Roughhouse friday, p.4
Roughhouse Friday, page 4
It was late August. In the past few days the air had gotten colder, the water in the channel a bit rougher. Off the beach, in the shoal waters, a pack of deformed pink salmon swam in dizzy circles, headed back home to spawn before they died.
“I’d like that,” I said.
That night, George made me dinner. There was muktuk from his Yupik wife’s village, seal oil, seaweed, herring eggs, and canned salmon. While we ate, we watched a Chuck Norris movie about Vietnam. Norris was running around blowing up thatched bunkers, throwing knives into the chests of little men in black pajamas. “That guy’s quite a warrior,” George said. Then he showed me a picture of himself on the wall, shirt off, standing with several other American soldiers. “Those white boys, they thought it was pretty funny when I used to let those kids from the village sit by my fire, cook ’em the little crawfish I caught in the river. But they didn’t know I was Alaskan Native; I was taught to respect people’s cultures. Pay attention to my surroundings. Old people in the villages, they used to come up to me, say, ‘You me same same,’ and that’s when I knew I was going to be okay.” He looked at me over the bridge of his glasses. “Your people, they understand my people.”
The next morning, George called me in for breakfast. He showed me a brochure he’d been working on for his bentwood boxes—steam-bent ceremonial boxes with formline designs painted on them. He was trying to sell the work, wanted to explain where he was from, but he needed someone to read over his writing. “My people, we’ve got a language so good we never had to write anything down.” I read through his narrative—right down to the name of his clan and his house, he could pin down his origins. I cleaned up the grammar a bit while George read the Sitka Sentinel. When I was done, I gave him the paper, and he slid me the classifieds section. “You know,” George said, “I saw some jobs in there you might like. You young guys, you don’t like to stick around, but I think you ought to stay up here, see if you can learn something from my people, just like I learned something from yours.”
I showed up to my interview with the Sitka Native Education Program wearing a polyester suit jacket and a pair of too-short slacks that I’d bought the day before at the White Elephant. The SNEP office was in the back of the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall, in an old building on Katlian Street. I met with four people—a white man who was the principal of Sitka High, and three members of the Native community: a representative from the ANB named Wilbur, a school board member called Hank, and a woman called Laura, who was the director of SNEP. The demands of the position sounded basic enough: about one-third of Sitka’s student population was Native; my job was to help them keep their grades up. Pay was thirteen dollars an hour, thirty-two hours a week. No one seemed to mind that I had no experience in education; their primary concern was whether I’d be able to work with students with a complex cultural history.
I did not know then that the very building I was sitting in was the meeting place for the first chapter of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, founded in 1912 by a group of Natives—Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian—who led the fight for Native rights to land and citizenship. The early members of the ANB had banned the use of Native language at all meetings, in an attempt to keep pace with the white-speak of their opponents. They’d also adopted as their anthem “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Following passage of the Alaska Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, championed by Natives, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, SNEP was created by the Alaska Native Sisterhood to celebrate the very culture that the federal government had spent the past century trying to erase.
On George’s advice—that my people understood his people—I answered the interviewers’ question with a story about my mother: where she came from, and what it was like to grow up in Maine in the house of a woman from rural Thailand.
“Ha!” Hank said, rubbing his chin. “This whole time, I thought you were a Tsimshian!” He looked at Wilbur. “Doesn’t he look like one of those Tsimshians?”
Wilbur looked at me sideways. “Little bit.”
Then Laura asked me if I had any questions. I asked what I thought was the most obvious one: What was so bad about the local high school that the Native students needed their own special tutor? The room fell silent. The principal of Sitka High shifted in his chair. Hank looked at his hands. Wilbur studied the floor. Finally Laura said, in a clear but careful voice, “When you learn something about the history of our people, maybe you’ll understand.”
Later that afternoon, I sat in George’s fifth wheel, mulling over the logic of Laura’s final words. If my people understood George’s people, and if the only way to understand Laura’s students was by learning about the history of her people, then …
“Hey, Jade!” George’s wife was calling for me through the window. “Got someone on the phone for you.”
It was Laura. She was calling to offer me the job. I took it on the spot.
* * *
No matter what I do.
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, singing along to Cash’s cover of “Solitary Man” while spinning a ring on my finger that my parents had given me as a graduation present. The ring was made of two halves of their wedding rings—flower designs for my mother, vague shields for my father—that had been cut apart, then soldered together. The gift meant as much to me as anything I owned: it reminded me that, despite my parents’ separation, their past was bound by something more powerful than war and circumstance. The only time I’d taken the ring off was while I was paddling north, when the ring had left a welt on my hand, so I’d worn it around my neck on a piece of rope.
If this—living alone in a basement like some melancholy Gollum—was the best I could do with my mother’s sacrifices, there seemed little sign that it would get any better. In the past weeks, all the cruise ships and summer workers had gone home, and the light had begun to fade by several minutes a day, and even the salmon, which had been vigorously spawning for most of September, now lay on the banks of Indian River in ribbons of putrid, rotting white flesh. Most mornings, I woke to pale rainy light streaming through my windows, feeling as though everything inside me, too, were turning dark, rainy, and rotten. But that night when I closed my eyes, none of that blurry mist was hanging behind my lids. Instead, I saw only the bright flashes of impact—Whack! Whack! Whack!—of Victor’s gloves snapping in front of my face. Then, as if no time had passed, I bolted awake to the beep-beep-beep of my alarm clock, to a tardy dawn light pouring through the narrow windows above my bed, painting the cinder-block walls with the bland promise of another gray day.
3. THE SAVAGE
My classroom was in the back wing of Sitka High School, next to the shop and special-education rooms, in a practice studio for the SHS drill team. It wasn’t a very uplifting place to learn: there were no windows, and little furniture beyond a few tables and chairs. Three of the walls were covered in shiny whiteboards, while the fourth wall was hidden behind an ominous black curtain, behind which stood a floor-to-ceiling mirror. A series of stage lights hung from the ceiling, which you could control from a small panel in the closet. The bell didn’t ring until 8:00 a.m., but I liked to get to school a few minutes early, even though I didn’t have much to prepare for.
On my first day, a guidance counselor told me that I might not have much to do for the first couple weeks because it took a while for kids to start falling far enough behind to justify a period with me. But now, six weeks into the school year, my periods were starting to fill up. In the morning, I worked with two Native boys, Danny and Nathan. Danny showed up most days with a can of Pimp Juice energy drink and his fingertips covered in Doritos powder. He looked white, but according to his paperwork, his mother had roots in Klawock, and his father lived Down South. Danny was supposed to have ADD, which made him an odd best friend for Nathan, who moved slowly and spoke little. The two boys loved basketball and always raced through their algebra homework so they could spend the last fifteen minutes playing one-on-one. I’d tried to enforce a rule that the boys couldn’t bring a basketball into my classroom. Now, though, I let them keep a ball under my desk.
Recently, Danny had gotten all fired up about his upcoming ferry trip to Juneau, where he planned to blow his dividend check—an annual bump from oil industry profits, distributed evenly at about a thousand bucks per full-time resident—on a pair of basketball shoes and a new game console and as much candy as he wanted. The capital city, located on the mainland about ninety miles northeast, had four times the population of Sitka, and a lot more stores. Nathan, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care about the “free money.” We balanced a few equations, I made sure the boys’ homework was in decent shape, and then we spent the rest of class working on a spinning Allen Iverson move they’d seen on TV. When the bell rang, Danny shouted, “See ya later, Jade!” while giving me a sideways peace sign. Nathan just nodded and waved.
Then I worked with two young women, Carrie and Donna. Carrie also looked white but her paperwork said she had ties to Prince of Wales Island. She didn’t say much in class, just stared off into the distance, silently chewing on candy. She weighed perhaps eighty pounds, always wore bright blue contact lenses over her brown eyes, and rarely showed any effort in school. Sometimes I’d quietly ask her to start her homework, and she’d snap out of her trance and apologize and shuffle some books around on her desk. One morning Carrie came to class in a Sitka Wolves JV cheerleading outfit, with red-and-blue pom-poms dangling from her backpack, and matching sneakers. She’d just gotten moved up from the freshman squad and was excited to show me pictures of herself standing atop a human tower, arms raised in a V. She was smiling, gazing proudly at an invisible crowd with a self-possession that I was yet to see in the hallways of Sitka High. But when I asked her to focus on her math, her fake blue eyes glazed over, and she became silent and still again.
Donna was more outspoken than Carrie, but it took her a twenty-ounce Pepsi before she could get going in the morning. She struggled in math, and I even spent a few periods in her classroom trying to figure out what her teacher was doing that Donna didn’t understand. Donna came from a local Tlingit family, and her grandparents were well-known members of the Native community. When I learned how deeply involved Donna’s family was in the history of Sitka, and how they’d spent the past seven decades fighting to keep their language alive, I didn’t blame her for being so uninterested in algebra and Spanish. Some days I let her skip homework to draw formline designs in her workbook, to practice her Tlingit phonetics and vocabulary. But her favorite thing was to make me and Carrie laugh. She loved to do impressions of her elders. “Oh! Chee whiz! Choover the chaweekend I go to Choonah to cheeat some chalibut!” was one routine. Or: “Holy chumping mukluks, Donna!” But her best impression was of her white father: “If it wasn’t for your mother,” she said in a gruff man-voice, “you’d be nothing but a dribble of goo sliding down my leg!”
In the afternoon, I worked with a kid named J.B. He showed zero interest in receiving any help or even recognizing my existence. I think this was largely because his buddies on the basketball team always poked their heads in the door, heckling and shooting spitballs at him, teasing him for having a special babysitter. J.B. could also pass for white, so rather than be the one to blow his cover, I always kept my distance and sat a few tables away.
That afternoon, with about fifteen minutes left in the period, the guidance counselor showed up in the library with a young man in a hooded black sweatshirt, black pants, black sneakers, and giant headphones blasting speed metal over his ears. “Jade! This is Peter!”
Peter nodded but didn’t speak. I offered him a chair. He sat down.
“Peter is having some trouble in math this semester. I thought he could use a period with you, see if we can get those grades up?”
“Sure.” I liked the guidance counselor; she was compassionate and cheerful, but sometimes I felt like she was living in a different world.
“Great!” As she walked out, she gave me double thumbs-up behind Peter’s back.
Peter took out his math book, plopped it on his desk.
“You understand any of this stuff?”
Peter stared at the clock on the wall.
“What about this?” I turned several pages to that week’s unit.
Peter remained silent. So I just sat with him for the rest of the period, shoulder to shoulder, eyes on the clock, waiting for the bell to ring.
* * *
For the next two weeks, I went back to the SJ gym to work out with Victor every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night. There wasn’t much space in the small room, so I remained in the corner, teaching myself to jump rope while the high school boys worked the heavy bag and bob-and-weave ropes. Meanwhile, Victor gave most of his attention to the two white men who had fights in November. I knew nothing about Victor beyond what I’d gathered from our first meeting: he was older than me, maybe in his midthirties, married, with a one-year-old son. He’d grown up in Sitka and worked full-time as an electrician at the town hospital. But every time I heard him talk about the “Roughhouse show” with the other men, his voice grew more serious, even solemn, in a way that made me want to know more about it. I didn’t have any idea what Roughhouse Friday was, or why Victor called it a “show,” but being the new guy, I didn’t think it was my place to ask.
The first Roughhouse fighter was named Todd Thompson. Todd was from Newark, New Jersey, and had been living in Sitka and working as a fisherman and at the cannery for about a decade. He had a shaved head, sunken eyes, and sinewy forearms covered in tattoos of wolves and fish. His skin was so white that it was almost translucent, and whenever he threw a punch, little waves of muscle rippled across his cheeks. Todd lived on a houseboat with his dogs, in a slip down at Old Thomsen’s Harbor, and every night after practice he showered and changed in the locker room downstairs. One night when I asked Todd how long he’d been training with Victor, he told me that they’d been working out together for over a decade. The only reason Todd hadn’t had a Roughhouse fight yet was because he’d “never stayed clean long enough.” “If it wasn’t for Victor,” Todd told me, “I’d probably go right back to being a crackhead again.”
The other Roughhouse fighter was an Australian lightweight named Scott Robinson, who, in the Roughhouse ring, was known as Kid Roo. Roo was only about five foot seven and barely 150 pounds, but his torso was stacked with tight bundles of muscle. Roo had ended up in Sitka after a yearlong walkabout when he’d met his wife, Nicole, on the interisland ferry and decided then and there that he would marry her. Back in Australia, Roo had fought under any number of names—Scott Robinson, Robert Scott, Scott Robbins—racking up, as Victor would later tell me, somewhere between eight, eighteen, or twenty-eight fights. Scott showed up at Victor’s gym one day, challenged Victor himself, and dropped him with a body shot in the first minute. “Balls of steel,” Victor sometimes said, when recalling that night several years ago. “To show up from nowhere, walk into another man’s gym, and drop him in front of all his fighters … you gotta have balls of solid fucking steel.” As the reigning lightweight champion of Southeast Alaska, Roo held the record for the fastest knockout in Roughhouse history (eleven seconds, round one). When he hit the mitts with Victor, it was easy to see why: his power rose out of his legs until it exploded through his fists with a deep, hollow thud.
After Victor worked with the two men, he gave his time to the high school boys. In addition to Richie, there were two Native brothers, Wyatt and Ethan Ojala. Wyatt, the older of the two, was pink cheeked and built like a bulldozer. He had heavy, methodical hands and, with one leg shorter than the other, moved with a natural puncher’s rocking motion. Ethan was leaner and darker than his brother, but didn’t yet have the muscle to give his punches any pop. Victor had been working with the boys for over three years. When he called out punch combinations—“Double jab–hook–right hand!”—they attacked his mitts with dutiful precision. The boys had only had one fight each, at a small tournament in Ketchikan. It was expensive to fly off Baranof Island and difficult to find kids their age with any experience.
The last half hour of training was dedicated to sparring. Roo was by far the most technically sound fighter in the gym. Against Todd, he stalked forward, closing the distance between them by dropping his forehead onto Todd’s chest, then driving him back into the walls with short hooks and uppercuts. In between rounds, while Roo chatted with Victor, Todd punched himself in the helmet, shaking his head and swearing. When the high school boys fought, Richie’s wild style lined up nicely with Wyatt’s patient, steady attack, but Ethan was just too little to hurt the older boys and sometimes left the gym crying. Then Victor would step in with Wyatt and Richie to even the score. Once Victor was warm, he would fight with Roo. The two men circled each other, gradually punching with more and more force, until they were all but swinging for each other’s heads. I knew little about each man’s history, little about their pasts and what made them fight, but the stiff silence in the room told me that something bigger was taking place, less a confrontation than a conversation, as if in fighting each other they were defining some larger truth about where they came from and who they were. And yet, when the beeper sounded, Victor and Roo would bump gloves and act as though nothing had happened.
