Anger Pills

Birth name: Bodie Gibbons
Nickname: Bodie the Boomer
Birthdate: 04/18/72
Hometown: Melbourne, Australia
Record: 1-5-3
Weight: 213.0
Height: 5’9”
Personal hero: Bruce Lee

The dizzying white flashes of discharging camera bulbs send him staggering blindly about the ring in this hot, cramped space, too, too small to contain the gravitas of all the past minute’s events. They swarm about like locusts, rackety wings buzzing in time with the turning clock wheels of their frenzied media brains. I’ll be stuffed, Story of the Bloody Year! they go a-chirpy-chirpy-cheeping as they snap away furiously through the ropes. And under the heat of it all, blind as a joey fresh out his mum, he feels like chucking up his brekkie.

One minute and twenty-three seconds earlier:
“...and in the other corner, we’ve got Riley-Jack the Nose-Wrecker!”
Bodie snatched off his mock tortoise Wayfarer’s and bolted up stiff on the stool as the behemoth that was Riley-Jack the Nose-Wrecker clambered over the ropes and into the ring. He could see instantly how this bloke’s been spending his summers hauling boxcars by their chains through the sweltering blaze of the Outback and making a few quid on the side driving dingoes from people’s yards by the look of his mug alone.
“Root me sideways, Willie! Bloke’s built like a shit brick house! I’ll get KO’ed quicker than a root with your sister! What the hell you puttin’ me in a ring with the likes of him for?”
“Easy, Bodie. Keep your spittle in your gabber, alright? I never thought he’d be the size of a Winnebago. But no worries. I’ve been saving something special for a time like this.”
“What? You got some magic beans gonna sprout me the hell outta here?”
“Better. Magic pills.”
“You gone daffy?”
“No time to worry about that. These are premium grade. Just pop a few of these and you’ll have him pashing the floor.”
Willie was right. Willie had smelly feet and he ate too much fast food, but he was more right than Bodie could imagine.
“Go on. Give ‘em a burl.”
Sticky from the sweat of his palm, they were small, round things colored pink and blue. The pink ones had smiley faces on them and the blue ones had stars.
“Oh what the hell, down the hatch with you all.”
He sent a great sticky handful of Willie’s magic beans laughing and dancing and screaming down the back of his throat, and gulping hard, he threw down his towel and rose to his feet and he strode across the ring to pound fists with this eight-foot gorilla, Mr. Riley-Jack the Nose-Wrecker.
It was time to get angry.
He lost his mouth guard in the first blow, his chin gone sailing free as a birdy over the line of his shoulder, going... going... gone, past the point of no return. He felt himself falling through space and time and falling through colors, ambo sirens wailing in his ears, and then, suddenly, inexplicably, deliciously, the sweet sounds of something he hadn’t heard in five years’ time: The Beach Boys playing live their 1973 hit single “Sail On, Sailor,” only this time he wasn’t stoned-drunk out his mind.
This time he was the bloody sailor––and oh, how very far away was he sailing.
“Often frightened,” wailed Brian Wilson somewhere between his ears. “Unenlightened. Sail on, sail on, sailor!”
And away he went, a-sailing to the moon and then some.
There were things dancing and singing there which oughtn’t be dancing and singing in the first––like cartoon cattle drawn sometime in the 1920s and their flower friends with happy faces and jointless arms and legs, and all of them were holding hands and kicking their feet about their heads and singing cheerily in unison: “Sail on, sail on, sailor!” and they were swaying back and forth in time to the music, bending their 2-D animated stalks and flashing big, shiny, tooth-filled grins that no one should ever have to see on the face of a flower in waking life. Relentlessly, tirelessly, they bounced up and down, a leg to the left, a leg to the right, petal-bonneted heads twisting this way and that. All smiles and sunshine.
And there were blueys floating all about, too, pulling long, dangly tentacles through the air as they pulsed to and fro with their pancake-shaped jelly bodies brilliant shades of Pacific blue.
And as Bodie smashed feet-first far down into the elastic floor, sinking for miles and miles, and miles some more, he felt a great surge of power coursing through his veins like a most devastating tidal wave ready to come crashing in and annihilate the world’s most beautiful coral reefs.
And he loved it.
Readied now, steadied now, chest heaving and heart working like butterfly wings, he looked up fiercely into the gaping maw of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
“Let’s dance.”
Bodie the Boomer launched hot as a rocket off the jungle floor, sailing up past the palms and the fire-belching volcanoes, and he smashed a ferocious right hook into the head of the tyrannosaur. There came in reply a mechanical Godzilla scream and the rex lashed back madly, snapping with massive jaws as Bodie ducked and weaved and rolled under the long, slithery tail, coming up again to shatter the dinosaur’s right leg with another devastating blow.
Limping, the tyrannosaur chased after, chomping and snapping, saliva strung between his long dagger-teeth, and Bodie responded by blackening one of his silly reptile eyes. Down the beast thudded––and Bodie, breathing fire himself and huffing huge as a puffer, swooped down to pummel the fallen king’s face into oblivion.
Suddenly, in the midst of his moment of victory, down from the hills there came bouncing a great flock of fighting Kangaroo Jacks wearing slouch hats and boxing gloves, and they were all coming for him!
They swarmed all around, sweaty noses sticking into his face and feet thumping into his belly, and he raged wildly and swept out his Samson arms and blew them all back with his insanely-adrenalized wrath.
He was Bodie the Boomer.
He was Bodie the Tyrannosaur-Slayer.
He was fucking Bruce Lee, Fists of Fury.

And swirling there in the cramped ring, under the blinding flashes of the paparazzi, he feels like chucking up his brekkie, and maybe he will once he gets a look at his crazed eyes in the mirror and sees all the red dripping down his big heaving bare chest and the bits of faces stuck flat like gum on the ends of his gloves, so many blokes lying immobile about his wrapped ankles, all wearing their form-fitting black T-shirts that say ‘SECURITY’ across the gulf between their shoulders. He swallows oxygen like it were beer, and blind as Mr. Oedipus himself, he revels in the glory of the lights and the heat and the nonsensical blather of so many people surging in stadium seats, and he hopes this blistering hot stupor will never wear.