The Domino Diaries

by Brin-Jonathan Butler

  “You like F. Scott Fitzgerald, man?” Tyson asked.

  “Yep.”

  “He said something like, ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ Some shit like that. Maybe I’ll prove him wrong.”

  2

  THE ONE-EYED KING

  In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

  —Fran Lebowitz

  What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?

  —Bertolt Brecht

  I’VE SUFFERED FROM A TERRIBLE sense of direction all my life. My internal compass must be broken. I’m always lost. Yet almost every friend I’ve ever made I met asking for directions. I take a lot of care in choosing the strangers I approach.

  Not long ago I was walking under the construction of the World Trade Center with a stranger. He was a former amateur fighter I’d just met for an interview named Eric Kelly. For a child growing up in the ghetto, a boxing gym was a lifeline to avoid a life working on a street corner. Gyms like that were now largely extinct across New York, traded in for more profitable gentrified white-collar gyms. Kelly had risen from the streets to become a four-time national amateur champion. Then, just before embarking on a professional career, he lost everything. His dream evaporated after he mouthed off to the wrong person in a pool hall and had a pool cue smashed over his eye. Multiple surgeries weren’t able to fix the damage to the nerve endings and muscles over Kelly’s eyelid.

  Only recently Kelly had gotten famous around the country after a video went viral of him training various masters of the universe—mostly Wall Street bankers in the Financial District—to fight, and gleefully deriding them all as “softer than baby shit.” In a country where four hundred people controlled as much wealth as the bottom 150 million, Eric Kelly paid no attention to the bank statements of his clients and instead explored their worth.

  I interviewed one of Kelly’s boxing clients from J.P. Morgan who explained, “Maybe, deep down, we just miss that whole Occupy Wall Street movement a little bit. Maybe some of us are a little nostalgic for that hatred they had for us, and Eric Kelly picks up the slack.”

  Another trader chimed in, “Maybe it’s the stress of being full of shit as soon as you leave your front door every morning. Being full of shit at work. Where don’t you have to be full of shit in this city? But you don’t have to be here. I love Kelly. I signed up for a full year in advance after my first day with him. He doesn’t care where you come from or how much you make. He’s constitutionally incapable of being dishonest.”

  I’d never heard of anyone from the 99 percent sought by the 1 percent—outside of dominatrices and day laborers—with Kelly’s job description before. But then Trey Parker, America’s answer to Jonathan Swift, once bemoaned South Park’s impotence to satirize America given the nation’s incapacity to feel shame about anything. Since I’d moved to Manhattan, Kelly’s gym was the most interesting intersection of race and class I’d heard of in upstairs-downstairs New York society. America ate it up as CNN, Fox News, and Bloomberg Businessweek all covered the story. The William Morris agency signed Kelly within the month. After the uproar not only was Kelly not fired, but more Wall Street clients than ever lined up at his gym in the Financial District to have Eric Kelly do little more than tell them the truth. I’d seen Kelly’s clients stare at themselves in the mirror, shadowboxing, searching for something they still weren’t able to find. “Ain’t you heard, motherfuckers?” Kelly would shout over. “You can look as hard as you want in the mirror, but vampires ain’t got no reflection. But look away from the mirror and at me, and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  * * *

  “So what do you think being able to fight says about somebody?” I asked Kelly. “In that video and your gym, when you’re making fun of these Wall Street guys for not being able to fight, what are you trying to say?”

  “You ever been in a fight?” Kelly asked.

  I nodded, feeling Kelly’s damaged gaze unriddle me.

  “You out looking for it or did it find you?” he followed up.

  “The one that really counted—the first one—found me.”

  I was eleven, lured out to a field in front of half my school, waiting like everyone else to watch a fight that was supposed to happen. I’d never seen any of the fights kids had organized before. I was small and terrified of violence. I kept looking around waiting for it to start until I was pushed from behind onto the ground and everyone swarmed in. For the few agonizing minutes it took me to escape, the kids not close enough to stomp or kick took turns clearing their throats to spit. The worst day of my life didn’t just happen in front of everyone I knew, rather they had all joined in. Eventually, physically at least, I managed to get away, but it took me years to outrun the humiliation and cowardice all those people exposed in me that day. And even though New York was 2,500 miles and twenty-two years away from cowering into a ball under that mob’s collective heel, it was pretty obvious to Kelly, as I explained the incident to him, that that day had marked my life as much as Kelly’s in a pool hall.

  “It’s the only fight I’ve ever had outside a ring,” I told him.

  “So tell me something—” Kelly paused, performing an ultrasound with his stare. “Did you learn something about yourself you never learned before from that experience?”

  “Getting beat up changed my life forever,” I confessed.

  “At least you admit it.” Kelly smiled. In my insecurity it took me his entire pause to let down my guard and find the sympathy in it. “It changes anybody’s life forever, kid. You were hurt pretty bad?”

  “I was humiliated.”

  “All fighters are more afraid of being humiliated than getting hurt.” Kelly smiled again. “But that need to get to the bottom of who the fuck we are takes over. Stuff happens in life. You get tested. You gotta be ready to step up to the plate. Life ain’t like them bankers fuckin’ up the economy, gettin’ bailed out when you fuck up. Out here you gotta live with the consequences of the choices you make. Look at my fuckin’ eye, man. You think those guys I train could have lasted a minute in the world I came from?”

  3

  THE AUDITION

  Boxing is an unnatural act. Everything in boxing is backwards to life.… Instead of running from pain, which is the natural thing in life, in boxing you step to it.

  —F. X. Toole

  MY FIRST VISIT to a boxing gym was less about gaining acceptance in the ring than it was about auditioning for the rest of my life.

  All boxers are liars. Con men. The better the liar, the better the fighter. If you knew what was in a fighter’s heart, if you knew what he was thinking, he’d be easier to find. And if you could find him, he’d be easier to hit. And if you could hit him, you never know, you might expose him. You might expose every person they never stood up to and every person they never stood up for. Sometimes even a single blow can unveil the watermark of a man’s soul in a way nothing else ever could. And like all compulsive cheats, boxers are addicted to decoding truth. It’s not an accident that, for security, banks hire ex–bank robbers and casinos hire ex-cheats. Honesty doesn’t necessarily require any understanding of the truth, but for a liar, it’s vital.

  I stepped into my first boxing gym in Vancouver when I was fifteen, summoning everything I had in order to hide the fact I’d never stood up for myself physically outside of a gym. After puberty provided my first growth spurt, I stood five-foot-two and 115 pounds. I’d used up most of my courage that night just approaching the neighborhood where the gym was located. Skid row in Vancouver was my hometown’s dirty little secret. None of my friends went anywhere near it. But the best boxing gyms in the world tend to be located in the most dangerous, wounded neighborhoods their cities can dish out. Like lighthouses, they operate almost as a kind of protest against the darkness. They’re there to remind the people searching them out that they’re the safest place on earth for a simple reason: because everybody who lives there, w
herever and whatever they came from, were just as scared as you the first time they came. But you only find that stuff out if you return. Everybody stepping into a boxing gym feels like the uncrowned, pound-for-pound champion of cowardice—I know I did.

  I was scared for a lot of reasons. Boxers are the only artists who damage their instrument each time they use them. The great artists of boxing paint their canvases in blood, and at any moment they risk losing everything they have forever. What could possibly entice people to risk their core like that? But then a lot of people I knew with real opportunities in life were dead set on chasing careers they knew would leave them miserable. The more options their parents had left them with, the more afraid they were of making the wrong choices in life. Nobody wants the success of what they chase after to look more depressing than the failure of others to attain their aims.

  That first boxing gym was situated in the basement of the Astoria Hotel, located in the festering heart of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It was only a few miles from where I grew up, but it was another hellish world away. It wasn’t like ghettos I saw on TV or in the movies. It was never known as a particularly violent area. There weren’t tenements or drive-by shootings or action that people who didn’t live there would get a voyeuristic thrill peeping on. It was a different angle on the darkness of human nature. Instead of sudden death in a flash, it offered slow death in a ghoulish fade. It had the highest rates of HIV and intravenous drug use in North America, and this was all publicly on display as thousands of lives were left to rot. Any time I’d driven through it I would observe the procession of imploding lives starved for a fix. My father’s child protection law firm, which had a good portion of the area’s at-risk kids as its charge, wasn’t far away, though the firm was about as useful as throwing matches into the wind. The situation further deteriorated once the city shut down the mental health hospitals and thousands of former patients flooded the area, their sickness treated as a criminal rather than as a health issue. In no time, with even greater expense to taxpayers, the prisons filled up with the same mentally ill addicts who were once looked after in hospitals.

  That first rainy night, I turned the corner at Main Street’s bustling open drug market, as frantic at all hours as a kicked-over anthill, and walked alone along Hastings. Half a block away police lights splashed against boarded-up stores and stained a few by-the-hour hotels. I hurried up just as a couple of tormented souls in handcuffs were dragged screaming and thrown against the hoods of a police cruiser. I watched crumpled bills stuffed into palms for Baggies and vials. Strangers limped past me smoking crack from hollowed-out Bic pens or pipes. Strung-out prostitutes touched up their makeup on street corners while homeless junkies shot up behind Dumpsters down the alleys. And later on I found out that at the same time I was commuting to my gym in the mid-1990s, Canada’s most notorious serial killer, a pig farmer by the name of Willie Pickton, was combing the area for runaway and drug-addicted hookers that would, over the years, eventually add up to, according to Pickton’s later boasts, forty-nine girls. While the shelters reported dozens of these girls missing, for years the city ignored them and allowed Pickton to carry on with his own demented version of population control in the area. Nobody charged with the responsibility of protecting people even bothered to muster an effort to slow him down.

  I took a deep breath and climbed down the Astoria’s dark, rickety stairs toward the stench of stale beer and mildew in the basement. There was an ice machine humming down there beside stacks of empty beer cans and bottles loaded onto a conveyor belt that climbed up toward the hotel pub. As I descended the creaking steps a timer somewhere below chimed in the distance. Even before my nose could register the salty sting of sweat, a clammy moisture rose over me. A few steps more and I spotted the entrance and behind it heard the muffled percussion of speed bags over the slap of skipping ropes. I opened the door and although nobody turned around, it was clear they all knew fresh meat had arrived.

  I stood in the entrance just as a short, shirtless Asian man elbowed past me, dropped his gym bag on my foot, and spread out his arms.

  “Can someone in the fuck tell me how I’m supposed to train right now after the best blow job I ever had in my life?”

  The gym in unison: “Shut the fuck up, Loi!”

  Some years later I read that this same man, Loi Chow, a former jockey, would accept the tidy sum of $1,500 to become the first ever man to fight—and decisively lose—a three-round professional bout against a woman billed as a “Battle of the Sexes.”

  My initiation at the Astoria gym, by design, was baptism by fire. They tossed every new kid who arrived into the ring to have their heads taken off in front of everybody, cowboys and Indians style. Before I even knew how to wipe my nose in boxing, that’s how it went for me. They say the worst blows in boxing are the ones you don’t see coming. But when you’re a beginner you see plenty of them coming; the problem is you can’t do anything about it. You don’t know how.

  If you’re out of shape or new, the ring is one of the loneliest places in the world. The worst blow, for my money, is that first big one that hasn’t hit you yet, it’s just hanging there on the way to hitting you. I’d say you have roughly the same idea what it’s going to feel like as you do the first time you put your dick inside a girl. The notable difference is that you can’t learn to take a punch. Whether you have a glass chin or you don’t, the only way of finding out is having it land. And when this punch happens in a gym, the news is going public in a hurry.

  They threw me in there with a Golden Gloves champion, and before long I took a couple of right hands flush on the jaw—ones that I saw coming a mile away and had no clue how to avoid—and it was lights out. I was still on my feet, but I’d checked out. The impact was a surprisingly euphoric sensation. Somewhere in the darkness a ribbon of color smeared across my sight line. As I came to, glassy-eyed and goofy, I was still on my feet with a blurry figure I’d never seen before dancing in front of me, dipping one shoulder in preparation for a left hook to finish me off. The moment I remembered where I was and what was going on, I hugged him and wouldn’t let go. He drove me back into a corner.

  “Leggo, you fuckin’ faggot!” he yelled in my ear.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t. He’d given me a lot to think about.

  My head still wasn’t clear, but I feebly attempted to consider his appraisal. At fifteen I hadn’t kissed a girl yet. I’d never been attracted to a man but, then, maybe what my opponent was suggesting was that I simply hadn’t met the right man. He was right insofar as I couldn’t entirely rule it out. While it seemed fairly unlikely, it was indeed possible. How could you know? Maybe it explained all my problems.…

  The bell rang and the bald trainer stepped into the ring and removed my headgear and gloves. By this time, the euphoric sensation of being knocked out had shifted into a throbbing dizziness and I couldn’t breathe properly.

  “Take it easy, kid.” The trainer smiled. “Take it easy. So we’ll see you same time tomorrow?”

  It was his tone that conveyed what he really meant: I didn’t belong.

  I later found out that the trainer at that time was a municipal judge who channeled as many troubled kids as he could through that boxing gym instead of sending them to juvenile prison. My father had educated many of the social workers who represented the kids who entered this man’s courtroom.

  All I knew or cared about after he laughed and called for two more kids to get in the ring was that I never wanted to see him or anyone else from his gym for the rest of my life.

  I rode home on the bus with a swollen cheek pressed up against the window, trying to soak up as much of the outside chill as I could. It wasn’t hard to envision them still laughing at me back at the gym. I imagined that that sadistic trainer was probably egging them on. My jaw was too sore to enunciate the words, but I swore a thousand times on that ride that I’d never go back.

  The next day I was more pissed off at him than sorry for myself, so I decided I wo
uld go back.

  Of course it was only after I went back that they started to look after me. It took me a while to wise up enough to understand that maybe this was the point. They’d really been looking after me the whole time. If you don’t come back after that first beating in front of all the strangers at the gym, you would be wasting your own time with boxing as much as theirs.

  4

  DIRTY SECRETS

  I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

  —Maya Angelou

  YOU LEARN PRETTY FAST that fighters who need to look around for inspiration rarely amount to much. Maybe it’s the same thing for writers. If you’re waiting around for a breeze to fill your sails you probably have no business sailing upstream against anything in the first place. Besides, all the greatest boxers had a lot of holes in their sails.

  In his book Why We Can’t Wait, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

  More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in this novel situation. The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: “Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis.…”

  Would you believe me if I told you that Joe Louis only became Joe Louis because his mother hated boxing? She tried to get him interested in playing an instrument, so he hid his gloves from her in his violin case. When it came time for his first amateur fight, Joe Louis Barrow omitted the “Barrow” when he signed the register to keep his boxing a secret from his mother. The name stuck. Louis lost his first fight. But he hung around in boxing anyway.