A snapshot of my glittering career: five smiling champions in street clothes, belts on their hips, Golden Gloves around their necks, Bruce the proud dad, and me in front, red nose to match my gloves—the official commemorative photo of the National Champs’ party, complete with another Gleason’s green-icing cake and soda pop. Bruce insisted I get in the picture with Veronica, Evie, Alicia, Patricia, and Sky.
“No, no, I didn’t fight,” I argued, blinking back tears (agh, I’m pathetic).
“But you have to be in it. You’re my professional,” said Bruce, kindly.
I mean to prove him right. The Moscow bout is the first of its kind, a post–Cold War eight-fight card featuring seven of the famous trainer Bob Jackson’s boys and one female. Bruce doesn’t know who the Russian girl is, but he thinks she’s a 139-pound amateur. Soon this will be amended to 132 pounds, two national amateur titles, and a 4-0 pro record—it’s Zoulfia Koutdoussova. Since I am weighing 152, I would not only have to drop twenty pounds in a month but I’d be the grass-green girl again, struggling with the shock of the ring while she called on her relatively vast experience. Now, much as I enjoy the underdog status, I don’t like it that much. After Philly, I vowed my next bout would be against an equal. And as for losing twenty pounds—once my permanent ambition—this now looks plain stupid. I have faced it, I have embraced it, I am heavy, and, having learned at NYU how to calculate my fat percentage, I no longer hate myself for it. At 152, I’m carrying a mere fourteen percent fat and it’s probably impossible to hit 132 so fast without depleting my ammunition, my muscles. Reluctantly, I ask Bruce to find someone else, and in a few days he’s booked her. Dora Webber will go to Russia.
But all is not lost—there’s still the bout in Port Chester, New York, on one of John Beninati’s cards. John B. is my new promoter pal, who Bruce says has a huge crush on me. I have no idea about that until he calls me on the Gleason’s pay phones (every fight guy in America has those pay phone numbers—you don’t give out any information until you know who they are and why they’re asking) to make me the offer. He says we’ve met many a time.
“You know me,” he says, laughing, and, the next day, when he arrives at the gym with a contract, the penny drops.
“Why do you think I was always ringside?” he says. “You’re sparring here, I’m here. You’re sparring there, whoosh, I’m there. Did you never wonder why? I’ve been watching you for a year!”
We drive out to Port Chester so I can make an appearance on the local radio sports show and plug the card.
“Women’s boxing’s a gimmick,” John declares in the car. “It’ll never catch on.”
“So why promote it?”
“They like it. Anyway, it’s an excuse to hang out with you.” He claims I’ve been disdainful of him. I insist I haven’t been ignoring him; I was just absorbed in training.
“Drop-dead gorgeous women like yourself shouldn’t box,” he says. “J.D., she can fight all she likes, but you shouldn’t be allowed.”
“So why did you sign me up?”
“Oh, I’m getting you a tomato can. I’ll find someone who looks really tough but who you can chop up into little pieces.”
“You mean you haven’t found an opponent?”
“Not yet, but we’ll get you some girl.”
Oh no. I want to win, but even if everyone else has been papered, I want it real. Still, I do the broadcast with a fictional opponent in the putative other corner, another performance.
John B. is entertainingly eccentric. Turns out he was in music before boxing (and in wrestling—he promotes that, too); he used to be the Smiths’ manager. He’s really good looking, tall with pale green eyes, and this deferential mooning is therefore all the weirder. Extreme versions of this sort of admiration have been coming my way lately via the Internet, which is still a slightly subversive mode of communication, not yet the money minting machine it would be in five more minutes. For a trendy Web site, I’d just done an arty piece about boxing, including a women’s section, and it has caused some lurid e-mails.
“Hi Kate, I am a 30 y.o. guy from Atlanta who just recently took up boxing. It is extremely strenuous as you know!” says one. “The women in my gym have shown very impressive skill. I would love to find out how well I would do against them in a fight. A few of the more experienced women could probably substitute my chin for a speed bag! Another would enjoy dominating me with her quick jabs and double or triple jabs. She would always target my eyes, making them puff up to the size of a couple of plump tomatoes with little slits….”
Curious as to his response—will he dematerialize when confronted, like a flasher?—I reply. What’s the appeal, I ask, in being beaten up by women?
“I am sexually submissive outside of boxing,” he replies, “but it would be a turn-on to lose to a woman in the ring. It’s not the pain I enjoy as much as it is the fact that I am being dominated by a woman in a fair fight. Getting knocked out cold could be a little dangerous, so I think about getting my face rearranged by a woman and that also gets me off. The thing with the eyes was just a scenario….”
I decline politely his invitation to spar in Atlanta, and, glad of his candor though I am, I’m perturbed because I simply cannot empathize. In my brothel-receptionist days, everyone seemed suddenly to be selling sex, buying it, faking it, mocking it, and the Atlanta e-mails bring that back. The soft end of S&M is very mainstream, long appropriated to impart edginess to liquor and fashion commercials and Madonna, but the proliferation of female fight Web sites my correspondent told me about, this is harder stuff. You should check them out, he said, especially the Ring Mistresses. Those girls are so sweet. Sweet? At the brothel, every other caller asked if we had wrestling mats, and lately, in Gleason’s locker room I’ve been offered several private wrestling gigs, with guys in hotel rooms who want to lose. (“Two hundred bucks cash! Easy work!”) Call me a prude, but I don’t relish this any more than I wanted to spar with Dennis the masochist. The subtexts are unerotic, they make me long for an old-fashioned boyfriend, a desire that I am hazily aware of having been fighting through fighting—because I fear that if I invite a man in emotionally and physically, I’ll be vulnerable in the ring. An open heart is not the boxer’s kind, and, like Lucia Rijker, I’m not taking that risk. Unlike her, I suspect I may be using the ring as an excuse not to risk my heart. Instead of a relationship, I’ve got a thing with a totally unsuitable twenty-two-year-old boxer of breathtaking beauty, and now John B.’s unrequited crush on me. It’s defensive.
I’ve come to believe that there is a fundamental difference in the way women fight versus the way men fight, and it is about our sexuality. Battle is the antithesis of female sexuality, whereas male sexuality is fused to it. Girl fights are a male turn-on because of the abandon, the passion they see displayed. It reminds them of women caught in flagrante delicto. Now, it is true that I must open up and let it all flow in order to fight well, but that opening up in the ring is the diametric opposite of letting go in bed—not the opposite of male-pattern emotionless sex-as-sport but of true body-and-soul lovemaking. I’m beginning to think boxing might mark the very crossroads of modern femininity and old-fashioned masculinity. Boxers in the forties, when even the word “sex” itself was risqué, were supreme sex symbols and movie stars’ consorts. After the sixties and feminism, the sexual metaphor of the ring became more overt. For instance, in his book The Fight, about the 1975 Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle,” the bellicose antifeminist Norman Mailer quotes a bit of training advice from Ali’s sidekick, Bundini Brown: “You got to get the hard-on, and then you got to keep it. You want to be careful not to lose the hard-on, and cautious not to come.”
So what about my hard-on? After I come, I experience a surge of energy (he falls asleep). Men, famously, swear off sex before a bout—or used to—so as not to weaken the legs, not to lose that hard-on, that virility. And the female word for virility is … what? Fertility? Vampishness? Gusto, perhaps. A woman’s sex drive is just as integral a part of her as a man’s is to him; our hard-ons happen on the inside, and, when aroused, we are every bit as sexually aggressive as men. I’m not sure where that drive is located when we step in the ring, but I do suspect it sits in a separate compartment. Could it be that in fighting, men incorporate a drive that is normally external, whereas women detach that which is normally incorporated? Joyce Carol Oates in On Boxing cites Sugar Ray Leonard’s desire to come out of retirement solely to beat Marvin Hagler—“I want Hagler, I need that man.” “The Opponent,” claims Oates, “is the rival for one’s own masculinity….” Was Jen Childers, then, the rival for my femininity? Absurd. I donned my aggression to fight her, lured it out of hiding places. Despite her “low blow” complaint, the only time I actually hit her below the belt was when I said, “Well done, you’re a brute,” after the decision. It was a vicious compliment. She had lost the femininity fight.
That fear of mine, that entering a relationship would deplete my forces, that I would be capitulating to a femininity that doesn’t function in the ring, is spurious, I know. Lucia Rijker may share it in her fashion, but scores of boxers disprove it, and there exists an interesting subgroup of boxers who are intimate with, even married to, their corners—among them Kathy Collins, Christy Martin, Patty Martinez, Shakurah Witherspoon (heavyweight champ Tim Witherspoon’s sister-in-law), Denise Moraetes (née Lutrick; it was love at first sight when she met Tom, Augusta Boxing Club’s director, at the Nationals), and Jill Matthews, whose husband is now her manager. What a sweet thing to have your lover in your corner, literally, not just metaphorically. I see how this could come to pass when you work so closely together.
Since the fight, there have been subtle changes in my status around here. First, everyone at Gleason’s tells me how much better I am now, so I know I’m getting dissed when my back is turned. This is an excellent compliment. Second, there is an extra bond between Colin and me. We talk more, trust more. His old friends from Guyana, he has told me, are dead, except for one, who betrayed him. He doesn’t make real friends now, he says, because if a bunch of guys were kidding around and one of them happened to say something that got him angry, he thinks he could kill the man. It breaks my heart that he considers himself so dangerous. I only saw that side of him one time, when a brittle guy at the gym—one of those with yellowed clippings on his locker about the time he went the distance against Duran—got in some pointless argument with Colin’s “big daughter,” Sandy Gutierrez, which is almost impossible given her shy demeanor. She’d been provoking him playfully, but he got riled, started calling her names, pushing her, poking a finger at her. Sandy, quite capable of decking him, took the high road, but Colin saw red. It took everyone in the gym to restrain him.
Colin had suffered a loss recently that he dismissed as nothing. Gary St. Clair, his star prospect who never did roadwork, had been lured away by the Don King machine. Colin had started Gary as a teenager in Guyana and the kid had followed him to the famous Kronk in Detroit, then to Gleason’s, where Colin got him his first American fights and got him noticed. As soon as Gary went to King’s training camp in Miami, he stopped calling; he was there six months and Colin never heard from him—only through the grapevine, which informed him that the kid was being used as a sparring partner, often with bigger fighters, and was getting not a whiff of a bout.
“He shouldn’t have ditched you,” I said.
“I don’t care,” Colin said, with a shrug. “He can do what he want.”
“But Gary’s different,” I said. “You were close.”
“Nah,” he spat. “That’s boxing.”
“I thought you said boxing was about love.”
“I’m not going to help them anymore,” he said, ignoring what I said. “Some of those boys, I knew them since they was little kids. I teach them everything. They don’t have money, I still train them. Gary’s stupid. I’m not going to help them anymore. I’m just going to train Americans. And women. You wouldn’t do that, Kadie.”
He was right, but this bothered me. I was not a twenty-three-year-old incredibly talented man; I was a thirty-frve-year-old hardworking but deeply flawed female athlete. Colin had stars in his eyes about me since that fight. He thought I was set to soar. He also acquired a little gleam in the eye about me, which I treated as a running joke between us. I worried that he was serious and squashed the thought whenever it popped up. My emotions about boxing were complex enough all by themselves.
“When you ask me over to watch the Biloxi fights?” Colin would say, doing a Groucho Marx with the eyebrows.
“Ah, shuddup,” I’d say and feint a jab to his chin. But he did come over to watch the fight tape, bringing a bag of grapes, and we sat on the sofa and discussed the bouts and ate grapes, and I heard him hoping and got uncomfortable and shooed him out. Much as I had grown to adore Colin, I wanted him to remain my trainer and my friend. He kept mentioning how sweet that afternoon in Philly before the fight had been, and I, without dissembling, would agree, ignoring what he really meant. The afterimage of that day had messed with our symbiosis. Lately, if I’d refuse to spar one day, or if I’d whine about how badly I thought I was performing, Colin would no longer just tell me to shut up and get on with it, or mock me (“You’re being a giiiirl”—same taunt as with the guys); he’d let me get away with it. He admitted it was hard for him not to see me as “his girl” when I seemed vulnerable—or, I suppose, feminine.
“I’m not your girl,” I’d snap.
“I know, I know.”
“So don’t make special rules. I’m here to box.”
“You not like Corey or Gary. They vex me.”
“Yeah, but I need bullying, too, sometimes.”
“Kadie, if you don’t feel like it, you don’t pay me no heed.”
“Oh, I guess you’re right.”
“You’re smart. I don’t want to see you get hurt. It take one punch.”
“Well, that’s for me to worry about.”
“Maaay-be. But after boxing …”
“After boxing.” I wished he wouldn’t say that. What if he really did have his heart on the line? No, of course he didn’t. It was just proximity, like an office crush. I mean, we saw each other all the time, three hours a day, six days a week. There were many aspects to our bond—coworkers, teacher and student, daddy (he could be more paternal with me than with his twelve-year-old daughter), couple of kids (he’d play tricks, tap my shoulder then disappear; he still does), friends, confidants (though we never discussed lovers), mom (I’d bully him about his health), but no sexual tension. That takes two. We trusted each other; he respected my space, and I needed my space.
Kathy time comes around—as planned since before she became the dual champion. La Collins looks slick in the color-coordinated gear of Everlast Woman, her new sponsor. Myself, I am very hungover. In fact, I may still be drunk. Yesterday was my birthday, making it precisely a year and two weeks since Kathy and I last did business, though I’ve seen her regularly at the Gleason’s Friday-night White Collar Sparring sessions. It turns out this is, after all, a “moving around for the camera” occasion—ABC, I think, is doing a feature on her—and I’m too tired to be nervous. Kathy demonstrates the use of the heavybag. She is killing that thing—being double champ seems to have doubled her power. I point out to Colin how I am in no fit state to invite a similar whumping. She’s double champ; I’m seeing double. If she hits me too hard, I might hit the wrong one back. Colin raises his eyes to heaven. He’s forever smelling my breath and checking my bloodshot gaze in a parody of the worried parent. This is the first time he’d have been justified in scolding, but he doesn’t.
Kathy and I agree to make it look good at no risk to ourselves. She’s forgotten her mouthguard.
“Huh,” snorts Colin, “she doan forget it. She want you to take it easy, but she be going hard. Remember what they say to Lisa?”
But I trust her. It’s like talking to an old friend you haven’t seen for ages; it’s as if we’d sparred yesterday. I’m comfortable. But the guys are bored, they want blood. I have her on the ropes, then in the corner—she went there like a pony, it was nothing—and I glimpse Hector, Menacho, Sinbad over her shoulder willing me to do damage, and Colin’s right here: “Uppercut, uppercut, body. Come on! Bodeee!” and I’m ignoring them all. In the breaks, I preempt the harangue: “I know I know, I let her go. I told you, I’m not into it today. You think she’d just lay there and take it? This isn’t a fight. Remember Veronica….”
It is the least eventful, most enjoyable of sparring sessions. Though nobody says as much, I know Kathy was not “on” today either, and she is guiltily grateful afterwards, she and Frankie very friendly. This disgusts Gleason’s. I let the gym down. I feel a bit guilty, too, because Colin lost face. “I understand,” he says, crestfallen. “You doan want to go hard today, thass cool.” It is not cool. Today I have trashed my place in the pecking order, lost the modicum of status I had won by fighting. To be honest, I’m more angry than remorseful—stupid little boys, wanting a war just for kicks and pride. They wanted to control my body, make it attack. How dare they tell me what to do! Boxing is all about that, though. You think you’re an individual, fighting alone, but you’re not your own boss. Others buy you, manage you, sell you, pull you out, send you in. If you’re a fighter, you must fight. I don’t realize it, but today I have begun to rebel.
I got over the hangover, got serious—tomato can or not, I’m fighting in four weeks and I must spar. But with whom? There’s Darius, the former pro about my height, and Charlie, a featherweight who wears a blue scuba-diving suit and spars at least twelve rounds a day.
“I have to,” he tells me. “I have a lot of anger. See, I was messed up by my ex-wife. It’s in there, and it’s pain.” Yet Charlie is a gentleman in the ring. He hits hard at innocuous targets like forehead, shoulder, biceps at worst, but pulls his punches to the face, temples, chin. He keeps denying this, but eventually he comes clean.
“So when you spar with me,” I want to know, “that’s not anger, is it?”
“That’s more fun. That’s exercise. With the guys, I get rid of the anger.”
“Charlie,” I say, “next time, will you go hard with me like you do with the guys? Could you do that?”
“I can try,” he says, looking doubtful.
“No, really, because if you hold back, how will I ever learn?”
“Yeah, okay, we’ll try it,” he says. And he swears blind he’s taken off the brakes, but I’ve seen him go for it, I know he’s sparing me.
I spar with Zab Judah. He’s 8-0 as a pro now, and recently won at the Garden—the big one, not the Theater. He’s lost exactly one round since he turned professional, is number one on every fight magazine’s hot list, and within a year will have won the USBA and IBF junior welterweight belts to cement things. Zab doesn’t entirely hold back and I even get some shots in, so I’m pretty pleased with myself until I get to the locker room, where Evelyn is waiting.
“Zab making you look bad there,” she declares, matter-of-factly. “Don’t you hate that?” (“Good work, Kate” is what she’d said at the ring just now.)
“No, not really. I like that he went for it.”
She looks at me, then erupts into grave concern.
“Ooh, how did you get that on your nose? He wasn’t hitting hard.”
“Well, he did pop me with a couple.”
“Really? Didn’t look like he was hitting hard.”
Colin says I should spar with Evelyn. I know I should. She’s the only woman the right size, but she scares me—more outside the ring than in it. Today, she greeted me like this:
“Hey, Kate! Looking flabby. What happened to your definition?”
Whenever a new girl appears, she gives her the lowdown on the boxing life. “If you work hard,” she concludes, “maybe one day you’ll be a great champion like me.”
I think she’d try to kill me.
I’m saved by the bell—of the phone, that is—when Dora Webber’s people call Bruce seeking Kathy Collins for sparring. Kathy’s not available, so they get the consolation prize: me. I love Dora’s ring style. She’s a wily fighter with tremendous power and a decade more experience than any woman I’ve encountered. She actually went the distance with Rijker. But I don’t love her attitude: I’m gonna make her head spin like a Dutch windmill … I can’t sleep the night before her visit. It must seem as if the terrors are my constant companions in the gym, but almost the opposite is the case. Between highlights march hour upon hour of drudgery, instruction, pedestrian sparring, roadwork, lots of fun and practice, practice, practice. It took a long time to reach this EKG period, long plateaus interspersed with red peaks, to have boxing stab me like a good horror movie with lovely dread.
Meanwhile I’m pestering Bruce for word on my Port Chester opponent. Get John to call me, please? I beg. It’s odd. Normally, he’s looking for excuses. I have a bad feeling. The imminence of Dora compounds it. She needs the work as much as I do—she is sparring for Russia—but what if she is a grudge holder, looking to avenge those evil draw decisions? What if she hates women? My bout is days away. I am ready, but it doesn’t smell right. John B. won’t even return calls disguised as innocent questions about the tickets I’m supposed to sell (most boxers do this, even famous ones). Bruce suggests I call the Athletic Commission to see when I’m down for the CAT scan. You don’t fight in New York State without that. Even though I had a premonition, when I call and find there is not one single female on the list for that card, I can barely believe it. What a creep. Afraid to tell me. It feels like they canceled Christmas. Then again, it’s like I passed the breath test after a pint of vodka.
Dora day. She’s late. I watch Jill Matthews go a few rounds with former heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon, half hoping Dora won’t show and I can be next with him. But now here she comes with her trainer. Snub-nosed and square-shaped, blond hair in a seventies mullet, Dora is not a smiler. After some time, changed and warmed, she joins me in the ring and we await the next bell. It’s the worst bell-waiting I’ve ever done, including the fight, and my dread persists, uncharacteristically, into the first minute. I’m on a hair trigger, catching jabs that aren’t there, pulling my own, weedily aimed at her headgear. I drop my gaze to her throat, a Reggie Forde trick—he says it focuses you and disconcerts your opponent—but I still can’t stop using my shoulders as earmuffs. Dora speaks.
“Hey, sweetheart, relax!” she says. I crack a smile. “There you go,” she says. “See, this ain’t so bad.”
No, I guess it’s not. I calm down, but only a little bit. After all, these exchanges are exploratory and I don’t know what a heavier punch might buy. In the ring, Dora is quite the knockout artist, and I don’t know how volatile she is, or how elastic the sparring protocol is when two women from different gyms are paired. She wanted Kathy for revenge, I assume, because of the recent dubious draw decision. Is she planning to take that out on me? Well, there’s nothing to do but bite the bullet. I let my right connect with the middle of her face (what an asset that tiny nose is, dished at the bridge like black ones) at about seventy percent power, thinking, Uh-oh, here we go, and she accepts it, notes it; we circle, she catches a jab, slips one, sidesteps and—wham! There it is. A short, straight right. I think I let it in, I think I wanted it, to get it over. I’m gone; the black appears, but momentarily; a leg wobble. If she followed it with a hook, I’d be down. Wonder if she could have; yes, I bet she could have, but since she didn’t, instinct throws a jab for me, so she knows I’m still here. And now it gets really good.
A superior opponent raises your tennis game, and so it is with boxing. Mind you, a fast rally may tax your skill, but a tennis ball won’t break your teeth like a volley of punches can, and it just flies away when the pace beats you. Sparring makes me think not of tennis, however, or of the obvious analogy, dancing, but of riding a horse. You are harnessed to each other, moving in sync. You plus horse set the pace and the rhythm. Do we trot now? If I can ride, I decide; if I’m not in control, the animal carries me however it likes. Ideally, we work in tandem, moving together. That is how it is today. Dora is such a treat. She has figured out what I can and can’t do, and she’s pushing my limits. I learn and learn. I’m doing my utmost to best her, but she sees everything coming, does these great feints with her entire torso, not just arms.
“Colin, she’s amazing,” I keep saying in the breaks.
“She the best woman I seen,” he agrees. “She fight like a guy.” After me, another girl, a 105-pound novice Colin trains, asks for a round, and Dora nods okay. I figure she’ll pull everything like I do with this girl, but Dora waits ten seconds, then knocks her down.
“Suck it up,” she says, as the novice climbs back onto her feet, woozily. “Come on! Don’t quit!” But she quits. This, too, is instructive. As the visitor, though she outweighs the novice by thirty-odd pounds and tons of experience, Dora did the right thing, but I wonder if I could be such a bully.
“Yeah, there was nobody to fight back in the eighties, nothing going on,” Dora says after we’re done training. “Now there’s all these girls fighting. So I figured, ‘Hey, get back in the ring, let’s kick some ass.’”
“You getting a rematch with Lucia?” I ask.
“Rijker,” she spits. “Hmm. She’s the one I want.”
“How about Kathy Collins?”
“She knows she lost that. I don’t care.”
I’m not scared of sparring with Dora anymore, but she is daunting in conversation—tough as a rock, keen on revenge. When Kathy Collins finally gets to spar with her a few months later, I’m gratified when she admits she was terrified at the prospect.
“But she’s such a good girl,” said Kathy after their second eight-round session. “You can really work with her. Fifteen years’ experience! She’s the only woman I’ve sparred I can really learn off.”
Moscow, September 27, 1997—Dora Webber is the only American to win in eight bouts of U.S.-Russian matchups.
Kathy C. needs work again, but I have a deadline or something, and now no fight, so someone else gets her, and I arrive in time to catch the final seconds. A ripped blonde is leaning her full weight on Kathy, inelegantly shoving fists into her sides and occasionally up the middle. Who on earth is this? I follow them to the locker room.
“Man, we were really going for it at the end there,” she’s saying to Kathy, who I can tell disagrees by her frown and monosyllabic replies. Kathy addresses me instead.
“I’m sick of this shit,” she drawls, slouching on the bench in her Everlast Woman. “Roadwork, roadwork, spar, spar, diet, diet …”
“You did get skinny. You dropping a division?”
“Nah, I just picked up my roadwork, to five miles a day. Makes a big difference. But I tell ya, I can’t wait till I’m finished with this shit and get a life.”
The blond brawler chimes in. “So what you doin’?” she asks me. “You fight in the Gloves?” She’s very attitudinal, sort of Martina Hingis meets Latrell Sprewell.
“No—too old. Had one pro fight. How come I’ve never seen you here?”
“I train real early. Come in from Upstate.”
Her name is Angela Reiss. We’re the same weight, so we swap numbers to spar sometime.
Time passes. I’m fed up. I know what Kathy C. meant—and I’m not even sniffing another contract. Colin is fed up. He has stopped training new guys, plays a lot of dominoes, mentions “after boxing” often enough to be irritating. He gets me the same sparring partners every day, no new challenges—Darry, Charlie, that novice girl—and I’m just too lackadaisical to kick up a fuss. Life outside has trumped boxing. Then one day in late November, Bruce has news for me.
“You know your old friend Don Elbaum?”
“Er, yes.”
“He wants to know if you’d like to fight on his card next month.”
“Right. What is she this time? Seven foot, twelve-and-oh, all knockouts?”
“Well, no. This time, we’ll get you the opponent.”
“Huh? What happened to his golden girl?”
Turns out Jen Childers retired after our bout. Not only retired, but disappeared, shattering her management contract with Elbaum. Rumor has it, she ran off to California with her boyfriend, who’s on the lam after being accused of murder. Elbaum is not happy.
“Jen Childers is over,” sneers the small Don a few days later on his Gleason’s visit. “She wasn’t so hot anyway. Hey, now it’s all Kate Sekules!” He is suddenly able to pronounce my name. Craving the closure I missed in September, I say yes to the December fifth card—that’s two weeks away. It is an annual holiday charity affair in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar town that, so Peter Kahn tells me, was once the mecca for fighters at the beginning of the road, famous for bottomless cards of hard-fought four-rounders. This will be a nostalgia trip, he says. I’ll taste the days when everyone cared about boxing, when fights were fights. I’ll also be the first woman to have fought pro there. Heading the card of four-and six-rounders is a gen-you-wine championship bout, twelve rounds for the junior middleweight belt—the IBC one. The IBC is the upstart organization whose ratings are not listed in the boxing magazines. The next day an opponent is confirmed at 147 pounds, and I add my signature to hers on the contract. Angela Reiss signed it early this morning.
Now that we have a purpose, Colin perks up, and so do I. Sparring every day, running every morning—like I’ve been doing all along, only now with gusto. Again, news spreads instantly. “Ah, you’ll beat her easy,” say the gym critics. “You’re better technically, you’re in better condition. She’s gonna lose.” A few hours earlier, they’ll have said exactly the same to Angela.
I am delighted when Peter Kahn offers to work my corner. His irreverence is soothing, and he was there last time; he’s good insurance. Colin, wanting another sweet Philly afternoon, is peeved, but pretends not to care. The special savor of anxiety is back. I know I’m not sparring hard enough. Colin isn’t putting me in with Evelyn or Veronica, or calling up Dora or Kathy, and I’m not calling him on it. The anticipation of hard sparring is much worse than the reality, and I’ve been feeling girly and weak before the gym. Then, sparring with Charlie, I manage to pop my left shoulder out of its socket. Bob Jackson, one of the world’s best quik-fit body fixers, has a feel. He says it’s badly bruised from the dislocation, but I’ll be okay. Shelly, on the other hand, a genius physiotherapist whom Colin trains, says I’ve sprained my supraspinatus and may not be fit to fight. I discover the shoulder hardly hurts when I throw a good clean punch but screams during arm punches, twisted weak punches, wrong punches, and I figure I can work with that. The pain recedes.
One week to go and Colin squints at me appraisingly.
“You weigh yourself?”
“Um, well not this week.”
“You gotta weigh yourself, Kadie. You doan wanna be like Julio Cesar Green. He gotta lose ten pound overnight for that title shot. He was in here hours, jumping rope in four sweaters.”
Certain I’m still 152 or less, I step on the scale and—oh shit! It claims I’m 158 pounds. My period is coming up. One of my great talents is menstrual edema, during which I can carry as much as ten pounds of extra fluid. It drops off just as suddenly, but, unfortunately, that stage is due after the weigh-in. When I report the tragedy to Colin, he shrugs.
“No problem. Ten pounds is nothing,” he says.
“Oh sure, for men it’s nothing. You can sweat it out overnight. But you’ve never seen a girl drop ten pounds in a week, have you? Have you?”
“Calm yourself. Ten pounds is nothing.”
Ten pounds, of course, is the magic number, the amount that every woman, however skinny, thinks she ought to lose; the losing of ten pounds—we all think this—will usher in the new age and solve every problem. I thought I no longer minded the number on the scale, but having to lose that magic ten in a week heralds a regression. Sweat it out, says Colin, who has evidently ignored all my patient explanations about the science of sweating, how the weight loss is temporary; how it floods back the moment a sip of water passes your lips; how wringing out the last drops of moisture from tissues about to be pummeled is assisted suicide (if you dehydrate too fast, your skull will rattle your desiccated brain like a maraca); how over half a person’s lean body mass is water and should remain so; how the sensation of thirst is no use as an indication you’ve dried out, since you’ve already gone too far when you feel it … Of course he hadn’t been listening. He knew better.
Sweating and boxing have always been soulmates, because temporary weight loss, a mirage on the scale, is often all that is required. When you see an apparent discrepancy in size between opponents, you’re not imagining it. One really is bigger—he’s gained ten pounds since the weigh-in that morning. A man can easily lose ten pounds in the steam room or on a long summer run; more when wearing heavy clothes or a sauna suit. The fight gym is one of the last refuges of that crackly plastic top and pants clamped to your extremities by elastic. It isn’t healthy to short-circuit your cooling system by preventing the evaporation of sweat, but it’s effective, as the lake that collects around your ankles shows. Most boxers stay roughly at their fighting weight specifically to avoid the fatigue of emergency dehydration, but rare is the fighter who has never participated in the tradition of sweating at the last minute.
“I guess I was tired,” one guy told me after a loss. “I was five pounds over, so I’d run fourteen miles the night before.”
“The worst time,” Terry Southerland told me once, “was when I’d taken laxatives and been in the steam room, and that stuff started working right about the fourth round. Man, that was the toughest fight I ever had.”
“My own weight,” wrote Jake LaMotta, somewhat hyperbolically, “could go from one fifty-five to one ninety-five in a matter of two, three days…. I figure that all through my career, I lost four thousand pounds of weight. Two tons.” In fact, LaMotta’s career was all but finished by sweating, when, weighing 187, he signed at 160 for his final meeting with Sugar Ray Robinson. Despite sweating and starving, he still had to drop the last five pounds in the steam room the night before. He ended up so weak, he described the Valentine’s Day bout as a one-victim massacre.
Even though I’m a champion sweater, I don’t believe that stupid sweat tricks will work for me, but with nothing to lose but the chance to fight, I decide to do it Colin’s way … with a little modification. I would not follow his diet of dry toast and ice cream, nor did I believe his assertion that when pushed to the limits, your pores extrude actual fat; but I would try the trickle-and-spit hydration method of sloshing water in my mouth without ever swallowing, and I would train in a sauna suit. While New York is still believing the low-fat, high-carb gospel, I employ the body builders’ method of getting ripped for a show, which involves cutting carbohydrates to the bone—the Atkins Diet method. It is a logical regime: carbohydrates are digested slowly, requiring four times their weight in fluid on their long passage through the small intestine; so dropping them restricts edema. Unfortunately, it also drops your blood-sugar level to the basement and makes you feel like a bear in winter. I compromise and eat cereal for breakfast. As for not drinking while training, I decide to ignore what I’d been taught, that about three eight-ounce cups of water per hour is advisable during exercise. Why do boxers take only a squirt from the bottle between rounds? Colin says you’ve got to get used to thirst, because you can’t drink in the middle of a fight, and, anyhow, you don’t want fluid sloshing around in your belly. You want it hard and empty, ready to deflect blows. Never mind that even two percent dehydration leads to a ten-to fifteen-percent reduction in stamina, and that two percent of my body weight—three pounds—translates into a mere six cups of water.
After the first workout using the traditional boxing dehydration system, I have lost three pounds.
“See!” crows Colin. “I told you. Ten pounds is nothing.”
“It’s just fluid,” I screech. “It’ll be back tomorrow.”
But it is not. The next day—five more till weigh-in—I lose another two. This also stays away. I am living on grilled chicken and steamed vegetables. I am tired. I put it down to the gym work, not to mention my day job—a couple of travel articles are due before Scranton—but the fatigue is more than physical. I am weary, sad, and angry. Some chemical reaction has started with the diet, some reflux of hurt from the past, at being made to feel wrong in my body, of concentrating on it to the exclusion of more interesting subjects, of being alienated from it. The reason for the regime has escaped my subconscious (“The incentive to fight is always subconscious,” says José Torres) and I’m feeling victimized and isolated, as if I were being forced to do this against my will and nobody understands. I fill an entire journal with self-pity. I feel like weeping but fear it would weaken me. Fear is back, as bad as before. I take it all out on Colin, who bickers right back, and on anyone who crosses my path in the gym, like the white-collar boxer who asks why I’m wearing sweat apparatus.
“Got to drop some pounds,” I explain.
“I’ve never had a weight problem, luckily,” he shares. “But you look fine.”
“It’s not that,” I snap disdainfully. “It’s that I’m fighting Friday.”
How dare he assume this is vanity. How dare all men assume that all women care about is losing weight. Oh, this week I am made entirely of Achilles’ heels.
A couple of days before Scranton, Patrick Forde, Reggie’s cousin, is watching me doing ab work.
“You scared of your own anger,” he declares.
I stare back. “In fact, I’m more scared of not having enough,” I protest.
“No, you scared of it,” he says, with a Mona Lisa smile. “It’s the djinn. You know about the djinn?” He says how, back in Guyana, the djinn are malevolent spirits that jump in when your guard is down, when you’re tired or angry or asleep, and cause mischief or wreak havoc. “You don’t want to let go,” says Patrick, “because the djinn will get in and you don’t know what happen then.”
What if Patrick’s right? I think the djinn are the prescription I need. I never did learn to unleash the beast like the boys in the playground who fought for fun. Maybe I am afraid of what I might find if I lost control. I can’t evade the truth that although there is much love in the boxing gym, fighting, even sparring, can feel like hate to me, that being hit feels personal. When I hit back, I can’t help doing so without anger, through a retarding glue made of my cherished idea of me: that I am reasonable, compassionate, equitable. If I could only hit while feeling that fury I’ve refracted through tantrums about weight and feminism and injustices, I would be free. I wonder: If the djinn got in, would I still be me? But my defenses against that are impervious; it’s not as if I had a choice in the matter.
Three days later I wake up in Scranton soaked in sweat. Out the Motel Six window, bloated snow clouds rest on low concrete block buildings, gray on gray on gray. We got lost in New Jersey, Colin and Peter and I, and finally arrived around midnight, whereupon Peter picked up the front desk phone and dialed Elbaum.
“She’s not coming, Don … I dunno … No, she said she didn’t feel like it … Well, right, go figure … More money? I dunno. Let me ask her … Ha-ha-ha …Yeah, we just got here. Eight-thirty at the hall? Right …” He’s giggling like a schoolboy. “It always gets him. Every time. He never learns.”
The entire trip was surreal, departing the gym after I’d jumped rope for eight rounds in the plastic suit, then lounging alone in the leather backseat of Peter’s big car, like vacations in the parental vehicle, singing Flanders and Swann numbers—an obscure British duo big in the fifties whose entire oeuvre Peter knew—driving around and around industrial Jersey exurbs and down deserted Route 81, tortured by thirst and forbidden to drink a drop, finally feigning sleep while the guys talked boxing. There were so many crossed wires in my memory banks; it was more drug trip than road trip. At Scranton, they were off to the IHOP.
“No dinner for her.”
“Hell, let’s be gentlemen and see her to her room.”
It was as expected: functional, ugly, musty, no towels, no soap, broken TV.
“Remember, Kadie,” said Colin, “when you get lonely, one knock for me, two for Peter. No, change it to three, ’cause I might not hear juss one.”
“We’ll go in one by one,” added Peter. “Only, we’ll wait till after the fight, ’cause she’ll be really tired then. She might beat us up before.”
It’s a strain and a relief to laugh at the clowns. They turn the thermostat up to full.
“Now, here’s our blankets, too. Jump a few rounds of rope before bed.” And that’s why I wake in a puddle.
My second professional weigh-in and I know the ropes, though the sense of occasion I felt last time is sadly absent, partly due to starvation. I haven’t eaten a morsel or drunk a drop for twenty-two hours. Scranton’s indoor stadium is indistinguishable from a school hall, with soda dispensing machines and granite staircases and scratched plank floors. We wait in a utility chamber full of molded plastic chairs, Formica tables, and a bunch of white boys, since at least half of every bout—except for mine and the title contenders’—is a local kid. Don Elbaum comes over. “This time you’re winning, ha-ha,” he says. I preferred him when he wasn’t on my side; now he’s all nervous—perhaps my snotty-sounding British accent is causing this, or maybe the fix is in. I don’t want the fix. Then again, right now, I don’t want the fight. This is one of the worst days of my life, this and yesterday, I wrote this morning, though I am trying very hard to look forward to it, trying to be like Jill and Lucia with their pre-bout excitement. There’s Angela on the other side of the room. This is my first glimpse of her since we met in the locker room at Gleason’s after she sparred with Kathy. Back then, I’d learned about her recent move from Brooklyn to the countryside upstate, how she’d decided to opt for a domestic life with her boyfriend, leaving city pressures behind. The nice spot of sparring we’d discussed then would have been entirely consistent with her bucolic plans, but this—this is something else entirely. Now, from opposite sides of the weigh-in room, we exchange hostile nods.
There’s an interminable delay while Kenny Ellis (19-0-2), favorite for that IBC title, fails to make weight. The IBC commissioner, here to chaperone his belt, is engaged in Talmudic disputation with the Pennsylvania State Commissioner and Elbaum. Are they going to let him fight with an extra four pounds? It’s a title shot after all. A half pound over normally disqualifies, as well he knows. “The scale’s off,” Kenny is protesting. “I was weighing fifty-two yesterday and I haven’t eaten a thing.” The IBC commissioner illustrates his organization’s image problem by adjusting the equipment. When it’s my turn, I hold my breath in case it’s heavy, but I am fine. I hit the nail on the head, a perfect 147 pounds. You see, gloats Colin, ten pounds is nothing. And I have to admit, forever after, it does persist in seeming so. The medical is more perfunctory even than Philadelphia’s—a blood-pressure check, a pregnancy test, and a question about recent headaches, then it’s lunchtime.
A room has been set aside for our buffet in Scranton’s finest sports bar, all gaudy carpets and video games, the Eagles and Biggy Smalls competing with the NFL. Boxers dive into the sloppy, oily lasagna the second it appears, vacuuming it all up. I order a chicken salad and soup, my hunger gone. Colin hits the pool table. The more I talk to Peter, the more Colin ignores me, and the more he ignores me, the more I talk to Peter. I’m mad at him for acting sarcastic, like a wronged boyfriend, when what I need is pre-fight succor. Our plan this time is another simple one: come forward, block and make her miss, tire her out, then throw bombs, all bombs, all on target. He’s been assuring me I hit so damn hard that this is all I need, but lately, since he learned I’d got an extra corner, he’s replaced our customary complicity with childish moodiness. Instead of patiently reiterating what I need to do, he just shrugs and says, “Whatever you like,” denying anything’s amiss when I call him on it, like he did about Gary: “I don’t care.” Padwork has been languorous, not urgent; sparring has been silent. I’ve given up on him. If he wants to be like that, let him. Peter can be my grown-up.
That afternoon is snapshots in my head: Peter and car left at the gas station; Colin and me crossing the icy wasteland back to the motel; me striding ahead, livid, savoring my conniption like a fresh piece of gum. Then: stinking room, I snap off the babbling black TV screen, rip Vogue to shreds, lie rigid on my back, eyes speeding, heart pounding, for hours. Then: I dial their room. “Col, would you come over?” A sinking of the heart. Colin, perched on the other bed, holds my hand. I say, “Sorry I’ve been shitty.” He says, “No, that’s okay. You be nervous.” Making him count the ways I am a good boxer. Making him my comforter. My ire gone flat. Smiling him out the door, relieved that we were close again, perturbed because that is the wrong template. Fitful sleep. Pack.
This dressing room is a giant sports locker containing rack upon rack of basketballs. The ceiling slopes to knee height in back where the couch is; rather homey. Peter, already wearing his cornerman’s jacket, is in his element, darting in and out, reporting gossip from trainers and managers of his extensive acquaintance. He says she’s down the other end of the hall, which means I must pass her en route to the bathroom downstairs. My neurotic bladder insists I do this immediately, and I nearly collide with her hovering outside what is literally a closet, holding forth to some cops in uniform, her pale hair braided like Heidi’s, her eyes so hooded they’re black, her gestures exaggerated for my benefit, though she pretends she hasn’t seen me. They said she’d be strung out with stage fright, they said she’s no good, they said I’ll smoke her, but she is the strutting one, not I. Only now do I recall hearing (just after the contract-signing) that she has fought karate for years; she was runner-up in a world seido tournament. She is looking forward to this.
I’m slouched on the couch in my new black-and-blue Everlast robe and trunks. I chose these colors as a joke. Colin’s compassion and solicitude continue, which I like and hate equally. Surely he wouldn’t be mollifying his guys with one hour to go? When it’s time to warm up, we go out to the corridor, punching our way into the opponents’ dressing room just like last time, except that here the dressing room is the gents’ toilet. Just like last time, we make extra noise on the pads to psych her out, though something tells me this gal isn’t having a little cry but is more likely signing autographs for the Scranton Fire Department.
“Remember,” says Colin, between combinations, “I’m with you, baby. You know when you get hit, I’m going to feel it too. You’ll have my strength as well as yours.”
“Ah, that’s sweet,” I say, but I hate that. Is my own strength not enough?
“No, I mean it, Kadie. I’ll be in there with you. We’ll kill the girl.”
“Colin, I’ve got to fight. Don’t baby me.”
“No, no, I’m just saying I’ll be feeling every punch.”
“Well, let’s not feel too many, eh?”
The front of the house is packed when I go for my final pee, and teenage girls in spray-on pants and spike heels don’t bother disguising their drop-jaw stares. Suited up in my battle dress, I am part toxic alien species, part guy in drag, not much woman. Angela is so pumped, there’s a testosterone fog in the corridor. As for me, on the eve of my period, I am all estrogen. I have told myself the PMS lunacy will work in my favor and am ignoring the weepy, sleepy, clumsy symptoms. There is no warning before the fifth bout, our bout, and now—right now—it is time.
“I have such a good feeling about this, it’s ridiculous,” says Peter as we stand at the doorway.
“Oh God,” I reply.
This time, it is she who takes her corner first, and she’s bouncing in place, slapping both gloves together rhythmically. Boy, she’s making a meal of this—seen too many fight flicks. “I told him that,” giggles Peter when the ring announcer tells the crowd I’m from Philadelphia. “May as well get them on your side.” Fine, but now I’m not me. The ref does his spiel, the seconds climb out, and here it is, the bell I’ve waited ten months to hear.
Her pair of jabs don’t reach my face, my first stops short of hers, then—ugh, what is that?—she does some business around my waist level, then grabs me and spins. Look, let’s start over. Plan: I come forward, stepping between her feet to push her back (“Always do that, Kadie, use your strength”), a jab and a right and she’s at the ropes, three, four, five uppercuts by me. Good. She performs a U-shaped bob for no reason, and back again, really hammy ones, and then I make my first mistake. Showing the kindness of sparring, I let her off the ropes. Bad, bad idea. And I can’t decipher Colin and Peter’s yelling, and it’s confusion as she—she, not I—comes forward, connecting twice with a double jab, missing another, then—YOWCH!—a right hand that pounds my temple like a battering ram, and on with this peculiar thing she does that’s going to become very familiar. Her head drops like a charging bull and she walks, her fists going bom-bom-bom, one by one into my stomach, and, whoop, she’s at my head again and I’m actually backing up—Colin! Louder, goddammit! What the hell do I do with this creature?—and now she’s leaning her entire body weight on me. Where’s the ref? Wish I’d watched her with Kathy.
We are about two-thirds through when I realize with horror that I’ve forgotten something important—been too distracted to throw a whole lot of punches. So I figure: get out from this gross hug, get after her, and—SLAM!—I eat another of those rights. They come from the side, loop around, really ugly, but, man, they’re evil, heavy as anvils, I don’t like them. I do not like them. Now I’m aiming for her face and I land some, but I can’t taste my own power. Then I feel the ropes at my back and before I can swivel, there’s another huge right—she leads with them and I’m not seeing how—and a jab and a leaning-on-me, and I stumble slightly and, horror of horrors, now the ref wakes up. He points her to a neutral corner and gives me the standing eight count. How dare he? I nod impatiently the whole time, arms akimbo; I want her back, but on the “eight,” the bell rings. I hear the crowd burble and bleat—no Blue Horizon mayhem here.
Colin’s got his rubber hands on again, extracts the mouth-guard, sponges the back of my neck.
“Okay, Kadie?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, cross with myself. Shit, why didn’t I spar harder? Then I’d know how to get around her mugger’s tactics. “But she hits incredibly hard. This is not a good night to walk into rights.”
“Keep her in front,” he says. “When she come in with the right, get under and round with a hook.”
The crowd comes to life in a wolf-whistle chorus as the ring girl ponysteps past in satin hotpants and a sports bra, grinning.
“Don’t let her back you up like that,” Peter chimes in.
“Yeah, what’m I s’posed to do? This bloody head butt thing … Ah hell.”
It’s time again. Back again. Bell. The second round starts okay; I’m using my reach, clocking her with a selection of jabs and rights, but again, though she winces, I’m just not feeling my power tonight. She’s irritating with this cocky loll, dangling her left arm like an elephant’s trunk then swinging it up ineffectually. The ones that hurt come the other way—like this! Fifteen, twenty seconds in, smashing into my cheekbone, my nose, like Veronica’s right, only this time I can’t quit. It enfeebles me, but I’m okay. There is not a chance in hell I’m going down. And here’s the bull act again, now she’s not even punching, just clutching and stumbling me forward. Why? On the ref’s blind side, she pins my right arm, illegally. I wrench it free and hook around her shoulder to the chin, but I’m off balance and it’s weak. The rest is monotonous: she just keeps putting me in clinch after clinch and I step back to make space for uppercuts, but my leverage is off. I’m all ass-backward tonight, can’t get untracked, treacle feet—oh, I knew it. I’ve got to throw more punches! So sick of this: clutch, separate, clutch, separate, clutch, separate. Bell.
Peter’s wielding a cotton swab.
“Blood?” I say, surprised. No blood. I don’t know what to say to them. I’m letting them down. I feel horrible. Can we come back tomorrow? I’ll be more into it then.
“You okay, Kadie?”
“YES, I’m OKAY. Don’t ask that! Don’t I look okay? Don’t answer that.”
In the opposite corner, Angela is on her feet, apparently chatting with her trainer who’s not even standing on the apron, but on the floor. Show off. Somehow, I can’t absorb Colin’s advice; it’s sliding right out of my ears. It’s halfway, I’m thinking—as the ring-card girl, now in green thong bikini, totters by to a high-decibel leer—halfway through, half done, glass half full. Seconds out, he says. Ding.
I steam out, winging. Okay, let’s get this over with, play her at her own game. I press her back into her corner, nice combinations; she shells up, then I take another slug in the face before allowing the dumb dance to commence again, more like wrestling than boxing at this point. She is so bad, they were right, I should be winning, but I can’t gain enough overview to unravel her, at least while I’m under this barrage of punches. Everyone, they say, has a plan until they get hit. Whenever she is in trouble, she ties me up, grabbing on to me like a raft in a storm—is that fair? Judges don’t care. They’re not scoring amateur, they don’t mind a brawl. Here’s the bull again. Pressing herself into me as close as a lover, I feel her rasping breath and even this I can’t cash in on. I feel, so help me, bored. Look at me, Ma, a thousand total strangers baying while I hold this blond woman’s head in my armpit and glumly rabbit-punch the crown. I don’t see the point anymore. The punishment I’m taking is nothing, nothing. The bell. Release.
I have brought them here under false pretenses. I have stolen a thousand hours of Colin’s life. They thought I came to fight but I came to finish fighting. I’m nodding intelligently as Colin explains the way out of her silly clinches, but he may as well be speaking Urdu. While I’m active inside it, the sweet science of bruising makes as much sense to me as particle physics makes to a neutron. My private plan: get out of here. Bell.
We are made to touch gloves before the final round, then in we go again and, as in Philly, my entire life has consisted of this idiotic conflict. Like they tell you, there is indeed plenty of time in the ring, time enough to slip a punch and forge a battle plan for the next exchange, or, in my case, plenty of time to ponder this year in boxing, how far I have come. I am, paradoxically, better now—none of her bombs has turned my head and I still have plenty of juice—but undermining my will is the spiritual malaise that drove me into here. I lack something I thought I could find in the ring, but it isn’t here; there’s nothing here for me. I do know I can throw a punch and take a punch. I have heart—I see the little black dots and keep on going—but I don’t have enough to stop another’s heart in its tracks. This shames me not at all.
Angela is looming laboriously, like Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. She’s run out of gas. Her rights don’t sting anymore and her hands are so low, I’m clocking her jaw at will. The trouble is, I haven’t any will. All that work and I just don’t care. I do try to rouse my soldiers, assisted by a dim awareness of Colin and Peter’s encouragement—“Dig! Bring it out!”—but it doesn’t do much good. I am about to be made very happy, and not by the decision, which is bound to go against me. It will be some months before I can fully admit it, but what is coming up now really is the final bell.