BY THE TIME I was nine, I walked around with my shoes untied because it was too difficult to bend over and fix them; climbing the monkey bars left me winded. My mother took me to the YMHA to find something that would slim me down. We ended up in a big rec room lined with portable blue mats, watching a judo class. I saw people in elegant white suits throwing each other to the ground in sharp, stinging arcs. Instantly, I recognized a different kind of hunger hidden inside me.
The instructor led me onto the mat, paired me with a kid about my size, and explained how to do a simple hip throw. I yanked the sleeve as he told me to, stepped in, turned, felt the balance catch and tip. That sensation of somebody’s body flying over mine: it was like opening the shutters and letting light flood into a pitch-black room.
We were endomorphs, the kind of people who didn’t go outside when it was hot. But I took to judo with the same compulsive habits that I’d learned at the dinner table. If we were supposed to do thirty throwing drills, I did forty. It didn’t matter that my lungs were burning. I wanted to feel that wheel turn. I wanted to make my partner into a weightless blur. I wanted to see him sprawled on the mat in front of me, helpless. I wanted to smash them all.