The other day I was asked
if I wanted to fight. My aggressor was a blonde Nordic man. He was at least 6ft
3. I accepted.
It occurred to me that at
the age of 23, I’ve never really been in a fight. The only time I’ve ever had
to swing for my life was in Year 5, when Charles grabbed my tie and wrapped it
round my neck. I swung my arm blindly round and caught him in the eye. My fist
blackened his eye and my watch caught his eyebrow and made it gush blood over
his white shirt. We’ve been firm friends ever since.
Now that I am out of
middle school and have gainful employment, which means that I can afford not to
live in ghettos and can choose to take a taxi rather than dark backstreets home
from clubs, it’s getting increasingly unlikely that I’ll ever really get into
one. This is probably part of the reason I joined the boxing gym. I don’t have
the standard martial arts pretext of being prepared with self-defence for if a
fight was to occur. I just really wanted to punch someone.
In some ways the gym
exactly fulfilled my aesthetic expectations: it’s in a fairly Spartan unit,
crammed into the archway of a railway bridge. Everything rattles pleasingly
when trains pass overhead. The equipment is shabby and patched with duct tape,
the air is perfumed with intermingled sweat and testosterone and the gym-leader
is a mysterious man who makes us call him Master Rezza. We all do. On the other
hand, thought, the gym is located in Stamford Brook—a leafy, well-to-do suburb—
so does lose some of its gritty veneer.
Having pranced around the
gym-matt floor for a few weeks, yielding triumph after triumph over first my
shadow and then a large back filled with foam pellets, I was flushed with
success. My left jab was lightening quick, and my right hook was a sure-fire
killer. I was even pretty sure that despite having missed the week that we did
‘footwork’, I was pretty damn nimble. As I stepped through the rope and into
the ring, I had the arrogant pride of a boxer. Unfortunately, that’s all I had.
It was like a replayed scene
from my youth, sitting in someone’s loft-bedroom, watching the older boys play
Tekken on the old playstation, while I busy studied the manual. Dragon punch: up, up, square, circle, left.
Tiger kick: square, down, square, right,
right, square. Then when I was finally handed the controller, all concept
of dragon punch went out the window as my experience opponent kicked 7 shades
of shit out of me and while I frantically mashed the keypad and tried to
remember which button was ‘block’. That is less a metaphor for my fight than an
accurate, scaled down image.
As I reeled back from yet
another carefully landed blow to the face I thought to myself “Thank god I’m not
doing this in a Texan bar brawl or in prison or something.” The worst thing was:
he wasn’t even trying.
Still, I am persevering.
The credential of having been part of a boxing gym gives me a gritty edge to my
otherwise hopelessly middle class credentials. Like how Will Self gets away
with being shamelessly wordy because he did a bit of heroin at some point in
the past. And who know? Maybe next time I’ll land a punch.
