Contacts and Blood

What has comedian Jack Benny have to do with boxing, you may ask.  Due to insomnia, I've become hooked on Benny's long running TV show.  Reruns are shown four nights of the week at 1:00 AM, two episodes back to back.  One episode I saw involved Benny taking a woman out to see a classical violinist give a concert.  She kept trying to get him to take her to a boxing match instead.  Benny told her no, that she was going to be exposed to some culture for a change.  They went to the concert, but she eventually got bored.  The woman pulled out a transistor radio, turned it up loud, and listened to the boxing match.  The majority of the audience members sitting around Benny and the woman got offended and they got up to leave.  Benny had to apologize to them and to the musician onstage.

While walking to church on Sunday, I ran into Bean.  He hasn't been in the gym for awhile because he's had appointments with clients.  Bean is a personal trainer.  "Money is tight, so I have to take the work when it comes," he said. 

The crowd was small at the gym tonight: Amy, Igor, Reygie, Matt and big Andre.  Andre told us about a spectacular fight that happened when some guys at a club decided to roll up on him and his cousin.  Andre described how he had taken on a couple of guys at one time, while his cousin handled two others.  One guy was throwing wild, unfocused punches, and Andre just laid the guy out. I'm still trying to figure out why the guys thought they could rush Andre; he's not a small man. The manager of the club saw what happened, and concluded correctly that Andre and his cousin were not at fault.  The cops were called on the guys who started the fight.  The only injury Andre had was when he fell on his wrist the wrong way at a point during the dust up. 

Reygie may be the only person who has a fight at Brooks Park next week.  Alan explained that Brooks doesn't have any heavyweights or Andre could have gotten a match.  There won't be any women in the show this time, either, which dashes chances for Sarah and I to see some action. 

No, Andre didn't hit Reygie and make his head go up in this shot.  Reygie had just lost one of his contacts, and the action had to be stopped momentarily.  He took both of them out, and I grabbed a latex glove to put them on.  I laid the glove on the coach's desk. 

Reygie, who is nearsighted, started making jokes about different everyone looked.  "Hillari, you look like Beyonce from afar!" he said, and we all laughed.  He also said something to Alan about looking good. 

I wish I had put the glove with the contacts somewhere else after that sparring session was over.   When Reygie went to retrieve the contacts later, one of them was gone.  Igor had his bag on Alan's desk again, and he had been over there changing his clothes to leave.  Either the contact was knocked on the floor, or it got stuck to Igor's bag or clothes and went out the door with him.  If Igor wasn't so self-absorbed all the time, he would have seen the glove with the contact lenses before he started moving stuff around.  Luckily, Reygie had another pair of contact lenses in his car.

 

Paul and Andre were hanging in there together for a couple of rounds.  That is until Paul got a bloody nose.  Alan cleaned him up and sent him back out.  It wasn't long before Andre got in another punch that made Paul's nose turn into a gusher again. I was hoping that none of the blood would get on his white shirt, but it did.  Some of it was on the canvas, too.  Alan got it up with a towel.  "You're going to have to use hydrogen peroxide to get that blood out," I told Paul. 

I sparred with Andre, too, and he encouraged me to get some hooks in.  He was in one of the corners, and he told me to just keep working.  I kept using my right hook again and again on Andre's jaw and head. There were other times during the three rounds we did where my right hook kept connecting to his head.  The first several didn't faze him, but then I delivered one that caused Andre to shake his head.  "I felt that one!" he said.