar with the hopes of breaking his limb. As I began extending my body to lock his elbow 180 degrees, I was lifted into the air, shook off, and felt a hammer fist land just below my nose. I heard the Ooo’s of the crowd. Someone yelled, “you’re in control, Cameron.” “Control” reminded me to breathe. Fatigue’s slow, grinding pain overwhelmed me already because I wasn’t breathing as his relentless attack ensued.

“Hockenberry softening up the ribcage,” the announcer said excitedly, as he landed three left hands to my body from on top. I saw the punches in slow motion, felt little to nothing, wondered if I was having an out of body experience. Were the punches seriously damaging?

Cleverness, I found out, comes when your body registers that you are in a life-or-death situation. I trapped his arm, and as he forced the point of his chin into my lips then gums, driving through his legs, using his free forearm and elbow to try to lacerate the soft tissue of my face, I let it happen. As long as it meant he struggled. I grabbed the top of his head and pulled down when he wanted to rise up to reign down punches; I pushed his head up when he wanted to grind his chin into me. It was a game of counterbalances. If I was cut, if I bled, so be it. I was slowly sapping the energy from him, making him overwork to perform unimportant tasks. I used Eddie Bravo’s “Rubber-Guard,” a jiu-jitsu system reliant on flexibility that made my opponent constantly swipe (like a cat to yarn) my leg from resting on the back of his neck. Basically, I annoyed him, like the sibling repetition game:

“Stop it or I’m gonna tell Mom.”

“Stop it or I’m gonna tell Mom.”

“I’m stupid.”

“I’m stupid….”

“Hey!”

            The ten-second gong sounded and I continued my game. I focused on getting three or four deep breaths in. I stood up sick. Questioned whether I had enough to take another round of intensity like that if I wasn’t breathing. The seconds between rounds passed and my body - acclimated to sprinting through weeds and resting, sprinting through weeds and resting - began to settle down. I focused on what I was going to do to him rather than how I felt. My right hand itched. I was putting him down with it as soon as the round began.

Round two began with him taking his hands off his knees. I landed a leaping right hook that rattled him. He wiped it off afterwards, and smiled at me, as though he had guacamole on his cheek. I’ve watched enough fights to know that if a fighter smiles after they’ve been hit, it means they are hurt. I threw a right Thai-kick, turning my hips like a can opener and unleashing the density of my tibia into the giving muscle of his left quadriceps. Not wanting to stand and trade, he immediately took me down to the ground, where he found reasonable success in round one. Back into his waters, where I annoyed him to the point where he would never, ever, share his toys with me. In fact, he exploded his torso upwards, coming down with the clenched right hand of a bully wanting, needing lunch money. I worked for an omoplata, heard the announcer and fans go wild. I felt the bones in his right arm click and clank like gears. Something gave. Then came that same swiping hammer fist I’d tasted earlier. I slithered to the left, using his anaconda attributes. His fist landed flush into the apron, crunching his knuckles and rolling his wrist forward, a position unable to support his weight.

I hopped out the side like our rabbits when I accidentally left the crate open, unleashing a left, right, left hook combination from behind to his kidneys as he crouched on all fours, head tucked in, as I stood above him. No longer did I want to annoy. I wanted revenge on the bully that just tried to steal the peanut butter and jelly my mother packed in my Ninja Turtles lunchbox. His body hunkered just like a turtle, without the dense shell. Strikes came like lightning: silent, rapid, and with the ability to damage. The storm finished when he gasped from a body blow, sucking air that wasn’t there, trying to stand up and grab the tamed cage. The rear naked choke sunk-in, as in my debut, I took the space after exhalation the way an anaconda would; I squeezed with all the passion Cassie used to secure her role. He tapped out. I couldn’t breathe. Started shaking as in the stall after Cassie’s audition. Kissed the soft rigidity of the cage that would temper Jason of the Argonauts.