This is part two of three of a serial fiction piece by Jack Vening, with accompanying illustrations by Mike Baylis.

2. Motivation

It’s important to remember your origins. I got into boxing how most people do: by beating the shit out of old fridges abandoned on the street with a gang of other ugly kids. Those were mean days, when everyone was throwing their fridges away, when there were no girls to talk to, because our parents kept them locked away in vaults. We were all unhandsome and horny and itching to destroy things people had once paid a lot of money for.

In a modern society, beating up a fridge with your bare hands is viewed as an obscene act. My father fought back, blasting us with a fire-hose if we were ever caught. He called us shit-hounds and cum-brains, bad kids, real-life motherfuckers like out of a fairy-tale. He was a retiree with long, elegant hands, who had once dreamed of being a manager of champion boxers, but whose only real talent turned out to be playing the saxophone, for which he resented himself immensely. Every night after dinner he would play for my mother and I as the three of us wept.

How couldn’t we have dreamt of something else? The last time he caught me assaulting a fridge, what restraint he’d shown became untethered.

“You didn’t cry when you came out of your mother,” he screamed, as he sprayed us. “You honked like a goose, smelled like a lit match. The doctor held you up by the scruff of your neck and showed you round. ‘Behold!’ he said, ‘The horrors of nature.’ You didn’t look like a baby, you looked like one of those guys who they find preserved in a swamp a million years after he’d fallen in taking a shit. Begone!”

Normally we would run, but this time I stayed, busting my knuckles on the fridge, the fire-hose stripping my skin like paint. Every time he spoke I hit harder. By the time the water pressure cut out the fridge was in pieces, and I marched upstairs to our apartment and found my father’s saxophone and punched it right square in the belly, where the toots come out. From then on it honked like a goose every time he played it.

I thought, Behold the horrors of nature.

I learned that you can’t break an instrument and just expect the world to ignore it. That was the first time I went to prison. Have you ever been to jail? Holy smokes: what a snore-house. The movies make out that incarceration is the closest thing a human can come to experiencing hell, but in a Western Democracy this just means you forfeit freedoms only invented in the last decade, like watching Korean news at two in the morning.

I thrived. With my experience I was the strongest guy by a mile. The second strongest ran a book club. I learned that most people serving time are doing so only for an ugly mistake or, at worst, a minor excursion into the criminal hemisphere. My first cellmate had thrown his drink in a baby’s face, who was, by chance, the son of a UN ambassador. Another guy accidentally sent his mixed recycling to the President every week for forty years.

Maybe it’s true that these are not excusable mistakes, but they are tremendously human ones. Can we expect a letter of warning every time we make a heinous error? The universe suggests we can’t, but we go on expecting it all the same. And I expected a lot. Eventually, I was arrested so many times that the warden said he would keep the door unlocked for when I was coming back in. This was a joke, of course. Let me tell you: the whole system would fall apart. The hills would be full of fugitives running book clubs.

Either way, I didn’t care. I had ambition now, and I’d already seen the worst that could happen. Using his connections, an old cellmate got me on the waiting list for a boxing academy for young hoodlums, and soon I was making money doing what I loved.

I got there because I was hungry—starving, for something else. At the academy they taught us that wolves will swallow mud when there’s nothing else to eat. They’ll keep it inside them, pushing them further, reminding them what they want. You’ll never be great until you’re so hungry you’re willing to fill your belly with mud. Just remember to burp it up at a convenient time later.

Jack Vening is a bookseller and writer from Canberra. He is currently working on a fake book of motivational boxing memoir, and a collection of stories for the QLA Young Writers Fellowship, which he won in 2014.