Amateur

by Thomas Page McBee

  He looked pissed.

  As I charged forward, he stuck out his right glove and gestured like Come and get it. The crowd erupted.

  I tried to rush him, but he didn’t let my punches push him back. He held steady, his big body harder than mine, and swung back. He hit me so hard, my headgear pitched to the side.

  He wouldn’t be chased around anymore. I watched his chest grow broader as the hits to my head slowed me down. My guard slipped a few times, and he punched right through it.

  Meanwhile, I could hear a growing chant: “Eric! Eric! Eric!” The improbable victor, just as he’d hoped. I was the villain of his story.

  He pressed me into a corner. I got out from under him, but was on my back legs. He chased me around the ring, throwing as he moved, and I forgot to stand still and just hit back. He had me against the ropes, covering my face, when the ref pulled him off me, his eyes wild with rage.

  I got a standing eight. I could smell the acrid sweat of my gloves as I adjusted my headgear, waving off the ref, just as I did that first time we sparred: I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine.

  • • •

  In the final round, we both wheezed and wobbled, staring at each other. The crowd was growing tired too. In eleven minutes, we had both won and lost.

  I didn’t hate him, that was the problem.

  It was a peaceful feeling. The fight was coming to a close. I wondered if this was what death felt like, just the labored sound of my own breathing. I hoped so, because I was not afraid, or resigned. Present, I thought.

  Eric pressed me into my corner, punching me hard in the head until the ref pulled him off. The crowd made O’s with their mouths, laughing and cheering as they held their beers. I was not angry at them, as I thought about our shared yearning and bad breath and black eyes and missed chances and resentments and silk robes.

  I saw my mom, cheering me as she once had my brother at his ice-hockey games. I understood, in that moment, her hallucinations near the end. I forgave her for thinking my brother was me, for not knowing how to say good-bye, for dying. I forgave myself too.

  Eric stalked the ring, watching, hungry for that knockout.

  “Eric, Eric, Eric!” people yelled.

  He nailed me so hard, my head turned a strange angle.

  “Always hit back twice as hard,” Danny would say, so I threw a straight right. He ducked, but I got him with a jab that knocked him on his heels. I was dizzy, uneven on my feet, but I tried to come in again anyway. He nailed me in the chin and I cursed as my head popped back. We lumbered around each other, throwing wild jabs. Come on, I willed my body, but not before he got in another straight right, and another. I jabbed back. Come on. He hit me again.

  I was still standing, at least.

  I could feel the ring beneath my feet and the sweat in my hair as the bell rang. I turned around and walked back to my corner, my eyes already black. I high-fived Danny and smiled big for the JumboTron.

  I won.

  • • •

  Except, I didn’t.

  In the center of the ring, the announcer held our gloves, as we faced the crowd, and said, “All three judges scored this match identically. Your winner, fighting out of the blue corner—”

  As he raised Eric’s glove, Eric’s face sagged into a relief that softened me.

  I turned to hug him, our arms sliding briefly around each other’s beaten bodies, and I felt, in the flushing of the violence that I’d done and had been done to me, that I wasn’t hugging him, but a lost part of myself.

  One Week Later

  * * *

  “So how come you didn’t tell me?” Danny said in a cut-the-bullshit voice. We were in a sterile coffee shop around the corner from Church’s. I’d called him to meet up after my black eyes healed, telling myself I wanted to interview him, or thank him. But a tension was knotting my stomach, coiled under the surface.

  The day after the fight, I woke up to a photo Danny had posted on Instagram of the two of us. We were in the ring a couple of hours before the match, arms around each other’s shoulders, just as they were setting up the stretcher. He’d written, “With everything against us, Thomas showed me it takes more than a 20-pound disadvantage to slow us down. His heart is unquestionable. The average man wouldn’t do what he’s done.”

  I was touched, and struck, by the language: the average man.

  I’d begun the interview professionally, asking him all the requisite background questions, and he’d humored me: he told me about being overweight as a kid, and the older sister who got him into boxing. I held my swiftly chilling coffee in my hand, and Danny picked at his sandwich, and our conversation devolved into small talk, so eventually I cut the recorder and stood up to go.

  Danny looked at me for a long time, still sitting.

  I sat back down. “Yeah?”

  “So how come you didn’t tell me?”

  I studied Danny’s face. It reminded me of Jess, that night on the dance floor, how she knew our future before I did, how she was not scared to meet me in exactly the place where I was.

  “I figured this was why you wanted to interview me in the first place.” He shrugged, messing around with the sandwich wrapper, and I held my breath as he told me that he’d figured out I was trans the week of my fight, noticed the word on my Instagram. “I knew what it meant, but I didn’t know what it meant.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment.

  “Can I record this?”

  He nodded.

  • • •

  Testosterone activates genes, creating a twin of yourself. When I first injected a needle into my thigh, I did not know if I would go bald, or if my voice would get low, or how hairy I’d become. I knew I’d never be tall or have sperm, but whether I’d be able to grow a beard was up in the air. It is easy for people to see a man like me and think, Trans men are men too. But not all trans men look like me.

  In the cold light of the postfight drudgery, seeing the photo Danny had posted, I felt conflicted. Sure, I’d wanted to report back from the most brutally masculine environment I could think of without the risk that guys would censor themselves or treat me differently.

  What would have changed if the guys had known, all along, that I was trans?

  I felt what shame researcher Brené Brown calls “the fear of disconnection.”

  This was the root of my personal crisis of masculinity, I realized. A part of me feared, still, no matter how dumb and toxic I knew it was, that I wasn’t “real” enough. Whatever Danny said, I told myself, I would not let it define me.

  Still, I braced myself, fearing that his reaction could undo me. His faith in me in this form, so soon after I lost my mom, had felt parental.

  “I figured the reason that you didn’t want me to know was because it was in a boxing gym and you didn’t want that type of attention,” he said, clearly still stung. “It shocked me—I had no idea, nobody knows, nobody would have known—nobody still knows. It’s shocking to know that you kept it in.”

  I nodded. It was shocking, he was right. Just as I hadn’t believed, really believed, that I could be a man and be loved outside the ring, I hadn’t thought I could be my whole self and be loved within it.

  “Trust me, during the fight, it was in my mind,” he said.

  I pulled my napkin into tiny pieces under the table, still not sure what he was getting at.

  “I was, like, ‘Oh, man, this is going to be the best thing ever,’ ” he finally said. “I was thinking, ‘If this guy fucking wins, oh my God.’ ”

  We grinned at each other.

  “I was just waiting for you to tell me,” he said.

  • • •

  In W. C. Heinz’s book The Professional, a reporter says to a boxer, “The rest of us have to prove our manliness, or something, by standing up to some guy. A fighter never has that urge because he gets rid of it in his work. That’s why I say that, when everything else is equal, fighters are the best-adjusted males in the world.”

  To wh
ich the boxer replies doubtfully, “I don’t know.”

  I don’t know either. It’s a paradox.

  Boxing breaks many of the binaries that men are conditioned to believe about our bodies, our genders, ourselves. With its cover of “realness” and violence, it provides room for what so many men lack: tenderness, and touch, and vulnerability. The narratives we see about boxing matches always start at the ending: two guys in the ring, squaring off. The violence obscures the deeper story, the one about the fighters who see your biggest weakness and teach you how to turn it into an advantage. In gyms all over the world, men are sharing their worst fears, men are asking for help, men are sparring one another with great care.

  In my five months boxing, I saw men weep unself-consciously. Over and over, men tied and untied my headgear and cup and gloves. An amateur fighter I did not know spent an hour one day at the gym giving me a pep talk, dotted with his own failings, after watching me get clobbered by Stephen—Stephen, whom I continued to see around the neighborhood with his comically large hunting dog, no less kind to me outside the ring or after he learned I was trans.

  “I’m the guy that’s sitting at the corner with the dogs smoking cigars with the MTA workers who are supposed to be downstairs working, but they’re just blowing off steam,” he once told me, about his place in the universe. “Tomorrow, I’m the guy who’s hanging out with some starving artist, and then next week some successful artist, and then the next day some big Wall Street hotshot, then hanging out with the super of my building. I have a lot of masculinity models. I try to observe and take the best features of different types and combine them.”

  He wasn’t the man I thought he was, but then again, I wasn’t the man he thought I was either.

  “It was unfortunate that the fight turned out the way it did with us,” Danny said over his wilting sandwich. “But you did fucking excellent. I don’t regret anything.”

  “It was a good fight, and I lost it,” I said, breaking a cardinal rule of boxing.

  Danny looked as if he were going to argue, but he didn’t. He wasn’t the average man either, and we both knew that I was right.

  “I would never have treated you differently,” Danny told me. “There’s nothing different about you, or anybody that’s trans. Nothing different,” he said, just like he’d said that I had balls that night before the fight, when he knew that I, in fact, didn’t. “There’s no gender—it’s all in your head. You performed as well as any other man would.”

  “I had to prove it to myself.” I knew as I said it that it was true.

  “Well”—he threw away his trash and pushed open the door to the coffee shop, the sun, strangely bright for a bleak November day, rendering him backlit—“you proved it to me.”

  His face was visible once again: my friend, Danny. He held the door for me, like, You coming?

  I wanted this to be a story about men and violence that didn’t end with That’s just how guys are, but until I lived it, I did not believe that it was possible.

  Danny gestured again, Come on. I stood in his shadow for just a moment and then I stepped after him, into the light.

  EPILOGUE

  2017

  * * *

  As my own masculinity crisis stabilized, America’s took an explosive turn. The rumbling energy on Orchard Street that day was now on the surface, exposed, and the whole country faced the violent fallout.

  As for me, I still failed a lot: at not interrupting, at giving enough of myself when people were in need, at listening to feedback, at listening in general. But I also remembered that change starts with paying attention. I never stopped benefiting from my body in space: the silence when I speak remains, as does my ability to walk alone down dark streets at night without fear. But it grew ever easier to disavow the parts of manhood that troubled me. I dropped my towel in locker rooms, knowing that I could claim my male body, with all of its history, as enough.

  I just had to fight for it.

  I learned how to come forward from Danny, but I quit boxing that night in Madison Square Garden. My fight came out in new ways, like in the otherwise ordinary business meeting after the unmasking of Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein, when a brusque colleague told me she had fended off men at work for years and had reported it each time. We were alone, and when I told her I was sorry, the stories cascaded out. She said she’d been touched and propositioned, that she actually thought it was normal, even as she knew it wasn’t. She said she didn’t even believe herself.

  “I believe you,” I said. I could feel, in the electric air, that those words meant something very different in this body.

  “I believe you,” I said, over and over, to Jess, to my friends, to my coworkers, and especially in front of other men. I believed women had been abused, raped, underpaid, passed over for promotions, shut down, and interrupted. I knew it as well as I knew myself.

  I believed every story, and saying so became an incantation, a small but necessary beginning, a rebellion: it was something, I knew, that men were not “supposed” to do.

  I thought of Danny, peeking out over his gloves. “See, Tommy, I’m not hurt. I’m watching. I’m looking for my opportunity.” Half of knowing how to fight is just being willing, really willing, to pay attention.

  I saw everything.

  • • •

  Which is, in its own way, why I was in the desert dark of Palm Springs in my sensible rental, driving slow and steady into the night.

  I carried a photo of a man my sister had found in an old photo album, an ex of my mother’s who looked a lot like me: the same eyes, my sister and I agreed. He and I had exchanged emails and agreed to meet near his home in Joshua Tree, so I brought Mom in her urn and we flew across the whole of our divided country.

  Jess was the first to suggest I try to meet the man who might be my biological father. She and I were newly engaged, and maybe she sensed in me the last unresolved shadow. It was the last thing I had to do before we married, the ending that allowed me a new beginning.

  But it was my mother who got me on the plane. Before I knew she was sick but shortly before she died, Mom asked me if I would consider having children. I’d always been skittish about the idea, but maybe she sensed that my transition had awakened in me new possibilities. She wanted me to pass on my genes, she said. The words hung between us for a beat, taking the fuzzy shape of the man who wasn’t there, the man she always said was a one-night stand, and the limitations of my body: none of it a mistake, all of it out in the open.

  “I can’t have biological kids,” I reminded her finally.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “I forgot.” Maybe it was the illness talking, but I knew what she meant.

  She told me, with an urgency that would only strike me later, that I should think about it, regardless. It was unlike her to belabor a point, and she’d not once mentioned wanting to be a grandmother, but her desire for me to have kids was, I recognized, a referendum on her own choice to have me.

  “Having children is the best thing I ever did,” she said. I believed her. I heard, in her voice, a letting go. I heard a good-bye.

  • • •

  After I woke up in the dry heat and did push-ups on the floor of my hotel; after I watched the sun bake the lifeless land and the jackrabbits hop across the alien landscape; after I arranged to meet my maybe-father the next morning at a coffee shop in town—I put on Mom’s favorite Paul Simon album and cried.

  I was there, I realized, to finally be alone with all my ghosts.

  “You were my miracle baby,” my mom once told me. She was here with me, as I made terrible coffee. So was Stephen, his shirt flapping as he read that Tyson quote in the belly of Madison Square Garden, blessing me as I howled unself-consciously into a limp pillow.

  “ ‘All through my training I’ve been afraid of this man,’ ” he said. “ ‘I thought this man might be capable of beating me. I’ve dreamed of him beating me. I always stayed afraid of him.’ ”

  A fighter fights
himself, I thought, as the sun set and the air finally cooled. I thought about the experts I’d spoken to in my hope for some bigger answer, people who shared with me their most urgent and personal questions in the hope of helping me face mine. I thought about Niobe Way, who, when I asked her how to be a “good man,” suggested forgoing that question for bigger and better ones such as “What are you doing in your life that’s actually keeping the status quo?” or “How are you keeping silent in terms of things you see?”

  “What’s a man?” Danny had said, the last time I saw him. We’d been in the back room of Church’s, among a new batch of fighters hitting heavy bags, and he’d shoved his arms through the sleeves of his black hoodie, looking at me as if I already knew the answer, because I did. “I think there’s no definition. I feel like it’s just a category to be put in.”

  That night, as I sat on the trunk of my rental car in the desert, watching the dime-size moon rise, I was the only human body, male or otherwise, for miles in any direction. It was strange to think that this too was America, with its bugs buzzing and bats rustling in the distance.

  My thoughts returned to the month before I began injecting testosterone, back at the beginning of the masculinity crisis. I’d driven up to Oregon from California to see my stepfather for the first time in a decade. This was before I went on testosterone, when I first suspected that facing my fears could provide answers, even uncomfortable ones. I was surprised by what I saw in his papery, scruffy face, his crumbling, old-man body. He did not scare me, and I did not hate him. His life seemed, suddenly and completely, a waste.

  How am I keeping silent about the things I see?

  For there to be “good men,” there have to be bad ones.

  As soon as I spotted my stepfather, old and alone, I stopped believing in monsters. When he waved good-bye to me on that chilly spring night, shuffling off down the street corner, I knew it would be the last conversation we ever had. In it, he’d told me that he too had been abused as a child.