Roughhouse friday, p.26
Roughhouse Friday, page 26
Then I felt the same sudden impulse to hear my father’s voice—the same urgency I had experienced after many long hours on the water, or the morning after a fight when the surge of aggression still burned in my forearms, when the question Why?—unasked, unspeakable, still promising an answer—throbbed in my brain as a single syllable.
After about eight rings, my father’s answering machine came on. I got about halfway through a garbled, bumbling message when my stepmother picked up. I was impatient with her—that was the beginning of a period when even the sound of her voice made me sick with resentment—and quickly asked to speak with my dad.
“My son,” he said, in a tired, distant voice. It had been three weeks since he’d come to watch me fight, but I still felt like I had not seen him in a long time. He listened carefully, sleepily, as I laid out the high stakes of the moment: I had to move out of my apartment. I wanted to keep fighting. But Victor himself had told me that if I didn’t leave town, I’d never take my fighting to the next level … but then there was that letter about Spain that my father had sent me … and as I continued rambling, my chest tightened, my voice became high and tight and grandiose, and the silence of the night screamed in my ears as if any minute the entire universe might explode through my windows. I said, “I’m moving to Spain.”
My father was quiet for a moment. “Spain?”
“Spain.” I reminded him of the article he’d sent me. I reminded him of the dark girls in shawls and the bullfights and all the other fantasies I held about a place that did not exist. Fantasies that were projections of our own losses, of our own longings to imagine ourselves into realized men. They were limited dreams—but the only ones we had in common.
“Hmm,” my father said calmly. He didn’t tell me I was crazy. He didn’t ask me to reconsider. All he said was “Well, my son, if that’s what you want to do … you ought to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Move to Spain.”
* * *
I packed up the contents of my apartment into two piles. In the first pile was everything that I had acquired over the past year that I was giving to the White Elephant. In the second pile were all the things I was bringing back with me: my boxing and camping gear, and my Southeast Showdown belt. I’d sold my sea kayak to a friend—and then gave him my banjo, on the condition that I’d come back for it one day.
The night before I left, I didn’t sleep much. But it wasn’t the anxious insomnia of the fall and winter. Instead, I lay in a quiet, almost meditative silence, an emptiness so vast that when the early light of summer began to paint my windows around 4:00 a.m., I was almost sad to see the darkness go. I shouldered my backpack and took one last look at my basement apartment: after a single Roughhouse season, it looked exactly as it had when I’d first moved in.
I rode downtown through a sunny morning, the light bright over the mountains, the sky clear and featureless. As I pedaled over the harbor bridge, no mist hung over the channel. The water shimmered, and time seemed to move backward and then forward and then it just stopped. I ditched my bike in the woods, just deep enough into the tree line so that someone might find it and put it to good use.
As the plane left the tarmac, I felt the familiar anticipation of flying to Juneau for a fight. But as I looked off the wing, I saw in the mountains below, in the waters of the Inside Passage running between them, a different world: the hills and pine forests of northern New England, the dark waters of Lake Champlain, the tidal rivers of Maine. As that world faded beneath me, I took the Showdown belt out of my backpack, recognized myself for what I had become: a certain version of a young man, rising through the clouds with something golden in his hands.
EPILOGUE: RETURN
Over the next few years I fought a handful of times, in several different states, against opponents whose names I half remember. I lived in Portland, worked out with a club of high-level amateurs and pros, and trained with even more fervor and devotion than I had in Sitka. But before long I realized that, at twenty-six years old, I’d never be more than a valuable sparring partner to up-and-coming boxers who’d never questioned their instincts to fight. I remember those years less as a series of fights than as a chain of memories—lights, punches landed and taken—always shadowed with a restless desire to find something at the other end of them, some place in the world to call my own.
The only bout I recall with total clarity took place during the Northern New England regional finals, in the city of my birth, Burlington, Vermont, just after the New Year a few years later. When I told my father that I was coming to fight in his stomping grounds—at the hallowed Memorial Auditorium, right down the street from his office—he went overboard and invited just about every man he knew: friends from the military, friends from his mental health firm, all his old buddies from the Champlain Islands, my stepbrothers. The annual tournament was a big deal in Vermont: local kids from the rural parts of the state trained all year for a shot at glory, for a chance to advance into the next stage of Golden Gloves competition. I had no idea whom I was fighting—didn’t even pause to look at his name before stepping into the ring before one thousand people.
I could feel that my father was in the audience. He’d mentioned the names of the men who had come to watch me fight. They were the husbands of my mother’s old friends, the fathers of boys who I’d known for much of my life. They were the same men who had likely been standing along the road some twenty years earlier, when I, in that yellow GALAHAD T-shirt, running next to my father, had fallen to the ground at the finish line of the Fourth of July race. They had all known about the terms of my parents’ separation. In the years since, on the occasions when I had run into these men, a part of me still believed that they still saw me as that broken little child who’d flopped at the finish line on purpose.
The bell rang. I shuffled toward my opponent. Our bodies came together. In a tangle of elbows and arms, fists and shoulders, I began to work through his defense, to find holes in his guard for the tight hooks, for the short uppercuts—appakats! The punches landed. One after another. The kid was strong—like many of the Vermont fighters, he was a working-class, country-raised farm boy. When I dug into his body, I could feel his strength—working strength—in all the muscles that fought to protect him. By the second round, he had begun to tire. In our clinches, he began to hang on me a bit more. When he broke apart, he paused to take a deep breath.
By the third round, when we’d taken each other into the deep water of the fight, I backed him up onto the ropes, waited for him to throw his desperate right hand, which he did, then I slid beneath it and drilled his lower back with a series of left hooks. The kid was too blind with exhaustion to recognize that I was going to keep throwing the punch as often as he would let me. Every time the punch landed, I slid out with my back foot and tapped jabs off his forehead, to keep him pinned. Then I slid back in, pivoting to my right, to put new pain in a new opening in my opponent’s guard. It was lethal, brutal work, but my hands moved effortlessly, as if being commanded by invisible levers in the sky.
For what felt like a full minute, I kept on like this—three years of bag work, thousands of hours in front of the mirror, hundreds of miles of running, enough uppercuts to flatten my nose and give me chronic sinus infections—all of it coming together in a single moment. As a fighter, I knew already that I had no future: I was too old, the wrong size, probably not fast enough to ever be more than a bottom-rung pro. But once or twice in a lifetime, it can feel as though the world is bending toward your purpose, as though the arc of all things has specific regard for the story you are trying to beat into meaning. That night, in the city where my mother had brought me into the world, in the little patch of this country that she had intended to make her home, in front of the community that my father came from and the community that I had always felt rejected my mother, I found myself moving in that unspoken realm of a power greater than me. It did not last long. From that night, I have a single picture: my opponent, backed up against the ropes, shelled up behind his gloves, me, diving forward, leaning left, my left hand cocked as I prepare to throw a hook to his body. But it is not the damage of landing the punch that continues to haunt me; rather, it is the expression on my face: one of beautiful, uninhibited and unrepentant anger. “You got good wind,” my opponent said after the final bell. “You hit hard.” We shook hands and went our separate ways. I never did get his name.
I left the ring, walked through the crowd, holding a tall golden trophy in one hand, and found my father. He hugged me, slapped me hard on the cheek, then turned with me under his arm, so that the men he’d invited could bear witness to the young warrior that his son had become. Even now as I write this, I can feel myself resisting this final moment, because I know that it was merely one of many false professions of finality in my relationship with my father, a relationship that, now that I am a father myself, is forever unfolding. But that night, I, fully grown and semirealized, walked forward to meet those men with no secret shame inside me, no questions about the past, no inclination to pretend that I was injured. The confused anger that had possessed me as a boy had been made visible in the ring. It had taken two decades to reclaim what I believed I had lost, but in that passing moment I had all of it back.
“Holy shit,” one of my stepbrothers said, stepping forward, holding out his hand. “You’re a fucking badass.”
Behind him, in the stunned and fearful eyes of the men who had come to watch me fight, and in the proud eyes of my father as he paraded me in front of those men, and even in the omniscient invisible eyes of that original city of my birth, I saw the figure of who the confused little boy of my youth had been waiting all these years to see: the angry young man who, one day—in some other kingdom, in some other time—would come back to name him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you first to Betsy Lerner: for your radical loyalty, confidence, belief, and support. I am so grateful to have you in my corner.
Thank you to my editor, Colin Dickerman, for giving this story a home. I appreciate greatly the time and care that you and the people at Farrar, Straus and Giroux have devoted to my book. It means so much to me to finally see it in print.
In the writing world, I have been helped by so many friends and mentors that to name one demands that I name you all. So I will say only that your presence has been essential to my emotional and spiritual life as well as to my creative process. A number of institutions and fellowships have supported me and my family during these last years: the University of New Hampshire, Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing, the Telling Room, the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, Bowdoin College, Deerfield Academy, the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
There is a long and very complicated history of non-Native people writing about Native people in order to understand themselves, and I am very aware that this book is part of that often delinquent canon. During the five or so years in which I traveled back and forth to Southeast Alaska, many people offered me enormous kindness and generosity, including the families of George Bennett, Victor and Miranda Littlefield, Scott and Niecole Robinson, Jessika Beam, and my former coworkers at the Sitka Native Education Program: Laura Castillo, Judy Brady, and Sam Payenna. I also wish to thank Eric for being such a good friend and climbing partner during the first year I lived in town. I’d like to thank Ethan, Wyatt, Richie, Roman, Jay, Jack, and Scott for being such good friends and sparring partners. And Cliff, Amber, Tasha, Matt, Angelika, and many others for being such good friends during those strange, molten years when none of us knew where we’d end up.
Thank you to Bob Haag for giving me a place to fight. Thank you to Anthony Lindoff, Mike Edenshaw, Ben Reed, Chuck McCracken, and Fernando Pintang for being good opponents. Thank you to the writers at the Juneau Empire for your coverage of the Roughhouse show, which I relied on heavily: Charles Bingham, Ron Wilmot, Courtney Nelson, and Klas Stolpe. Thank you to Ethan Billings and the people at Marlintini’s Lounge who hosted the fights. Thank you to Edna Abbott and the many other Roughhouse fighters who spoke with me over the years about their experiences. I wish I could have written about you all instead, but that, I suppose, is not the point of a memoir.
Thank you to Bobby Russo and the many fighters at the Portland Boxing Club, who gave me a boxing home. I know that the image of the boxing writer is a well-used cliché, but without the opportunity to spend much of my twenties fighting and training, I would not have been able to engage with myself—or this story—in any functional way.
Lastly, to my father and mother: I know it is probably not your preference to have your son tell the story of our family. My aim in writing in this book was only to understand our past so that, in understanding, I might be a better father and husband.
Finally, to my wife and two daughters: you fill my life with meaning and purpose and love.
ALSO BY JAED COFFIN
A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jaed Coffin is the author of the memoir A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants. He teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives with his family in Maine. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue: Galahad
PART I
1. Whack!
2. Solitary Man
3. The Savage
4. Miss Mary and The Goat
5. The Stone
PART II
6. Roughhouse
7. The Nice Guy
8. Running
9. The Hoonah Hooligan
10. Back East
11. Redeem
12. The Banana
13. Mixed Breeds
14. The Iceman
15. The Wildflower
PART III
16. Spawn
17. The Showdown
18. The Grail
Epilogue: Return
Acknowledgments
Also by Jaed Coffin
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2019 by Jaed Coffin
All rights reserved
First edition, 2019
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72039-1
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This is a work of nonfiction. However, the names and identifying characteristics of certain individuals have been changed to protect their privacy, and dialogue has been reconstructed to the best of the author’s recollection.
Jaed Coffin, Roughhouse Friday
