Three skeletons doing the lambada. IEs Mi Estudio! they grin. That’s the ad I pick from The Village Voice for the gym least likely to employ a standard pep team in thong leotards. It is 1992. I’m in New York—in a SoHo sublet, to be precise—and I need a place to sweat. Crosby Street Studio turns out to be as hip as its logo, just right for SoHo in the days when bohemians without trust funds still lived there and art galleries outnumbered Banana Republics. It consists of two huge, sunny loft studios with schizophrenia—graffiti art versus ballet barres; hip-hop versus yoga—and is run by a Canadian-born former actor and tennis player named Leslie Howe, whom I could no sooner imagine going “Whooo!” in the high-impact section than I could see Queen Elizabeth sparring.
I hate aerobics. Let me count the ways: the mirror; the rat-on-a-treadmill aspect; ridiculous moves with the arm-waving and the twirling; tedious boom-chick-boom-chick disco music in four-four time. But Leslie’s class features sounds mixed by her DJ friend Vincent, moves inspired by sports and African dance, and not a headset microphone in sight. It is all right. It keeps me fit as I perform the steps in a half-trance, my thoughts elsewhere.
One day, we’re about to do the limbo-dance, slapping-the-floor part, when a great thing happens. Suddenly, Leslie puts her left foot forward, points her shoulder at the class, folds her forearms up to her chin, and throws a punch. We class members look at each other, dubious. Leslie takes up the position again, rocks back onto her right foot and punches from the other side, then steps on her left and throws another jab, then a right, then a jab, all in time to the Vincent groove. Gradually, each in her own time, we all awake from the torpor born of mindless repetition, adopt various simulacra of the boxer’s stance, and follow suit. Bam! The punch that matters. I must look like a chicken trying to hit a golf ball, but I fall in love with myself throwing that fist, head over heels, right there, bam! Unlike my years of submission to aerobics, this punch feels like me. It satisfies the tomboy. After five minutes of shadowboxing, I am happy and drenched. What a lark! Boxing! How mad.
Well, pretty soon, on the schedule sheet at Crosby Street, this notice appears:
Gleason’s Gym Boxing Workout
Learn boxing skills from professional fighters
Juan La Porte and Stephen Johnson.
Hit heavy bag, speed bag, double-end bag,
jump rope and padwork.
Get the best workout in town!
“You should try it, Kate,” Leslie says.
“Ooh, no, I don’t think so. Isn’t it very serious?” I whine. I have never met a boxer. In my mind, John Conteh notwithstanding, a boxer is a growling bully, a boot-camp sergeant, a cruel misogynist. That class must be for the guys who work out here. I fail to perceive the hypocrisy of this opinion.
“No, the class is real laid-back, and boxing’s a blast. I’ve been doing it a while now.”
“What—at Gleason’s?” I gasp. I know about Gleason’s. Gleason’s is the most famous boxing gym in the world. The name has forever languished in my internal lexicon, unused. “Is that in New York?”
“Sure,” she says. “In Brooklyn. I’ve been going every morning.” I resolve to try the Crosby Street version of a Gleason’s Gym workout. What can it do to me? I can leave. I need never go back. And I do so like this shadowboxing in class.
It takes me a couple of weeks to get around to it—in other words, to screw up my courage—but one October evening, pretending it’s no big deal, I take the elevator to Juan La Porte and Stephan Johnson’s Boxing Workout. It’s been a while since I’ve been in the dancers’ domain of the lower studio with its barre and rosin box, and it has changed. From the tall ceiling, on two fat chains, hang two canvas heavybags. Attached to the only mirror-free, windowless wall is a pair of platforms with teardrop-shaped red leather bags depended beneath. The place is nearly empty. There are no people with limbs at funny angles or yogis with pretzel legs. Just two muscley men in tanks and sweatpants, one short and thick, the other my height and wiry. I do a nervous smile.
“Hi! Is this the boxing class?”
“No,” says the short guy. “You’re the boxing class.”
We laugh. Bugger, I’m thinking. I can’t leave now. Then another body shows up, a slip of a Japanese girl, and we begin by jumping some rope, something I last did with Cha, but an adhesive skill, apparently. I can do this. Then we start the lesson, and I’m feeling millionaire-ish from the one-on-one teaching ratio, not realizing it’s the norm at boxing gyms.
I get Stephan, the wiry one. He has a soft voice, he is diffident, and very patient, carefully teaching me the most fundamental of fundamentals. The first thing he does is wrap my hands in cream bandages, hooking a loop over my thumb and passing the canvas repeatedly around my knuckles while I splay my fingers, then looping it across my wrist, around my thumb, wrist, knuckles, and fastening it with Velcro at the wrist. I love the feel of these hands, snugly parceled, and the way they look, sort of important and foreign. Stephan shows me how to stand with my left foot forward, pointing at the mirror but a bit pigeon-toed, my right foot shoulder-width behind at a forty-five-degree angle to it. Don’t lock your knees; bend them, he says, and don’t have your feet flat on the floor. Keep your weight evenly distributed, he says. Try transferring it from foot to foot, keeping on your toes. There. Now have your left shoulder in, over the foot, toward the mirror, he says, and angle your upper body to the right. That’s to make a smaller target. Now put up your fists, pressing your elbows over your ribs. Your hands should be by your chin, the left hand in front and a bit higher, so you’re looking over it.
As kids, we used to play that game Twister, where a spin of a wheel dictates which colored circles you must place your extremities upon, and you end up contorted, precariously balanced, and locked in place. This boxing stance reminds me of Twister. When Stephan puts me into position, it looks right, but how I’m supposed to achieve any mobility from here is beyond me. Still, I warm to it a little, weaving from foot to foot, bending my knees deep and bouncing back up. Now, says Stephan, there are four punches, and all of boxing is those four punches: jab, right, hook, and uppercut. He explains how the jab is the first thing, the lead-off, the punch that sets up a combination. Extend your left arm straight out in front, he instructs, stepping in with your left foot at the same time, then bring it back. That’s all there is to it, the cornerstone of boxing, easy. Easy like copying out War and Peace in the Cyrillic alphabet. I throw my first jab. It looks okay to me.
“Not bad,” says Stephan, “but your arm’s gotta be straight. Don’t bend your elbow like that, keep your wrist firm and try to turn your fist at the end, so it’s flat to the floor. You gotta snap it out, and snap it back, right to where you started, in close to the body, like this …” He sends out a pair of jabs so fast, I miss them, then repeats it in slow motion. I copy, he corrects, I try and try, again and again. My left arm, previously used only for catching softballs, is getting tired. When I bring it back in, I find I can’t wrap my elbows in tight like I’m supposed to. My breasts are in the way. I recall what the Amazons did about this.
After an hour, we join Juan and the Japanese woman for speed bag and calisthenics. Juan is a joker and a flirt, and is built, as the English say, like a brick shithouse. The speed bag is his party trick. It’s good for your reactions, he says, saturating the room with rhythmic thunder, his hands a blur—digada-digada-digada-drrrrum, diddly-diddly DA! When I try it, the air-filled leather bag bounces off the platform and I just keep on missing the rebound. It seems the harder I try, the more elusive the bag becomes. Juan finds this hilarious. Stephan says not to worry, I’ll get it. Abdominal work is full sit-ups and other moves the fitness industry has renounced as evil. In the end, I’m dripping with sweat and I feel wonderful, and idiotic to have been afraid, and hooked. And I didn’t even hit anything. I try the other boxing class, Michael Olajidé Jr.’s Aerobox, in which we incessantly jump rope and speed-box to a rabid techno soundtrack. It’s so impossible, I get defensively furious at the guy, until he comes up afterwards and shakes my hand and says I did great and, by the way, he just took the New York Jets through it and it defeated them. Olajidé is plyometric like Tigger and wears a glamorous eye patch—which, I later learn, covers a torn retina he got in an uninspired (his opinion) bout with Thomas Hearns. He sees half of everything. I keep doing his class. Before long, I’m at every boxing class on the schedule.
To my shame, I remember going on to friends about how sweet the boxers were, showing off that I knew real pugilists. It seemed radical to scrape against that world, and I loved setting off the tiny social firework that I was boxing now. Or, rather, “boxing.” I did not pretend that this was the real thing, but new acquaintances could always be counted on to respond with the same few lines—namely: “Bet your boyfriend’s careful!” or “Oooh I’d better watch out!” or “Aren’t you worried about your face?” The boxing classes were getting popular, and Crosby Street metamorphosed further into a faux fight gym, festooned with a tickertape parade of drying handwraps and a spaghetti of jump ropes. More boxer-teachers appeared: Lonnie “Lightning” Smith, 1985 WBC junior middleweight champ; Carlos Ferrer, who has his own white-collar boxing gym now; and my favorite, Terry “The Panther” Southerland, a gap-toothed ranked lightweight. Leslie Howe replaced half her aerobics sessions with “Boxers’ Exercise.” The dance classes stopped. A ring appeared. The canvas was a little loose, but it looked lovely. I was looking lovelier myself. Boxing was helping me like my image. The aerobics-class mirror had been my adversary, but the shadow-boxing mirror was there to use, not abuse.
Performing grapevines in Lycra shorts to “Can You Feel It?” had yielded benefits, but also a new way to watch myself critically. A few years back, circa 1988, the early aerobics classes in London had brought me back into my body, recalling the pure joy of movement that I’d barely felt since swinging on car tires in the adventure playground with Candy, but class remained an exercise in self-assessment, leading to joy or gloom according to the size I judged myself that day, compared to my neighbors. The challenge of the choreography was so faint that my mind would wander, often onto its tedious fat track. There were side tracks of resentment—resentment of my desire to conform and resentment of spending my entire fund of psychic energy on wishing I could lose ten pounds. On bad days, and they were legion, misery about weight blocked out the world. I tried to circumvent the compulsion—took the back row, put oomph into the steps, pretended I was dancing, boycotted classes with shitty music, dieted—but I couldn’t lose myself in that infernal floor-to-ceiling fog-free mirror. It was “Dance” all over again, something degrading that girls were forced to do while boys learned sculling and cricket and rugby.
Apart from a couple of enlightened teachers, I felt alone in fighting the weight obsession as opposed to the weight. The camel’s back broke when Dawn, my favorite instructor, read out a news clip about Karen Voigt, fitness queen of California.
“Says here she’s five-eleven and weighs a hundred and twelve pounds,” she said. “I don’t think so.” Derisive laughter, then silence.
“It’s not true, is it?” one woman piped up.
“Probably not with all that muscle. She just wants to shame you into buying her videos.”
Relieved laugh. Another woman spoke:
“But … is that possible, five-eleven and a hundred and twelve pounds?”
“I suppose so, but you’d have to work out six hours a day and live on lettuce and supplements. It’s not worth it, girls.”
In exposing how the fitness industry propagates and then profits from our imagined inadequacies, Dawn was part of the solution, but I was part of the problem, submitting to the madness. I had to get out of estrogen-filled rooms full of career dieters. That was something else I resented: only women had eyes for this territory, the bond that divides, comparing with caliper eyes—Is she thinner than me? Am I bigger than her? If one more locker-room pal said, “Wow, you’ve lost weight,” I would throw up. I was already sick on the empty calories of magazines and their toxic concepts like “model,” “calorie chart,” and “if you can hold a pencil under your breast, it’s too droopy.” Men seemed able to avoid the whole thing. My father, for one, thoroughly enjoyed cultivating his paunch (which probably killed him, but that’s another issue). Men got to play free.
I left the studio and went exploring—tried weight training, Pilates, yoga, running, squash, flamenco, returned to tennis (I was no good) and swimming (chlorine hurt my eyes), found a circus school and learned the trapeze. In 1989, softball was just catching on in London. The band Madness had gotten hooked on it during U.S. tours and started a pick-up game in Regent’s Park. I joined it. Three years later, I won the London “Ringer Award” (a bell on a stick) for being the player on the most teams, and sort of played for England in the Advertising Age Softball World Series in Dallas. (We came in last.) Softball hit the spot, being infinitely engrossing and also a coed sport. Not only was this more fun socially, it seemed an antidote to the syndrome described above. On the London diamonds, nobody could argue that men were better athletes than women, only that Americans were better than Brits. Well, except for one particularly fine player who did argue the former: my American boyfriend.
We met one Sunday during warm-up while I was running, glove up, for a fly ball and smashed heads with someone and was knocked out cold. Flat on my back, I saw stars, cobalt-blue dancing lights; then the stars cleared and I saw Sam. “He’s cute,” I thought. Later, he admitted he’d once shot hoops with an All-State girl player who trounced him, but that she was the only superior female athlete he’d ever encountered. I’ll never be pussy-whipped, he said. Pussy-whipped? Bam. A custom-designed, call-to-arms, son-of-the-jazz-club incident. I was infuriated and attracted. I had to lock horns. An intimate relationship should be shelter, fellowship, love, not battle; but after two long bouts of living-with-someone, and many flings, I was fighting the very concept of settling down. I thought I had a new variety of femininity. I was roaring girl, predator, untamable creature. You can’t pin me down, no. I will not submit. In men it’s called commitment phobia; in me it was the very same, a mask for the terrifying desire to have exactly what I fought. Sam and I were well matched. He was a good opponent.
After a year, Sam returned to his native New York, which gave me an extra excuse for going there in 1989. The next three years, I was a yo-yo across the Atlantic. I lived in sublets, wrote guide books, travel articles, restaurant reviews, took aerobics classes, played softball—but not in New York. Here the ball game was not the cutting-edge craze I knew, and I was unhappy playing three innings in right field (at best) on a competitive yuppie team, or being tolerated at Sam’s all-male league champs’ practices. I felt a sharper gender divide in the U.S. Itinerant and sportless, my body became my adversary again—a protean and recalcitrant “it”—and I sought alternative ways to get into my body, in every sense: acupuncture (the Chinese stop paying their physician when they’re sick), herbs, the chakras, visualization. I began to view the body as a vital energy system fused with mind, heart, and soul. I grasped that the thoughts in my mind don’t merely influence, they literally create my world—bad body thoughts more than blocked out the scenery, they wrote the script. I quit reading magazines—evil influence.
Then boxing. Boxing brought it all together. It was purely athletic. It suited my frame. I looked more authentic doing it than beanpole women, even in my own critical eyes. The “blindsight,” where I could not recognize reality, where one day I’d see myself as a hulking brute and the next as normal, even slim and graceful, abated. (Any woman who has asked the masochistic question “Do I look fat in this?” shares this affliction of blindsight—my misappropriation of a neurological term for believing you are blind though you are not. Oliver Sacks, famous chronicler of the outer reaches of perception, describes watching a sufferer: “[H]e manifestly responded to objects, could locate them, was seeing, and yet denied any consciousness of seeing.” Or, my version: I am manifestly slim, am told I am slim, have proof I am slim, yet deny any consciousness of being slim. Models and actors and dancers and other women with perfect bodies are just as prone to blindsight, as are supersuccessful, high-powered women, no matter what their size or shape. I remember Oprah Winfrey’s poignant admission that when she was fat, all pleasure in her accomplishments, her wealth, her life, was obscured by her self-loathing, so locked in misery was she about not fitting the acceptable mold. And let’s not even start on Princess Diana. Blindsight means blind to your own qualities, as if it were wrong to approve of yourself unless you conform precisely.)
I was better at hitting bags than softballs—heavybags, double-end bags (the air-filled ball suspended at eye level on elastic ropes), and I’d got the hang of speed bags. I was so engrossed, I didn’t even notice my body reducing and tightening. Crosby Street, however, was still a girly gym. Fashion was having a flirtation with boxing around this time, as clips faxed by friends proved. “The female boxer is the icon of the moment!” gushed Vogue beneath a picture of a kangaroo “sparring” with a sticklike Shalom Harlow. The bloody (not literally) supermodels appeared in a Revlon ad, wearing scarlet boxing gloves to match the lipstick on their expensive pouts. On the West Coast, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jody Foster were “executive boxing” in the hit class of Hollywood. Women were flocking to SoHo, and the TV cameras followed. They didn’t care whether the boxing babes they’d come to shoot could throw an effective uppercut. Neither did most of the babes. Flirting with Juan was a better sport. Someone pinned a crayon cartoon of a dog inside a heart on the notice board. “Juan La Porte, Love Puppy,” it said.
Leslie Howe remained enigmatic. Thanks to her Gleason’s forays she looked like a boxer, her muscles cut, her gear street—sky-blue Adidas sweats and a T-shirt she’d pull up at the front and tuck behind her head during the abs section. She was living with Lonnie “Lightning” Smith and occasionally worked his corner. She was featured in several magazine spreads pinned on the notice board next to the Love Puppy. I felt awe and envy.
“Are those your own gloves?” I asked her. I didn’t even have my own handwraps. “When are you going to fight?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m sparring.”
She didn’t explain what sparring was. Nor that she couldn’t fight if she wanted to, because women weren’t doing that then. I was restless in the fake ring. I wanted to graduate to Gleason’s too, but as my teacher, the boss of boxers, and a fitness professional, Leslie resided in a lofty category where I didn’t belong.
In March 1994, I returned from an extended visit to England (where Dawn was now teaching an aerobic boxing class) to find Crosby Street was gone. The rent, I heard months later, had doubled and Leslie had dismantled the ring, packed up the bags, and moved the circus uptown to the new Barneys store, to be director of a gym that never opened. Desultorily, I searched for bearable classes and wrote articles about fitness for the magazines I despised, my secret mission: to help explode the size-two conspiracy. For Vogue, I wrote about the mutated eating disorder of exercise obsession, and about the coming trend of mindful fitness. That one was never printed. Too weird, they said. Of course, now every gym has yoga, qi gong, Pilates, even meditation classes (not to mention boxing), but at that time it was all about treadmills. The trendy Crunch chain was taking off, pushing the envelope with live gospel choirs, African drummers, drag queen instructors, but it was a case of plus ça change—same moves, same miseries, different clothes. I figured I should take further action and went to New York University to get my Fitness Instruction Certificate.
The course was excellent, though it toed the party line of the moment—low-fat, high-carb diet, moderate, consistent exercise— and I had them rolling in the aisles at my nutrition show-and-tell when I presented Diets of the Seventies. It was all about low carbohydrates, I explained. Steak, but no baked potato; salad dressing, but no pasta. How absurd that sounded. The diametric opposite of what we knew to work. Not I. The seventies diet books I’d brought were mine. I was still able to drop weight when I dropped carbs, even at the height of pasta-bagel mania. My weight problem had never been about willpower; my problem lay in being told I had a problem in the first place, in blind obedience to the dogma of dieting. I would retain extra pounds to be perverse. It made me uncomfortable, but someone had to do it. Big is better, I insisted, not believing it for a second. See, I said to the class, the fitness and fashion industries are twins. As soon as hemlines rise, they must fall, so there’s something new to sell, and when carbs are high, they must drop, and—watch—they will. And they did. In 1995, the high-carb Zone cashed in, as did Dr. Atkins, a few years later.
Exercise trends are just the same. The early nineties was the Step era. Effective and beloved as it is, I loathe the Step. Like treadmill, Stairclimber, VersaClimber, NordicTrack, and so on, it requires automaton movement, divorcing mind from body. Nevertheless, I spent hours at NYU designing Step workouts, and for Vogue I interviewed Gin Miller, the Step’s inventor, a couple of times. Gin is fascinating, self-aware, questing, and is herself conflicted about the fitness industry, having suffered for her unfashionable “Welsh footballer’s legs,” as she put it. But when I watch a Step class, it looks like people grimly climbing stairs to nowhere, seeking the mythical fitness grail. Boxing was different, but in a studio setting it remained redolent of the industry’s lying ways. (My favorite statistic: 60 percent of gym memberships are never used; in other words, gyms keep afloat on our guilt.) Studio boxing seemed to bear the same relationship to real boxing that UV lamps do to the sun. I missed Crosby Street, but I sensed something had been lacking there. I had reached the end of its rope.
As I learned their business, I roamed the clubs like the Flying Dutchman, finding no port. By now, boxing classes had started at all the big gyms—Equinox had Michael Olajidé Jr.’s Aerobox and Stephan Johnson’s boxing circuit, and Crunch had Terry Southerland. My mindset was horrible. Here’s a journal entry:
I did Michael’s class, and what do you know? I had to go and have another fat fit. This time I saw toward the end how I wasn’t really bigger than a lot of the women I’d perceived as skinny while I was huge and hulking. In fact, I saw I was thinner than some. There were a bunch of models in the front row—Michael’s acolytes—because ABC was filming. I just hope they didn’t get me in the picture. It was awful feeling that the camera would need to keep away from the fat girl in the baggy tank in the back. Things improved a bit during the shadowboxing section, but what was irritating was that many of the front-row girls have obviously never boxed. No style, no form. In the locker room after, I saw one of the front-row people I couldn’t help comparing myself to. She had defined abs and normal, if a bit porky, shoulders, then a massive butt and great big cellulite thighs. She didn’t appear to mind or notice. That gets me paranoid.
I was scared of liking my body in case it looked to others the way that woman’s body looked to me … fat! And the last to know it! I was quite aware how this preemptive strike of judging in the very way I feared being judged was heinously hypocritical, but I found it impossible to avoid that trap in a gym-with-mirrors, when I’d been trying to find my true place on the good-body-scale since my first bikini on the beach. “Do I look like her?” I’d ask my mother, pointing out a flabby middle-aged person. In photos, I envy my own teenage self, but I couldn’t see straight in the mirrors I searched, and the same was true now. I looked fine. More than that, I garnered frequent and often extravagant compliments on my physique, which I accepted hungrily and disbelieved totally. My neighbor Kyle, a choreographer who used to take classes at Crosby Street, recently told me how all the dancers there felt inadequate compared to us boxer types with our amazing muscular bodies. Needless to say, we (well, I, at least) felt inadequate compared to the dancers with their amazing lithe bodies. But blindsight is like that.
Fleeing Equinox, I found a gym I liked well enough, with boxing classes led by Luke “Mad Dog” Massey, a freckled, gold-toothed model and amateur boxer from London with a lightning mind and a filthy fast mouth. His boxing record was crap, he said, but his street-fighting record was unblemished. He’d killed a guy, he said. Luke taught enthusiastically, painting the sport dark to enhance his image, teaching me dirty tricks like elbowing, and letting me move around in the ring with him while he dodged my punches. It wasn’t real sparring. The gym did a Crosby Street, opening an entire new floor for boxing, but something was missing—the sun, perhaps.
Then in August, just before my thirty-third birthday, I ran into Terry Southerland at Crunch.
“Terry, I’m sick of these play gyms,” I complained. “I want to learn to fight.” As I spoke I realized I meant it. Terry looked serious, then nodded.
“We can do that,” he said.
“What? You’re kidding!”
“No, I mean it. You know what you’re doing. We’ll take you to Gleason’s.”
In one sentence my horizon had stretched to … to where? Suddenly I had a ticket to the fabulous Gleason’s, place of Leslie Howe, home of Juan La Porte, Stephan Johnson, Terry, et al. Though I’d been working up to it for well over a year, this was all a bit sudden. Cousins to the fears I’d felt before my first class accosted me now, and a new idea occurred—I wanted to go to the next level, but I had no reason or desire to fight my sisters. The notion, now that it was within range, was as foreign as owning a gun, rather horrible. I felt like paraphrasing Muhammad Ali’s famous declaration: I ain’t got no quarrel with no women. Instead, after the split second those thoughts took, I heard myself saying something quite idiotic.
“I want to fight a guy.”
“Um … sure, baby.”
“No really. I don’t think I want to fight women. Can I do that?”
“Yeah, I guess I can clear it with the commissioner,” said Terry, laughing in his boots.