The Spiral Staircase

Chronic Inflammation or What I Did This Week Instead of Working on My Novel

Warning: This post contains inflammatory language, because I am mildly inflamed after a weird week of stupidly arguing about politics with everybody, eating too many sandwiches, and getting zero work done. 

A few weeks ago, a young man at the boxing gym came into my office, very agitated about the unit they were doing on slavery. He is African American and he told me that his teacher was white and that he thought the class was racist. He was so angry that it took a while just to calm him down enough that we could go over the ridiculous handouts he'd been given.

Two sheets: one about the transatlantic slave trade, one about the slave trade during the Ottoman Empire. The writing was extremely strange, like they had been cobbled together from multiple sources, alternating between language you'd find at the Civil Rights Museum "this sweeping tragedy of human rights" and weird shit you'd find in a 1950's textbook "the strong, robust African was the ideal field laborer."

The trans-Saharan handout mentioned how highly prized eunuchs were, which it euphemistically defined as "men subject to mutilation." Now, this kid is 16. Unless he's reading all the Game of Throne novels or getting into the Anne Rice back catalogue, I don't think he needs to know what a fucking eunuch is, and I don't want to be the one to tell him.

His assignment, I shit you not, was to write an essay saying which slave trade was better or worse and why. 

This kid's reading comprehension and writing skills need work. I told him he didn't have to do the assignment but could write an essay saying that both were wrong and why. But I said we'd have to do a great job, because sometimes, when you challenge authority, you have to be even better than if you follow the rules. He never showed up to finish it.

Last week he comes in with a new assignment, this one on the movie 12 Years a Slave. To my alarm, I found myself correcting sentences like: "He rape and beat his slave's." I had intentionally avoided this movie, but I made myself watch it and have spent all week haunted. I'm still shaking my head at the thought of this teacher making 16-year-olds watch this and then just releasing them back into the world.

I hated my middle school Social Studies teacher with a burning passion. I think his name was Tom Fleming. He had worked in the Peace Corps in Central America and was like one of the characters in this old SNL chestnut.

I went to the kind of Quaker school that had out gay teachers (this was in the 80s and so that was pretty remarkable) and held an assembly when the Gulf War was declared so everyone could express our feelings and cry. 

I was down with all that, but Tom was so self-righteous and really almost sadistic, making us sit through film after film about the stages of radiation sickness in Hiroshima and a day in the life of an Auschwitz prisoner. Almost everyone in that class was white and rich. I was one of the few scholarship kids. I remember arguing with Tom, but, like that kid at my gym, I didn't have the sophistication to articulate my critique.

Why did he need us to feel a certain way about history? Was this really education or was it something else?  

Shep Fairey

Shahirah, who has been doing amazing reporting on the Rohingya, has been sending me terrifying articles about the policing of identity politics in fiction. Kirkus recently retracted a star from one of their YA reviews after readers complained about the novel's depiction of Muslim characters through the eyes of a white protagonist. A writer who dared to ask, "I'm Indian. Can I Write Black Characters?" has been eviscerated on the blogosphere, where the consensus answer seems to be: "No. Stay in your lane." She writes:

The debate about whether writers should create worlds and characters based in cultures other than their own is an important one. At its core, pushback in this area serves as a corrective to centuries of colonialism, stereotypical portrayals and racist caricatures. But I worry about how we balance pertinent questions about appropriation with the creative freedom to push boundaries and take risks that are essential to good writing.

I worry about this, too. Sometimes I worry so much that I can't write. My YA manuscript has a biracial heroine. It is filled with people of diverse backgrounds and off-color humor, because it's a boxing book and that's the boxing world.

I'm far more worried about the response of adult gatekeepers than the sensibilities of my young readers. I have confidence in my ability to reach young people. I have no confidence in my ability to deal with the morality police in art. That's why I left the academic world after four years at Brown and did anything else I could to survive: cooking, yoga, boxing. The academy didn't teach us to keep an open mind or make things of value. It taught us to win arguments. It taught us contempt for the opposition. 

I was so lucky to find boxing. And I was lucky to be there for the rise of Claressa Shields, the greatest woman boxer of all time. It was a wild ride, and I want to take people on that ride. My novel has to be "problematic," in the true meaning of that word (not the way Kirkus uses it nor the way we used it at Brown), because boxing itself is problematic.

From Merriam-Webster:

Most importantly, my novel has to be fun, because boxing is fun, and because what I most want to do with my words is make people laugh and cry. Not win, except maybe in the sense of winning the endless battle against shame.

via @jfagone on Twitter 

I got mad at so many people this weekend. My wonderful boss, who voted for Trump and yet does extraordinary good for the youth in New York by running our free gyms, posted an argument suggesting that our program was an antidote to anthem protesting. 

The great thing about our gym is that it brings together so many different kinds of people. I've had kids tell me, proudly, "In my country, we throw gay people off mountains." I've heard boys say things about girls that I cannot retype for fear of spontaneously combusting. Yet I've also been treated with more genuine respect there than at the cocktail parties of the liberal elite to which I once fancied I belonged.

The bottom line is, we learn from each other. As that kid who got into Stanford by writing #blacklivesmatter over and over again as his application essay told the Washington Post, "It really is so hard to hate someone you know."

Heather Hardy, via Facebook 

My next rage attack came from comment threads on boxer Shelly Vincent's page about Heather Hardy. Hardy and Vincent are top female featherweights who have made opposite choices about how to market themselves. Shelly's fans were being quite vicious and slut-shaming about what Heather wore to weigh-in for her Bellator MMA fight. I wrote to Shelly complaining about it, and she was kind enough to respond. 

Both women are rape survivors. Both value their roles as mentors to young women. Both are devoted to their sport. They legitimately don't like each other, which is good for business, but sometimes we forget there's a real person on the other end of the Internet. And that she isn't the real enemy.

Heather lost by bloody TKO in the 2nd round.

I fought with two more of my friends.

L. and I argued about whether a woman writing about being abused by Harvey Weinstein constitutes Art. I took the negative position.

J. and I argued because she said, like it was completely obvious, "You're not a feminist, Sarah." Hearing one of my girlfriends say this about me made me feel sort of like Krzysztof Włodarczyk after Murat Gassiev landed a double left uppercut to his face and ribs.

photo: Gabe Oppenheim

J. wouldn't come out and say exactly why I'm not, in her estimation, a feminist, but I think it has something to do with sex. 

I like what Caitlin Moran wrote in How to Be a Woman:

There is currently this idea that feminists aren't supposed to bitch about each other...Well, personally, I believe that feminism will get you so far, and then you have to start bitching...

Because the purpose of feminism isn't to make a particular type of woman. The idea that there are inherently wrong and inherently right "types" of women is what's screwed feminism for so long -- this idea that "we" wouldn't accept slaggy birds, dim birds, birds that bitch, birds that hire cleaners, birds that stay at home with their kids, birds that have pink Mini Metros with POWERED BY FAIRY DUST! bumper stickers, birds in burkas, or birds that like to pretend, in their heads, that they're married to Zach Braff from Scrubs and that you sometimes have sex in an ambulance while the rest of the cast watch and, latterly, clap. You know what? Feminism will have all of you.

What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy, and smug they might be.

Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.

photo: Jean Manon

On Saturday I went to the aforementioned Murat Gassiev slugfest in Newark, where I had the enlightening assignment of helping the ring card girls climb the ring stairs in their precarious heels. I held the ropes open for them as they ducked through, graceful despite their restrictive black miniskirts, and stood on the apron as they made their darling rounds, elbows hyperextended, permasmiles affixed. Whistles rained down from the Poles in the upper balconies. It was the best view I have ever had of the ring during a pro fight.

Mia and Janine were gorgeous and gracious and industrious and smart. They had to stand center ring during the introduction of the main event, holding aloft the Russian, Polish, and American flags throughout the ring walks, fighter introductions, and three national anthems. Taking into account the height of their heels and the unwavering brilliance of their smiles, this was arguably a greater athletic performance than Steve Bujaj delivered in the main supporting bout. 

 

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

I was having too much fun to blog.

Paris was supposed to be a writing retreat, but so many of my friends were passing through that it wound up being like Rick's Cafe in Casablanca.

My hostess Annie was impossibly generous. I felt at home in her sunny one-bedroom in St. Denis, in the shadow of the Basilica. She woke up at 3 AM to work in the metro while I dozed off my midnight dinners. My old buddy Zack, at work on the great American war novel, came out to hear Ethan play jazz.

Debi and I had cheese and rose to celebrate the publication of her stunning book on Guantanemo.

And Rati and I and made mischief, ate fondue, and saw organ concerts.

 

Then I went to Meaux and got tattooed. A few years back, Nicolas had inked an X on my ring finger for my tenth anniversary. This time I wanted something big. He designed a beautiful mongoose and cobra, entwined in combat, that stretches from my hip to my knee. 

Getting tattooed by Nicolas is a 360-degree art experience. His wife bustles about, minding toddlers, while his tweenage son bakes pastry. Nicolas talks soothingly of philosophy while you shudder with pain. There are kittens and chickens and vintage Transformers and beer and Monbazillac and Haribo-infused vodka in a bottle shaped like a skull. And Meaux is the home of brie, so there's also lots of cheese.

Anyone who thinks French people are rude doesn't know the right French people. After all that, our week in London was a little gray. I got a bad cold. Ethan played Ronnie Scott's and I stayed glued to the hotel bar, writing feverishly about Shame for the Threepenny Review. Then we went to Cornwall, where our minds were blown.

Ethan covers the magic of the St. Endellion Festival in his blog post. The Verdi Requiem was probably the best concert I've ever been to. We got to see Billy Budd three times. I read the Melville and stayed up late drinking champagne and talking about characterization with our friend Mark Padmore and the other opera stars. It was a peak experience I will treasure for the rest of my life.

 

Everybody, from the opera stars to the childcare workers, is a volunteer. I wanted to participate and was happy that they let me help in the kitchen. Elsie and I made Stout Cake, adapted from a Nigella recipe. 

I was only back in the gym for a second before I flew to Chicago for one last party. Shah hosted, and Nigel rolled through!

I fell in love with a dog named Winter.

And I officiated the wedding ceremony of my dear friends Corey and Amanda at the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool, a secret garden in the heart of Lincoln Park. This was my seventh wedding and the only one to count a blue heron among its guests. Corey had chosen the following James Baldwin quote, upon which I have been ceaselessly reflecting:

"Love takes away the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

Afterward we went back to the hotel and watched the Mayweather-McGregor fight, and I threw my back out rooting for Floyd. It still hurts. 

 

 

Terminal 2

I'm killing six hours in Charles de Gaule while I wait for Annie to fetch me. Paris, where everyone looks beautiful and even being sleep-deprived in an airport feels luxurious.

I met Annie five years ago in the Paris metro. I was unsure which option to select on the ticket machine, so I went to the window and said to the man working there, in my weirdo French, "It's been a long time since I've done this."

The man laughed and said, "Me, too. It's been a long time since I've done this."

He and his female colleague both came out of the little booth. It seemed like they knew my mom and I would be good for a laugh. The man spoke English, so Mom pounced and was soon asking him if he was Jewish. (He was, from Algeria. Mom asked every vaguely Semitic Parisian if they were Jewish. It was embarrassing but led to some good conversations.) 

Meanwhile, the woman told me her name was Annie and that she was from the West Indies. I said, "I coach boxing in a West Indian neighborhood in New York."

She said, "I coach kickboxing! I was the featherweight champion of Paris."

I told her I had been the featherweight champion of New York for a second. I went and trained with her fighters, and we've been friends ever since. This seemed like a good time to throw myself on her hospitality.

Air France delivered on the flight over with ample wine and a delightful selection of classic Disney movies. I hadn't seen Beauty and the Beast in ages and was kind of blown away by how beautifully it's constructed. 

I remember watching Jean Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete in high school French class. When I came home from school, Mom said, to my horror, "Great movie. Beast represents the penis, and Beauty is the vagina." 

This was too much information for a fourteen-year-old, but it certainly shaped my future critical output. 

Lyrics by Howard Ashman, who died of AIDS just before the film's release. 

 

Tale as old as time

True as it can be

Barely even friends

then somebody bends

Unexpectedly

 

Just a little change

Small to say the least

Both a little scared

Neither one prepared

Beauty and the beast

 

Ever just the same

Ever a surprise

Ever as before

Ever just as sure

As the sun will rise

 

Tale as old as time

Tune as old as song

Bittersweet and strange

Finding you can change

Learning you were wrong

 

Certain as the sun

Rising in the east

Tale as old as time

Song as old as rhyme

Beauty and the beast

 

 

Malingerings

My summer project is to get out of the city as much as possible, ostensibly to write my boxing novel but so far just to procrastinate, hence this blog post, and malinger, which is my new favorite word. 

This week I have imposed myself on my former writing teacher in idyllic Amagansett. Steve Friedman is one of those people without whom I would have given up writing. He hired me to assist on Scott Jurek's memoir Eat and Run, despite the fact that I was due to donate a kidney midway through, and he once told me, a propos of my love for the essay form and lack of computer skills, "You are a young dinosaur," which I still use as an affirmation.

"Me Slag no like anything!" 

When I was little, kids used to tease me by calling me "tri-Sarah-tops," which really hurt my feelings but now doesn't seem so bad. Although I lack the distinctive facial horn, I am low-to-the-ground, combative, and nearly extinct.

Here's some other chestnuts from Steve Friedman:

Funny stuff comes in threes.

Things have more power when they remain unnamed.

Write what you write best, rather than reaching for what you admire in others.

I especially needed that last one. We undervalue what comes easily, but the reason it comes easily is because it is ours. For example, I look up to my friend Shahirah, because her writing displays such timeliness and astute political understanding, but I know better than to try to write like that.

Shahirah also keeps me from giving up writing. I have pined for her greatly since her removal to Chi-town, but she is most excellent on the texteses and today inspired me with some words about Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose morning schedule makes me feel marginally better about myself:

CHART
MISS MILLAY
Dec. 31, 1940

Awoke 7:30, after untroubled night. Pain less than previous day.
7:35- Urinated- no difficulty or distress
7:40- 3/8 gr. M.S. {morphine shot} hypodermically, self-administered in left upper arm…
7:45-8- smoked cigarette (Egyptian) mouth burns from excessive smoking
8:15- Thirsty, went to the ice box for a glass of water, but no water there. Take can of beer instead which do not want. Headache, lassitude…
8:20- cigarette (Egyptian)
9:00- “
9:30- Gin Rickey (cigarette)
11:15- Gin Rickey
12:15- Martini (4 cigarettes)
12:45- 1/4 grain M.S. & cigarette
1.- Pain bad and also in lumbar region. no relief from M.S.

I think I like the word "malinger" so much because it somehow feels onomatopoetic, although it can't be, since malingering is pretty much a silent activity apart from the sound of your fingers on the keyboard as you Google your frenemies and the occasional sigh of self-pity.

Claudia Rankine (who is sighing for a much more legit reason) writes:

"To live through the days sometimes you moan like a deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control these sighs than that which brings the sighs about."

Citizen is a brilliant, beautiful, compressed, genre-defying book that I read on the recommendation of my husband, the misogynist, who sighed a whole lot while he was being trolled.

I'll eventually stop calling my husband "The Misogynist," but not yet, because it's still too much fun. He took a while to stop calling me "The Replicant" after my jump rope injury put me in an orthopedic boot that he claimed made me look like a robot from Blade Runner. This was actually a compliment, though. Because look at Pris.

Coincidentally, I sustained the jump rope injury aboard the same ill-fated jazz cruise on which Ethan became a misogynist by interviewing Robert Glasper. Although maybe it wasn't so ill-fated as we once suspected, because, while I iced my leg and malingered, he spent the cruise composing a suite of music for a new Mark Morris dance called Pepperland that just premiered in Liverpool to great acclaim.

I was lucky enough to catch a dress rehearsal, although without Elizabeth Kurtzman's fabulous costumes. The music is beautiful and strange, for voice, theramin (!!!), piano, harpsichord, trombone, soprano sax (Sam Newsome!), and drums. The dance, like all of Mark's work, is both simple and deep, funny and sad. I can't wait until it comes to BAM.

There are actual roosters crowing as I blog, which reminds me that "cock-a-doodle-do" was the example my sixth grade English teacher, Ferne, gave when I asked her what "onomatopoetic" meant. When I touched down in Paris for the first time, a passenger on my plane cried out "Cocorico!" which is how roosters crow in French. 

My Sanskrit teacher, Vyas Houston, said all of Sanskrit was like that, the sound of the words matching the essential vibration of the objects they signified, even for abstract nouns like satya or ahimsa. I don't know how accurate that is, but I do know that Vyas lived in a world of enhanced connection to sound. In a weekend seminar of 40 people, he would have everyone's name memorized by the end of the morning session, and it wasn't some cheap memory trick. He matched the sound of your name to who you were. When you ran into him years later, he still knew your name. 

"Writing is writing," says Steve, when I tell him all I did today was blog. "Even not writing is writing."

 

 

 

My Husband, the Misogynist: Ethan Iverson, Robert Glasper, Boxing, and Me

It’s been a rough few days in the Iverson-Deming household, what with this whole the-Internet-thinks-my-husband-hates-women thing. If you’re not up on the fray, while Ethan and I were on the dumb jazz cruise and I was laid up with a torn calf muscle – and if you take only one thing from this post, let it be this: DON’T JUMP ROPE ON A BOAT – in between waiting on me hand and foot, bugging me about finishing my novel, and composing a suite of dance music, Ethan interviewed three musicians for his blog, including Robert Glasper.

Glasper told my husband:

I’ve seen what that does to the audience, playing that groove. I love making the audience feel that way. Getting back to women: women love that. They don’t love a whole lot of soloing. When you hit that one groove and stay there, it’s like musical clitoris. You’re there, you stay on that groove, and the women’s eyes close and they start to sway, going into a trance.

The Internet exploded with outrage, calling this “vile sexism.” At first, people weren’t so much blaming Ethan, because he hadn’t said it himself, although some suggested he should have cut it from the interview. But what blogger in her right mind would cut a money quote like that? It’s not hate speech. The only reason to censor something like that is if you have a vested interest in keeping Glasper out of hot water or if you’re writing for kids.

Boxer Emile Griffith (Getty Images)

I had a nice conversation on the jazz boat with Robert Glasper and Terrence Blanchard, who were lounging poolside apres-gig, about the tragic life of the gay boxing champion Emile Griffith. I can tell a misogynist the same way I can tell a professional escort: their eyes glaze over during conversation because they have no use for me. Glasper wasn’t like that. I see his comments as a window into the erotic impulse in a male performer.

Obviously it’s sexist to contend that women are uncritical listeners who just want to groove out and don’t appreciate esoteric art. Woman=matter. Man=mind. An age-old equation every female intellectual needs to stare down at some point. I tried to explain that to Ethan right after the shit hit the fan, but he was already in defense mode and couldn’t take it in.

I watched with mild alarm as he posted successive updates, entrenching his position. I agreed with him that people were overreacting, and that this kind of thing led to Trump's rise. But I also recognize that this argument can lead to dangerous places. We do need to pay attention to how we speak.

I think Ethan would have apologized immediately if the critique came in the first instance from women with a stake in the music or men who were civil. But that’s not what happened. The quote was pulled out of context by jazz boys fighting for turf. It was batted back and forth with sporting glee until people he’d never met were Tweeting asking if he thought women should even be allowed to play jazz.

If you’ve never been subject to an Internet shitstorm, you can’t understand just how fucked up and deeply personal things get. I got trolled by the nation of Ireland during the Summer Olympics, because I fired off a dumb Tweet about boxer Michael Conlan. By the time the two hundredth Irishman has called you a stupid cunt who knows nothing about boxing, you’re not in the mood to apologize.  

A few days into the pile-on, Ethan really started to unravel. He came home from a gig on the verge of tears because he was getting lost in the forms. The idea that he had hurt so many women he didn’t even know was really painful to him. Real feminism isn’t about tokenism or irreproachable usage: It’s about valuing female power and intellect. It’s about the way Ethan treats me, my mother, his teacher Sophia, his female students and collaborators, and the great women musicians, writers, and dancers he reveres.

Let me tell you how we met. On New Year’s Eve 2001, the saxophonist Bill McHenry threw a costume party. I went in my (extremely unflattering) amateur boxing gear, including my mouthpiece and abdominal protector. It was like that scene in Buffy where Willow wears an Inuit snowsuit because she doesn’t understand that Halloween is a free pass to dress like a slut.

When I got to the floor with the booze, I saw this bald guy, deep in his cups, whose nasal Midwestern voice floated to me across the brownstone.

“I have no patience,” he was saying, “for these narcissistic male writers like Updike and Mailer and Roth who have no use for women.”

I was astonished. It would have been love at first sight, except that I didn’t think anyone who got drunk and complained about misogyny in literature could possibly be heterosexual. Instead, I thought, “We are going to be best friends.”

He is still my best friend, and he turned out to be straight!

I was very glad he ended up apologizing about the interview, and Ethan was, too. I think it humbled and strengthened him. At the gig the other night, he soloed with a freedom and sadness I hadn’t heard in a long time. If you wanna play the blues, you gotta pay the dues. And we don’t get to choose what they are.

photo: Sue Johnson

The other day at the Barclays Center, I watched featherweight champion Heather Hardy improve to 19-0 to an empty stadium. Hers was the only woman’s bout on the card, and they made her go first, off TV, so that she took her ring walk while the doors of the venue were still closed and her sponsors waited outside in the cold. This despite the fact that she sold $37,000 worth of tickets, far more than anyone on the card. They put the kid from my gym who was having his very first pro fight – and who was not, as a male prospect, required to sell any tickets – in a favorable position near the main event. That is misogyny.

I watched the fights from the nosebleed seats, because I’ve quit trying to get press credentialed. The only time in my twenty years of involvement with boxing that I’ve consistently gotten great access was when I was fucking this male media executive who knew nothing about boxing. A couple years ago, my membership application was rejected by the Boxing Writer’s Association of America. I wasn’t trying to win an award or anything; I was just trying to be a member of the only trade association in my craft.

Check out the condescending rejection note they sent me, and bear in mind that I’ve published three novels, won a Pushcart Prize and McDowell Fellowship, got cited in Best American Essays and Best American Sportswriting, won the NYC Golden Gloves, assisted in the coaching of multiple national champions, and wrote for NBC’s boxing coverage of the London Games:

Dear Sarah,

I’m sorry to report that the membership committee has voted against admitting you to the BWAA at the present time. No one person was responsible for this decision.  It was a consensus reached after discussion among all committee members.

The act of writing a hundred or more articles about boxing does not necessarily qualify an applicant for membership.  We look for articles that are full journalistic work.  We look for variety.  And we look for articles that evince a full understanding of what goes on behind the scenes as well as on-camera.

Your love for the sport came through in your application and you have plenty of background.  I encourage you to look at some examples of what the BWAA considers to be exemplary writing about boxing and absorb the ways in which the authors try to go above and beyond in their fact-finding, their analysis, and their use of language. Links to many award-winning boxing articles from the past several years are here: http://www.bwaa.org/writingawards.htm

Best of luck with your continued writing about boxing.  Just like it works in the ring, the best way to move up the ladder is to keep working at it. Applicants may reapply for admission after one year.

Best wishes,

Cliff Rold

You can bet I will not be reapplying, if only because I’m scared of what I might do to Cliff Rold if I run into him at the yearly banquet. The BWAA has four women out of 115 members and they’re all in the non-voting category. That is misogyny. And when I’m crying with impotent rage over some bullshit like this, Ethan is the one who holds me and talks about Virginia Woolf. I would have thrown in the towel years ago if not for him.

My tenth anniversary tattoo

Is it misogyny when one of my male colleagues tells our fighters, “Don’t punch like a girl”? I guess. He’s using “girl” to signify “weak person who doesn’t understand how to generate power from the lower body.” It’s sexist language, but I know what he means, and I know he’s not talking about me. I’ve seen the respect he accords his wife and daughters and the few serious women boxers who have come through our doors to train. So I pick my battles.

When his language is particularly egregious – or when there are actual girls present – I pipe up, but I avoid direct attack. It is very hard to change someone, and (as I wrote in the following post on the Women’s March) nobody learns when they feel shamed and backed into a corner. People learn when they are calm enough to take in new information.

My husband blogs for free, even though we’re being priced out of our apartment and I am a financial albatross. He pays for his interview transcriptions himself and spends hundreds of hours every year researching and editing. He does what he does out of love, so I think people will forgive him.

Haters gonna hate. If even one more person learned where the clitoris is, my team won.

Women (and Girls!) March on Washington

I put a Moleskine in the pocket of my coat but didn't take notes on the march. Let the youngsters do the heavy lifting. The Lower East Side Girls Club had serious podcasting and banner-making chops.

Photos by Sue Jaye Johnson

We rolled out of Manhattan on a chartered bus at 6 AM, fortified with fresh-squeezed juices, mini-muffins, and pumpkin loaves. Because the revolution serves good food and happiness is the best revenge.

 

The girls made people happy. They wore glitter on their cheeks and I Know My Rights tee-shirts à la Colin Kaepernick. Some interviewed marchers about their histories and beliefs, while others leaned over the barriers, boosting the crowd. When Aisha yelled through the megaphone about justice being built on the backbones of girls, everybody cheered.

Due to the historic turnout, we were bottlenecked and unable to hear the speakers or music. This was a little bit of a bummer but also a reminder of the limited nature of any one person's view. 

As Sue said, "Sometimes just getting to the gig is the gig." 

I saw kids from Bucknell College, Jewish and LGBT groups, a Pacific Islanders drum corps, Texans and Floridians and lots of other New Yorkers, goofballs in Harry Potter outfits proclaiming Trump a Slytherin, women dressed like suffragettes, and a weatherbeaten white couple with a sign that read "We Marched in Selma." At one point, Arielle and Jai materialized like two Venuses.

Back when I was a broke boxer, I lived in their brownstone, tutoring Arielle in French and math. Now she's all grown up and making her own movies.

I reflected on all the women who have supported me throughout my life, offering shelter, sandwiches, inspiration.

Look who else we saw! Tiara Brown, former world amateur champion, in full superhero mode. While we chatted and took selfies, Officer Brown helped a half dozen people, at one point even allowing a woman who had lost her car to get some cell phone juice from the cop van. The streets are safer with strong, community-minded police like Tiara out there. Plus she looks fierce in that uniform. Beauty is also a form of revenge.

On the bus home, the girls were jubilant over Colin Kaepernick's Instagram repost of their picture. He wrote: "It's beautiful to see powerful young women fighting systemic oppression! They are our future!" The post has over 40,000 likes, but it also has a comment thread that is truly astounding in its bile. 

I don't know if the Internet has made people more vicious, but certainly it degrades discourse. And certainly it allowed Trump to rise. 

Both sides are guilty of this. We lob one-liners at each other like molotov cocktails, hoping to shame the opposition into silence. But people do not learn when they are ashamed; people learn when they are calm. And you can't attack directly; you need to take them by surprise. Women are good at that.

Dead Dad Essay

I started this blog eight years ago, and one of my first posts was a little prose poem about my fatherless childhood. A few weeks later, my dad called to wish me a happy birthday. 

I picked up, even though I wasn't drunk. My parents divorced when I was two, and conversations with Dad were something I endured every year or so, like going to the gynecologist. The trick was to talk constantly so as to avoid awkward silences, while also steering clear of any topic that made me feel vulnerable, such as politics, feminism, race in America, my writing, my mother, or my hopes and dreams. It helped to be drunk.

Dad was retiring soon from the Oklahoma City urban planning department, and I asked about his plans. My stepmother’s parents had just died, leaving a hundred head of cattle orphaned on their ranch. Donna was trying to convince Dad to take the reins. 

“But what I really want,” he said, his voice sheepish, “is to buy a big old RV and take Donna on the road. Just be a bum for a while.”

This made me unaccountably sad. Somehow I just knew it would never happen. 

I could hear my husband lurking in the bedroom, pretending not to listen. Ethan was protective when it came to my complex parental relationships. He always took my side, even when I was wrong. This was one of his best qualities.

“I read your blog,” my father said.

My heartbeat accelerated as I tried to recall the last thing I’d posted. 

“About when you and Danny were little.”

Oh God. The piece about our fatherless childhood. 

It had never occurred to me my father might read that. I began apologizing, but he cut me off.

“I am so sorry I wasn’t there for you when you were growing up,” he said.

The words had the weighty feeling of something rehearsed. It made me intensely uncomfortable. My husband materialized by my side, placing one of his soft pianist’s hands on my shoulder.

“It’s alright, Dad,” I said. “Everything turned out okay.”

Mom had told me many times that she left my father for my sake – “It was okay to treat me like a piece of shit, but I wouldn’t let him do that to you” – and for all her apocryphal accounts, I believed this one.

“I felt sorry when I read your blog,” Dad drawled. “But that was just my first reaction. I read it again, and I thought...that’s a damn fine piece of writing.”

I was stunned. My father had criticized every piece of my work he had ever seen, dating back to the spice rack I made for him in fifth grade shop class. I think I dissociated a little. 

When I got off the phone, my husband had tears in his eyes. 

“Your father finally gave it up to you,” he said. 

Ethan’s own parents had never acknowledged his musical talent. His father was a painter who drank himself to death when Ethan was nineteen. We had several of his canvasses in our apartment: portraits of classic cars whose surfaces reflected faces, farmhouses, Wisconsin cornfields. Ethan’s mother and her boyfriend lived in Minnesota, where they cared for a younger brother with fetal alcohol syndrome. They were kind people yet permanently diminished by life’s disappointments; both would be dead within the year. 

Superficially, my husband’s closemouthed Norwegian people differed from my volatile mix of Texan bible thumpers and East Coast Jews. Yet our families shared all the things that really mattered: florid mental illness, bad luck, the tendency to hoard things and/or sell them on eBay, a solid commitment to substance abuse, and conflicting stories about who raped whom. 

My marriage, as a consequence, maintained a foreign policy of splendid isolation. Ethan and I saw our birth families as a necessary yet painful part of our origin story, like the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker. They gave us the wounds that made us interesting, but one bite was enough; we didn’t go back to the spiders’ for Passover. 

A few years ago my father had come to stay with us in Brooklyn after one of his city planning conferences. The first thing he did was plug his iPod into our stereo and play his own music, an action my husband later described as “the most emasculating thing you can do to a jazz musician in his own home.” Dad was just trying to impress Ethan, but it was a misstep, as usual. The trip was full of them. 

The “Slow Flow” yoga class we attended together was not meant as revenge. I thought it would be a relaxing exercise experience, but the founders of the Laughing Lotus Yoga Center obviously had in mind some strange usage of the word “slow” that I wasn’t previously aware of. Jasmine, a hypomanic brunette with no body fat, opened class with a ten-minute monologue about redecorating her altar. Dad’s two years of gentle yoga at the Oklahoma City YMCA had not prepared him for an ordeal on this scale.

My own yoga training had begun at the Kripalu Center in the Berkshire Mountains. In a Kripalu class, emotionally damaged people of all shapes and sizes rolled around on the carpet, weeping. I’d never quite adjusted to the cool-kids yoga of New York, which centered around a push-up-type movement called a “vinyasa” performed in $200 pants.

Dad’s problems were worse. Like most heavy people, he had trouble stepping forward from downward dog into the lunge because his belly got in the way. We had side-by-side mats, so I had an excellent view of his hernial efforts as he struggled to keep up with the blaring trance music. I telepathically begged Jasmine for help, but she was busy adjusting the sacrums of the more attractive students. She ignored my father’s labored breathing the way Martha Stewart might ignore a farting dinner guest. After a while, Dad grew fatigued and toppled over. 

“This class is too advanced for you,” Jasmine hissed. “Please leave.”

Dad stumbled to his feet, blushing, and we rolled up our mats in silence. I felt like a horrible person. He had started taking yoga to connect with me, and here I was, setting him up to be humiliated. He and I were always out of sync, always trying to make up for time that was long gone.

After this visit, my husband said, “I have this feeling you should call your dad more. He’s not going to be around forever.”

I should have listened. My father took a bad fall off the porch steps of Donna’s family ranch, tearing the quadriceps tendons in both knees. His doctor recommended surgery to repair them. Double knee surgery on an inactive, overweight man seemed like a bad idea to me, but I didn’t get involved. I told Dad I would meditate and chant for him while he was under. 

As I was leaving to teach yoga one day, my cell rang.  

Dad was all alone in the recovery room, his voice groggy from anesthesia. The surgery was over. Not only had I not chanted or meditated, I hadn’t even thought of him at all. I stood on my stoop, blinking in the sun and trying to think of something to say. I was late for class and felt embarrassed, so I cut him short and got off the phone. 

Two weeks later I thought about calling, but I decided to have a drink first. By the time I got drunk, I forgot.

The next weekend I was with Ethan in a hotel room in Philadelphia. My cell rang, showing an Oklahoma area code. It was a police officer, who said my father had died. I could hear my stepmother crying in the background.  

I copied the words “pulmonary embolism” on a sheet of hotel stationery, my heart leaden with guilt. I tried to remember our last phone call. 

Had I even said “I love you”? 

I couldn’t remember. 

I flew to Oklahoma, where two Presbyterian ministers – one fat and one skinny – were presiding over my father’s funeral. The fat minister was from the big church in Oklahoma City whose patrician congregation had made my father uncomfortable. He was pale and sweaty and looked on the verge of death himself. 

“How would you describe Mike’s political views?” he asked us at the pre-funeral meeting.

We all remained silent, my stepmother because her mind was frozen with grief, her sister Janet because she was deferring to us, and me because I did not want to speak ill of the dead.

“Well,” drawled the fat minister, “would you say Mike was on the side of the little guy or of big government?” 

The leading nature of the question enraged me.

“He would have said he was for the little guy,” I answered, “but he voted Republican.”

The fat minister regarded me with naked loathing. At the end of the visit, he turned to face Donna and Janet and said, “You’re such simple, unpretentious people. I know how much Mike valued that.”

The skinny minister received us in his small rural church in Ardmore, Oklahoma. He was upbeat, sales-oriented, and so white that he’d had the top of his head burned off to combat skin cancer. He told a fun story about how hard it had been not to cry at the last funeral he’d worked.

“One thing I’ve learned is that it’s always best to avoid unpleasant surprises!” said the skinny minister. “Any guests who might be a source of conflict?”

Donna looked at me.

“Mom isn’t coming,” I said.

“Well...now...Sarah, maybe she wants to come.”

I got that icky feeling that preceded our passive-aggressive negotiations about where to eat lunch. My stepmother never revealed what she wanted until I had chosen the other option. 

“It didn’t occur to me to invite her,” I admitted.

Were exes supposed to come to a funeral? I certainly didn’t want her there. It was enough chaos dealing with my grief-addled stepmom, oversexed Granny with the early-stage Alzheimer’s, and Uncle Dave, who was writing a book on psychic Jesus.

“Isn’t it wonderful that we’re having this conversation now?” said the skinny minister. “No surprises!” 

He told a story about a wedding he’d worked where the bride had entrusted his ministerial fee to her trashy, drug-addicted mother. The mom absconded with the cash, but he’d never told the couple because he didn’t want to ruin their special day. 

“Why don’t you call your mother and invite her,” Donna said. 

I detected in her voice a touch of martyrdom.

Back at the ranch, I called Mom and told her Donna said she was welcome to come but that everyone would understand why she couldn’t. I suggested a nice flower arrangement might be appropriate.

“Great!” Mom cried. “I’ll fly out with Dan!” 

She was euphoric, viewing Dad’s funeral as an exciting vacation and chance to reconnect with old friends and enemies. I tried to dissuade her, but it was futile. When I told Donna my mother was coming, she burst into tears. 

“Your dad’s got juice,” my husband said. “Two babes fighting over his coffin.” 

I ironed the shirt my father wore. No one ever taught me to iron, so I went very slowly. It was thick blue cotton from Brook’s Brothers, and it looked good with his favorite tie, the one with the painted pear. 

I wore a black velvet dress that I’d bought under peer pressure while shopping with a socialite. For some reason I had never returned it. It felt good to have something rich to put on for Dad.

I forced myself to approach the corpse, arrayed beneath an explosion of carnations. It looked something like my father. The rouged cheeks and painted lips were wrong, but the thick silver hair was handsome as ever. I touched the chest. Even through the jacket, shirt, and undershirt it was hard as stone. 

At the service I read a list of sixty-two things I loved about my dad, one for every year of his life. As usual, I put in a dumb joke – #52: He had a cute accent, even though he thought I was the one with the accent – but the line that really had them rolling in the aisles was #42: He was coming around to the idea of being a rancher.

I hadn’t meant that to be funny. The funeral was in rural Ardmore, and I think it was Dad’s city slicker colleagues who were laughing. It was loud laughter, and I sensed beneath it an undercurrent of viciousness. I paused for a moment, feeling suddenly helpless. There were so many things about my father’s world that I would never understand.

When I returned a few weeks later to help Donna clean the house, I asked for the wireless password to check my email. She called out a string of digits. 

My fingers froze. “That’s my birthday.” 

“Your birthday was his password for everything,” she said.

It’s hard to explain why this detail should be what made me grieve. Maybe it’s because my father was a detail man. When I do math, I feel his mind in mine. Even in death he was orderly: all the bills filed away, written in his beautiful draftsman’s hand. 

I cried then, and I am crying again now, thinking of my big, silent father typing my birthday into ATMs and voice mail systems, day after day. Meanwhile, weeks went by when he never even crossed my mind. 

It was like getting to the end of a sad whodunit. All the clues: how my father used to say the happiest night of his life was a dinner spent with me and my brother; the countless strangers at the funeral who told me how proud he was of me; the dry-erase board at his office where I’d written “Hi Dad” when I was twelve, which he’d never let anyone clean, after all these years. 

“Your parents are the people who always have to take you in,” my husband said. “When they’re dead, you have nowhere to go.”

Dad would have taken me in, but I had never asked. It became a point of pride never to ask him for anything. It hit me so hard. My father loved me. He had always loved me, and I never knew.

Exotic World

Just back from Vegas, where I covered the Burlesque Hall of Fame weekend for Penthouse Forum. Here I am with my dear friend Peekaboo (in the see-through dress and pasties) and her crew of starlets and dandies. Peekaboo competed for Miss Exotic World the same day American Pharaoh won the triple crown. Although the title went to Trixie Little, Peeks danced her ass off and is the queen of my heart.

Photo: Debi Cornwall

My favorite kid from our gym just made his pro debut. Now I'm taking an extended break from boxing while I try to get this novel into shape.

 

Ethan got me a llama in Australia to keep me company on my homeless tour. Our place is still being patched up post-fire, but I've lined up some luxurious squats thanks to very generous friends. Lllama and I are currently residing in Bellport, where the sea air is fine.  

Another Class of Cobbler

Debi warned me not to bring just any shoes to her shoemaker, as he has been known to deny service to footwear he considers gauche. I waited until I had two pairs of vintage heels from Ethan's 90-year-old piano teacher Sophia. 

The heels had been given to Sophia by her friend Sita Devi, the Maharani of Baroda, a mysterious Indian noblewoman who used to cavort with the Paris jet set. The Maharani gave Sophia a lot of gifts, including a collection of 107 saris. 

The shoemaker was a beetle-browed Russian who operated out of a storefront on Montague Street next to Connecticut Muffin. He examined the pumps silently. One pair was gold with a rhinestone teardrop over the toe; the other was lavender silk. They were so old that the bottoms of the heels had crumbled away.  

"Nice shoes," he said at last.

I swelled with pride. "They belonged to a princess." 

"I know," he said.

After he fixed them I wore them a few times. They made me think of the Little Mermaid. Not the Disney version, the Andersen original, where the witch tells the little mermaid, "you will feel great pain, as if a sword were passing through you. But all who see you will say that you are the prettiest little human being they ever saw."

After that, I went back to my local guy, an Italian man who never judged me for buying cheap shoes that needed to be resoled constantly because I walk weird. But then one day his store was closed down, and I heard from the neighbors that something awful had happened to him. And I had one pair of boots - gray suede with stacked heels that I bought in Genoa with my mom - that had proven beyond the Italian's power to mend. So today I returned to Debi's guy with three pairs of shoes that had survived our apartment fire.

Things were subtly changed. The Connecticut Muffin was now defunct. There was a row of old shoes for sale next to the register. The Russian greeted me eagerly and showed not the slightest scorn for the pair of Chinese Laundry peep-toe booties that I had bought at TJ Maxx with Cousin Nikki for $30, ten dollars cheaper than what he now demanded for resoling.

Although that seemed outlandish, the shoes were surprisingly versatile. I'd worn the stilettos down to the metal core, creating a terrible sensation when I walked on pavement, like the shoe equivalent of tinfoil on fillings.

"I don't know if you can even fix these," I said, demonstrating the loose heel on the gray boots that the Italian had only worsened. The Russian disappeared into the back with them, then returned a moment later.

"I can fix," he said. 

He turned my baby blue Donald Pliner cowboy boots over in his hands. They didn't even really need new soles, I realized. I had brought them in to elevate the collection.

"These are well made," he said.

"Yeah."

My stepmom had bought them for me in Houston after we'd buried my dad. I thought about telling the Russian that, but I was afraid he'd say, "I know."

He added up some figures in his head and announced the repairs would cost $165.

This was a staggering figure, but we lost so much in the fire that I've taken a sort of nihilistic attitude to financial transactions. I let a car service driver charge me $20 for a ride today that should have cost $8, and the other day I bought a $30 pair of panties.

"You pay full amount in cash now," said the Russian.

I only had $75, so he told me to come back with the rest tomorrow. I told him I wasn't sure I'd have time.

"Come soon. Bring cash. Rent is expensive here."

He pointed sadly to the row of old shoes for sale and told me they had been left behind by former customers.

I asked his name, and he said it was Vitaly.  

"Like Vitaly Klitschko," I said. 

"No!" he cried.

He launched into a long diatribe about Vitaly's venal approach to Ukrainian politics. I'm seeing Wladimir fight this Saturday at the Garden, before any of the shoes will be ready. I should have taken notes.

 

 

 

 

Whiplash

My husband really gets into it about jazz drumming and race over at Do the Math. 

Tonight he plays in the solo piano showcase at the Village Vanguard, part of an exciting week of programming coordinated by Jason Moran to celebrate the 80th anniversary of that hallowed dive. I used to be scared to go to the Vanguard because the owner was so mean. Now it's my favorite place to hear music. I guess it wouldn't be a treasure if it didn't have a dragon.

Thanks to everyone for your support about the fire. Still no progress on our place, and we've got crash pads lined up through April. 

 

When I walk in the door of the boxing gym, I always feel better. I never know what kind of questions the young people will ask me. I've got a poetry student, a meditation buddy, an aspiring essayist, a kid slogging through pre-calculus, and yesterday Donovan brought in some linear equations. Meanwhile, our elite fighters continue to kick ass in the Golden Gloves. Last night Chiquito made it to the finals at the Barclays Center. Shu Shu is in, too. Tonight Africa, Big Black, and Omar fight. 

As Ray Arcel told Thomas Hauser, "The important part of boxing is not that youngsters realize their dreams, but that they can dream. Every day in the gym they're somebody special. They're a fighter."