Sparring with Joey was actually pretty fun. Now that he knew better, he didn’t fall into the trap of taking it easy on me or thinking I couldn’t hit just because I was female. He gave it a really solid effort and showed that he’d learned from our last time in the ring. He still wasn’t as fast as me or have the reach, but he gave it a solid effort.
He did a good job of controlling that left shoulder drop until he got tired, too, but that was understandable. It’s hard to maintain good form when you’re exhausted.
What he absolutely didn’t expect was when I pivoted in on him and tossed him down to the mat with a well-timed hip throw. I’d noticed that neither Joey or Richie had ever once attempted any grappling, so I figured it was somehow mentally off-limits when fighting a girl.
Again, I wanted real fighting, not some sort of ‘well, I’m fighting a chick, so I better go easy’ mentality. If those barriers were going to be broken, it was me that was going to have to do it.
The crowd that had gathered around the ring to watch let out a collective “Ohh!” when I tossed Joey down on the mat and started hammering away on him, not giving him the chance to do anything but cover up. Realizing he had no out, he tapped and I stood up off him.
I gave him a hand to help him up, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’re getting better,” I told him. “Especially on not telegraphing so much. But you still fell into the trap of not treating me like a real fighter.”
“Can I be honest with you?” Joey asked, leaning in so nobody else would hear our conversation.
“Of course,” I said, my voice low.
“It just doesn’t feel right, you know, um, well, like, wrestling with a chick,” he said.
“I get it, I do,” I agreed. “You like the feel of a nice, strong man in your arms.”
Joey looked at me indignantly, then realized I was yanking his chain and laughed. “When you put it that way…” he said.
“Next time we spar, bring your full game. Get it out of your head that I’ve got tits. What you need to do is come in with the attitude that I’m just another fighter, a fighter who’s got reach and speed on you.”
“Well, that’s no fucking lie,” Joey admitted. “You read me like a fucking book, too.”
“You did a lot better on that,” I said, wrapping an arm around his shoulder as we made our way to the ropes. “Keep working on that. Also, do more speed work, and more fitness. You were really slowing down by the end. No way should I have been able to get in with the hip like that.”
“Yeah, I was pretty gassed,” Joey admitted, holding the ropes for me to exit the ring.
Ditching my gear at my bag, I had a momentary flash of Angela worrying about my bruises. Emmy had never been concerned like that, but then, she was there at the start when I first took up kickboxing as a form of cross training.
Coach Lawrence handed me a water bottle once I had my headgear off. “I didn’t see that throw coming,” he said. “But I guess I should have. You been working with Jody, after all, and his thing is the ground game.”
“Does that change your thinking on how best to go against me?” I asked, curious.
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “Just pure striking? There isn’t anybody in this gym I’d put against you.You’re unbelievably fast. Like, I mean world-class fast. It just doesn’t seem right for anybody as tall as you to be able to move so freaking quick. You maybe don’t hit as hard as a lot of the guys, but you get it done so fast that you can land two or three in the time anybody else could land a punch. So yeah, nobody is going to win against you in that game. The only way, and I mean the only way, is to get ahold of you and make it count,” he said.
“So if I were to spar with you…” I said.
“I’d take any hits I had to to get in on you and get you to the floor. It’s as simple as that,” he said with a shrug.
“You’re assuming my ground game is weak,” I told him.
“True,” he admitted, making a wry face and nodding his head. “I haven’t seen your wrestling skills, but that was a pretty sweet judo move.”
“Honestly, it’s not my strength, but I like to think it isn’t my weakness, either. The main reason I did that to Joey is because he was being, well…”
“Yeah, I get that,” Lawrence said. “That’s the other thing. It’s hard for these guys to wrap their heads around the idea that you’re a real fighter.”
“Got it in one,” I said.
I was standing around with a cup of gas station coffee in my hand talking to Geoff when a highway patrol car pulled up.
Leaning out of his open window, the officer made a show of looking at our two Porsches. “We’re cracking down on reckless drivers on Angeles Crest this weekend,” he said. “I’m sure you two would never consider exceeding the speed limit, but you might want to mention to others that enforcement will be high.”
“We’ll make sure to do that, officer,” Geoff said, raising his own paper coffee cup in salute.
“Well, looks like it’s Malibu today,” Geoff said when the CHP car left to head up into the hills.
“So, the real question is whether we tell Stein or not,” I said with a smirk.
“You are evil,” Geoff said with a laugh.
“And maybe I’m going home,” I said. “The 918 just isn’t any fun in Malibu.”
“Yeah, I can believe that,” Geoff said. “Really, driving like an asshole on public roads just doesn’t have the same appeal after spending the weekend hauling the mail on the track.”
"Yeah, there is that,” I agreed.
We stood there in silence for a minute, just drinking our coffee, before Geoff spoke again. “How are Angela and Emmy doing?” he asked out of the blue.
“Good- real good,” I said. “They come home next Monday.”
“It must be tough, them being gone so long,” he commiserated.
“Yeah, it is,” I agreed. “I’ll be happy to have ‘em home, even if it’s only for a little while before the next round of the tour.”
“So besides the track, what have you been doing while they’re gone?”
“When the cats are away, the mouse will work,” I said. “Really, since I’ve had nothing better to do I’ve been putting in long hours at the office. I mean, I don’t really watch TV, I wouldn’t even know where to go to bowl a few lanes…” I said with a shrug.
“That’s ‘bowl a few frames’,” Geoff corrected. “The lane is the path the ball goes down towards the pins.”
“Shows how much I know,” I said. “I guess my one real pastime besides the driving is beating guys up at my fight gym.”
“You go up against guys in the octagon?” Geoff asked, surprised.
“Well, sure, but it’s just sparring, not real fights,” I said. “I do it for practice, not competition.”
“What do the guys get out of it?”
“Same thing. They get practice against a fighter with a different set of skills than their usual sparring partners, get to see how they measure up, learn what works and what doesn’t.”
“And get punched in the face,” Geoff added drily.
“Repeatedly,” I agreed with a laugh. “Where is everybody, anyway?” I asked, looking at my watch and wondering if I’d missed a text changing the start location.
“Stephen’s still in Phoenix, but I have no idea where everybody else is,” Geoff said, just as Teddy Bear’s gray Corvette pulled up to the gas pumps.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
When Teddy Bear got out to fill his tank he gave us a wave. “Where is everybody else?” he shouted, looking around.
I gave him an exaggerated shrug, since I certainly didn’t know.
“A CHP officer warned us they’re cracking down on Angeles Crest,” Geoff told Teddy Bear when he joined us.
“That was nice of him,” Teddy Bear said.
“We were just talking about maybe bailing this morning,” Geoff told him.
While they were talking about what to do, I checked the text that had just come through on my phone.
“Hey, Geoff, can I ask a favor?” I asked. “Can you give me a ride down to Temecula? I’ll need to drop my car off at home first.”
“Temecula? Down the 15?” Geoff asked. “What’s down there?”
“There’s a used car I might want to buy. I think you might want to see it,” I told him, handing him the phone so he could see the picture that Walter James had sent me.
“Is this real?” Geoff asked, scrolling through the photos.
“What is it?” Teddy Bear asked, his curiosity piqued.
“A late ‘80s Carrera done up rally-style,” Geoff said, handing the phone to Teddy Bear. Turning to me, he asked, “What’s the story?”
“When my crew chief gave me a hard time about running off the track last weekend I told him maybe I should buy a rally car. Well, I guess word got around, and somebody just traded this in down at Temecula BMW- so the sales manager wanted to know if I was interested,” I explained.
“That’s too pretty to ever actually take off-road,” Teddy Bear said, handing me the phone.
“So you’re just going to buy it? Just like that?” Geoff asked.
I shrugged, saying, “Well, it’s worth a look. I mean, it could be a lot of fun.”
“I gotta see this, too,” Teddy Bear said. “How about we all go down and check it out?”
That decided, Geoff shot Jimmy and Stein texts saying that the CHP had shut ACH down and we were leaving. Teddy Bear and Geoff followed me home, where I dropped off the 918. Teddy Bear and I played paper, rock, scissors for which of us got stuck in Geoff’s abbreviated back seat, with the concession that if the sale didn’t work out we’d switch places for the drive back.
“It’s a good thing I’ve been doing the whole ‘hot yoga’ thing recently,” Teddy Bear said as he climbed awkwardly into the back of the Carrera.
“If you think this is bad, you should try the back seat of the car Leah’s buying. Those Carreras back in the late ‘80s were much, much smaller- I think this car has at least a foot longer wheelbase,” Geoff said as I climbed in, scooting the passenger seat as far forward as I could for Teddy Bear.
On the ninety-odd minute drive down to the dealership we got to talking about buying cars, and Teddy Bear told Geoff about how I’d sold Godzilla to James, “Just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.
“Two hundred fifty K. James asks what’s fair, this race driver dude says they’re selling in Europe for two hundred thousand euros, so James asks if two hundred and fifty grand will take care of it. Leah thinks about it for a moment, then says sure, and that’s that. Done deal.”
“The BMW race car- that was a surprise birthday present from your in-laws, wasn’t it?” Geoff asked me.
“Yeah. I had no idea. I thought they’d just gone and rented the track and got me coaching for my birthday. All of a sudden it was like, ‘Hey, happy birthday! Here’s your new track car!’” I said.
“Linda’s parents never got me anything like that,” Geoff said. “I think I need to talk to them.”
The rallied-out Porsche was much better than I’d expected, and Joachim said that he’d gone over it and that the conversion was properly done.
“The guy that traded it in, he basically took a high-mileage older Porsche and completely restomodded it,” he said. “He had all the paperwork. Body-off- I mean, he did it right.”
“So why did he trade it in?” I asked, admiring the flawless dark olive paint, running my fingers over the graphics only to find they were paint, too, and not decals.
“I dunno. I never got to talk to the guy. But he traded it in for an Alpina,” Walter said. “My guess? His wife told him to get rid of the garage queen and get something nice.”
“Leah, if you do not buy this car, I will never speak to you again,” Geoff said from the Recaro driver’s seat. “You don’t know how bad I want to tell them to take my S in trade for this thing right now.”
“If Ms Farmer doesn’t want it, I can make you a good deal,” Walter James said, trying to be helpful, but completely missing Geoff’s stricken face.
“Let’s take it out for a test drive,” I suggested, immediately prompting Geoff and Teddy Bear to Rochambeau for who got the ride-along. Laughing, I said, “We can all drive it. I get to go first.”
Just taking the car out for a quick twenty minute loop in the hills west of town, a few things struck me. Compared to what I was used to, it was way down on power but never felt slow. Sure, slower than my other cars, but fast enough to be a lot of fun. It handled very differently than I was used to, with a lot of body roll and a surprising willingness to throw the back end out at any time. I intentionally ran fast across some really rough sections of road (no dirt, since I wasn’t going to make the guys at the shop clean it up if I didn’t take it home), and the suspension with its additional three or four inches of wheel travel just ate up the pavement irregularities with no drama.
When Teddy Bear took the wheel and I sat in the passenger seat, I had to keep telling him to go faster.
“It feels like we’re gonna tip over!” he replied after about the third time I told him to take the turn faster.
“You haven’t even gotten any of the wheels off the ground,” I replied.
Geoff loved it, though, happily stepping the back out and gunning it out of turns, laughing like a madman as the inside front wheel got light.
“Seriously, Leah, buy this,” he said. “This car deserves to have somebody that’ll drive it the way it should be driven.”
Back at the dealership, I told Walter to get the paperwork going, so he hustled off to his office to write it up.
“How much?” Teddy Bear asked as we all stood around looking at my brand-new 1988 Porsche Carrera Safari.
“No idea,” I said with a shrug.
“That’s our Leah,” Teddy Bear said with a laugh. “I bet you’re going to pay in cash, right?”
“I’m certainly not gonna finance it,” I agreed.
“I love the color,” Geoff said, changing the subject. “Up until this year, it was only available on 911s in 2007 or 2008, something like that. They brought it back for this new model year.”
“So this wouldn’t have been the original color?” I asked.
“Nah. In the late ‘80s they had a lot of color options- more than they do now- but this wouldn’t have been one of ‘em,” Geoff said.
“Well, it looks factory,” Teddy Bear said.
“It does,” I agreed.
“You’d better bring this to the club meeting Wednesday after next,” Geoff said.
“I was planning on it,” I told him.
“What’re you gonna tell Angela and Emmy?” Geoff asked.
“Nothing. I’m not gonna mention it until they spot it in the garage.”
“I wanna be you when I grow up,” Teddy Bear said, shaking his head in amusement.
We went to lunch at a burger and barbecue place in Old Town which turned out to be a locally owned breastaurant. In some ways I was a bit disappointed by that, but the waitresses were pretty and their Daisy Duke shorts and cowboy boots showed off their legs nicely. Some of the waitresses wore snug leather vests with nothing else, but most had plaid shirts knotted under their breasts, which were all in push-up bras.
“I like this place,” Teddy Bear commented after our waitress left with a sassy sashay.
“I kinda do, too,” I agreed, watching Kimberly’s butt in the snug denim. “I wonder if the owners would be willing to sell?”
“Y’know, I’ve never even asked,” Teddy Bear said, sipping his iced tea. “What is it you do for a living?”
Passing up the chance to tease, I said, “Mostly real estate investment and development, but I do have a hospitality division that owns and manages a bunch of restaurants, nightclubs and even a couple of boutique hotels.”
“And that’s why you’re wondering if this place might be for sale?” Geoff asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Places like this get by on a surprisingly low margin, if they really are owner-operated non-chain or franchise. The food costs are high, especially compared to, say, Mexican or Chinese restaurants, where a lot of the food is bulk staples like rice or beans. Since I own a good number of medium to high end restaurants, I can get better pricing and better choices- well, I mean, I don’t do this, I have people who do it, right? But we can get better access to higher quality meats for cheaper than these owners can, for example. Also, ancillary costs like accounting can eat up a large chunk in a mom and pop restaurant, but since I have a large company, those costs defray down to almost zero on an individual establishment’s P and L sheets, right?”
It was at this point that I saw I was losing the guys, so I finished by saying, “Yeah, I know, not as glamorous as the life of the mob boss that so many people seem to think I lead, but there it is.”
“Seems pretty glamorous to me,” Teddy Bear said. “A great house, twice as many hot wives as anybody really deserves, and all the toys you can play with.”
“Three houses now,” I said. “I just bought Angela a penthouse in London.”
“Fuck my life,” Teddy Bear said, shaking his head.
Just then the waitress showed up with our lunches, and after setting them down, pulled her phone from her back pocket. “Can I get a selfie with you?” she asked Teddy Bear. “I loved you in ‘Death Before Dying.’”
“Sure,” he replied with a smile, which really did show off his rugged good looks. After Kimberly got her picture and left, he asked, “Should I hit her up for her phone number?”
“Would you really want to drive all the way down here just for a date?” I asked.
“Good point,” he admitted.
“She does have nice butt, though…” I said.
“Oh, that reminds me,” Teddy Bear said. “You remember that actress that was hot tubbing with Mitch Wagner at your housewarming party? Solange Hamilton? She got cast in my new show. She’s actually pretty good, you know? A lot better than I would have expected, honestly. We shot a sex scene the other day, and besides her rock-hard wall-eyed boobs, the rest of her looks pretty damned good with no clothes on. Her butt’s real, too- no Brazilian lift there. I know, because I got to spend about four hours with my hands on it.”
“And here you were just a moment ago complaining about your life,” Geoff said, chuckling.
“Dude, you have no idea how demotivating it is to be in bed with a hot chick while twenty-seven guys stand around filming and recording everything, talking about where to go for lunch while the director constantly tells you to raise your arm, or whatever. I don’t know how the porn guys do it,” Teddy Bear replied.
“When I first met Solange, she complained that she wasn’t getting any good jobs because she didn’t want to do nudity,” I said, remembering back.
“Honestly, if she toned down the bimbo look, she probably could do O.K. Like I said, she’s a decent actress,” Teddy Bear said.
After lunch Geoff took off for home, But Teddy Bear had no time constraints so he rode with me as I took the very long way back to Los Angeles. We wound up on a very narrow, barely wide enough for two cars type of road through the mountains west of Lake Elsinore. The road was potholed, patched, and occasionally just dirt, perfect for the Porsche Safari.
Sure, ‘Safari’ was never an official model from Porsche, but the “Safari 3.2” graphics on the rocker panel looked legit, so I was happy to run with it.
“I feel like I should be reading a rally sheet and calling out the turns ahead,” Teddy Bear said as I drove through one particularly rough section at a pretty solid clip.
“I wouldn’t understand any of that, anyway,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of rally games for my driving simulator, and they have the co-driver calling out the turns and none of it makes any sense except for the ‘left’ or ‘right’ parts.”
“Yeah, I like watching it on TV, but I don’t understand it, either,” Teddy Bear admitted. “But it sounds cool.”