Roughhouse friday, p.8
Roughhouse Friday, page 8
In junior high, I sometimes dabbled with fighting, usually only on occasions when the violence was brought my way. One afternoon, I was cornered by the youngest brother from a family of four boys, who’d wrongly assumed that I’d stolen his baseball hat. We wrestled in front of a small crowd until, by luck, I accidently flipped the kid onto the pedal of my bike, which left him in a howling mess in the dirt, me as the default victor. But rather than celebrate my win, I spent the next two days apologizing to the kid, worried that his older brothers would come for me.
Small for my age, and late to puberty, I’d had a couple of encounters with man-child bullies. One of them, Dean, liked to put me in headlocks during gym class and make me dance around like a puppet, until I, copying a move I’d learned from a Steven Seagal movie I’d watched with my father, whipped his arm around his back and pushed him into a locker. Dean hadn’t expected me to fight, and when he turned on me, I begged his forgiveness. On another occasion, a boy named Jason, who used to pick on me at a summer day camp, told me, “Go back to China and eat your rice!” in front of about forty other boys. I had no comeback—physical or verbal. Then another boy—not much bigger than me, but somehow braver and more witty—came to my defense: “He’s not from China, shit for brains! Get it right!” As I watched the two boys stare each other down, I made no vows of revenge or loyalty. Instead, I just felt numb, confused, and empty—as if spectating on a world in which I had no part.
At the beginning of high school, I began to feel urges to fight, but never was able to cross the line into violence. Once, during a soccer game, an opposing player, after a hard tackle, had called me a “fucking refugee.” Something exploded in my brain, but even after leaving my position to run across the field in the kid’s direction, I pulled up short just inches from his face. He looked at me, more surprised than fearful, and yet all I could bring myself to do was look back at the boy, fists clenched, mind screaming, paralyzed by a feeling with no name.
A few years later, the night before I left my hometown for college, I was hanging out at a buddy’s house, late, when a giant football player who’d been rumored to use steroids pulled up to the stoop in his SUV. There’d been some incident with his girlfriend and one of my friends, and the football player wanted to know which one of us needed an ass-kicking.
I stood up off the stoop. “Go fuck yourself.”
The football player looked at me, turned his head sideways. “What’d you say?”
“I said go fuck yourself.” My friends—none of them the fighting type—turned to me, confused. But I was not afraid. I was in the best shape of my life: I’d been working on a framing crew all summer, lifting weights, and running at night in preparation for playing soccer in college. My body was ready.
The football player opened his door. He had a broken leg, in a large white cast. He pointed to the cast. “I got a busted leg. But if you say one more word, I’m gonna come over and kick your ass.”
I looked at him. I looked at his cast. I could feel the air tightening all around me, the cosmos contracting around the single point of pause.
“One fucking word,” he said.
I can still hear the triumphant laugh of the football player as he got back in his SUV, the sound of my silence as he left me behind.
Fighting. Noble opportunities. Vexing.
I let the letter fall to the floor. A current of feeling spread through my body with the same unfurling sensation as when Victor had dropped me with a shot to the lower kidneys.
I got out of bed, dressed, put on a raincoat and rubber boots, then walked around the side of my apartment, lifted my kayak onto my shoulder, and carried it across the street and a few hundred yards to the McDonald’s parking lot. I stepped down a rock retaining wall into a mudflat, then slid my boat, which I had not touched since arriving in Sitka, into the still water of the harbor and began paddling into a heavy mist that hung over the channel and buried the bowl of the volcano on Kruzof Island in clouds. When I was about halfway across the channel, I stopped paddling, stared into the green-gray world on the horizon, studied the clouds as they moved above me. Then I just stayed there, floating.
* * *
Every week, I had to fill out a form for SNEP detailing the number of Native students I’d been working with. This wasn’t a straightforward task: since a lot of my students were part white and part Native, or part Filipino, it was often hard to put a finger on who was who. Sometimes these facts revealed themselves on individualized education program paperwork, but not always. Usually, I just filled out the form—which read BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS across the top—and rounded up, figuring that a lot of my students were underreporting their identity.
On my way to the gym, I stopped off at the ANB Hall to put the form in a folder on the SNEP office door. It was late in the evening. Outside, a bus driver named Karen Williams was dropping kids off for afternoon classes, one of the services SNEP offered to local families. In the ANB auditorium, the walls were covered with pictures of the old days: people standing in front of house poles, dressed in full regalia. At a pair of long tables, a woman named Vida Davis was teaching young people Tlingit. I loved the sound of spoken Tlingit: it sounded so different from English, and as a tonal language with forty-one consonants, interspersed with catches in breath, sometimes resembled a harder, more definitive version of Thai. A lot of the kids were pretending to not pay attention, but I knew from experience that even familiarity with the sound of a language could, without warning, call up a bolt of memory and longing.
I dropped my form into the box. On my way out, I ran into one of my coworkers, a master bead worker named Paul. Paul was a few years older than me—midtwenties, maybe—and he was short, compact, and quiet. He liked to wear bright Hawaiian shirts, with flames and dragons on the back, his hair in a hard part down the middle. Paul and I liked each other—we were the only two male employees of SNEP—but rarely took the time to talk.
“How’s it going up there?” I said.
“Good.” Paul’s workshop was in a small loft over the office. He had been spending the afternoon working on regalia for men’s dance shirts. He invited me upstairs to have a look. There were several bins of beads of various colors, which were being woven into black-and-red felt vests, adorned with the imagery of Tlingit crests and clans.
“Looks like my people’s regalia,” I said.
This was not exactly true. It reminded me of the hill tribe clothing I had seen on a trip up north with my mother. I had no relation to hill tribe people. My cousins were modern Thais: they had cell phones before I did; they dressed in cheap American clothing and bleached their skin.
“Oh yeah?” Paul said.
“Yeah. Same.”
“That’s cool. I’m all about respecting other people’s cultures.” Paul told me that I ought to come to the next dance class. “Not only for Natives.”
On my way out, the kids were still finishing up. As I walked by their tables, I passed the photographs of the old days of Sitka, studying the house and clan poles adorned with different animal crests, the people sitting beneath them. As I stared at the photos, the people in them stared back.
* * *
I rode my bike down Lincoln Street in a light rain, pumping my pedals as fast as I could. When I got to the gym, I climbed the stairs and found Victor.
He was unpacking his duffel of boxing gear, waiting for the rest of the club to show up. “Hey, man, I just talked to the Goat. He’s fuckin’ pissed. He called me from Philadelphia and was like, ‘Vic, man, you know some guy named Jed?’ And I said, ‘Guy named Jade started coming to the gym?’ And the Goat said, ‘Well, apparently he’s going out with Mary now!’ Then he starts going on and on about how you’re trying to take his place. He was like, ‘I’m so fuckin’ pissed off, I’m gonna name my dog after him just so I don’t forget to kick his ass!’” Victor shook his head. “I don’t know, man. I never seen the Goat mad like that before. Haag was supposed to fly him back to town to fight in a show this spring. I hope he can cool down before that.”
I tried to explain to Victor that I’d stop hanging around with Miss Mary if it meant that I was causing problems in his gym. But I knew there was only one way to fix things. “I want to fight,” I said.
Victor dropped the duffel bag. “Fuck yeah, Jade.”
* * *
For the next three weeks, my life took on a new clarity of purpose. I went to bed early every night, slept well, and woke up at the same time—seven—every morning. My days at school were efficient and orderly, and when I got home, I took a brief nap before jogging to and from the gym—a distance of about four miles there and back. During training, Victor devoted as many rounds on the mitts to me as he did to Roo and Todd. In addition to working on “straight punches,” he also showed me a basic slip maneuver, tailored especially to southpaws, wherein you countered with a lead off a righty jab, driving your fist into the pocket right beneath your opponent’s chin. We did it over and over until I didn’t have to pause before throwing it; then at night, I stood in the mirror with my shirt off, imagining the punch coming at me from different angles, throwing my left into the face of an invisible opponent.
As we approached the fight date, the pace of our workouts increased, too: One night we did two hundred jumping jacks in a row. Another night, we did a hundred burpees. We doubled up on sets of push-ups and sit-ups and often worked with partners, punching each other in the back of the head and whaling each other in the stomach. I started sparring with Roo and Todd and the high school boys. I rarely landed more than a single punch. I had limited hand speed and still hadn’t figured out how to circle and punch at the same time, but that didn’t matter. The basic routine of taking off my ring, wrapping my hands, adorning myself in sparring equipment, all felt like the basic rites of a sacred ritual.
On weekends, I got out of bed early, put on my boots, and rode my bike to the end of HPR, to the gates of the Starrigavan Wilderness. I bushwhacked through groves of devil’s club, crossing muskegs, following neon tags of old hunting trails, and scrambling up loose ledges until I broke through the tree line and onto the open ridges. There, you could jog for miles and miles with full views of the coastal mountains and the waterways surrounding town. I climbed until I stood above the clouds, looking down into the labyrinth of valleys and ravines, the clouds threading between the clefts, filling in the empty spaces. The swirling script of ridges and shoulders appeared like a topography of broken lines. But when I traced those lines, they all led to the same mass of land: an island, surrounded by dark water, floating on the edge of the world.
* * *
The last night before my fight, Victor led us through a light workout. We did some mitt work, shadowboxing but mostly just breaking a sweat. After we were done, while we were stretching, Victor asked me if I’d picked out a name yet.
“A name?”
“Yeah. A ring name. If you don’t pick one out, someone else will.” Victor shrugged. “Roo hates his name, but the Goat made it up for him and Haag loves it, so it stuck. Some asshole tried to call me Big Chief until I came up with the Savage.”
I asked Todd what name he’d chosen.
He put his hands over his head, jogged in place. “From the slums of Newark, New Jersey, Todd ‘the Dirty Dog’ Thompson!” Then he dropped his hands and shrugged. “I live with my dogs in a little boat, so I figured it made sense.”
As we put gear away for the night, I thought of all the names I’d been given in the past. My father had once told me that before I was born, he’d wanted to name me Jethro, to honor my Nantucket heritage. Jethro Coffin was a direct descendant of the founder of Nantucket—an honor that my father seemed to claim for his own blood, despite that the only times I’d ever heard of Nantucket were among the kids I disliked the most in college. For a period during my boyhood, my father had tried to call me Galahad, but the name—honorific, complicated, loaded with irony he didn’t seem to recognize—hadn’t stuck. Then, when I’d spent summers at his house, playing on his town Little League team, he called me the Hammer, perhaps because I, the catcher, the power hitter, captain of the all-star team, could do the most damage. One summer, my father had sent me to a boys’ camp where you had to dress up like a Native American, in handmade clothes, and pretend to live in a tepee as part of a tribe. You also had to make up an Indian name. Most boys chose names like Owl Moon and White Fox, but I, in bold recognition of my mixed blood, had chosen Many Rivers. After the camp was sued by the American Indian Movement for exploitation of cultural rituals in the name of profit, I’d felt so stupid to have been part of such a thing that I’d sworn to never speak the name again. In college, my freshman-year roommate—a prep school kid from a Boston suburb who was a star on the lacrosse team—had called me Mohammed the Asian Buddhist Prince in front of a one-hundred-person psychology class. The name stuck, was shortened to Mohams and then Mo before cycling out of existence. When I got drunk, my friends called me the Red Baron because of my bloodshot eyeballs and blotchy skin. The only name that seemed to honor my origins without any irony or denigration was when I’d been given the Pali name Jaed Da Wat Tat No Namat—an auspicious moniker whose meaning had never been revealed to me—by the head monk of my mother’s temple. But outside Thailand, the name sounded silly.
On our way downstairs, Victor said, “You know, Jade, I was wondering—where you from?”
“Maine.” Just like I’d told him the first night we met.
“Where’s your blood from?”
I told Victor the story I’d grown comfortable with: my mother was from Thailand, my father was American, they’d met in the Vietnam War. There, always, was where the story ended.
“What about the Half-Asian Sensation?” Todd said.
I thought about that. Why not the Half-White Knight?
Victor was still thinking. “Jade … Jade Coffin…” He paused. “What about the Stone?”
“The Stone?” I said.
“Jade ‘the Stone’ Coffin,” Victor said.
I repeated the name a few times to myself. “The Stone.” It did not occur to me that Victor had likely associated the Stone with jade stone and coffin—perhaps in his mind’s eye he’d seen a glowing green tomb where my opponents would all be laid to rest.
“The Stone,” I said. “Sounds good.”
Victor and I squared up plans for our departure on Friday morning, then parted ways. But later, as I ran down Halibut Point Road, I imagined a blank, featureless tablet, waiting to be engraved with a story. I threw punches into the rain, hissing my new name—“The Stone! The Stone!”—into the mist.
PART II
6. ROUGHHOUSE
All night, I’d been having visions of my opponent standing across a dirty canvas, in the corner of a dimly lit ring, his face hidden in shadows. He did not move much: just the rising and falling of his chest as he breathed in the dark. Even with my eyes open I felt as though the man remained in my apartment, hidden in my closet, buried inside the walls. I lay in my bed, fists clenched, heart pounding, staring at the ceiling, waiting for daylight. Then, around five in the morning, two beams of lunar light passed through my windows, projecting themselves onto my walls like a pair of giant moons. I jumped out of bed, swung my backpack over my shoulder, and went outside.
“How you holding up?” Victor said. He was sitting in his truck, his hat pulled low over his eyes.
“I’m all right. Didn’t sleep much.”
“I used to get so worked up the week before a fight I’d get sick. It’s just nerves. They’ll go away.”
We drove down Halibut Point Road, the pavement shiny with ice, the lights of the harbor bridge blinking through the clouds like low-hanging stars. In the airport terminal, two men in line for the 6:00 a.m. Juneau service asked Victor if he was going over to fight. Victor shook his head. “Retired. Got a wife and kid.” Then he looked at me. “Now I just train badasses like this guy.”
One of the men held out his hand. “Those guys in Juneau are fuckers. Go over there and kick some ass. Win one for Sitka.”
I shook the man’s hand, made a face that I hoped would project seriousness and malice, and promised him I would.
* * *
The flight to Juneau took about twenty minutes. Off the wing, as the sun rose, the black water of Chatham Strait moved between the masses of Chichagof and Admiralty Islands, the ridges and peaks of the dark coastal mountains made bright by white handprints of snow. While Victor slept, I studied the Rorschach shapes as if trying to decode their secret meaning, but one shape blended into another, and the mountains went on forever, thousands of miles north into ice fields and more mountains and more wilderness that likely didn’t stop until the Arctic Ocean.
When we landed in Juneau, Todd was waiting for us at the terminal. Losing all that weight had hollowed out his cheeks and pulled his face forward into a beak-like shape. With his hungry eyes staring out from beneath the hood of his sweatshirt, he looked like a scared and emaciated little bird. Though Roo wouldn’t be coming until the evening flight, Todd had flown over the night before, so that he could weigh in early and still have a full day to get some food down. But when Victor asked Todd if he’d eaten yet, he grew quiet. “Spent my last ten bucks on a bacon double cheeseburger, but I was so nervous I puked it right back up.”
“You gotta eat something, Todd,” Victor said.
Todd nodded. “I know. I know.”
We walked down the airport road with our packs over our heads. The rain turned to ice. In the distance, the drab mountains of the Mendenhall Valley rose up around the city. A long chain of clouds passed over the mountains like a gossamer curtain.
When we got to the intersection with the Glacier Highway, Victor pointed to a two-story building on the corner. On the first floor was a diner called Donna’s, but above the diner hung a large white wooden sign, burned at one corner, with a picture of a marlin jumping out of a martini glass. Along the bottom of the sign it read MARLINTINI’S LOUNGE. (Years ago, the bar had been called the Landing Strip because of its proximity to the airport. Then it was renamed Hoochies, after the salmon tackle, before closing down. The owner of the bar, Ethan Billings—“Like Montana!”—once told me that he and his late partner, Jim Cashem, had bought the bar and “stomped butt” because they were the kind of guys who always “put our necks—well, our ball sacks—on the line.”)
