fight club
When I was a kid I ran around shirtless and feral with these two brothers, Gavin and Regan, who swore and used the word “sexy” and had phones that belonged to them (in 2005 — they would’ve been maybe 10 and 7 years old). Regan and I fought under the shade of the giant brown maple with a yellow swing.
At summer philosophy camp when I was 14 I learned how to shoot a basketball from a lanky, sardonic Catholic boy who went to my high school. He told me that the WNBA was less fun to watch than the NBA because women just weren’t as good. I borrowed the book Fight Club from my curly-haired crush, a boy who told me he didn’t want me to try and climb the Claw, the misshapen-looking metal structure at the center of a Stanford fountain, because I would get hurt, and then he went and climbed it himself.
Back home from camp, I challenged a boy to a fight. The blue-eyed track star who’d kept me up all night lying on a high-jump mat, talking about Plato’s allegory of the cave. We set a time and date and place. It would be a private affair, grappling on a deserted lawn, not a spectacle. He had 50 pounds on me but I really believed until the moment he was on top of me, all the wind knocked out of my chest, and his eyes shatteringly close, that I could’ve won. Dusk was falling purple and black over Marymoor Park. He got up off me and we pedaled on our bikes to a free movie the city was showing on a blow-up screen.
That year I joined the wrestling team at school. Interminable hours of practice. I climbed into a senior boy’s car before the sun came out and stumbled out of the gym into my father’s after the sun dove back behind the mountains. Those terrible days bookended by night. When I started wrestling, everyone asked me Why? in a way they didn’t ask Eddy or Jacob or Bryan or Michael or any of the boys. It would be too pat, too easy, and not quite true to answer it was Marymoor Park — the wet green beneath me and his weight on top of me, the wound of losing, the shock that maybe it would be this way and for the rest of my life.
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My friend L. and I were talking about the fantasy of fighting someone and winning.
It’s a cope, she said as we walked past peaceful bungalows and cardboard boxes of free things on the sidewalk, limned by orange light. You tell yourself you just haven’t beaten your friends because you’re holding back from hurting them, but that you’d win if it was for real, if you needed to.
Sometimes I’ll be walking and I think about what I would do if I really needed to hurt someone. My favorite opening move, the single-leg takedown. This whole violent daydream plays out in my head and I notice it does something to me physiologically, my heart beats faster, I feel angry. Then I remind myself that really, if I could run, I would run.
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Before the winter sports season properly started we had preseason conditioning. We did deadlifts, squatted and benched, strapped ourselves into mysterious machines that promised to work muscles I’d never heard of. I had dreams of working out. In one I amputated a limb by accident, the leg press crushing down on my shin and shearing it off somehow.
My parents came to watch a match. I wore the foam headgear and green school singlet and kneepads, looking small and ridiculous. The referee raised my hand — a win by forfeit. I weighed between 102-106 pounds that winter. No other school in our league fielded someone in the 106 class. Our coach strategically put the one boy on our team who was my size into competition with 113-pound boys, since he was a better wrestler than me and more likely to win. Coach paired me with the girls from our team for exhibition matches instead. I wrote about one, kind of, in a short story once. After he witnessed one of these my father said, We probably supported you doing this wrestling thing more because you’re a girl than we would’ve if you were a boy.
I couldn’t escape gender on the mat. I felt shit about not being very good because my success or failure seemed freighted with political significance. Did I think pugnacity might win my liberation?
(All my girls like to fight, but why?)
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I was lucky to join a wrestling team whose star, before she graduated, was a girl. She took fourth at State. There’s a lot of criticism of the politics of representation, the way it might seem shallow or insufficient to fight for more people who look like you in movies or TV or sports. Wrestling was terrifying and alienating, but a million times easier because Catherine had been so good. When I saw stars after Michael dumped me on the ground out of a fireman’s carry I knew it was OK, they wouldn’t think it was because I was a girl. My own life didn’t have to be a refutation.
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Sometimes now it still takes me aback when I hear men talking about putting on weight as a good thing — muscle mass, making gains. A couple weeks ago I went to a Lunar New Year party and saw an old classmate. He said when he lifted a lot in college, he’d put on 40 pounds eating yogurts jam-packed with protein powder and peanut butter.
My capacity to win, when I was that teenager winning forfeits, was my capacity for emptiness. In the locker room they tugged our back fat with calipers to intone some percentage at us I’ve forgotten now. At weigh-in I came in a hair over, stripped down to nothing and ran laps and spat into a sink until I made the weight class, my mouth cotton. The whole time I wrestled, 3 months, I don’t remember getting my period.
How much pleasure I took in self-denial. Not of food, thankfully, I actually ate when I was hungry, I liked to eat. But we did things that were painful again and again. Sports tend to make you do that. Fast feet, sprawl! they barked at us and we threw ourselves onto the ground, pushed ourselves back up, feet prestissimo on the dark green mat. Held my body in a V, core trembling, Coach counting down from 10 and then, 4, 3, with a grin he went back to 8, 7, 6. If you wanted to leave during practice to use the bathroom you had to do ten dips.
I was surprised in the summer when I went running with the cross-country kids and my friend grew thirsty, begged the coach for water he grudgingly let her waterfall from his bottle. Couldn’t she just hold it in, couldn’t she just withstand need? In college I raced two boys around a track for three miles. I couldn’t run as fast as either of them; I started out keeping pace, then my strength flagged. At the end, when I swallowed, I tasted iron in my throat. Later when the three of us went for a daylong hike in the woods of far northern California, I drank half as much water, giving so much of what I had to one of them. I felt bitterly superior. As if self-abnegation was strength. In the novel The Startup Wife, the protagonist says bitterly while reflecting on her own ceding of power, I carried the water and I let you drink.
In a novel I’m reading now, Vladimir, there’s a line where the female professor narrator observes students and says, A few male athletes ran in a superior manner; a few female athletes ran as if to punish themselves.
I saw C., another girl I know from rugby, at a party. I didn’t expect to see her, a mathematician, in the sea of mostly history PhDs, our hair and clothing all smoky from two bonfires. I was drunk, the combination of inquisitive and confessional I get after a parade of cider, punch, beer, wine, and liquor into my mouth. I told C., smilingly, that I’d felt so inferior at the gym while weightlifting in front of her, how I’d added such light plates to the bar, had to jump up just to reach the squat stand’s hook for the barbell collar.
I don’t know if I like the gym, I might have said, or I don’t know if I know why I even wanted to lift. I asked her why she did.
It’s like, you can either be thin or you can be strong, C. said. And I knew I couldn’t be thin. So I decided to be strong.
At this she laughed and flexed her arm, to show exactly the strength she meant.
I think of how in the myths the Amazons would cut off their breasts to better be able to pull back a bow and arrow.
What do I want — some access to domination that is not premised on the mutilation of the self?
Or should I want the total end to domination?
What they don’t say is that it feels good. Orgiastic is a word used to describe sexual frenzy but also frenetic violence. American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer writes on a granite bench in the Black Garden of Nordhorn, Blood goes into the tube because you want to fuck. Pumping does not murder but feels like it. You lose your worrying mind. You want to die and kill and wake like silk to do it again. The business school’s soccer team trash talks the drama kids I play with, yells How long you gonna cry there? when we have a player down, and I hate them. Rugby match in Philadelphia: there’s a tall girl who runs like the wind and I have to block her. I can’t quite get there but in the single-minded pursuit trying to strike her down I lose my worrying mind. I want to die and kill and wake like silk to do it again.
February & my love is in another state, a poem by José Olivarez ❄️