Hard Rain

obsession had nothing to do with health, of course. In fact, the
    guy was an obvious steroid abuser. His neck was so thick it looked as
    though he could slide a tie up over his head without having to loosen
    the knot, and he sported acne so severe that the club's stark
    incandescent lighting, designed to show off to maximum effect the rips
    and cuts its members had developed in their bodies, cast small shadows
    over the pocked landscape of his face. His testicles were probably the
    size of raisins, his blood pressure likely rampaging through an
    overworked heart.
    I'd also seen him explode into the kind of abrupt, unprovoked violence
    that is another symptom of steroid abuse.
    One night, someone I hadn't seen before, no doubt one of the club's
    civilian members who liked the location and thought that rubbing elbows
    with reputed gangsters made them tougher by osmosis, started removing
    some of the numerous iron plates that were weighing down the bar the
    yakutza had been using to bench-press. The jakuza had walked away from
    the station, probably to take a break, and the new guy must have
    mistakenly assumed this meant he was through. The guy was pretty
    sizable himself, his colorful Spandex sleeveless top showing off a
    weightlifter's chest and arms.
    Someone probably should have warned him. But the club's membership
    consisted primarily of chinpira low-level young jakuza and wanna-be
    punks not exactly good Samaritan types who were interested in helping
    their fellow man. Anyway, you have to be at least mildly stupid to
    start disassembling a bar like the one the jakuza was using without
    looking around for permission first. There were probably a hundred and
    fifty kilos on it, maybe more.
    Someone nudged the jakuza and pointed. The jakuza, who had been
    squatting, reared up and bellowed, "Orya!" loud enough to vibrate the
    plate glass in the front of the rectangular room. What the fuck!
    Everyone looked up, as startled as if there had been an explosion even
    the new guy who had been so clueless just an instant earlier. Still
    bellowing expletives, the jakuza strode directly to the bench-press
    station, doing a good job of using his voice, either by instinct or
    design, to disorient his victim.
    Everything about the jakuza his words, his tone, his movement and
    posture screamed Attack! But the man was too frozen, either by fear or
    denial, to move off the line of assault. And although he was holding a
    ten-kilo iron plate with edges considerably harder than the jakuza's
    cranium, the man did nothing but drop his mouth open, perhaps in
    surprise, perhaps in inchoate and certainly futile apology.
    Thejakuza blasted into him like a rhino, his shoulder driving into the
    man's stomach. I saw the man try to brace for the impact, but again he
    failed to move off the line of attack and his attempt was largely
    useless. The jakuza drove him backward into the wall, then unleashed a
    flurry of crude punches to his head and neck. The man, in shock now
    and running on autopilot, dropped the plate and managed to raise his
    arms to ward off a few of the blows, but thejakuza, still bellowing,
    slapped the attempted blocks out of the way and kept on punching. I
    saw one of his shots connect to the left side of the man's neck, to the
    real estate over the carotid sinus, and the man began to crumble as his
    nervous system overcompensated from the shock of the blow by reducing
    blood pressure to the brain. Thejakuza, feet planted widely as though
    he had an axe and was splitting logs, continued to hammer at the top of
    his victim's head and neck. The man fell to the floor, but retained
    enough consciousness to curl up and protect himself to some extent from
    the hail of kicks that followed.
    Huffing and swearing, the jakuza bent and caught the prostrate man's
    right ankle between an enormous biceps and forearm. For a moment, I
    thought he was going to apply a jujitsu leg lock and try to break
    something. Instead, he straightened and proceeded to drag the man's
    prone form to the club's entrance and out into the street.
    He returned a moment later, alone, and, after taking a moment to catch
    his breath, resumed his rightful place on the bench without looking at
    anyone else in the room. Everyone returned to what they were doing:
    his affiliates, because they didn't care; the civilians, because they
    were unnerved. It was as though nothing had happened, although the
    silence in the club indicated that indeed something had.
    A part of my