I was trying to save him.
• • •
So, less than two weeks before my fight, I boarded a plane to San Francisco. Danny didn’t have to tell me that the plan was ill-advised for my boxing prospects. But my small family and I had faced a much bigger fight since Mom died than my upcoming match in Madison Square Garden, and so my sister, brother-in-law, Jess, and I flew to San Francisco to be there for my brother, whose son was about to be born, because he would be my mother’s grandson, and because she could not.
I knew that even the prescribed sprints, ab work, and six-mile runs couldn’t replace the six days of training I’d miss. Before, I would have made my apologies and focused on my goal. But the heart of the experiment boxing had become was to face questions that got me on the plane, like: What sort of man was I? Who was I fighting for?
Mike Tyson’s disturbing parable of an autobiography, Undisputed Truth, was weirdly prescient reading for my flight out. It is a tragic text, a stomach-turning argument against the worst kind of masculinity and the machinations of the sport itself. He details the genesis of his boxing carer: a street fight at ten with the bully who killed his pet pigeon. That moment of cruelty, against a backdrop of a startlingly abusive home life, led him away from his first instinct—tenderness—to a life defined entirely by violence.
I grabbed a pen and marked the places he lost himself into a cartography I did not want to follow. “I wanted to be a villain,” he wrote in one particularly sad passage. “The villain is always remembered, even when he doesn’t outshine the hero. Even though the hero kills him, he makes the hero the hero.”
Regardless of his posturing, what makes a villain a villain is that he is the hero of his own story. My interest in Tyson stemmed from his compulsive earnestness. He was a veritable scholar on toxic masculinity, and he was right: a winner does indeed need a loser, and violence, from war to racism to rape, requires a story about why the enemy deserves to be overpowered.
“If your humanity rests on someone else not being human, then there’s no humanity,” Niobe Way, the developmental psychologist, said. It’s a shadow made visible. Once you see it, you see it everywhere. It is the story of violence.
And it’s hard to overestimate the impact of that distorted logic on masculinity. Way told me a story that haunted me: In 2012, she met with the seventh-grade boys she worked with in Manhattan. It was the same week twenty-year-old Adam Lanza had killed his mother, then drove to an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and murdered twenty students, six adults, and himself. I covered that shooting at the paper I worked for in Boston. I had been a man for less than a year.
“Tell me,” Way said to the kids, “why did that boy kill so many people?”
A few volunteered that he was “crazy.”
“But tell me why he’s crazy,” she said.
The students considered that for a moment.
“He was lonely,” three twelve-year-old boys with beginners’ minds told her, in chilling unison.
• • •
Just as my path to manhood had been obscured by the shadow of his father, my brother faced the worst model possible for how to bring up a son. His father was a charming sociopath with a lilting Southern accent and a fondness for shooting dogs with BB guns.
When we arrived at Brett’s family’s front door in Oakland, he was obviously scared. He was also excited, carrying everyone’s bags up the stairs to his house, looking like my baby brother again for the first time since high school.
As Brett and his wife, Cristina, walked us by a preschool in Berkeley they wanted to send their child to, as Brett talked about their prenatal classes and showed us the books in the baby’s room, I saw that my brother and I would be more than okay, that we were already better than the man who raised us. As if that weren’t the point of the story. As if I weren’t writing a book about fathers and sons.
“I felt this shame growing up,” Brett told me once, years ago. “I remember sitting in the van with you guys when you told me what Dad did to you, and I felt dirty. I felt, ‘That’s my father,’ one; and two, ‘I’m his son.’ I struggled with the fact that I was a guy. I think it’s been a lifetime struggle.”
I thought a lot about that struggle when Brett joined me on my long prefight runs through Oakland, and we talked about his upgraded home-security system, and how scared he was to be a parent without having any parents himself. I knew I was the eldest, and the closest thing to it, so I told him he would be an excellent dad, because I was sure of it.
I was reminded of the time we went to Napa for his birthday many years earlier, before I was on testosterone and before he’d met Cristina, when we both were young and living in San Francisco. I had looked up his astrological chart as we idled away the time between vineyards. I told him that he was a Cancer rising and started to read the description off my phone as we drank coffee near the French Laundry, surrounded by tourists despite the drizzle.
“What does that mean?” he asked, his aviators mirroring my face back to me.
“It says you’re imaginative, and sensitive, and nurturing.” He looked chiseled and young, a little out of place still, living in a city after so many years in wintry industrial towns. I could see, in the months since he’d arrived, that he was becoming himself.
“I’m nurturing!” he echoed, his thick arms crossed across his chest. “I’m nurturing.”
Since my transition, I’ve revisited that moment: my surprise at his enthusiasm, the emphatic way he announced it, the pride in his voice. What a reward it must have seemed to him to be acknowledged for the man he was, not the one he was afraid of becoming. Here he was, the person he’d been all along.
As we ran past my old haunts and his new ones, I could see our shadows along the gym and the bookstore and the coffee shop I’d once frequented on Rockridge Avenue. The Before me was nowhere and also everywhere, a paradox. Like gender. Like life.
“I’m nurturing,” Brett had said, shaking his head. “Did you know that about me?”
We were leaning against a car, the two realest men you know, and of course I said yes.
• • •
I still failed sometimes too at being the man I wanted to be. Like when we were outside the grocery store and Brett asked me about the mechanics of throwing a hook after a straight right, and Clare—who had been taking boxing classes for years—tried to pipe in, and we both kept talking as if she didn’t exist.
Clare, a tattooed social worker who regularly faced down clients who threatened to kill her, was a powerful presence, yet she was silenced by our jocular camaraderie so swiftly I didn’t even notice that it had happened.
Jess pointed it out, gently, later that night. As soon as she mentioned it, I was transported back to the leafy sidewalk, Clare’s voice behind us: “It’s in the pivot—” she’d started to say. We were ten months apart and we’d been close our entire lives. I thought of Larissa. I couldn’t believe I’d made the same sexist mistake again.
“You should just acknowledge it,” Jess said, before falling asleep. I lay awake, hearing Clare speak, that small moment like a cresting wave, interrupted. How could I not notice my own sister’s voice, clear and confident, then quashed, so quickly, by our lower ones? My sister, whose temper as a kid was unrivaled, whom I’d put money on in any fistfight, whom I’d always admired for her passion and the way she could easily channel it into a righteous and powerful rage.
As I considered how to apologize, I realized that a gulf between us had grown, glacially but steadily, since Mom’s death. I knew that Mom had only allowed Clare to see her naked body, to help her use the toilet, to bathe. When she died, Clare had, overnight, become the only woman in our tiny family. At breakfast the next morning, I saw in the way she held herself and the questions she asked that she was trying to do for Brett what Mom would have, if she were here, and I smiled at her in a way that I hoped showed that I noticed.
Meanwhile, my nephew still hadn’t arrived. We went on long walks and picked up
vitamins and tried to distract Cristina from her discomfort. Our tickets home were prepurchased, but I considered extending our stay anyway, caught between worlds. Danny eventually texted me: I had to get back to training. It was a week before the fight. Did I want to get killed?
I knew he was right. Maybe it was stupid to fly across the country, to let my muscles weaken and my cardio fall apart, so close to fight night. Maybe I was making up for my guilt for all the Christmases and Thanksgivings I’d not come home for, not realizing until the last holiday we were together that Mom was really sick, and even then I had no idea that she would die within months. Being in Oakland was a messy reminder, as family always is, of my worst and best selves, the physics of my present and my past, running concurrent in collapsed time.
My siblings and I had always protected each other the best we could, but we couldn’t fight each others’ fights. I knew they would understand.
The next morning Jess and I left for home, missing Ronin’s birth by just a day. I hugged my sister extra hard, making my body a bookmark, because I did not yet have the words that held both our history and our future, or an apology that acknowledged that the gravity between us had shifted in subtle, powerful ways.
On the plane ride home, thinking of her, I underlined a surprisingly poignant piece of advice that Cus D’Amato gave Tyson when he was sixteen, after he lost his first tournament fight: “You have to face your demons, Mike, or they will follow you to eternity. Remember to always be careful how you fight your fights, because the way you fight your fights will be the way you live your life.”
I knew that Clare and I had lost something in my becoming, that my being a man changed everything, even the things I most wanted to stay the same.
My sister had been my best friend since I could remember, and I was humbled to realize that I was a beginner in this part of my life as well. I needed to learn how to be her brother too.
• • •
After I returned from Oakland, in the week before the fight, I remembered with more immediacy my life in my other body. I did not “deserve” the open-sesame quality of this life any more than I “deserved” the “wrong bathrooms,” or the stepfather who molested me.
Nobody at the gym talked about politics, despite the brewing turbulence happening beyond its doors. No one talked about Clinton’s emails or Trump’s Twitter account.
Danny said he didn’t care that the guys he trained were rich, that they were boxing for the thrill of it. He didn’t care that I had no idea what I was doing, that I was a tourist, and a white one at that. “I don’t think about it,” he said, even when I pushed him. “You’re all fighters to me.”
But I thought about our different New Yorks as the fight drew near, and how they were laid over each other, and how Danny worked harder than me for longer, and his reward was being my coach and my reward was getting all the glory I could barely appreciate. I thought about being a white man in America. I thought about my pay raises, the assumptions of competency, the sudden freedom to walk alone at night, the way my body had transitioned from threatened to threat. I thought about the advantages thrown at me for an aesthetic that looked like a birthright. I thought about passing, and how it erased a part of me, and how hormones responded to context, and how race and masculinity were inventions that benefited me, and what I could do to challenge that.
“You have it in you,” Danny said, as if he could hear my thoughts, though he was talking about the fight. “I just have to bring it out in you.” He’d treated me differently since I’d come back from San Francisco: following me on my social media accounts, “liking” various photos and stories I shared. He hugged me longer at the end of every round, and he gave me meaningful looks over the top of his mitts.
“I see everything,” he said. “Go again.”
• • •
A tough blow: Chris came by a few days before the match to say that Eric had stopped showing up to training and that no one had heard from him, not even his coach. If I’m honest, a small part of me—the scared part—liked the out.
“Let it go,” Danny said. “We have work to do.”
Two days before fight night, I showed up at the gym and suited up as Danny announced my final challenge: a brutal day of “hard sparring” with Stephen, whose ankle had fully healed. Tomorrow would be easy: eating, bullshitting, watching fights on YouTube, Danny said. But today, punches would not be pulled. There would be no getting tired.
I nodded. Stephen looked at me with what I recognized as the desperation of a man with something to prove. But in the split second between when we jumped in the ring and the clear sound of the bell, I felt a calm stillness, as if I were a big fish at the bottom of the ocean. I thought it was adrenaline washing over me as he rushed me, but it wasn’t: it was relief.
Time slowed. I met him in the middle of the ring, exchanged, got out. I stood my ground, didn’t get pushed backward, didn’t gas out. I worked the indented bite of my mouthguard like a baby chewing on a pacifier. I noticed every detail: The sound of my glove, connecting with his headgear. The bloom of pain in my gut as he pummeled my stomach. The arrhythmic heartbeat sounds of the others, pounding heavy bags and speed bags, all of us resting as the bell signaled the end of a round, each of us alone in our pursuit of glory but part of a larger organism, confined by time and starting over again and again. Stephen was brutal, even mean, but he never succeeded in intimidating me. I could see who he was, see the child he’d been, see the need and fear and beauty of his body, just like my own.
Stephen hugged me at the end of the last round. “You believed in your punches!” he said, grinning.
But the final test was yet to come. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was when Danny hopped in next and came at me harder than he ever had before. He didn’t telegraph his big right, didn’t ape Eric so blatantly. I’d gotten comfortable moving with him, but this wasn’t our usual routine. He chased me around the ring, my mind gauzy with a very old betrayal.
“Keep your guard up!” Danny yelled. “Get off the ropes!”
I obeyed, awed a bit by Danny’s hard hooks, the bruises forming on my face. He was merciless, and I could feel my energy draining as he stared right through me, not breaking character. He let up a little, crossing back to his side of the ring, eying me as the clock wound down.
“Come on, Tommy,” he said, sounding like himself. “Do not gas out!”
I thought of all the ways I’d chosen to live, even when it felt impossible to be alive in this body, and I hit Danny, hard, in the stomach.
He sucked in air and nodded. We touched gloves so I understood that he wanted me to hurt him. “Don’t hold back,” he said.
Stephen hopped back in. I let him rush me the way Danny had showed me, and I stayed calm, breathed deep, and touched into a warmth deep in my chest. I fanned it, a controlled growing flame. Then I rolled, and rolled again, and rolled again. I could see Stephen getting tired, and that’s when I hit him—he was slower to dodge my punches, and I got him good a few times around the head. I saw his head move in slow motion, saw his mistakes, got him with a hook and a cross.
Danny hollered with joy from the corner. Stephen, meanwhile, whooped when I punched him so hard his head spun, and I saw caution in his next approach.
I watched Stephen change into the fighter he wanted to be, I watched him come back harder. He only wanted to hurt me, I realized, because I’d asked him to.
I felt my cheeks bruising and put my arms up, just as I had when I sparred Eric that day two months earlier. This time, I knew how to hit back. I didn’t want to, but I had to. Stephen looked at me like a man possessed, and I kept my gloves up. I counterpunched, I took on his energy as in physics, and I hit him as he hit me, but I never forgot his body was soft and pliable, like mine.
“You’re ready,” Danny said, at the bell, ecstatic. “You see that? You won all three rounds.”
“You quit thinking,” Stephen said approvingly, hanging off the ropes.
He was right,
in his way. I had always kept my distance with men, like an animal on the perimeter of the herd. As I pulled off my gloves and packed up for the night, it occurred to me that what I had wanted, most of all, was to experience the rites and rituals of a manhood where violence could be managed, so that I could finally move beyond it.
So it happened that there I was, still intact, loving those men even as I hit them in the face, and knowing that they loved me back.
• • •
I called my sister that night. “I’m sorry,” I began, and we talked about that day in Oakland, how I’d spoken over her, how I hadn’t meant that moment to be gendered, and how I saw that it was. In this new life, I didn’t realize that qualities that defined me positively in old dynamics didn’t always translate well to new ones.
“Sometimes when I’m with both you and Brett, there will be just little moments where I’m the only female voice in the conversation,” Clare said, “and that appears to not be valued in the same way—and neither of you appear to be aware of it at all.”
I told her what I’d witnessed: That when Mom was dying, Clare had been the one to take family leave from work and brush Mom’s hair and paint her nails so that she could exist in her body, even as it poisoned her. Clare had done the hard, dirty work of being present for my mom, who only showed herself in this way to her daughter. As I met with lawyers and funeral directors, my sister had been the dutiful daughter, just as our mother had done for her mother, and that, more than anything, was what I was sorry for.
What I didn’t say was that I didn’t know regret until our mother was dying. I wish, more than anything else, that I had found the tenderness to hold her close, to tell her who I was, to insist as bravely as Clare did in bearing witness to her death. I let gender be an excuse because Mom seemed to want me to, because it was expected, because men often do. I wish I hadn’t.
Clare forgave me—she even understood.
“Sometimes I worry that the old me is gone,” I ventured, afraid of how she’d respond.
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