Showdown

If aliens had invaded the planet when I was eight years old, and I was given a choice as to whom I would pick to champion Earth—the biggest and the baddest human on the planet against the biggest and baddest creature from outer space—I wouldn’t have hesitated. I would have picked Mike Tyson. And in this scenario, Mike Tyson would have never gone on to do terrible things to women, or bite off another person’s ear, or tattoo his face, or lose a child to a terrible accident. In this scenario, Mike Tyson would square off, bare-knuckled against some multi armed, six eyed, crustacean slash insectoid under the lights of Madison Square Garden, or Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, or maybe the ruins of the Roman Coliseum in the middle of the night. And it wouldn’t matter so much if you were from Des Moines, Iowa, or Damascus, or Leningrad, or Rio De Janeiro, or Hong Kong. The noise would be deafening, us screaming at our rabbit-eared televisions. “Save our flawed existence, Mike.” Destroy this hideous creature who shadowboxes and taunts our shirtless champion with its gross-lobster-arms. Or maybe (my eight year old mind erases all that nonsense), there is no fanfare. We cut to Mike Tyson fighting this horrible-dripping-alien-fighter in the middle of the ocean on the back of a gigantic blue whale. And we don’t get to watch, because this isn’t our fight. The whale just floats there, hoping in its whale mind for a quick ending to the pain above him, and every so often a military dolphin flips itself onto the fighting surface, trying to take out the insectoid’s legs—because, after all, this is their planet too. We aren’t the only ones who live here.