Knock Out! Part One - Novella

K N O C K   O U T !

P A R T   O N E

BY Paul William Fassett

Damn this mental block. It's come from working on the same thing over and over and then compounding the problem with never leaving the house. I spent the last year, maybe more just sitting around, waiting for inspiration to strike me but that's just not how it works. Inspiration isn't like a living thing. It's something you force into existence by getting out there. Talking to people. I love to be around people, not just one though. I need many people. When I am around just one, things get awkward. We run out of things to talk about after about fifteen minutes and then I spend the rest of the time trying to come up with small talk to keep the whole thing going.

I guess I should describe myself, give you a mental picture of who I am. I've got average length hair. A couple inches on the top, short on the sides. It's curly and dark brown. I used to try and straighten it when it was long but whenever it would rain it would just get curly again and frizzy. Frizzy was the worst. Made me look like I had an afro. I tried everything from hairspray to putting corn oil in it. Yes, cooking oil. I expended a lot of energy trying to pretend I was something that I wasn't, that now that I am older I don't know who I am. I guess I am average with a few exceptions. I have a uni-brow. I pluck it of course but on days that I forget it's very obvious and sometimes I go weeks without plucking it and don't realize until someone makes a comment.

I work at a restaurant for people who want to seem fancy but don't want to spend a whole lot of money to prove it. It's called The Hunter's Lodge and there are tons of pictures of hunting dogs and guys in those Sherlock Holmes hats looking off into the distance with a rifle in hand. I went from being a busboy to a fry-cook in a year. Not exactly a move up but it was slightly more money, so I guess there's that.

I was walking back home from work that night, because my car was permanently fucked, costing me about four hundred dollars a month to maintain. It was currently sitting in a permanent parking spot in my apartment complex and I had to get the tags updated just to keep the landlord from towing it.

So yeah, my life was pretty much in the shitter. The only thing I had to look forward to was boxing. I paid thirty-five dollars a month for a locker and the privilege to take all of my aggression out on a heavy bag. I never trained with anyone there because the private lessons were stupid expensive. That's about half a weeks pay. Not that I would have wanted to train seriously. The idea of being punched in the head for a living is the last thing I would call a good time.

I guess that brings me to the event. My apartment is nothing to write home about. It's about four-fifty a month and less than that in square footage. I had some noisy neighbors too. Real rioters. The guys below me blast their music at a decible just shy of a jet engine and all hours of the night too. The girl living next door doesn't make a whole lot of noise though she is coming and going at all hours of the night. Anytime someone closes their doors around here it vibrates our paper mache walls like a gun shot going off.

That brings me to the trouble. The whole ordeal that's got me tied to a chair in some guys fucking basement.