by Martin Kihn
“Sit! Hola, sit!” I shouted in my best Alpha voice.
Hola ran faster, knocking over the standing lamp beside the chair.
“Sit, dammit! Hola! Goddammit!”
She changed directions, and Ruby darted back under the sofa.
This might seem like a minor incident to you, but it struck me at the time as a total indictment of my way of life, my body, and my project. I wondered: what kind of an Asshole am I if my own pets can call me fat and knock over my standing lamp at will?
I thought about what Al had said the first time we met, how I had to get my Instrument in shape. And I thought about the image Dr. Strong had guided me through, of my ideal self. This ideal self was not overweight. His cat did not mock and belittle him. Absolutely not.
That night I realized I needed to become an intimidating physical presence, a fearsome creature so dominant and terrible that even my own pets might, on occasion, heed my commands.
In the course of my time at Queensway Boxing Gym on 48th Street I almost got killed, and I was reborn. Here’s how it happened.
I walked up a seedy narrow stairway painted with peeling gray lead-based paint, the kind of stairway New York used to have back when people learned how to box for reasons other than physical fitness. Faded posters lurked on the walls announcing cards that were ancient history—including one on which Muhammad Ali looked as young as Jared Leto.
I passed a couple grunting types slick with sweat coming down the stairs. They smiled and said hi. Not a good sign.
But at the top of the staircase, shrouded in the darkness, a young Hispanic guy was yelling into his cell phone at someone.
“You wanna know why I’m leaving! I’ll tell you why I’m fuckin’ leaving—’cause you’re fuckin’ kicking me out on my ass is why! You’re—no, listen to me—you’re—shut the fuck up I’m talking here—” and so on, for as long as it took me to get up the stairs. I turned the corner, stopped, and continued to listen.
He slammed his phone shut, snapped “Cabrón!” a few times, then moved past me in the hall, shaking his head.
We made eye contact.
“Girlfriends,” I said, knowingly.
“What?”
“Who you were just talking to. A lady friend, right?”
“That wasn’t no lady,” he sneered. “That was my mother.”
Now we were getting somewhere.
The gym itself was about the size of a SoHo loft, with two sparring rings set up beside the infectious men’s locker room. Eight or ten broke-ass heavy bags hung in front of a set of dirty mirrors, and there was a small floor space for jumping rope. A few worn-out weight machines hung out by the water fountain.
A big woman signed me in and got me to give her my credit card imprint, and I’m not sure how it was done—probably I was distracted by all the feral energy around me, and the holy Alphaness of my mission—but she ended up locking me into a three-month contract at hideous expense.
It was worth it.
Turned out my coach was the young guy I’d seen yelling on the phone at his mother. I approved. If you wanted an agent who would sell his mother’s kidney for a percentage point, then you definitely wanted a boxing coach who’d talk to his parents like that. The only thing I’d ever called my mom was, once, a little late for dinner.
The kid’s name was Carlos, and I asked him about all the women in the gym. The place had a lot of them working out, which was strange considering there was no women’s locker room.
“Yeah—it’s that fuckin’ movie,” Carlos said.
“What movie?”
“Million Dollar Baby, man, you know that sick shit?”
I said I’d seen it. Had haunted my nightmares for weeks.
“I’m tellin’ you anyone’s inspired by that movie to box needs a brain replaced. But I got girls come in here, I got guys, they bring their bags from work, they work on Eighth Avenue over there. You leave here feeling good, that’s what it’s about. So why”—he looked me up and down, skeptically—“you wanna box?”
“I’m too nice.”
He laughed. “Yeah—I see that.”
“Do you get that a lot in here? People who think they’re too nice?”
Carlos thought about it. Thinking was for him, evidently, a kind of physical process; it involved many of the muscles in his face, which contracted and expanded like a storm front. “I get all reasons,” he said. “You get the guys wanna feel good, you get the girls. Lot of people, they wanna beat the shit outta somebody. You don’t wanna beat up on someone, do you?”
I said no, thinking of the Nemesis.
“I had this woman came in here, like three months, she beat the shit out of her boyfriend. Came in here right after, had all these cuts on her and shit. You can imagine what he looked like. I felt bad.”
“She probably would’ve done it anyway.”
He said he doubted it. “All the time she’s working the bag,” he said, “it’s like she hates the fuckin’ thing. I don’t know. What about sparring?”
“You mean, in the ring?”
“That’s where it usually happens,” he smiled.
“I don’t know. When do people do that?”
“Your case,” he said, lifting his face and leaning back slightly, “maybe never.”
It turns out that boxing gyms are not the right place to look for Assholes. I’ve run into much bigger dicks waiting on line at the New York City Ballet ticket window. Maybe boxing gets the anger out.
Another shocker: Boxing is complicated. I actually began to wonder if I was intelligent enough to do it. That would have sounded crazy just a month earlier, but there you have it. Take the matter of the “hand wraps.” My first day the owner woman asked me what color I wanted—yellow, red, or blue.
“I’ll take black,” I said, not having listened.
She laughed in my face.
“Once you try black,” she said, “you never go back.”
The wraps I got—blue, as it turned out—were like twenty miles long, and had to be put on manually by an expert, Carlos. He spent about an hour at the beginning of our thrice-weekly sessions painstakingly wrapping the blue gauze in and out and around some combination of my wrist, thumb, and fingers that was always the same, yet dictated by some complex formula known only to the elite.
And after the wraps came the shadow boxing, which is what it sounds like: fake-boxing, into the mirror, with proper technique. Sounds easy—until the fourth or fifth round, when my arms felt like they were going to flake off at the shoulders.
Once I started on the bag, with a pair of big black boxing gloves atop my blue hand wraps, my muscles started burning like the fifth ring of Hell on a hot day in June.
And these gyms aren’t all into politically-correct classroom ideas like, say, riot abusing students.
“Keep your hand up,” Carlos yelled, whapping my right ear. “Cover that up!”
My head rang like a bell for a day.
But I have to say the two most surprising things were the thing about rounds, and the thing about my left fucking arm.
First, the rounds. A round is three minutes. So far so good. But you go to a boxing gym, everything you do happens in rounds. This includes going to the bathroom. It’s three minutes on, one minute off, three minutes on, one minute off, three minutes—well, you get the idea. There’s this machine. It beeps two times quickly—beep! beep!—at the start of the round, then once at thirty-second warning, then twice again quickly—beep! beep!—at three minutes. Then a minute of silence, for prayers, or CPR.
Then again. And again. Again. All night long. All day long. For all I know—overnight, when everyone’s asleep, so the Queensway gym rodents have programmed in their little DNA the quartz-perfect precise duration of the regulation sparring round.
Four rounds shadow boxing. Three minutes on, one off, three on, and so on … Five rounds on the heavy bag. Five on the speed bag. After a couple months, it’s four on the heavy and four on the mitts. Then four on the jumprop
e—which I always cut to two. I was exhausted. I was always exhausted.
Which brings me to surprising thing number two—my left fucking arm.
Here’s the thing. There’re two arms, for most of us, and in boxing one is held out and in front of the head and the other closer in, by the ear. If you’re right handed, like me, the left arm is extended in front, the body is positioned sideways so the left side leads, and the right arm is near the right ear.
Think about that a moment.
What I’ve just said is the left arm is extended in front of the body. Remember I am right handed. Very right handed. About the only time I use my left hand is sometimes when I’m masturbating, to pretend I’m having an affair.
So my weak arm leads. But why? So my powerful shot, a right hook, can thunder like the Midnight Express into my opponent’s gut. Or something like that. In reality, it only creates problems.
“You got to jab,” said Carlos, the first time I hit the bag.
“Like this?”
“No—the left arm comes forward—pow! pow!—like that!” Then, later: “Don’t hit so much with the right arm.”
“But I’m right-handed.”
“Use your left. Again. Pow! pow! pow! pow!”—in a flurry of left-handed jabs that I couldn’t quite see because I was sweating out of my eyeballs. By now every organ in my body had developed pores that bled out water.
So the short story is that my left arm spent weeks in a state of near paralysis that caused me to lay it limply on conference tables and on my desk at work. I made no demands of it beyond the most essential. It had ceased to be my left arm; it had become my jab.
To you non-boxers, it may not be obvious how this activity aided my goal of becoming an Asshole. But trust me, if you’re living in a world of hurt compounded by the threat of your arm falling off, on top of a never-ending feeling of nausea and a nonstop beep-beep-beep … well, you’re going to become a tad less sweet-natured.
The condition of my arms made it hard for me to pick up the phone. Which made it easier to start executing one of my original Asshole fantasies—to turn into one of those office jerks who are loathed even more than the person who steals the yogurt from the refrigerator. Who am I talking about?
The guy who always uses the speakerphone.
I shouldn’t need to say this, but speakerphones were not created for one-on-one conversations. As far as I know, they were invented so groups of people in the same room could join in a conversation, even though the technology still hasn’t progressed to the stage where anyone can actually hear what anyone else is saying. The Asshole doesn’t see it that way. He sees the speakerphone as a great way to avoid the inconvenience of having to listen.
Next time the phone rang, I put it on speaker.
“Hey, is Marty there!” shouted my crazy Communist Uncle Francis, who could have been calling from anywhere. I think he lived on a boat.
“Speaking,” I shouted.
“Haven’t got rid of you yet, huh?”
“Any day now, ho ho.”
At this point, my office mate Bartholomew made a big show of sighing, coughing, banging open and shut his desk drawers.
“What’s wrong, you sound funny. Are you on an airplane? Are you going into a storm system?”
While I not-so-gently reminded Uncle Francis that he’d called me in my office, Bartholomew gave up and left, slamming the door behind him. I arose, opened it wide, and nudged up the volume on the phone.
“So what’re you up to?” asked my uncle. “Still selling shit people don’t need?”
“I started boxing.”
There was a burst of static—or maybe it was Uncle Francis having a heart attack over the phone. “I must be high—I thought you said you’re boxing.”
“I am,” I said. “It’s incredible exercise. And I’m trying to get more assertive.”
This next explosion of static was either a series of landmine tests in South Florida, or Uncle Francis wetting his pants with hilarity. Either way, it went on a little long for my taste.
“Did you say assertive?” he asked, once he’d got his breath back. “Marty’s gonna be assertive. What a concept. Good luck with that. Oh, shit. I gotta take this—”
I never particularly enjoyed hearing from my uncle, but after he hung up I realized he’d helped me this time without even meaning to. He proved to me that I have genuine, certified Assholes in my own genetic pool.
Take a look at your own family tree. I guarantee a slight breeze will shake a few of them out.
Despite the boxing, I continued to struggle with the issue Ruby had brought to my attention—that extra roll of fat. I began to call it Walter, because I’ve always hated that name.
To get rid of Walter forever, I adopted a new eating regimen that seemed perfect for my goals. It was called “The Warrior Diet” and was developed by a former Penthouse magazine editor named Ori Hofmekler.
As Hofmekler wrote in the forward to his book on the diet, “Whenever something revolutionary is proposed, society is loathe to accept it. Picasso dealt with it, and eventually won. Einstein grappled with it and came out on top.”
A touch grandiose, perhaps, but Hofmekler had mighty role models: the Spartan warriors of Ancient Greece, legendary bad boys with superb abs. His diet was built around what he claimed was the Spartan way—starving all day, feasting on lightly-cooked meat and greens after sundown. Dripping with scorn for today’s “very unwarrior-like” lifestyles, Hofmekler claimed that “hunger is a sign of vitality and health.”
This is not what my mother told me. But I thought it was worth a try.
One advantage of the Warrior Diet was it was easy to remember. Starve all day; eat meat at night. It might have been harder for me, at first, if I wasn’t in permanent physical pain from boxing. My arms hurt so much I almost forgot to get hungry.
And the Warrior Diet certainly succeeded in making me more of an Asshole. Before too many days went by, I was so weak and cranky I would have had to look up “polite” in the dictionary.
I did eventually get into the ring. I did it twice. And to avoid embarrassing myself more than I have to, I’ll just say about my opponents that one kind of looked like my father’s late father, after he died, and the other was—well, there really is no other way of saying this—the other one was a woman.
We wore headgear, though just by being in that ring in our physical condition we’d proved we had no brains to protect. There were three rounds, and Carlos was the ref, although he seemed to me to be spending most of his time at the ropes talking to this new girl student with a wicked hook and a nose ring she really should have left at home.
“With the left! With the left!” he screamed at me, without even looking. It was what he always told me.
The old guy had a pretty mean jab. And I’m proud to say that he only beat me on a technicality. Namely: I gave up after one round because I thought I was going to throw up. The only reason I didn’t expurgate on him was because I was so nervous about the fight I hadn’t eaten any lightly-cooked meat the night before.
I was less nervous for the woman. I mean—she was a woman, right?
Hah!
“This should be embarrassing,” she whispered as we were getting ready to start round one.
At first I thought she was being self-deprecating, in the manner of some of the ladies I knew, but I could not have been more wrong. She was actually trying a professional-level psychout. I was determined not to give her satisfaction.
I noticed that her arms were strong, but her abdominals looked a bit flabby. Although she wore a spandex top, there was evidence of self-indulgence. And from the way she was squinting her eyes as she scanned my torso, I was hopeful she might be severely near-sighted.
Jab! jab! jab!—three lightning-fast rounds of ammunition from my mighty, mighty left, followed by a power-hook to the kidney, technically illegal but what does an Asshole care about rules? Picture perfect and quick. Carlos would have been proud, had he been looking at me, and
had any of my punches actually connected.
Bam!—she let loose a single jab that hit me square in the forehead.
I’d never been hit in the head before. Until recently I was a pacifist, a give-peace-a-chancer, a runner-from-punches. It was not pleasant at all. I think it removed 1978 from my brain.
Pow! pow! pow! pow!—I was getting hysterical, hurtling punches that only glancingly connected as she danced side to side and didn’t break a sweat. She reeled me around the ring and then—Bam! bam!—a savage one-two that, despite only hitting me in my well-protected gloved hands, almost knocked me over.
After the blowout, Carlos took me aside. “How you feel?” he asked me.
I couldn’t say much, draping my body over the ropes for support. I noticed the woman who’d just kicked my ass hitting the weight machines for a workout that I had evidently failed to provide.
“Tell you what,” he said, “maybe we shouldn’t spar for a while. Get back to the bags. Work on the moves. Okay?”
“I suck,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed, after a moment, “but that’s okay. You can get it. Just gonna take you longer, man. You’re not”—he smiled, while coldly breaking my heart—“a fighter.”
Twenty minutes later, after I’d showered and changed, Carlos came up to me in the locker room.
“How’s it going?” he asked me. “Still feel like you’re too nice?”
“I don’t know, Carlos. I think I’m gonna have to quit boxing.”
He didn’t seem all that surprised. “That’s too bad. Whassup?”
“I feel like it helped me get more in shape,” I said, still wheezing and light-headed from the ring. “But I’ve got to focus on work now.”
Carlos studied me closely, though his eyes had a faraway look, like he was in love. I was seriously hoping it wasn’t with me. “Tell you what I’ll—”
Just then his phone rang. He looked at it.
“Fuckin’ moms!” he said, shaking his head. “I gotta take this—”
The one-two combo of boxing and the Warrior Diet had turned me meaner—but not quite mean enough. My experience was that if I made it through the day without eating much at all (as suggested), I usually overdid it at night. What that meant was I’d have stomach pains, and wake up after midnight feeling the Angel of Death descending through my intestines. Which is good for curbing that dangerous urge to eat breakfast, the tastiest of meals, but does nothing for one’s zest for life.