• • •
The night Jess and I met, deep into my self-sanctioned romantic break, wasn’t unlike my other disastrous false starts. A friend introduced us, and we talked gamely for two hours on the dance floor at a warehouse party in Bushwick. I brought us round after round of Jack and Coke in Solo cups, covering up my nervousness by mostly staying quiet as she told funny stories about growing up in Connecticut. She was charming, with a familiarity in her tone as if she’d known me Before, and we were just meeting again. I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands as the night wound down, and I felt the weight of her interest.
“When we were talking on the dance floor, you were kind of icing me out a little bit,” she said years later, a misconception that, luckily for me, added “a little bit of intrigue.”
But I remembered her ease with me that night, and I eventually screwed up the courage to ask her on a real date. In the intervening years, we too have faced and dismantled gendered expectations, such as when she pointed out that I often tried to fix her concerns about work by giving her unwanted advice instead of actually listening. Dating a woman as a man layered history onto us in a way I’d never experienced, and it took some getting used to.
“When I make a point of being a woman, it’s almost always political,” Jess explained to me once. “For me, gender isn’t the one thing I need people to know about me, because it more or less matches up with how I feel. But when I feel more rigid and gendered in my expectations, it’s not ever about gender. It’s about feeling out of control. We are all raised to believe that gender is the one fixed thing in life, and it’s not.”
When we’d first met, Jess told me that she was attracted to people, not bodies. But when I asked her about what drew her to me, and if it had anything to do with my masculinity, I heard myself reflected in her answer.
“When you’re being really sensitive and tender, I see that as very masculine,” she told me, calling up that conversation I’d had with that friend a long time ago. “When you’re being very comforting, or softening the situation, I see that as powerful.”
Even now, it is almost inconceivable to believe, but Jess didn’t think I was like a guy, but better. She thought I was the guy I wanted to be. Full stop.
• • •
My personal “masculinity crisis” only began to turn as I practiced doing what men weren’t supposed to: asking questions, risking exposure, seeking help, aligning with women, committing to an uncompromised version of myself.
Which, paradoxically, made me more comfortable with being a man. Tough and tender, I’d think all the time. I knew the mantra helped explain me to myself. But it wasn’t until Chris came by my office in Union Square that I saw how it allowed me to see other men with more nuance too.
He arrived on his motorcycle, and we talked about off-roading, and how he was an adrenaline junkie, and how he got into fighting. As with Stephen, I’d assumed he’d grown up rich because of his sparkly teeth and ease with the finance bros, but he said he was raised in subsidized housing outside Toronto and got jumped a lot growing up. He worked as a bouncer back then and sometimes even went looking for fights. “I’ve allowed stuff to happen that didn’t need to happen because I wanted to beat myself up,” he said.
Boxing changed his relationship to fighting, he said. “The chaos is contained and you’re forced to confront what is in front of you, because the ring is only so big.” Unlike the muddied momentum of a fight in the street, everything slows down. “You have the time to say, ‘Who am I?’ To say, ‘I see my adrenaline, and what is that a response to, and why is it responsive in this way?’ ”
Increasingly, I felt the same way: as if that boiling inside me could be cooled without losing its power, and in it I could see myself. I knew it had to do with the way sparring had transformed threat into play—an intimacy, like puppies wrestling.
But it was still dangerous, and sometimes I forgot just how much risk I assumed each time I stepped into the ring. One night, a month before the fight, Stephen rushed me and I could see little opportunities for shots—a straight right here, a jab to the kidneys there. I was still terrible, but I was learning to time a slip, to roll out from under punches. It felt like progress.
I heard his awful yelp before I realized that he was on the ground. Danny jumped into the ring and knelt down beside him. He was holding his knee to his chest, lying flat on his back, making all sorts of sounds I’d rarely heard a man make. It wasn’t crying, but it was the cousin of crying. It was the sound of a man who needed to cry and couldn’t.
Danny got him up, and Stephen leaned on Danny as they came out of the ring while I stared. “Are you okay?” I asked, and could see Stephen flinch at the question.
“I was in rehab for this ankle, I broke it a few months ago.” Stephen winced. I had never seen him express an emotion that wasn’t some variation of jocular pride. I could see, as I offered him a hand, that this was what all of his hollering and posturing was designed to hide.
I ordered us a car to get him home—he lived only a few blocks from me. On the ride back, to distract him, I asked a million questions about his job, something to do with creating algorithms for money management, which I didn’t understand at all.
When we reached his apartment, I carried his bag and he put his arm around my shoulders. His place was two stories, just a stone’s throw from my own tiny studio, a tenement on the border of Chinatown. He had a deck, leather furniture, a giant dog, and a gangly roommate named Ed, who was also learning to box. I deposited Stephen on his couch and asked if he needed anything, maybe ice from the freezer, but he ignored me.
He was going to fight, he told me or himself. He might just need a few days off. I tried not to be grateful for the reprieve from sparring with him. Looking around his huge place, I wondered if his roommate would take care of him.
“Thanks, Thomas.” Stephen waved his jovial wave, shooing me away. So, I left him, splayed out on his couch in that big, dark apartment, alone with his unspeakable, urgent dreams.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, trying for a tenderness he could understand.
“You will,” he answered as I shut the door.
• • •
The weather dipped. I wore a jacket for that long walk to and from the gym, my muscles tight from the cold. Stephen couldn’t spar for at least a week, and Elvis and Kenny weren’t around that Saturday when I met up with Danny at the gym. Stephen’s roommate, Ed, towered over me as Danny explained that we’d fight each other today. As we wrapped and cupped and velcroed into our gear, I smelled his nervousness, inhaled it like a stimulant.
When the bell rang, he looked jumpy. I did what Danny taught me: in and out, hit and move. I rolled Ed’s big haymakers, I bapped him lightly about the head. “Go for the body, Tommy!” Danny yelled. Ed looked at Danny, betrayed, but he wasn’t the one training for a fight. I pulled my punches, but got in a few shots to the ribs. Despite his inches, I felt like the bigger man. This is what winning feels like, I thought, exultant, until I saw Ed’s hangdog look.
A legitimate target.
I calmed myself, ashamed. Just as better boxers had instructed me, I told him as we pulled off our headgear and drank some water, “You’re not bringing your hands back up to your face.” Critique after sparring was considered a gift, a kindness not often offered and always appreciated. “And you’re standing for too long without moving. Just be sure to move after you throw a punch if it doesn’t land. If it does, keep hitting until you can’t anymore.”
Ed nodded, and we touched gloves. “Your reach is amazing,” I added. “One straight right, and you could knock me right out.” I didn’t tell him to believe in his punches. I didn’t know him well enough for that.
“I’m working on it,” he said, and then Danny told us to go again, and Ed landed a nice clean right to the center of my forehead that knocked me backward, then got in a sweet combo at the bell.
“Good one, Ed!” Danny shouted, and I nodded my agreement. I
knew what Ed felt like. After our last round, I hugged his bony body briefly, then got back in the ring with Danny.
“Now, again,” Danny said through his gloves, calling me forward.
Late that night, I hit the pads on Danny’s hands, hit his body suit, and he backed up dramatically as if I were doing some real damage. It struck me that men had to learn how to be touched again, and how to touch one another. I watched him wheeling over and thought it was generous, selfless even, for a champion boxer to be so ego-less as to give a guy back his dignity.
• • •
Increasingly, I saw my hope to build a bridge between my Before and After as a kind of binary of its own. I hadn’t crossed a magical line as much as I’d exploded my life, creating change in the messy way most people do. That was the hardest truth. I had changed, and I had stayed the same, and it was up to me to learn how to build a new self with the materials before me. “We had the same socialization,” I’d plead to Jess. “I am not that different than you.” We knew it to be true, yet—it wasn’t true anymore, not exactly.
Sometimes it felt as if she knew me better than anyone else ever had, like lifetimes of knowing, yet one lifetime she didn’t know and couldn’t understand. When she saw me, she saw Thomas and only Thomas. When we were upset with each other, to see my muscle and beard through her eyes was a heavy burden.
Jess, who held me when I shook as loss dislodged my mom from me, my mom and the child she birthed, the me she knew for thirty years before she died.
Jess, who told me Mom came to her in dreams when she first died with messages for me, who turned back toward me and put her head on my chest, who listened, who touched me. Jess, whom I knew I would marry that first night, when she pulled the Lovers card out of my tarot deck and said, so quietly, almost to herself, “Dammit.” Jess, who knew it too. Jess, who watched me strip off all of my wet, animal things, whom I could stand before naked.
Jess, who found me beautiful.
It took me so long to realize that, for her, for this lifetime, this Thomas was enough.
• • •
My mom, a physicist, taught me that time was a dimension. As the fight drew close, I hit the bag and hit the bag and hit the bag until I was in a trance, my body present to all the bodies around me and all the bodies I’d been and known, and I finally found a rare and perfect peace there.
This feeling manifested in unexpected moments, such as when the guys who ran Church’s pointedly blasted that terrible nineties song “Closing Time” at nine thirty each night. That song delivered me back to senior year, driving around in my Dodge Intrepid with my gay best friend, and then going to the all-ages gay club we’d dance at most Fridays. Pegasus ended the night with Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” and at the gym I could feel within myself both an exhausted man, hitting a heavy bag, and a tired teen in a sweaty fervor, melting into a mass with the glittering queens and the khaki butches and the diesel twinks and the leather daddies.
Thwack, thwack, thwack. The smell of sweat. Late-night radio on a long drive home. My mom’s stomach, gurgling as I wrapped my small arms around her. You have a golden core, I heard her say, on a loop. Danny unlaced my gloves and smiled at me, our faces wet. So many people, touching me, making me human again. Sometimes I cried without knowing it. Who knows, I’d think. Maybe Danny did too.
Danny, Stephen, and I were the only people left at Church’s on most nights when that song came on. The other guys would throw on sweatshirts and head home, and I’d limp to the locker room, alone but for the one dude outside mopping and hollering through the door, “Five minutes!” I’d strip naked then and turn toward the mirror above the sinks, taking in how my body looked without any additions or subtractions, a blur of tattooed color and skin and hair, and I would think that I really was a beautiful man—for the lives I’d lived, and not despite them.
What’s Wrong with Losing?
* * *
“You look like a genius on the mitts,” Danny said, as we sped into November. Though that wasn’t really true, as the fight approached, it was easy to see that I was improving, even when I lost. It wasn’t so much about landing more punches, or knowing how to dip—it was the choice I’d make, no matter how often I found myself cornered, to come back out swinging. It was learning a language that transcended winning or losing. I thought often about the day I sparred Eric. Getting back up from that mat was my initiation into a different kind of masculinity, one far more complex, less fragile, and more meaningful than I’d imagined.
Three weeks before the fight, Stephen was approaching fighting shape and though his naked aggression still freaked me out, I was ready to face him whenever Danny decided the time was right. For the moment, Danny had him square off with Kenny, who rolled under his punches amiably while I watched with admiration. I was so caught up in their dance that I didn’t notice Chris, appearing in his usual getup, until he called Danny and me over to the tables where boxers threw their bags or kept their spare gloves and hand wraps. It was a brutally cold day, the first glimpse of winter, though the gym retained its rainforest humidity, sweat condensing on heavy bags and the hitting end of our gloves. It made everything slippery.
“Eric still hasn’t hit his weight,” Chris said quietly to Danny and me, his voice solemn and a little pleading. “Do you think you can come up?”
I looked at Danny, who shook his head emphatically. Bulking before a fight slowed you down, and my biggest advantage was speed. I would not bulk.
“Nope,” he added for emphasis. “Not gonna happen.”
“What do you weigh now?” Chris asked me.
I reddened. “One thirty-three.”
“Shit.” We stood in an uncomfortable stand-off. I waited it out, watching Stephen rush Kenny, and Kenny cooly slip underneath his brutish advances. The squeak of their shoes echoed a little symphony in my ears.
“We’ll get him to one thirty-five on fight day, like we promised,” Danny finally spoke first. It was our compromise, and one Danny arranged as soon as he became my coach. I’d shed five pounds of water weight in the last few months, so putting it back on was my part. Eric had to do his. “He’ll drink water, don’t worry about it.” I’d never seen Danny this way, shoulders broadened, not standing down.
Eric had agreed, months ago, to lose those ten pounds to fight me. Chris had to be desperate to be here, asking. I worried out loud, after he’d left, that they’d call off our match.
Danny, unfazed, was holding my spit-slimed mouthguard. He washed it off with his water bottle and handed it to me to grip loosely in my gloved hand. He saw an advantage: “Let him lose a lot of weight right before a fight.” Danny grinned. “Let’s see how much energy he has then.”
I nodded, but it was hard to think of my weight when I was increasingly preoccupied by the due date of my younger brother’s son, fast approaching. It felt strangely out of the order of things for Brett to be the first of us to become a father, and on the other side of the country. When I first moved out west, over a decade ago, my mom had been devastated by the distance. Now I was back, and she was gone, and we were still scattered, without her to orbit around.
Danny swatted my butt and hopped in the ring with Stephen. “Tommy, watch,” Danny said.
I could see that he was imitating my style, or the style he’d taught me, anyway—fast, in and out. When Stephen rushed him aggressively, Danny rolled out and nailed him. I could taste the world we’d created here, the sweat and rubber, but I was thinking about Oakland, and the man who mugged me so many years ago. I was thinking about my life Before, and what is taken from us that cannot be recovered. Sometimes Danny kept up his guard and spoke to me through it while Stephen whaled away at him: “See, Tommy, I’m not hurt. I’m watching. I’m looking for my opportunity.”
It was beautiful to see that Danny was okay even as he was getting hit. I could see the whites of his eyes. He looked very, very calm, and it was clearly driving Stephen nuts. Danny blocked every punch, rolled under a hook, then hit Stephen relen
tlessly, driving him to the ropes before laying off just short of the bell.
Danny walked up to me, only slightly out of breath. Stephen hollered a primal yell into the air, half in jest, smiling as usual. He was covered in sweat.
“Do you get it?” Danny asked. “Guys like that, you use their own energy against them. He’s going to pressure you until he learns to be scared of you. Let him come at you with all that force, let him run into the ropes. Once you’ve trapped him, come back twice as hard.” I knew he meant Stephen, who jumped up and down in his corner, but I saw so many men lined up behind them, men who used their bodies as weapons outside the ring, men who used to scare me and did not anymore.
I looked at Stephen, watching him psych himself up in his animal way, trying not to appear wounded by Danny’s accurate analysis of his psychology. Maybe it was a lesson for Stephen too. He wasn’t fooling any of us.
“Closing Time” played like a siren song. My advantage wasn’t being a beginner, I realized, pulling off my hand wraps. It was seeing, really seeing, that I wasn’t the only one.
“You took a lot and didn’t react,” Danny said, which was a compliment.
Did I lose? Who knows? If boxing taught me anything, it was that losing and winning were decided by judges, split-second decisions, freeze-frames, and systems stacked for or against us before we were born. Luck wasn’t luck. It was rarely even timing.
“A fighter fights himself,” Danny said over and over, steady as a drumbeat. It reminded me of the three central conflicts of narrative, the ones I’d learned in high school English class: man against man; man against nature; man against himself.
The first two were only meaningful in the context of the last. Danny was right, I thought often, most especially when I was shadowboxing. I’d face the mirror or weave between orange cones on the floor, imagining another version of myself, the man I thought I was supposed to be, the man I was fighting, the man I was. I wasn’t trying to beat him.
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