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It’s only in your head, his identical twin, Larry, always told him. For fifty-two years, this had accounted for most of Ed’s problems.
Her chary yellow eyes locked with Ed’s, wide and watery, and in that moment, Ed did what anyone might do whose fate relied on knowing the real from the imaginary and whose track record in this knowing was not good: he shut the door and, left eye twitching, returned to his room, where he lay awake, tapping his socked foot against the floor.
But for thirty-five years, Terry had walked the narrow isthmus between the seas of sport and criminality, and on that crooked strip of land called Boxing, this sort of aggravation seemed, if not typical, plausible enough.
Expect nothing from no one, Terry had learned, but be open to everyone, because you never knew.
and the presence of these “real” boxers, who by and large looked one way, gave the gym a legitimacy that attracted the much larger pool of hobbyists—the Bob Alexander set—who by and large looked another.
Terry, then nineteen, began working under David at Shoal Creek? He’d been a grungy creature, Terry had, more acne than flesh, with Muppetish brown hair and an aroma so ripe it came off him in plumes, the skunky scent of a pothead Pig-Pen.
Was his aunt, a petite woman whose expressiveness was so pronounced she was frequently compared to a mime, really now outside his door—“Just
But from the start she knew she was plain, broad in the shoulders and heavy on bottom, near-sighted as soon as she was sighted: a pair of thick, round spectacles her binoculars to the world.
Standing before his old disciple and his new one, David Dalice experienced that familiar desire to toy with truly exploding his existence.
Like the gay kid who scrawls faggot across his dorm room door and reports it as a hate crime, he knew that sometimes the easiest way to avoid getting burned by others was to light the match yourself.
Christian, widow, mother, grandmother. Also, a thirteen-year cocker rescue foster-volunteer (“If they’ve got another few years of life they’ll go to a family,” she’d once told Belinda with a laugh/shrug. “If they’re bleeding out the eyes they come to me”).
Austin wasn’t Gay Paree, or Hollywood, or even Dallas, but she could live cheap and easy, and if, on her one half-day off a week, she wanted to sit with a Lone Star and a 99 cent Hobo Plate at Hector’s Taco Flats and flirt with college boys, or get sweaty grooving to redneck rock at the ’Dillo with cowboys and hippies alike (different costumes, same joint passed between them), in Austin that wasn’t called nonsense. It was called Tuesday.
X and Margaret, when they met on the track in P.E. Coach Beaupre, stout as a measuring cup, had announced they’d be “trying their groins” at the hurdles,
They blasted down I-35, windows open and Anthrax blaring, all the while X experiencing that strange sensation endemic to adolescence, that feeling of not believing something was happening even as it was happening, not believing it was happening until after it was done.
“You think some faggot receptionist cares if it’s a fake?” said Jesse, as if it were the job title that was the slur.
“Do I need to do a DTMTTSLS?” she asked. “Please don’t,” said X, exhausted from the goings-on of the previous day and not sure he was ready for one of Margaret’s classic Don’t Take Me to the Second Location Screams.
“Yeah, totally,” says Miriam with more conviction than is warranted. She does this sometimes, presses the pencil too hard on the page.
“Yeah. Of course.” He says it so casually, more casually than maybe anything Miriam Lopez has said in her entire life. It isn’t fair, is it, how easy it is for some people just to be?
According to Alexis, cops’ two favorite phrases are Shut the fuck up and Step the fuck back. “So if you ever don’t know what to say, just pick one.”
’Cause one day, soon, I’m gonna be in a fight fight, and I will be scared, and no one will know it.” He returns to Miriam, still lifting. “And you know why, Officer Lopez? ’Cause I’ll have made that face so many times, it’ll be my face.”
In the middle of the wild, in the middle of the city, the men stand on a low footbridge and wait for the coyote.
Here’s a dirty secret: you can always find a way to give yourself permission. A dream portends a breakup; a just-averted car wreck augurs the start of something new. The truth is, you were prepared before your head hit the pillow, before you slammed on the brakes: to end it all, to fall in love. A sign from the universe isn’t an answer. It’s an excuse. To do the thing you were already ready to do.
There was no I in Police, no police in Police, either. Passive voice had disappeared them from their own narratives. Suspects were taken in for questioning, perpetrators had been apprehended. By whom? No one ever said.
“This is not where I thought you were going,” admitted Barbara-Ann. “Honey,” said Bob Alexander, “we’re just pulling out of the driveway.”
“After I leave this room,” Bob told him as we looked on, disappointed, “I want you to examine yourself. What you’ve done to yourself. And I want you to ask yourself: Is the person staring back at you the person you want to be?”
‘Who knows what that boy could become if we encourage him? Maybe a fighter, even!’ A fighter? I say, ‘David, that boy’s gonna become a psychiatric patient if he keeps taking other people’s meds.’ ”
As the therapist of our group, she was the most invested in keeping the conversation tethered to planet Earth.
We read Bob’s handwritten words as Sergeant D’Angelo was saying the exact same ones:
What would it feel like to be twenty-one or twenty-two, and have none of the life experiences we’d had, and to be told, There is no second. Go again again again?
Will they ever meet outside the gym? Each makes vague overtures to the other. Nathaniel and his “young lady” should come over for dinner. Has David been to Casa Colombia? The house special is really good. “We should go sometime. The four of us.” Neither ever follows through.
the boy will do things he doesn’t believe in or doesn’t care about or doesn’t think about because at twenty-two, at twenty-six, at thirty-six, it will seem to him that doing these things isn’t actually doing them, that this is a trial run and not the real thing. And before Nathaniel knows it, this life that is practice for his life will become his life, the chasm between who Nathaniel understands himself to be and who he is so vast as to seem unimaginable, which is why he won’t imagine it.
He will never see the secret machinery that shapes sixteen-year-old Nathaniel into the Nathaniel he’ll become. He won’t see it because it’s not secret, it’s out in the open—that’s the trick, don’t hide something and no one will bother looking for it—and since he doesn’t realize how this machinery has built him in the first place he won’t realize, either, when he’s handed the controls.
