September 04, 2007
Labor Day in New York City brings back a flood of memories for me. Ten years ago I was scrambling to find my footing after my company closed.All the manufacturing of women’s accessories had moved offshore to Asia, and I was suddenly an anachronism despite, or rather because of, all my design and production skills.
I was still very young to be obsolete, and I couldn’t accept it. I made a deal with a guy who owned a small factory in the industrial zone of Garden City, Long Island, whereby I would design a line and market it to the mass market and ladies’ specialty chains and we would split the profits.
I designed the guy a beautiful line, and we even showed it at the Boutique Show at Javits Center, but the market was weak and my partner, whose factory it was, and who was bankrolling the venture, eventually lost interest.
I tried not to panic, and I lived normally during this time, working out at my gym and essentially living as I always had despite the forebodings of imminent doom I felt. My favorite gym workout was a twice-weekly boxing class led by a pro boxer named Stephen Johnson, a light middleweight from Brooklyn. The workout was about 50% aerobic, as Stephen led us through interminable jumping jacks, pushups, mountain climbing, running in place and every other torturous activity the human mind can devise to inflict pain, to the accompaniment of a blaring boom box.
Stephen would breeze through the workout, hardly raising a sweat. He was capable of doing a hundred and fifty pushups, leaving the rest of us, who were at various stages of athletic development, to follow as best we could.
After the warmup, we would put on the gloves and hit the bags.Stephen would start us off with sprints of 15 seconds and working up to two minutes. Two minutes of continuous punching is very strenuous indeed, but if you can’t succeed at that, how could you hope to prevail under real circumstances?
We would hit the bag high, hit the bag low, jab to the head, jab to the stomach by bending at the knees, punch combinations that Stephen dictated to us. Then Stephen would set up a circuit.You moved around the circuit to stations designated by Stephen. Here you did pushups for two minutes. The next station you jumped rope, and after that abdominals, or punched the speed bag. At on heavy bag you practiced double jab, right hand, left hook, the next bag another combination. At the last station in the circuit, Stephen held up target mitts and made you chase him around, all the time punching.
Finally, the last five minutes we strengthened our abdominals with crunches, leglifts and isometric tortures called “planks.” It was exhilarating to do the workout, and the feeling of accomplishment and pride at satisfactorily completing a punishing session like that is why so many people are devoted to athletic achievement. It’s not just the rush of endorphins, but the heightened sense of self-esteem and the flattering attention that is showered on people who are fit and attractive that make sports such a desirable pursuit in life.
So I was living my life and working out as though I still had a job and a career, which I didn’t.What I was doing was hanging on to a sense of normality in a world that didn’t exist anymore. I was denying a presentiment of doom and foreboding. Eventually my money would run out, I would be evicted from my apartment, all my possessions would be lost and I would be left homeless.
It wouldn’t be the first time that New Yorkers have gone from champagne flights on Air France to a cot in the armory. Only most of those people deserved it. They had engaged in shady financial affairs, or had lived way, way beyond their means. Me, I had always given the employer value for his money and lived rather modestly. But the fates have never seen fit to soften the blows in my life. I learned long ago to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’, as the saying goes.
My relationship with Stephen extended to the locker room, where I was able to gauge the full value of his physical development. The naked body tells no lies. Stephen was an aerobic creature, not very much muscle.At 5’10’’ he weighed in at around 150 lbs. Not that he was skin and bones, but he had no overt muscular development to speak of. He was all gristle and boxing technique. I said, “You look great but you’re too skinny.”
He answered, “I don’t want to fight in a heavier weight class.”
Probably the biggest punishment I was absorbing around this time was the woman I was seeing. I’ll call her Majda for the purposes of this story. She was a Trojan horse of a woman – once you admitted her inside the gates of your heart she proceeded to open up with a Pandora’s Box of destruction and decimate everything from the interior.
Her big bugaboo was the War On Drugs, which she had bought wholesale right from Republican speechwriters. This she wielded like a Polak laborer swings a sledgehammer. She was capable of destroying dates, dinner parties, even whole vacations that I had lovingly financed, with the intent of doing what the law had failed to do – punish me for my immoral behavior. In this she was aided by her family, who felt uncomfortable around me and were happy to see me brought low. They were from Yonkers, but Majda’s sister had acquired a cabin an Amagansett, and they now considered themselves to be eastenders. As if that weren’t enough, the whole family was enrolled en masse in Alcoholics Anonymous. They were militant teetotalers. Naturally, I didn’t let that stand in the way of me having a good time and swilling down booze in front of them. The end result was them all moving into the next room to curse me out, and Majda returing to give me a play-by-play description of what they were saying about me. My attitude was, Go back where you came from! Back to the Baltic states and fantasies of blonde, blue-eyed Aryans and wistful fantasies of Hitler’s Stuka dive bombers blowing the shit out of Jewish refugees. But don’t try that shit around here, chum!
Now, at the time I was smoking a lot of reefer and I didn’t care who knew it. Of course, I had had little or no experience to what is laughably referred to as the middle class, so I had no concept as to the remarkable earthquake of scandal I was creating in their minds. All my life bourgeois conformity was to me a stunted, brain-dead punching bag for ridicule and derision.Majda brought home to me the punishing aspects of middle class triumphalism like a fat lady in a W. C. Fields comedy movie. “It’s the drugs that make you behave like that.” “Nobody can stand you because you’re on drugs.” “Why don’t you get off the drugs and join the human race?”
Her objection to “the drugs” was not what I was doing to myself. I was functioning fine. Her objection was to the corrosive effect I was having on society at large and on her family and friends in particular by not making myself accessible enough to assuage their insecurities and discomfort at being around me, although I must allow as how even in total sobriety I wasn’t the kind of person that they would ever feel comfortable around in even the most optimum circumstances.
The fact is that I was a bad fit around these Calvinist twits. North Americans in general have not been brought up in a cultural environment which has prepared them for somebody like me, and the feeling of discomfort and revulsion I generate are hardening and thickening even further, as they seek normality against all odds in a world which must be ever more spinning out of control in their minds. Fuck ‘em, that’s their problem.
Another explanation is that in the interim period between the Cold War and the War on Terror, the traditional American longing for an enemy upon which to project their own internal unhappiness and dissatisfaction, like Hasidic Jews mangling a chicken, curled back on itself like an ingrown toenail as the regional yahoos declared war on potheads. It is a happy occurrence that these reactionary and xenophobic tendencies are currently focused on the Mexicans rather than toward some imaginary domestic enemies.
Look, I don’t want to get into a heavy moralizing rap with the reader about the glories of smoking reefer, but what are diabetics, who can’t drink alcohol because of the sugar content, supposed to do on Saturday night when everybody else is having a blast, blow their brains out? Smoking pot gives them a chance to live a little too.
And while we’re on the subject, I’m for legalizing prostitution too, for the benefit of men who can’t get a woman in the sexual marketplace. Why should they have to jerk off and get complexes about being lonely when other guys are swatting girls off. I’ve had enough of society being run for the benefit of fucking moralists, who can’t come to grips with their complexes and are determined to drag the rest of the world down with them. Do me a favor, you pricks, go kill yourselves and free up the earth’s resources for somebody who still feels he has something to live for.
Anyway, I had had quite enough of Majda’s convoluted psychology and I found myself free on Labor Day to do whatever I pleased. I had been spending every minute of the summer with her at the beach, and I longed to feel stifling hot pavement beneath my feet and the smell of fresh garbage in my nostrils, so I hotfooted it over to Brooklyn for the Caribbean Day Festival.
I took the number 4 train from the Upper East Side to Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, and in a matter of minutes was in a whole other world, like stepping through a portal in Stargate on the Sci-Fi Channel. Eastern Parkway is the nasty slum dweller’s answer to the Champs-Elysees. It is a six-lane boulevard bordered with trees and a separate access road on both sides. It is even anchored at one end by a triumphal arch at Grand Army Plaza, and a museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, at the entrance to Prospect Park. Further up the line from the museum, however, it takes on the aspect of the majestic avenues that were designed for Chicago’s West Side and have since declined into blight.
This area, Crown Heights is a tectonic juncture where ethnicities collide, as the Hasidic Jews have moved in to displace parts of the huge black and latino communities that had previously laid claim to the place. But in the summer of 1997 relations between these conflicting groups were rubbed raw. The gaping wounds of the race riots of 1990 were still fresh and tender, and New Yorkers were suffering through a fresh racial scarring resulting from the assault on a black Haitian in a Brooklyn police precinct station by white cops, who had dragged him into a toilet stall and jammed a toilet plunger handle up his rectum.
The city’s mayor at the time was Rudolph Giuliani, not notable for any kind of racial conciliation. Giuliani was playing the game of racial divisiveness that he had learned from his hero, Richard Nixon, who had devised the strategy of ramming it up the ass of black people in general in order to appeal to suburban white voters.
As a result, when I emerged from the Crown Heights subway station, I was the only white person in sight except for the massive police detachment that had been deployed to maintain order at the parade. When the white cops caught sight of me in the midst of all the black people, they stared at me like I must have been out of my mind.
It was still mid-morning, early in the day, and the parade had not yet gotten started. Vendors had set up stalls in the access roads on either side of the boulevard and were starting to do a brisk business selling West Indian culinary delicacies and souvenir trinkets. I stood around, waiting for things to start happening. It never bothered me to be the only white person for miles in either direction. I was hard-core. All the years of boxing and martial arts, and all the years of functioning in a very tough manufacturing environment around latin workers, had grown a pretty hard shell on me, you better believe it!
All of a sudden, in the middle of the still-empty boulevard, appeared a phalanx of BEARDED JEWS? I couldn’t believe my eyes! And in the middle of these guys marched Giuliani at quick-step.This Giuliani’s way of making an appearance at the West Indian Parade, hustling double-time down the avenue surrounded by Lubivitcher Jews before the parade had started. This Giuliani was one snaky motherfucker, let me tell you!
At length, Giuliani long departed, the parade got under way. It was a bit of Mardi Gras and a bit of Carnaval, gaily costumed marching societies dressed up in elaborate costumes of glitter and feathers, naked girls and muscular men in gold lamé wifebeater shirts wielding tridents. Flags of all the nations of the black diaspora and flatbed trucks outfitted like huge rolling boomboxes blaring out earsplitting Jump-Up music.
“If you got more than a dollar in your pocket let me hear you shout HaHaHa!”
“She tink she pretty but she not, she tink she rough but she not!”
“Wine-y wine-y!”
Oh, what a blast!Dominican men selling shots of rum for a dollar. Dishes of curried goat and plantains.Budweiser, King of Beers! “Let me hear you shout HaHaHa!”
The sun was beating down and the people were sweaty. The music blared and the rum flowed like nectar. The cops had set up an elaborate system of crowd control, which caused bottlenecks at the street crossings, and crowds of people were bunched up in knots at the corners. All of a sudden I heard from behind me a menacing black voice, “What are you doing in our neighborhood, whitey?”
I turned, ready for anything. It was Stephen Johnson, my boxing trainer. We embraced and I gave him an air kiss on both cheeks, like the Frenchmen do. “Let me buy you a drink,” I offered.
“Uh-uh, I’m in training.I got a fight coming up,” he said. “C’mon, I’m supposed to meet up with some people.”
“Wow,” I marveled, “It’s unbelievable that I would meet up with you in the middle of this riot!”
“Not really. This my ‘hood.I know everybody here. This is where I grew up, not far from here.”
“Stephen and I spent the whole day together at the parade. Every ten feet somebody stopped him and shook his hand. He was really a star in that place. He unfailingly presented me to his friends as his boxing student, and being a boxing student of Stephen Johnson in Crown Heights was equivalent of being introduced by Michaelangelo as his art student in sixteenth century Florence. Everybody was impressed that the maestro considered me to be a serious artist.
Not that these hardened black people fell over me with admiration. New York was too raw and unhappy at that time. But they let me enjoy my day. And even as the sun shined down on the parade, did I bathe in the reflected glory of Stephen Johnson, the neighborhood tough guy hero of Crown Heights.
But New York is not a city of happy endings. It is a theater of industrial reality, where even survival is a heroic victory against tremendous odds. I wouldn’t try to soft soap the reader: in New York you start at the top and work your way down.
That winter my mother died. My accessory line, which was stillborn anyway, never went anywhere, and, despairing of designing anything ever again, I enrolled in paralegal school, hoping to retool myself as – I don’t know what!I got my paralegal certificate and knocked around as a temp at a bunch of shit office jobs until these guys took a liking to me and offered me a permanent job as a coding supervisor in a Wall Street legal support company.
My gym was sold and I had to join a new gym after 12 years of working out in the same place. I lost contact with my friends, including Stephen. Then, in 2000, the news hit that Stephen was in a coma in an Atlantic City hospital as the result of a beating he had taken at a casino boxing match. I really cried when I read that. As I said, the guy never looked that solid to me. Not like a Vinnie Pazienza, who could get his neck broken in a car crash and six months later be fighting again. Stephen was an artist, fragile.
Finally, several days later, he died. It wasn’t the punch that killed him, it was his head hitting the floor. It turned out that Stephen had been turned down for a license to fight in New York State because of some kind of electrical disturbance in his brain, like a short circuit, or the synapses and neurons not connecting properly. So he got a license to fight in New Jersey, and he took a beating. But, again, it wasn’t the punch that killed him; it was the back of his head hitting the floor.
I attended the funeral at a huge mortuary in East New York. They were so proud to present him there that they hung out a huge bunting proclaiming, “Stephen Johnson, Our Champ.” There were some women at the funeral, but it was mostly tough men, boxers and martial artist, who formed little cliques and didn’t mix with each other much, out of rivalry and machismo.
They fixed Stephen up beautiful in the casket, really artistic. Naturally the grief in the place was overwhelming at the waste of it all. But what were you going to do, stop him from fighting? He would have gone all the way to Alaska or the Philippines to get a license to fight. We are all propelled to our inevitable end by our own compulsions more than other people’s designs and machinations.
Nevertheless, Stephen Johnson’s life and death illustrate a basic point about the lack of principled leadership in the sports world – if he had been required to wear a headgear, Stephen would be alive today, along with a lot of other unfortunate athletes. The blood lust that characterizes the boxing audience and the greed of the boxing promoters are a one-two punch that is laying low too many wonderful young people. If the fighters had been wearing headgears they would have presented the same thrilling athletic exhibition and then, win or lose, gone home to their families and friends. There is no reason for guys like Stephen to die.
That’s the point. Writers have been at the heart of social movements that illuminated the truth to vast audiences of humanity. Ideologies have risen and oppressive social systems have fallen. If sports writers and writers in general would militate for laws that protect boxers the same as they protect dogs, lives could be saved.
There was a terrible scandal when Michael Vick was caught barbarically torturing dogs, but every night prizefighters are permitted to get their brains squashed for a few bucks. I’m not advocating a law against boxing, but I thing Olympic rules should be the standard, where headgears are mandatory. Maybe I stink as a fighter, and maybe I stink as a writer, but somebody has to stand up for boxers, who can no more speak up for themselves than could Michael Vick’s dogs.
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Posted on 9/4/2007
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