Читать книгу Amateur - Thomas Page McBee - Страница 11

November 2015

According to the laws of physics and USA Boxing, this wasn’t a fair fight. But there we were, two guys past our primes, circling each other in front of seventeen hundred drunk onlookers in Madison Square Garden, that hallowed hall of American boxing.

Since July, I’d bled at the gums and screamed into pillows and almost quit. I’d failed. I’d temporarily, and to varying degrees, lost my mind, my hearing, and my friends. All so that a guy with seventeen pounds on me could beat bruises across my face, both of us a messy mosaic of blurred senses, damp armpits, hot lights, tangy throat, rubber-mouthguard bite marks, squeaky pivots, spangles of stars.

All so that my fists could connect with his stomach, and his mine. It would hurt, the stinging price of knowing my body’s upper limits, but for now my muscles harmonized out their combinations as a meditative quiet sucked the cheers out of the stadium. I understood that we were both just sinew, and blood, and bone, and follicles, and decay.

The truth was, I loved him even as I danced around him with my hands in the air. I was a new man, the first transgender man to fight in the most storied boxing venue on earth, there to close the gap between us like the fiction that it is.