Little Miss Hampton Beach

Little Miss Hampton Beach

There wasn’t ever any way I could have stayed and watched. No, not any, ever, and I should have known that when she first called and asked if I would come to Hampton Beach, asked maybe would I stand in her corner (we’ll get you a hoodie) at the Casino Ballroom, next to the new boyfriend Marcus (you’ll love him, he’s different, he’s kind), who was also her trainer, and her other corner, a cutman, a licensed old-timer with a low flat fee, a guy who himself had made it out of Fall River once, he told me, and on to Lowell at 165 in the Men’s Open. Turns out he was Marcus’s Uncle Alphonse, a retired dentist who had a small practice attached to his Campi in Montello and who now hung around here after buying in at some point once he’d stopped filling cavities. But he wasn’t here now in the small office with UNCLE AL stenciled on the gray-green metal door that was left open to the pulsing variegated din of the former warehouse I walked through—nothing was ever closed or locked, everything was open, it seemed, 24 hours. I put the gray sweatshirt, IRON GYM BROCKTON MA printed on the front, atop his desk and saw the shelves of VHS and the TV/VCR setup he’d told me about, the setup where he showed the kids (his term) how the old masters (again his term) did it, southpaws like Jamie with their own special section, Hagler, Hagler, Hagler on the spines, probably all of them, I thought. Was she thinking of Hagler in that motel room—or maybe Pacquaio, maybe Sweet Pea Whitaker, or one of the others that Uncle Al told me about, late on that night before the fight as down the street we drank brandy, that he’d shown her—was that what was going on the in that head of hers as she sat cross-legged like a schoolkid on one of the double beds, pincering special health food from a brown recycled carton, muscled Marcus on the other double bed, focused on his laptop, Jamie trying to relax the night before her first fight, rehydrate, her big brother having made the drive up from Easton (missing the same-day weigh-in due to traffic on 128), invited in to hang for a while, sitting there in a scuffed and faded crimson arm chair in the corner of the room, holding the neck of a green beer bottle between my legs, feet up on the hassock, watching my sister watch TV like we once did together as kids, watching her laugh, watching her sip chocolate milk, shorts and t-shirt loose, vascular arms and legs overwrought with tattoos, clusters of symbols and images and lines of indecipherable script, many of her own design, I know, she having drawn them and taken them to the tattoo artist, remembering now when she got her first, called me up at college (where I’d fled), eager to tell me about the small kanji symbol she’d calligraphed herself on mulberry paper and had a local guy do on her inner bicep, a place she thought she could hide from our folks for long enough. Dumb thing to do, I’m sure I said, they’re going to find out, it’ll just make things worse, the wrestling thing’s been hard enough—all told a stupid dismissive response, never asking what the character meant or which arm. The first call about having started boxing seemed to me like all the other calls with ideas and plans over the years as she moved around in her twenties, often with and because of a new guy (Marcus this time) or girl, taking odd and temp jobs, always these calls announcing grand plans and goals, for example, training once for an ultra and then later for some fitness competition that involved flipping giant tires, always leading in subsequent weeks to regular photos and videos of herself texted to me from rocky trails after long runs or in a gym spent after an intense session, always wide-eyed, looking for something from the lens, I now realize, looking for something it took my wife to tell that I withhold, trying to earn something with these athletic feats but also with the business plans and ventures she’d tell me about (that never materialize), plans to make some money with her art finally, selling mugs, sweatshirts, prints, and other things with her wild abstract drawings, studies she called them, that she’d been making since high school to the acclaim of her teachers, acclaim she all but lost when the suspension meant she couldn’t show her work in the senior exhibition. I don’t know why it has taken me all these years to see that she simply (simply) wanted me on board with something, wanted my acknowledgment, and I don’t know why it took Meg to point this out to me, to encourage and even insist that I go stand in her corner, in her corner of course both literal and a metaphor, something (be in her corner) I absolutely should have done when, after being told (again, I was happily away at college, this being an event that precipitated that first tattoo) the school board would not allow girls to wrestle (it’s different now in most places), Jamie walked onto the mat on the first day of tryouts, refused to leave, and then, when the coach put his hand on her shoulder to escort her away, cracked him with a step-back left hook, all instinct and art and—I can say now, though I wouldn’t have said it then—beauty of a certain alien kind. And truth, too. But I am late to seeing this beauty and art in violence, too late, I am afraid, because that day when she told me she’d obtained her amateur license and that Uncle Al had gotten her on her first card up in Hampton Beach, where mom and dad used to take us, she’d said, remember that Little Miss Hampton Beach pageant that Mom screamed at me about, I did not react well, thinking the decision unhinged, thinking boxing barbaric, dumb, reckless, knowing that our folks down in Florida, not on speaking terms with Jamie for some time, would’ve lost their minds (despite their belief that she was beyond help being confirmed), their kid an animal, while I myself not being able to imagine why anyone would want to do something where they were set up to get hurt repeatedly, to get hurt and hurt and do it again. Can you find truth there somewhere? I can imagine physical pain, though, and that’s what I imagined in the weeks following that call, and what I imagined when Meg finally pushed me to drive up the night before with plans to stand in her corner, which, as you know, I could not bring myself to actually do, could not bear watching her get hit, so after a second beer in the motel room and a Martell with Uncle Al at a spot he knew on D street I just bailed and drove away down Ocean Avenue along the boardwalk, passing the old stage on the beach (that pageant!), the traffic sparse at that late lonely hour on the Northern Expressway and then the Southeast, the occasional other headlights under the wrought-iron Atlantic sky seeming to burn and glare.

ARTICLEend

About the Author

Matthew C. Borushko is a writer in Massachsuetts. He is Professor of English at Stonehill College. More writing can be found here: https://www.matthewborushko.com/

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Photo by KoolShooters  : https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-in-a-boxing-ring-9945193/