SO WHAT, YOU COACH, BOXING?
JOURNAL 8
1. MANY ASPIRATIONS ARE NOW DEFUNCT
My dream was to be an archeologist.
I imagined myself out in the Egyptian desert brushing off the very tip of a brand new pyramid. I didn’t realize that they already found everything. There’s no new pyramids to unearth.
I think archeologists now mostly spend their time on their hands and knees staring closely at shattered pieces of pottery.
I hate shattered pieces of pottery. They don’t interest me AT ALL!
And you know, I was strongly obsessed with Ancient Egypt. My childhood room was filled with fake papyrus scrolls purchased from street vendors in Rio.
Now if I go into the Met and take a single step into the Ancient Egypt wing it’s literally narcoleptic: I’m immediately standing up snoring and Gaby has to wake me up.
Life is an aspiration-meatgrinder. The meat in question being your aspirations.
At several different points I wanted to be a professional in hockey, soccer, football, and basketball.
Unfortunately: I hate ice; I have bad ACLs; (I think I could’ve been Tom Brady, but due to anti-brasilian bias in my podunk Ohio town, they didn’t let me be QB…sorry New York Giants); and I can’t shoot.
In 6th grade they made us put our aspirations in the yearbook, and I said UFC Fighter or CFO or Coach.
I think CFO is officially the most ridiculous aspiration I ever had, but it corroborated one of the “interests” they made us put down because I guess when I was 11 one of my interests was “money”.
I did dip my toe into the business world in college.
Every morning of my morose-suffered freshman year, I would have a gargantuan breakfast of pancakes, biscuits, sausage, and all the infernal etceteras while reading Business Insider tips on how to become successful.
And then, exhausted from the breakfast, I would skip class and go back to my dorm and sleep.
If you add up the cumulative time I spent in the statistics, accounting, and economics classes I signed up for it would come to about one and a half weeks.
Holy fuck I even spent a summer reading business books!
Now if I accidentally catch a glimpse of Good to Great at Barnes & Nobles, I literally have to hold back the bile leaping up from my stomach.
Though I did become the business manager for a literary magazine Inklings, but mostly because I was the manliest of the bunch so they thought I could handle it.
I didn’t understand anything about the job and ended up embezzling $250 by accident.
After college I worked at a smoke shop called Smokey’s in Steubenville.
And at the end of my shift, the money in the register would always be off.
My paycheck would consistently get clipped because of it and I would go home thinking, Am I really this stupid?
Fortunately I was vindicated because it turned out my manager was a heroin addict and he was stealing the money for heroin purposes.
So I guess we can count that one as a win.
I only ever felt good about two jobs right off the bat.
One was my first job in highschool: I would deliver medicine for a pharmacy in Follansbee, West Virginia.
I would ride around town in a gaudy, conspicuous Kia Soul.
So gaudy and conspicuous in fact, it was easy for people to call in complaints about the reckless driving the Kia Soul was engaged in; to be fair to me, it’s hard to be a good driver when you’re texting, or asleep.
The other job was working at a sandwich shop in college.
After my first day I came home and told my roommate Jacob Decker, joyously and unironically, “this is what I wanna do for the rest of my life!”
But they got me for time theft.
Because I would leave after my shift and then come back and punch out an hour or two later.
Even my early literary aspirations looked dead in the water.
I took a creative writing class my freshman year in college, and no bullshit, I got a C minus. There were rockheaded dumbfuck football players in the class getting A’s and B’s! Nobody else got a C but me!
But my writing was so odious and pretentious that the professor could not abide.
And then I would submit to Inklings and I would be in the room while we read the submissions anonymously, and on several occasions, people laughed at my submission and passed without a vote.
What got me thru it all was a severe lack of self-awareness.
2. YES I DO
I did accomplish one of my 11-year-old dreams, I am a boxing coach!
I don’t wanna toot my own horn, but I did end up being a pretty good competitive boxer, and I could’ve gone pro if it wasn’t for the fact that being a professional boxer, —unless you’re Canelo Alvarez or close, —is an arduously torturous (both emotionally and physically) unremunerative life.
And you know what they call a fat boxer? —“Coach!”
I didn’t realize that one of my interests was inspiring rich wimps, but I love it.
I teach group classes and privates.
Group classes are wonderful because it is a cornucopia of the limits of human coordination. Oh the things I’ve seen. Gloves on the wrong hands. That one’s tough because then the thumbs are on the outside and it really looks extraterrestrial.
I usually let the person figure that one out on their own.
The best is dudes who come in and you ask, “have you ever boxed before?” and they say, “no, but I know how to fight.”
Reader, you might be surprised to hear this, but they absolutely don’t know how to fight.
I was showing one of these fellows the punches (jab, cross, lead and rear hook, lead and rear uppercut, numbered 1 thru 6) and he goes, “yeah but when am I gonna learn to throw these hands?”
You’re learning now!
I am a fast giver-upper. I tell them the right thing to do once or twice, and if they persist in their ridiculous error, I say, “nice, good job” and I move on.
Not for my private clients, usually. But it depends on what they want.
There’s different levels of the private client.
There’s the gab session. I have that with a few women and lazy children where we basically stand in the same spot and I hold pads for them, continuously, not verbalizing any combos, like a funhouse mirror version of Floyd and Roger Mayweather, and we bullshit for an hour.
Then you have your classic tech & finance psychos who are trying to get good at boxing as another step in their self-actualizing-optimization.
And I’m so fluid I can relate to all these guys, I hit em with that, “you read Good to Great?”
My least favorite just in terms of the physical toll it takes on my body are the bloodthirsty wimps.
These guys wanna spar but they don’t wanna spar. They want a human punching bag. You’re not allowed to hit em back and if you’re moving too much they say, “stop moving!”
One of these clients wants to hang me on a meat hook and go to town.
We’re negotiating a fee for that.
3. COMEDY!
To meld the two most laborious and physically painful parts of my life, I have been producing a comedy show at the boxing gym where I work (Church Street Boxing Gym), and, —let’s hold on that because I just remembered I have to tell something else first,
4. A DIGRESSION ABOUT A FIGHT BETWEEN GOTHS
I had a show at St. Mark’s Comedy Club Friday evening.
As I was loitering outside the club, killing time, I heard the most tremendous booming screaming, really an incredible voice belting out.
I heard someone near me say, “oh my god are those guys still fighting?” and so I approached the source of the scream.
There was an enormous group of goths hanging out.
I don’t know if I have my terminology right, and I don’t mean a group of the germanic peoples that invaded the Roman Empire in the 5th century; I mean people who are leathered up, pierced, tattooed, extravagantly mohawked, and seem like part of a contiguous exclusionary group.
And so anyway I approach and there’s two guys up in each other’s faces, the one with the booming voice has his fists clenched down at his sides and big biceps bulging out of his cutoff leather vest and he’s cartoon-angry, —neck cords popping out, the works.
The guy he’s screaming at incessantly is smaller, more feline, agile, he’s backing up with karate moves.
They’re both older because the bigger guy was screaming things like, “I hope you took your fucking heart medication today cause you’re gonna fucking need it!”
And the other guy was yelling, “I’ve been in this group 44 years!”
It seemed like they were ancient rivals, or better yet, best friends turned enemies.
I have never seen an argument cover so much physical space.
They were back and forth across the entire block of St. Marks between 2nd and 3rd without a moment of silence. Stopping traffic, they didn’t give a fuck.
When they were in front of a car, another member of the group would come and push the two of them out of the way like pulling a switch on the train tracks.
Eventually, —and I don’t know what took him so long, —the smaller dude pulled out a pair of nunchucks.
I’m not bullshitting you! Nunchucks! (Which jived with his karate-profile.)
And he started swinging them around, backing the big guy up.
The best is when they would catch somebody staring and one of them would yell out, “mind your own fucking business!”
How?! It’s a nunchuck fight in the middle of the street!
For inexplicable reasons the feline fellow gave up on the nunchucks and the big guy got in his face again, and in an effort to end the fight, another member of the group came over, grabbed the nunchucks, and put them around the big guy’s throat and pulled him off of the other guy.
This happened over about 40 minutes. And then I had to do my spot.
Gaby came down to meet me after the show, and I said, “were the goths still fighting?”
She said no but it looked like a goth was getting a stern talking to from another one.
We walked by and it was the big guy! getting a scolding from the person who pulled him away with the nunchucks.
I would love to join their group, but I just don’t have the mettle.
(Yes, that’s a pun.)
5. SOPORIFIC
Anyway, my show at the gym, the Knuckle Sandwich Comedy show, was an extraordinary success.
You know I’m not good with numbers, but I think we sold about 350 tickets at 30 bucks a pop, and after stiffing the comics, I took home a cool 10 grand.
No big deal.
Even though it’s more difficult than you might think to get someone to a comedy show.
As I was setting up, a guy walked in, thinking the gym was open. I told him it was closed.
And he goes, “are you setting up for something?”
I said, “a comedy show” thinking I would bark him in.
He made a noise like I punched him in the gut, “uhhhhh” and winced, and then walked out without another word.
Sometimes I think it’s unethical suborning people you know to come to a comedy show, but then I lay on my pile of cash and I think ethics schmethics.
After the show I went uptown with Gaby.
I took a couple beers from the gym stash and she took a White Claw.
She was worried about police (for good reason, she’s the only person I know who’s been fined for hopping the turnstile), so we concealed our beverages in sock-koozies.
We went to Chick-Fil-A, miraculously arriving 10 minutes before they closed.
And then we met Ethan, Sophie, Fernando, Fernando’s nameless boyfriend, Al, and his nameless friend, at Local 42.
I was too tired to imbibe the atmosphere.
All I picked up was a latino guy with a MAGA hat at the bar (he must have some family members he wants OUTTA HERE) sitting next to a guy that was reading affirmation-posts on Instagram on his iPad such as: “every legend was once a nobody.”
I only had 10 beers and Gaby wanted to go home. We went back to my house.
After [redacted for insalubrious sybaritic salacity], she played her favorite game which is keeping me awake when I am beyond desperate to sleep.
She said, “I’m not gonna let you sleep until you guess the word I’m thinking of.”
There were no hints, no guidelines, just any word.
We stayed up for 90 minutes, until 2:30 in the morning, and I must’ve guessed 250 words in English and Portuguese.
Until finally it came to me.
It was so obvious!
“Gaby, you brilliant minx,” I said.
And then I guessed it.
“redacted for insalubrious sybaritic salacity” incredible