Miguel ‘Manny’ Martinez was a former gang member turned good guy. By day, he ran a community center for troubled youth. By night, he ran the area’s only boxing and mixed martial arts training center. He was also a beast of a man. Six feet five inches, two-hundred thirty pounds of solid, chiseled muscle. He mostly hid the tattoos that told the story of his former life, but the tigers paw and claws that curved around the base of his neck were always visible and a constant reminder of where he had come from. He was also the best trainer in the tri-state area with golden gloves champions and MMA up and comers seeking his services in droves. Kyle was not going to be his latest and greatest.
Manny sought out Kyle after the dedication ceremony for the new safety features, like the 10-foot high safety fence, at Hide Memorial Park. The man seemed lost while giving his speech. Manny recognized the pain having been witness to too many families that had lost a child to violence. He felt he could help this man. And felt a calling to do just that.
Their conversations had been brief at first, nothing more than introductions and condolences. But a strange fellowship formed between the man who lost his child in an accident and the man who had seen too many children lost to the streets.
It was Manny who suggested Kyle come to train at his gym as a form of stress relief.
“The sweat will do you good. Trust me,” he had told Kyle.
And it did.
His first session in the gym was designed for a single purpose, to work Kyle to exhaustion. Manny punished Kyle’s body with aerobic activities and strength training and when Kyle felt he couldn’t move another inch, Manny pushed him harder. Then Manny drove Kyle home and helped him into his house and put him in bed, where Kyle fell into his first night of real sleep in almost a year.
A sore but refreshed Kyle showed up at the gym the next night and nearly every night thereafter. Training, sparring, learning and talking. It brought him a sense of focus and clarity and connection to his body and spirit. Unfortunately, he just wasn’t a very good fighter. Manny knew why. Kyle didn’t have a mean bone in his body. The word arrogant wasn’t even in his dictionary. The body of a titan, the killer instinct of a mouse. Those thoughts actually made Manny smile. He had not known very many genuinely nice people in his life. It was a nice change of pace.
***
She broke up with him over the phone. It was so pathetic and cliche, all Kyle could do was laugh at the drudgery that had become his life. But it also made him take a good hard look at himself. It was true, he wasn’t happy. At least she had been right about that.
“It’s just that with me being out here and you being back there, I am just not having any fun and I should at least be enjoying myself. But, I’m not. You can’t be happy, either. It’s nothing permanent. If we are meant to be together, we will be, just not while we are so far apart.”
“You’re breaking up with me? Over the phone? You just broke up with me.”
Kyle said, or rather whispered, the words out loud mostly so that he could hear them, to make sure that what he heard was actually real.
“Kyle, honey, it’s not like that.”
“No. It’s ok, Dana. Sew your wild oats, and all that. I get it. Listen, I’ve got to run. I’ll talk to you later.”
Dana Whitmore had been Kyle’s only girlfriend. To be frank, though Kyle had an exceptionally large group of friends, from both sexes, Dana was one of the few people he actually felt comfortable with. She was just so nice and had always been from their very first meeting on their very first day in middle school home room. It didn’t hurt that she was cute as a button back then and aged into an absolute knockout. Kyle decided it didn’t matter how nice or beautiful she was. She didn’t want him anymore and that was that. He did wonder briefly, however irrational it may have sounded to anyone who had ever laid eyes on him, if he would ever have sex again, having lost his virginity to a girl who no longer loved him.
Kyle was twenty years old and just starting his junior year, when he dropped out of college. Everyone told him he was crazy, and even though he thought they were probably right, he just couldn’t drag himself out of bed to go to class. He hated his classes, he wasn’t very fond of the professors and he couldn’t believe that some of his classmates had even graduated high school. He just knew he didn’t feel comfortable, or that he was learning anything that was relevant to the real world, and he felt that the worst case scenario was that he would take a semester break, lose half of his tuition, and try again later.
He never had to worry about it.
He started in the mail room. It was unheard of for someone to move from a menial administrative position to the technical side of the house. But, it happened.
Barely a month into his new life, the man slammed the phone down in an attempt to vent his frustration. The account, for a large photography printing outfit, was almost surely lost. The customer was furious. They asked for a new software platform and the equipment to run it, a quarter million dollar contract, and no hassles. It should have been easy, but now they were having daily complaints about distorted images on their screens. The technical department had been over the job specs dozens of times, and the platform had been tested, without error, over and over.
“It’s their monitors, not our hardware or software.”
Kyle had just dropped of a package and was walking back out the door. He wasn’t consciously listening to the conversation, nor was he commenting to anyone but himself. He was shocked when the man called him back to the office.
Over the next half hour, Kyle explained the article he had seen in last month’s journal, compatibility problems with one company’s monitors and another’s video cards. The article had stuck in his mind because both companies had a reputation for building top quality products. He thought it was funny that their products didn’t play nicely together. During the discussion, Kyle was witty and charming, and knew details for beyond his level of experience. When the man pushed him on how and why he knew so much, Kyle honestly had no explanation.
“I’m not sure. Chronic case of nerdiness?”
That sealed the deal. Kyle’s new boss chuckled all the way to human resources. Kyle started out on the technical help desk the next week. Six months later, he was promoted to lead technician. Six months after that, he had his first shot as a project leader. His natural leadership, confidence and ability to genuinely connect with people reveled in the spotlight. But it was his ability to diagnose complicated problems and develop innovative and effective solutions that caught the eye of his superiors. Kyle rode his success to a position as the youngest senior project leader in company history.