![]() You know, I was a tourist - is how I describe it. I always want to make the disclaimer that, though I trained, I don't - I never really had the same things at stake for the men and women who compete in this sport professionally or even as amateurs hoping to do it professionally. How much of these descriptions come from your experience? How much of it comes from talking to people that you knew? And as it bounces off the hard surfaces, it creates damage to those areas.ĭAVIES: Now, you trained in mixed martial arts as a young man. What happens is the - as the - as impacts occur to the head, the brain essentially slides back and forth in the skull. VERCHER: So the - it stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It's him, but it's his unfiltered self.ĭAVIES: And what's really happening here is something that happens to a lot of athletes that compete in high-impact sports, not just mixed martial arts but certainly football and hockey and boxing. And so there's a voice talking to him, in some sense. But he's also - he's experiencing what I described as a deterioration of his frontal lobe. VERCHER: He's got tinnitus, which comes and goes at varying degrees, sometimes to a maddening extent. He's at a point in his life where fighting is all he has left. And all of this is creating a great deal of uncertainty in him because he would obviously like for these things to not be occurring. But he's now experiencing this at a very amplified degree. He goes from happy to anxious to angry, not that we don't all do that in our normal lives. He's having violent swings in terms of mood. VERCHER: So he's experiencing short-term memory loss. You want to describe what he's going through? And the symptoms that this guy suffers are vividly described as we move through the book. But we learn about the punishment he's taken. He'd been suspended for something, which eventually emerges as the story unfolds. Worse than all that was the forgetting.ĭAVIES: And that is John Vercher reading from his new novel "After The Lights Go Out." So we meet this character, Xavier Wallace - Scarecrow was his nickname - who has made a comeback in the fight game and is hoping to get back into it. But he'd paid a cost for his time in the deep end, too - worse than the patchwork remnants of stitches in his forehead, worse than the accumulation of crackling scar tissue above his jagged orbital bones, worse even than the seemingly interminable intensifying headaches. Break the spirit, and the body follows fast behind. Kicks sloppy, thrown with languid legs, hinging and pivoting at the joints from sheer momentum. Xavier dragged them into deep waters, the championship rounds, where lactic acid tortured muscles, where deep breaths provided no oxygen, only the desperate need to breathe deeper, faster. Championship kickboxers, jiujitsu aces, each one the next big thing. The cage had no place for old, toothless lions fighting for their pride. Too many young bucks on the come up looking for a stepping stone to the next level. (Reading) The game had passed Xavier "Scarecrow" Wallace by. This is from the very beginning of the book, when we are learning about this character, Xavier Wallace. JOHN VERCHER: Thanks so much for having me, Dave.ĭAVIES: I'd like us to begin with a reading. He's the author of a previous novel titled "Three-Fifths." I spoke to Vercher last year when "After The Lights Go Out" was released in hardback.ĭAVIES: John Vercher, welcome to FRESH AIR. John Vercher's been selected as the University of North Carolina Asheville's Wilma Dykeman Writer-in-Residence for 2023, and he teaches writing and programs at Randolph College, Drexel University, and Chatham University. Like his main character, John Vercher is the son of mixed-race parents, and he trained in mixed martial arts as a young man, though he never fought professionally. As the story unfolds, he learns more about his family's past as he struggles to resurrect his fighting career. Xavier is the son of a Black mother who'd left the family when he was young and a white father who's now struggling with Alzheimer's. It's about the fight game, family, the ravages of dementia and about race. Vercher's novel, "After The Lights Go Out," is now out in paperback. The main character in Vercher's book is a veteran mixed martial arts fighter, and the groceries rotted in the car because the head trauma Xavier Wallace had suffered over the years left him unable to remember he'd bought them. That happens in the opening pages of the novel by our guest, John Vercher. Imagine opening your car door one day and being greeted by the stench of rotting groceries, including raw chicken and vegetables, that were left in the backseat overnight in sweltering weather.
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