Joplin Expats

When the tornado hit Joplin last year, like most people I was blown away. I mean, not literally. I made it out okay. I was crashing on a friend’s couch at the time, and the van the couch was inside was broken down in the Best Buy parking lot, outside the tornado’s path, so my Affliction shirt and Drowning Pool CDs were fine.
 
But looking at the wreckage of my hometown, I got that familiar sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. You know, the one you get when you wake up in the back of an ambulance, and you have to pull the oxygen mask down a little bit so you can ask the EMT if you won your fight, even though you know by the still crackling defibrillator paddles what she’s going to say.

Except cage fighting is a gift from God—it’s why He gave us fists. But looking around my hometown, I knew there was nothing good about this destruction. This was wrong. This was not a fair fight. So that’s when I decided I was going to track down the tornado and beat it up.  

As I stepped on a Greyhound headed East the next day, I told the enthusiastic crowd who’d responded to my going-away Evite that this fight wasn’t going to last one round. I told them that anyone who saw my match last January in the parking lot behind Mid-America Title Loans on Rangeline knows how brutal a knockout by rib-breaking can be, and when I found that tornado, it was going to be like that but with a whole lot more punishment and pain—and this time I wouldn’t be the one left unconscious.

As the bus doors closed, I shouted, “This time it’s personal!” and the homeless man who’d been dozing on a bench and my senile aunt went wild cheering as my steel steed roared toward destiny.

I stopped for lunch at the KFC in West Plains. I eat every meal at KFC because it’s name is one letter away from UFC, the company behind the sweetest fist fighting mankind has ever known, and because my training regimen requires a strict diet of fried foods and heavy starches. I was elbows deep in a bucket of Extra Crispy when I noticed a shifty-looking guy at the table next to me. Now this guy was all wrong. He had a tie on and was eating a salad, and he did that thing where he filled his cup with half Coke and half Diet Coke, like a middle-aged woman.

I knew from “Magnum P.I.” reruns that if I wanted to catch my prey then time was my enemy, so I slid into his booth.

“Hey,” I said. “I just got into town from Joplin.”

“Oh, wow, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I just saw some footage of the tornado on TV—unreal.”

“That’s funny,” I said, taking a cool sip of my gravy. “I never said anything about a tornado.”

He’d slipped up. Now I had him.  

“Right … well, I hope all of your loved ones are safe,” he said, beginning to clean up his lettuce.

“You know something, tough guy, don’t you?” I leaned in and sniffed his face. “Yeah, I can smell it all over you, and you’re not going anywhere until you tell me what is. ”

Like most of my previous matches in fast-food establishments, this one ended with me behind bars for a few days, but unlike previous bouts, this time I walked out of jail feeling like I’d let people down. If I couldn’t hammer punch this tornado for Joplin, who could?

Then I reminded myself that I was Stun Gun, once named a brawler of interest in a Big Nickel display ad,  and I resolved that despite this setback, I wasn’t going to disappoint my hometown. For months afterward I searched every place I thought an F5 might hide; I thoroughly combed every truck stop, motor court, meth house, country bar, culvert, mall bathroom, gas station bathroom, discount cigarette warehouse and highway porn store between here and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

But it was as if the tornado had vanished into thin air.

I finally returned home from my quest depressed, and for the first time in my life, feeling like a failure. And that’s when I saw the rebuilding. I saw that people in Joplin hadn’t given into regret and bitterness. Instead they’d momentarily rose above their differences to do what was best for the community.

Suddenly, I realized you can’t beat up every problem in your life, and sometimes blind anger isn’t the best course of action. Turns out, there are obstacles beyond the reach of even the fiercest rear naked choke hold, and even if you have an awesome life like mine, terrible things can still happen to you, and you can either waste a year trying to ground-and-pound a freak meteorological event or you can do something productive.

That is why I’m seeking a small loan from the city’s tornado relief fund to stage what I’m calling “Joplin Will Never Tap Out: The First Annual F5 Memorial Cage of Rage and Rebirth.” I will donate all profits from this first-class amateur MMA event to the Joplin School District’s legal defense fund for eminent domain, and unlike the last cage fighting tournament I was associated with in Pineville, fights will be arranged according to  weight class rather than my subjective appraisal of your muscle definition.

Oh, and as for my thoughts on “Warrior,” Tom Hardy had the underdeveloped legs of a pre-teen suffering from polio, and I STILL didn’t find it remotely believable that he lost to a sad, un-ripped high school physics teacher.