So I never wear them. Instead I have devoted the last fifteen years of my life to cultivating immunities to every drug you can name. I was born with the gift, it’s true, but in an industry like ours you have to work at it. At breakfast I have coffee, a bran muffin, and a heavy dose of vecuronium. For lunch it’s usually tuna fish and whatever muscimol I’m on. At dinner I like to mix it up with propofol or tsusensan or gamma-hydroxybutyrate or whatever. And then throughout the day it’s neurotoxins or paralytics or tranqs galore. I’m even doing my best with nixolophan.¹¹ I inject them, breathe them, swallow, transdermally patch them. I can outbeer the entire offensive line of the Giants. I can shoot up with all the junkies on Tenth Avenue and breeze through any field sobriety drill you throw at me. You should see my piss tests. It’s a lot to keep track of, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than wearing what basically amounts to an enhanced wet suit. I don’t honestly know why my uppers have been giving me so much grief about it.

Schermer makes another move on the K’plua. This time I shove him away, hardish, and then, just like that, it is totally on. He makes a strong, windmilly move. I counter with a violent lassoing motion, fist aloft, that doesn’t connect with anything.

“Buttons down,” I say in the best high-noon voice I’ve got.

“Buttons down,” Schermer agrees. We slide our buttons safely away and start circling each other in deep kungfu stances, making threatening movements—dog-paddle punches, minatory half-kicks—that look like an angry, disco-style hokey-pokey.

The good news is that I am saved from throwing, or catching, any punches.

The bad news is that my savior is a very sudden, very painful sensation of pressure in my bowels. Instantly I double over and collapse on the concrete. Before I know it my knees are drawn up to my chin and I’m lowing like an animal in a slaughterhouse. It feels like my intestines, suddenly molten, are braiding together into the nautical knots that I have been studying so hard: my duodenum is now an anchor bend, my colon a boom hitch.

With indelicate language Schermer indicates that he considers my inexpedient moaning and breakdancery writhing to be unsportsmanlike in the extreme. He circles me a few times, renewing his invitation that I get up. I cannot, and do not. He impugns my character, my mother, my ignoble pulse blood-lines, offers me a last chance, then advertises that failure to right myself in a timely manner will precipitate a number of punitive kicks and, very probably, induce him to start “throwing some knobs.” Most of my brain function is busy sorting the urgent signals of pain being sent from my gut and the only verbal response I manage is a series of sad, stuttering groans. I am able to apprehend his leg pulling back, his boot glinting, the offroading Vibram treads of his sole. I squeeze my eyes shut in anticipation of additional pain—a nearly incomprehensible idea—but when I open them again I see that gravity has performed a miracle. Schermer is now prostrate alongside me, his face turned away, immobilized.