Gleason’s is Times Square, bustle bustle, crash crash. Cameras are rolling in—ABC, NBC, CBS, the Shadow Boxers crew—Christy Martin’s publicist is fretting over protocol, a few of Don King’s lesser people are clustered with Bruce in the office. I am lurking in the corner. For days I’ve been giving myself advice: I mustn’t mind about Christy being better than me, I must just learn. And relax. Above all, relax. Recently I asked Reggie Forde, Bridgette’s trainer, how to relax in the ring. He laughed.
“It’s like making love,” Reggie said. “When you’re wit’ a woman for the first time, she’s not relaxed because she don’t know you. You gotta play wit’ her a little, let her know you’re gonta have fun together.” I laughed too. I saw exactly what he meant, although, by dint of my boxing, there seemed to be a role reversal—I’m not one of Reggie’s skittish fillies, I’m a colt, I’m a Reggie. I should be relaxed already. There was a wistful old-fashioned appeal to the scene Reggie painted that eluded me in my machismo. He wasn’t coming on to me; this was man-to-man ring advice, without agenda … or was I being the gull, like with Dennis? Boxing tips often arrive with an ambiguous gender spin.
Christy Martin’s attitude toward knotty questions of gender is … there aren’t any! Married to her trainer, Jim Martin, and identified by ring moniker as her father’s daughter, Christy is keen to prove her femininity. The trunks that get speckled with blood are fringed powder-pink satin. Jim Martin supports his wife’s chosen trade now, but he came the long way round. He has recently been joking to the press how, when Christy Salters appeared in his Tennessee gym in 1990—complete with mother and small dog—he was so mortified he “had it all set up to have her ribs broke.” Now Jim Martin is glad his wife is tough, and equally glad she is not “a manly type woman.” So is Christy, who favors miniskirts and lots of makeup, as if this drag proved she’s not a lesbian. It galls me, but only mildly. Not even the most gauche of her antifeminist statements can override the image of her “ferocity and serious boxing skills.” She’s expanding perceptions of what women can do, albeit involuntarily, but her wish to be viewed as simply a boxer, not a female boxer, is completely bananas. If she were a he, he’d be just another lightweight with an okay record—and a papered one at that, since most pre-Gogarty opponents were tomato cans. ABC, NBC, et al. are only interested in her sex.
When Christy Martin arrives, her attitude and entourage underline her determined ignorance of this. We are sniggering behind her back like eighth-graders; the men, too. They wonder what the big fuss is about. As is the fashion around here, they have been shooting her down just as they do with guys who win, even those on the home team. And, as always, the criticism says more about its source than its object. Thus I find myself defending Christy Martin’s boxing skills to Angel, even as I prepare to face them in the ring, with (I hope) his assistance.
“Nah, she ain’t so hot,” he sneers. “You don’t want to get all tense and shit.” This makes me uncomfortable.
“Angel, she’s really good. Did you see her fight?” I say.
“Sure, I did. Like I said, she ain’t so hot.”
I wonder about Angel sometimes. He trains me with that heavy concentration I admired from afar, but he also flirts his face off—all in fun, but the motif is often how useless we women are at this. I give it right back, but never touching on one incendiary theme—the subject of Angel’s own boxing career. He didn’t have one. I’m protecting him from knowing that I know because, like your shrink telling you all about himself, it could ruin the relationship. Today I want to lean on Angel, but I can’t lean on him if he’s being a baby, and a baby is exactly what he’s accusing me of being.
The cameras are all set up now, the time to spar draws close, and I’m feeling the cool shadow of the gallows, my heart thumping. I wrap my hands and start to shadowbox, waiting for Angel. Mr. Minor is watching. Mr. M. is rarely seen. He is more oracle than trainer, a dapper, white-haired gent with a cane and several national amateur titles, from the fifties, I think, though the number is vague. (I never ask a guy about his record unless I know it’s flawless, in case he’s ashamed of his number, like me with my weight.)
“You’re getting in with that girl, right?”
“Yep.”
“Well, she’s good. I seen her on the Tyson card. But she ain’t going to hurt you.”
I stop moving and peer at Mr. Minor.
“How do you know?”
“Because I spar how you spar.”
“Huh?”
“I spar how you spar. I feint, jab, double jab, a little this, a little that. I ain’t showing you nothin’, what you gonna do? Punch my lights out? No. You gonna take it easy.”
“Yeah, but what about her?”
“I spar how you spar. You start beatin’ up on her, then it’s gonna turn out different. She ain’t gonna let you hit her, but she ain’t gonna hit you first. Remember. I spar how you spar.”
I stare at Mr. Minor as this revelation sinks in, the best explanation of sparring rules I have ever heard; in fact, the only one. Christy’s request for a sparring partner was baffling, seeing as she and her husband had told reporters how there aren’t any female sparring partners out there. If she’s good enough to spar, they said, she’d be better used as an opponent. They can’t have known what they’d find at Gleason’s, any more than I know what they’ll find in me. I figure either I’ll prove pathetic, in which case she’d look bad beating up on me, or I’ll be good, in which case she’d show respect in order not to look bad getting beaten up by me. I honestly don’t know which scenario will play out since I don’t know how good or bad I am—an alarming measure of uncertainty—and having been overcautious in my only woman-to-woman experience to date, I don’t know how different it can get with someone not just my own weight but my own sex. “I spar how you spar” gives me back some control. It seems to lower the chaos to a level I can live with.
“I spar how you spar” does not apply to sparring with men. Too often, if he sparred how I sparred, he would knock me out cold. One can never quite tell how much he is holding back or, conversely, how little; it’s not as if he’d admit to being evenly matched with a woman. Judging myself harshly, I usually assume he’s holding everything back, like I do with the psychic. I wonder if the others think that way or if everyone else knows exactly how good they are. My skills have seemed alarmingly protean lately, going from supersonic to abysmal overnight. I was far from comfortable waiting to find out which side of the scales my skills would weigh down today. Last Monday, I watched Patricia Alcivar go a few rounds with the small, smiling Domenico Menacho, still my favorite sparring partner. I’d heard of Alcivar, of her reputation as the best female boxer at Wall Street Gym, all of nineteen years old, already a veteran of several New York marathons and about to face her first Golden Gloves final. I thought that on the eve of your big fight you were supposed to do a light workout, no sparring, in case you “leave your fight in the gym,” but Alcivar wasn’t playing it like that. She went six rounds in constant motion, throwing perhaps eighty punches a round without breaking a sweat, her waist-length hair swinging in its ponytail. I was so impressed, I took an ego nosedive.
“Look at her,” I said to Angel. “How quick she is, how much she moves.” (How big and slow I am. How pretty she is.)
“Yeah,” said Angel, “but look how she’s got her head down. She’s got no power there. And her legs are, like, two yards apart.” He was right, but it didn’t matter, I let my heart sink anyway.
“Don’t be getting down on yourself,” said Angel. “You’re stronger than any of the girls in here.” So what? I thought. What use is strength when you can’t breathe, when you don’t think right? Boxing is ninety percent mental.
By the time it was my turn with Domenico, I had become my teenage self at her most abject. Oh, here we go then, do I have to, do I have to, I hope they’re not watching. I hope she’s not watching. Oh, the shame of being boring. “Come on, Kate, git moving in there,” said Angel, but I was locked into my uselessness, and was despising myself for that. Nowhere is more conducive to self-loathing than the boxing ring, where there is even more opportunity for shortfall than in the fog-free aerobics mirror—that, at least, is solely about appearance. Neither is there a better place than the ring to practice self-aggrandizement, but this was not one of those days. I am always this bad, I was thinking as I circled Domenico, throwing out pointless jabs, letting him catch me with the most telegraphed of his. “Come on, woman, hook off the jab, hook off the jab,” he was saying, as he always does, but I had forgotten how. The more encouraging Domenico became, staying open so I could hit him, suggesting which punches to throw, the more humiliated I felt, until it was impossible to tell whether my clumsiness was caused by my negative thoughts or vice versa. My heart was set on nothing more than getting out of there.
The following evening I sat with Domenico at Madison Square Garden’s Paramount Theater for the second night of the 1996 Golden Gloves finals—it was the second year for women, the sixty-ninth for men—and I felt relieved, after yesterday’s experience, to be spectating. Just like last year, Gleason’s had had some successes the night before. Veronica Simmons had stopped a mother of three from the Bronx in the first round; laid her out flat. Sky had won again, this year by fighting. Her opponent was an actress from Alcivar’s gym who, the program says, is boxing because “it’s the rawest there is and I go for it all.” Then, two of the Judah brothers had fought two fighters from Michael Olajidé Sr.’s Kingsway gym—Sr. being the eyepatch-and-Aerobox Jr.’s estranged father and onetime trainer. Jr.’s young half brother, Tokunbo Olajidé, had beaten twelfth-grader Josiah Judah, while the latter’s eighteen-year-old brother, Zabdiel, won his third pair of Golden Gloves.
Gleason’s shares Zabdiel’s kudos with its resident Judah Brothers Boxing Club, a remarkable organization run by Josiah and Zab’s father, Yoel, universally known as Judah, who was the undisputed world kickboxing champion in his day, and who, unassisted, brings up Josiah, Zab, and their five brothers—all of whom box (even little Yoel, aged four, messes about in gloves). Bruce says he’s watched Judah’s boys grow into boxers “as long as I can remember.” There is always an embarrassment of Judahs around here—Dad, offspring, Uncle Jimmy, they live in the gym.
“I fought the courts for a year and a half to keep us together,” Judah tells me. “That’s why we’re so tight.” And of the multitude of reasons to admire the family, my favorite is that this closeness is so sincere. Even though Zabdiel is shooting up through the ranks at the speed of e-mail—he is number one in the country and will now turn pro—there’s not a scrap of jealousy among them.
“My brothers give me confidence, you know what I’m saying, to work harder and harder and harder,” Zab says. “We inspire each other.”
“We go to all the fights,” Josiah adds. “We hang out together. We party together.”
“I didn’t plan this,” says Judah. “After I seen how they fell in love with boxing, how they really love it, I say, ‘Uh-huh. Hoh-kay …’ Then I got them so hooked, after a time I’d say, ‘You don’t do well at school, you don’t train for a week.’ It’d kill ’em. Especially this one”—he nods at Zab on the bag. “He would cry tears.” In addition to training six champions, plus sixteen other (unrelated) fighters, Judah runs a successful construction business. He cooks, does the dishes and the laundry. “And we’re definitely spiritual,” he stresses. “We keep the laws of Moses.”
If I were ever tempted to succumb to stereotype vision—to see boxing as certain commentators and movies paint it, as a noble ascent from the ghetto, or from a dog-eat-dog grimy life, or to imagine that gender roles were stuck in the fifties—the Judahs alone could knock it out of me. Even if there were no women at Gleason’s, it would be impossible to hang around here and not rearrange tedious clichés I may once have entertained. Yet in the Garden, this second night of Gloves finals, it was the women who were making the packed crowd think twice. The five female bouts blew the men’s away, even though of the ten women left out of forty-four entrants (twice as many as last year), only two had been boxing more than a year. First up, Maritza Arroyo vs. Tyrene Manson. Tyrene I knew. She’d been coming over from Bed-Stuy Gym a lot to spar with Jill Matthews—finally, two perfectly matched women working together. It was beautiful how they’d ratchet up the heat and cool it, fight and box, fight and box, the trust and respect and skill levels sky high. Well, turned out Arroyo was every bit as good as Manson, going toe-to-toe in a beautiful bout worthy of Balanchine, and decisioning Tyrene in the end. “That woman is good,” thought Domenico. “Which one?” I asked. He beamed. “Both!”
Now it was Patricia Alcivar. She fought Eileen Lacy, a gymnastics instructor from the Nassau Police Athletic League. She lost. Although the weight of the punches don’t matter in amateur scoring, Lacy won by sheer power. Alcivar ran a marathon inside the twenty-foot square but her shots were feathers and the guys around me were restless. Even in the polite amateurs, heavier weights are the crowd pleasers because that’s where knockouts happen, and this was proving no different for women. As the weights rose, so did the volume. The 132-pound class featured Denise Lutrick, a controlled, athletic fighter, and easily the most experienced female, who’d won the 139-pound title last year. “Watch this woman,” said Domenico, who had sparred with her a great deal. “She the best of the lot.” Well, surprise surprise, every round was taken by newcomer Melissa Salamone, a six-month veteran with the showy moves of a pro. It was the fight of the night. Her brothers are boxers, explained Domenico, impressed. Then my weight class, 147 pounds, was won by Aimee Berg, a Manhattan sportswriter. I watched in sad silence, feeling ineffectually competitive. Last and largest was Bridgette Robinson, who was facing last year’s “super heavyweight” winner (by walkover), Helen Braxton. Later I was to hear how Bridgette had almost refused to enter the ring, so ragged were her nerves, but you’d never have known it watching her. The crowd went wild as she laid waste to Braxton, who claimed twelve years of fighting experience. If there were ever a barrier to legitimacy for the female division, tonight smashed through it. This caliber of amateurs meant the beginning of a feed system that would ensure the future of the sport. The chicks had landed.
In the right place at the right time with the wrong birthday, I was deep in self-pity when the Christy challenge arrived, three days after the Gloves finals. It transformed me. For the first time since the fights-that-weren’t-to-be, I had a purpose, and the fact that nobody wanted to stop me was a terrific boost—suddenly, one degree of separation between me and the top cat. I stopped being down on myself like that and thought I was good again. “Whatever happens, happens,” said Angel, relieved I’d quit whining.
So, my day at last. Mr. Minor slinks off, replaced by Katya and her cameraman, who want my feelings on film before they shoot the sparring session. “I haven’t a clue how it’ll be,” I say. “Yes, I’m nervous as hell. I may fall over before she hits me.” Yes, I’m nervous, but, greedy for my limelight, these nerves are fun. There’s something unreal about the day, with all those cameras in a wagon train around Christy shadowboxing, with Sky and Bridgette popping over with a cheer—Go get her Kate, beat the shit out of her—and all the guys’ eyes on me—Yeah, her, she’s gettin’ in with that girl from the Tyson fight. Over there, Christy looks small and, as everyone keeps saying, a bit pudgy in a plain T-shirt and shorts, her curly feathercut hair loose. From the corner of my eye, I track her progress through her workout, knowing they’ll come and get me whenever she’s ready, no warning. It seems a long time. Angel and Domenico take turns going over to spy on her but discover precisely nothing. It is so strange to have a woman boxer (even one who acts half male boxer and half wifey) be the one covered in cameras, not Arturo Gatti or Junior Jones or Kevin Kelly as usual. I haven’t seen her smile yet.
The wait goes on and the wait goes on. Doubts start, that familiar twang of anticlimax. Rumors fly. I find Bruce.
“She isn’t going to spar, is she?” I say.
“Well,” he says, “we don’t know. Let’s wait and see.”
We wait. The publicist flies importantly by.
“She ain’t gonna do it,” ventures Sky. “What’s she got to gain?”
“But she asked,” I say. “It was their idea.”
“What if you smoke her? She’d look ridiculous,” Katya points out.
“Ah, she scared of you, woman,” says Domenico.
“I like that, but I doubt it.”
“Yeah, she’s chickenshit. She don’t like the look of you,” Bridgette says.
“She probably thinks it’s you,” I say. “That would scare her.”
I do like to think she’s marked us, wondering which is the one, but I doubt it. She’s too busy being the superstar, having a payday, not a workday. Angel goes off to give someone padwork; Sky and Bridgette also disappear. Katya collars the publicist to arrange an interview and reports that they won’t talk about the sparring, but she’s been granted two minutes’ camera time. It is obvious this isn’t going to happen.
The publicist is finally cornered. Christy has hurt her hand, she tells us, but she’d be happy to sign an autograph. We are permitted to approach. Christy shows no interest in us, in the fact that we box, too. I don’t know why I don’t ask her about the sparring, but I don’t. I tear a page from my notebook and she writes: “Kate, Best Wishes! Christy Martin,” with an elaborate curlicue underneath and a small circle over the i, then poses for a snapshot with Bridgette, Sky, the heavybag, and me.
“Come on, woman! Let’s box!” Domenico yells, and he and I get in the corner ring and go eight rounds, two more than I’ve ever done, and I am better than I’ve ever been and it’s the antidote to the other day because Domenico isn’t holding back. I let out the aggression of being led on by the diva boxer and I feed off the relief of being let off the hook. The other day I hoped Alcivar wasn’t watching me with Menacho; now I really hope Martin is watching. Five seconds of this makes it to the final cut of Shadow Boxers, but nothing of her and me. Not what I had in mind.
Before I step into the ring, Angel says, “Don’t hold back,” so I know he’s been conferring with her trainer and that they’ve agreed we’ll go all out. He’s never said that before, and Terry never did. It is a few days after the Christy nonevent and I’ve finally been let off the leash. When the bell goes, I square up and march to meet her. She looks determinedly fierce and very nervous. I put a jab straight through her guard. She is startled. Then I circle a little, feeling not like the circus cat I was with Leslie but like a hell-eyed shark scenting meat. I know I’m the bad thing in here. I can strike anytime because she has no defense. To get the suspense over with, I answer a tickle of a jab with a good stiff one and a hard right. She nearly cries. Sort of draws breath and goes omigod and looks at her trainer to save her. I pause while she does that, then I release another combination and now she is terrified. I read her mind easily. It says, I didn’t know it was like this! She thinks I am not human and not like a woman should be, but the truth is, we’re more dangerous than men. We’re better at locating Achilles’ heels.
She holds up a glove to stop and I go over to the ropes.
“Angel, she’s scared,” I say. “I can’t hit her.”
“So hold back, then, but quit standing up like that. You’re all stood up. Keep down. Don’t be jumping around every time you throw a jab.”
Her trainer is explaining something, both of them looking over here, she is nodding. When we start in again, still round one, I tell her, “It’s okay, I won’t hit you,” thinking she’s earned that insult, and I continue not to strike, figuring I’ll work on my defense. But this woman is not the middle-aged psychic, she is extremely athletic and strong—which is why they said “Don’t hold back” in the first place—and now she has every intention of hitting me, partly out of fear and partly just to get me back. Her attitude is transformed. She’s leaping wildly around the ring with saucer eyes, kangaroo punching while I sidestep away and roll around the ropes, la-di-dah. In the breaks, I watch her all serious with her trainer and realize they are hatching strategies. She gets bolder and bolder and I’m wondering whether she notices I’m being the heavybag, not hitting back at all. I guess I’m half asleep when, in the third round, she lands one square on my nose between the eyes, a ramrod solid right that rocks me back and shocks me. It is the hardest punch I’ve ever taken. I didn’t see it coming because, simply, I wasn’t looking.
O irony, O ignominy, that it should come like this, my first big hit. All along I’ve been thinking, Yes, this may be boxing but there is more to come. Louder and louder, the suspicion that I am playing in a toy ring, until this hit, this miserable blow, this changes everything. The punch comes without pain. Instead, apparently random emotions ricochet at warp speed—disbelief, shame, outrage, mirth, irritation, shock, panic, petulance. My strength snaps away from under me like in the tablecloth trick, leaving all these familiar childish feelings scattered, upended on the surface. It takes perhaps half a second, but I am catapulted into a zone of suspended time where I think a lot of things through, debating, for instance, whether I want to do this anymore. This one punch shows how nothing saves you in here. All those pieces of paraphernalia that seemed so cool—mouthguard, headgear, breastplate, the Vaseline—they’re not playthings after all. Now I understand the melodramatic boxing clichés: “Everybody has a plan … until they get hit.” “This is a hurting game.” I am in it for real now. I extrapolate from this strong girl’s lucky heavy punch, and there’s my nightmare: an opponent doesn’t work with you, hold off for a second if you’re winded, trade nicely in technique. An opponent will nail you, stalk you around the small enclosure, take advantage of every weakness; no compassion. There are no more gender privileges. No tomboy’s schoolyard whining, playing the trump card, But I’m a girl. If I hit like a guy, I will be hit like a guy.
The sparring continues another round and nobody, least of all Angel or the girl, knows how that punch got to me. (I have an odd feeling, however, that her trainer knows. He looks triumphant.) I have changed inside. I’m angry and hurt. I took it personally. My promise not to hit her was not an invitation to take advantage but a call to lay down arms, so her shot was, metaphorically speaking, below the belt. Yet I deserved it, and, for all her jerky moves and bent-elbow jabs, it means that she is the better boxer. Instead of hitting back harder to prove I am, after all, better, I’m afraid I’m going to cry the humiliated tears of a child who’s done wrong and can’t admit it. Pride goes before a fall, my mother always said, but that very arrogance is the most necessary of all tools in the ring. I’m not here to be a good child. I’m supposed to hit out as madly and wildly as I wanted to at age six, albeit with the control I’m learning in the gym. The ring is the one and only place where you’re allowed—no, encouraged—to toss out all your sophisticated rules of moral and social behavior, but I can’t. I don’t approve of that. It quarrels with my nice view of myself as a reasonable and compassionate person. “I spar how you spar” is the prophylactic against every practice fight becoming an all-out brawl, limiting each boxer’s attempts to exert their dominion, but this beginner girl seems never to have heard of that. She went on hitting and I felt violated. I had the word “no” screaming in my head.
Occasionally, I’ll go without sparring on sparsely populated days, when Angel vetoes the only possible guy there. “I don’t want you in with him,” he says. “He’ll just fight.” “But that’s okay,” I say. “No, he don’t know how to hold back. He’ll try and hurt you,” he says. I see how that might be now. The beginner girl had been like one of those no-holding-back guys, but without their power. Her assault was fueled by fear. Fear made her good. It isn’t fear of the opponent, but the Ur-fear that assails us all. Those guys—the ones Angel won’t let me near—are called “punchers.” My new pal, Peter Kahn, a big kidder who says he’s the world’s only Jewish boxing trainer and does a mountain of thinking about everything pugilistic, explains how trainers weep with joy when they find a puncher. He’s training one now, he says, and mentions a kid with the nicest manners and sweetest smile in the gym. “No!” I say. “Tommy’s a brute like that?” “Oh yeah. You see him out here and butter wouldn’t melt, but, man, I have to scrape him off guys in the ring.” Peter says a pure puncher is pretty rare. Most are boxer-punchers, fighters who temper the pure aggression with strategy. I wonder whether Christy Martin is a puncher and how it would have been with her, whether I would have felt more the warrior, vindicated in retaliating against her polished skills instead of digging in my heels out of some private code of honor? The more this girl hit me, the more I refused to hit back. It seemed at the time that her fear itself was my opponent. It seemed at the time that to hit would have been to capitulate to fear, and that this could lead nowhere good. I believe in fighting fear. I want to become more loving. So why am I boxing?
Answers are not readily available to the things that perplex me. No scientific study on gender roles satisfies. They are all generalized, and everyone I know is odd. It has always seemed that men are sometimes coy and may withhold sex and act scared of me, like women are supposed to do. Men tend to like me, but I can’t find one I like back, unless I’m a couple of thousand miles away, or he is just passing through town. I have changed from being the one who never calls to being a complete sap. I am susceptible to imprinting on the least suitable of suitors after just a kiss, which is why I can now have only long-distance affairs. I used to scoff at girls like me. Where’s your pride? Your cojones? Now my heart hurts with the desire to join the world of couples I’ve despised. But it’s complicated. I’m still a tomboy, I still act tough. I wonder if I’m gay. I’m not. Femininity is ganging up on me. I am out of step. I am white, middle-class, bookish, and the gym, which ought to be an alien environment, is my most comfortable place. There are others like me here—Katya, Jill, Lisa, Dee, Sky, the girl who punched me, the psychic. Veronica and Bridgette, too, but they, being black, may think we don’t have much in common; I don’t fully comprehend the extent of the racial divide in New York because I’m not American. Sometimes I imagine Veronica seething at me and my ilk and I wouldn’t fancy sparring with her in case she does have an axe to grind. Though if she did, I sure couldn’t blame her.
Since all boxers come from peoples who have not, historically speaking, held the reins, whether racial or ethnic minorities or female, women don’t disturb the Gleason’s ecology, not even Yale grads Katya and Dee. The male boxers come in fewer varieties than the female: all black, Latino, Irish, working-class, low-income. Some guys can’t read. On the other hand, there is Stephan Johnson, who writes short stories about this world of boxing. And Francisco Mariscal, known behind his back as “the human punching bag” for his daily habit of sparring twelve or fourteen rounds (very poorly), is a poet. Mexico, or “Mehico,” is the name he answers to. He usually stands next to me while I jump rope, and sometimes recites something he wrote, but mostly I am his barometer.
“I like a animal,” says Mexico. “Sunday, I run five hours. I not stop for five hours. I crazy. You think I crazy?”
“You just got too much energy,” I tell him as I jump. “You’re lucky. I wish I had.”
“No, no. Is crazy.” I keep jumping. He stands there and smiles. Like Domenico, he is usually smiling. Then he says, as if it’s just occurred to him, “You think I an ugly man?”
“No, Francisco, you’re very good-looking.” He is pleased.
“You think I can get girlfriend?”
“I don’t know why you don’t have one.”
“You be my girlfriend?”
“No.” I’m laughing. “I told you. It would never work.”
“We get married?”
“Yeah, okay. That would work.”
I find this very soothing. In some ways I don’t believe anyone could ever want me, despite (or because of) the dubious evidence of Sam and Co. In other ways I act imperious, and it has been said of me that I eat men for breakfast. Somewhere in the middle is a sanctuary I can’t even imagine. I like it here in the gym because everyone’s a bit damaged and is using that in a very concrete and practical way. Of course, most of their damage was itself pretty concrete. To be able to hit without compunction, it helps to have been hit yourself when you were too young to retaliate. Then you have the anger in the right place in your soul, ready to slip out at the first Pavlovian punch. Not every boxer was a beaten child, but it helps to have at least been raised where toughness is more of a virtue than, say, turning the other cheek or humility. Still, so many boxers are religious, asking the Lord for strength, thanking the Lord for victory. Evander Holyfield, for instance, prays fervently before every bout. George Foreman, who preached on street corners in Houston, has a gospel choir sing him into the ring. How they reconcile beating the shit out of someone with their stringent Christian morals is beyond me. If you are the Lord’s assistant, fighting the good fight, does that make your opponent the devil? What if God is in his corner also? Does the more pious man win?
Angel provides only a muddy window into the boxing world. I can’t discuss this kind of thing with him; he’d just laugh. That laugh, so appealing at first, sounds more and more like a wall. When he tells me I’m sparring with the psychic the day after I got hit, I demur. This morning I woke up sad, with a bruise like a smudge of ashes on the bridge of my nose and my left eye slightly blackened, my neck stiff like I slept in a draft on a transatlantic flight, in coach. My body doesn’t know I was in cahoots with the damage; it’s acting like a victim. But Angel insists. Don’t be a baby, he says. Over four rounds several gentle jabs to my poor nose get through, and every one feels like an insult, a nose fatwa. It’s weird how the middle of my face suddenly seems to contain my whole self. I feel five years old and permeable. Some tears fall.
“Whassup, Kate. Don’t be crying in there,” yells Angel.
“I’m not,” I lie.
“You’re too emotional, Kate,” he says, laughing at me. He doesn’t understand—I’m not emotional, I’m angry, but at whom? Not at the psychic, who is only doing as she is told and after the “sparring” insists on performing a healing on my nose, holding her palm over it. I’m angry with myself, but I’m giving me a break. This is about learning.
One thing I’m learning is that Angel doesn’t take me seriously. For a couple of weeks he calls me Brook, the name of another girl he trains, another brunette, but unfriendly and a crap boxer. I suppose he finds us interchangeable. When I do something wrong, he pantomimes the mistake, mockingly. “Don’t do that,” I say. “You’re reinforcing the wrong way. I learn by copying. Show me the right way.” But he keeps parodying. Someone shows me how to turn my left shoulder in and up to shield from the right, like a bird with its head under its wing. I show Angel. “How about this, can I use this?” “Yeah, sure,” he says. “Why didn’t you show me that?” I say. He shrugs. “Not your style.” But it is my style. What about all the other things that could join my repertoire that I don’t know to ask about? Far from working with my style, he seems to be countering my natural rhythm.
“Tomorrow I’ll get out the ten-ounce gloves and I’ll whup you. I’ll hit you so hard. Knock some sense into you,” he says.
“I wish you would,” I say. “I might learn some defense.”
It makes me mad that he treats me as if I were being lazy or recalcitrant, when I am actually so eager and trusting that I feel a fool. I have to insult him back, when what I really want and need is someone to confide in. I keep leaving the gym drained instead of energized after another session of going through the motions. When I ask Angel when the Metros start, the New York amateur competition I’m hoping to enter despite turning thirty-five in August, he says, “Oh, August probably. But you won’t do it. Something will come up.”
Men switch trainers like cars. When they want to move on, they just do it. Being boxers, they have trained their emotions not to intrude on their work even more than other men. Angel isn’t the only one in here afraid of emotions. I am afraid. I’m afraid I’m a bad workman blaming his tools. I’m afraid of change, and of upsetting him, and of him not caring whether I stay or go. I’m afraid of my own softness. In here I am no good unless I am hard. But I don’t want to lose my softness, my valuable good heart. I want to be hard and soft simultaneously, but for this I need a trainer I can trust. So what if I cry? Crying isn’t quitting.
I know there can be more to the trainer-fighter bond than Angel will allow. I have been studying pairs of them and I see it—Bridgette Robinson and Reggie Forde; Jill Matthews and Lennox Blackmore; Judah and his sons (especially Zab, that one’s exceptional); Terry Southerland and Victor Valle. I watch Angel with Sechew Powell and I see it there, too, the silent intensity, the pride. He was like that with me at first. When the bond is strong, it is stronger for being unspoken. It reminds me of the parent who cuffs the child playfully or even a parent whose constant criticism conceals overwhelming pride in the child; love—or care anyway—held at one remove. The ministrations the trainer performs for you are, in fact, very parental, but not paternal—maternal. He wipes your face, roots around in your mouth, holds the spittoon, laces your gloves, buckles your headgear, feeds you water, smears you with Vaseline. Angel does these things for me, as Terry used to do them, and it is one of the sweetest things in the gym. This brusque tenderness from a man who is not my lover was startling at first, but easy to get used to since they all have such facility with the mouthguard insertion and the sweat mop, like a professional masseur with the towel. Apart from the athlete’s rubdown, the boxing gym is the only place I can think of where macho men touch each other with such easy familiarity, even intimacy, and now, without fanfare or special training, they do the same for us women. There is no sexual content.
Between men, the trainer-fighter bond can be as intense as the mentor-daddy-genius-kid thing that Cus D’Amato had with Mike Tyson. His beloved trainer’s death sent that fighter spinning out of control, and it’s moot whether he has ever recovered. Or the relationship can be completely businesslike. A trainer can make his reputation with a single good fighter, but a rising professional is usually a young, supremely confident, unsophisticated man who can be seduced by big bucks and the title-belt mirage. His arrogance won’t save him when bad, greedy management has taken him too far too fast and he’s lost his one shot at the big time, because a fight career is more fragile than it seems to the hungry contender, and the trainer-fighter relationship is an open one. The trainer can’t prevent “his” fighter straying; if the fighter wants to get into bed with another trainer, he will. He doesn’t mind ditching the one who cares in favor of the one who views him as a fighting banknote. Anyhow, in this sport, that jackal might actually do him more good.
With women the bond is so new it has barely been tested. At Gleason’s—my split with Terry having been more of a mutual drifting apart—only Katya Bankowsky has so far made a clean break with a trainer. It was Angel. She tells me that when she decided not to fight anymore after the Gloves and felt like a change, he shrugged it off as if it were no big deal. But she and I and Bridgette and Veronica in a locker-room conference decide that they do take it more personally when a woman leaves, they do get more possessive. Maybe a woman leaving him reminds him of some woman he has loved leaving, or simply of the concept of loving a woman.
I am still agonizing about whether to leave Angel when he puts me in to spar with Sky. Why this hasn’t happened before I have no idea—I guess we just haven’t coincided at the right time. Now, Sky, though she won the Gloves fair and square, is still no good. She can fight, she can win, but she can’t box for toffee, and she is the first to admit it—which is why I am incensed when she, just like the strong-but-useless girl, gets a right hand in. She can’t get near me at first; then her trainer starts instructing her exactly what to do. I can hear him—something like “After she double the jab she be open,” pointing out some habit of mine that I can’t break. It’s the same guy who was telling that other girl how to nail me. I walk straight into Sky’s right hand and I have no clue why.
“Angel,” I ask, “why?”
“Quit standing up like that,” he says.
“No, that’s not it. She’s taking advantage of something I do. What is it?”
“You just jumping around again.”
That is the last straw. It boils down to this. I can’t imagine going into battle with Angel in my corner. He might not be on my side.
I leave him.