“I knew you did,” he whispered. And with a reassured sigh, Tag slid into sleep, and I clung to my friend, determined to keep my promise to keep him earth-bound.
IT’S WEIRD. I started Tag Team because I knew, in the ring, in the octagon, no one really fights alone. You’re standing there, battling an opponent, but the fight really takes place in the weeks and months, sometimes years, that come before a fight. It’s in the preparation, it’s in the team you assemble that helps you prepare. See, a fighter always has a team.
Because you have a team, and that team is counting on you, no one wants to tap out. In MMA, tapping out is worse than losing a fight. If you battle to the end and you lose the fight, you haven’t really lost. But if you go into a fight and you have to tap out? That’s hard on a fighter. That’s hard on his team. That’s tough on morale. That means you didn’t take your opponent seriously, you didn’t do your homework, you didn’t prepare, your team didn’t help you prepare, and you got caught with your pants down. Or it means you got scared and you didn’t trust your training. You didn’t trust yourself. You didn’t trust your team. So you tapped out. And that’s hard to come back from.
No one fights alone. That was my motto for Tag Team, yet it was my motto for everyone else. It was my motto for my teammates, but I never believed it myself. I was the team, I wanted to be the team for everyone else. I’d told Millie before the Santos fight that everyone fights alone. And I guess, deep down, I didn’t want anyone to have to fight for me. Stupid? Obvious? Maybe. But that’s who I am. Or who I was.
My goal now? No tap outs. Stick around. Stay in it. Fight. And like I told Moses, when the bell rings, it rings. And so far, my team is getting me through. My whole team.
The guys all came to my wedding in Tag Team shirts. In fact, every single person in attendance was wearing a Tag Team shirt with a suit or a skirt. Even my parents and my two sisters, who surprised me with their presence, were wearing them. Henry wore his shirt with a tuxedo jacket and a bow tie. Moses wore all black, as usual, but he added a pair of shades that he didn’t remove even once, even though the ceremony was inside Millie’s favorite old church. The shades hid his eyes, and I knew he was crying. I cried too, but I didn’t feel compelled to hide it. The room was filled with people I cared about, people who cared about me, and it was easily the best day of my life—proof that even with a cancer diagnosis, you can still have a best day. You can still have lots of best days.
Henry walked Millie down the aisle, and she wore her mother’s veil and a white lace dress that seemed more suited to another era—maybe the era I’d described when we first met. Watching her walk toward me in that dress made me believe in destiny and all the crap Moses and I had always said we didn’t believe in. Or maybe it wasn’t about the dress at all, maybe she was just beautiful. Looking at her made me happy to be alive. But then again, she’d always had that effect on me.
We had a reception at the bar that was more after-party than anything, and Millie and I danced until we were breathless, but left when it was still in full swing. I wasn’t supposed to drive, so Mikey played chauffeur and drove us to our hotel, dragging boxing gloves and cans and a pair of Axel’s size 16 shoes from the bumper, blaring “Accidental Babies”—Millie’s request—as we made out in the backseat.
Speaking of accidental babies, we found out Millie was pregnant exactly a month after the wedding. It wasn’t really accidental at all. Millie had willed it to happen, I think. Once chemotherapy and radiation started, there wouldn’t be any little Taggerts until it was over—whatever ‘over’ meant. So she made sure it happened before. She was strengthening the team, calling in new recruits, making sure I had every reason to dig deep. We kept the all or nothing mindset. And we celebrated the news and refused to see the giants lurking in the shadows, making us fearful of what was to come.
I was just glad she wouldn’t be able to dance around that damn pole for much longer. I hadn’t wanted to show my inner caveman—and let’s be honest, my inner caveman is an outtie—but I wasn’t crazy about other men looking at my wife dancing around a pole. I suggested she should play her guitar a couple of nights a week at the bar instead, but she seemed content to keep the dancing in the basement and add some pre-natal yoga classes to the Tag Team fitness schedule, and actually pulled in quite a few new memberships.
Moses did his best to keep death away, and I let him believe I thought he could. I’d come close enough with that first round of chemo to know better. Nobody could stave it off when it finally came. And I watched it come for many suffering around me at the same treatment center. I was grateful Millie couldn’t see them. In some ways, it was a small mercy.
I’d been referred to the Huntsman Cancer Institute and upon further analysis, my tumor had been downgraded from a stage four glioblastoma to a stage three anaplastic astrocytoma. That was good news. Gigantic news. It changed a terminal diagnosis into a diagnosis threaded with hope. But the good news was cut off at the knees when the tendrils of the tumor I’d had removed refused to die, and month after month my MRI results hardly varied.
But bad news or good news, we still celebrated. We laughed. We loved. I kept singing and Millie kept dancing—if only for each other. She said as long as I kept singing she wouldn’t lose me. And it seemed to be working. Her belly grew, my businesses did too, and Henry grew most of all. He shot up over the summer and started packing on muscle with continued guidance at the gym. With his short hair and changed body, he was hardly recognizable when he started his junior year in high school.