by Sarah Deming
The pleasant warmth that had come over her was gone. She felt kind of cold inside. She pulled her winter jacket closer around herself.
Andre showily passed the pen to Monster and said, “Why don’t you keep it, champ. You’ll need it to sign that contract. Next time, that’ll be you in the Barclays.”
Everyone oohed and aahed over the generosity of the gift.
“What contract?” asked Coach sharply.
“Oh, didn’t you hear?” said Boca. His voice was exaggeratedly casual. “We’re going pro right after the Olympics. Andre here will be Monster’s manager.”
Coach let out an almost imperceptible laugh. He glanced at Monster and said, “Show it to a lawyer before you sign, young man.”
Silence fell over the group. Gravity still had a gross feeling in the pit of her stomach from what Andre had said to her. Suddenly she just wanted to go home.
Finally Mr. Rizzo said, “Don’t worry, Jefferson. I’d never let one of my kids sign anything without running it by my lawyers.”
Coach grunted. He liked Mr. Rizzo; everyone did.
Andre cleared his throat and said, “How about that steak dinner, gentlemen?”
“We out!” announced Boca, waving his arm.
Svetlana kissed Gravity good night. Boo Boo gave Tyler a hug. The Bocacrew shouldered their PLASMAFuel duffel bags. To Gravity’s horror, she saw Carmen Cruz emerge from the media door in her red dress and heels to take Andre’s arm as they headed off into the night.
“I hate that guy Andre,” Gravity said.
“Aw, he aight,” said D-Minus.
“He is not all right,” Gravity said. She wanted to tell them all what he had said to her, but she felt too ashamed.
“They’ll ruin Monster,” said Fatso.
“Bah,” said Coach. “He’ll do okay till the crossroads. They’ll build him up easy, then cash him in.”
Her phone chirped. It was Lefty, telling her to meet him across from Shake Shack. She woke up Auntie Rosa and collected Melsy and Ty, and they all piled into the Escalade.
Gravity leaned back into the pillows, adjusting the plate of chicharrones so it did not interfere with her sight line.
“Babe,” she said. “Scroll back like thirty seconds. I want to see that uppercut again.”
Lefty kissed her cheek as he reached for the laptop. She sighed, watching him stretch across the bed, and ran a hand over the back of his bare thigh. He turned to look at her and grinned.
“You good, mami?”
“Mmm.”
She had never in her life felt this relaxed. She and Lefty were in the bedroom he shared with one of his brothers. Lefty lived alone with his brothers; their mom was back in Puerto Rico and he never mentioned his dad. The brothers had been out all night, and she and Lefty had fucked on each of the beds, plus the floor.
Lefty hit Play and she snuggled into him, smelling his skin. They watched Alexis Argüello, the great Nicaraguan, in his old-school blue velvet trunks with his impossibly long limbs—his nickname was the Explosive Thin Man—lob a brutal uppercut to the midsection of Aaron Pryor.
“Goddamn,” said Lefty.
Gravity took another bite of the garlicky, greasy chicharron. It was hard to believe she had gotten hungry again after splitting that huge roti with Ty, but she and Lefty had burned a lot of calories. She moved her eyes from the computer screen to him.
He was looking right at her.
“You still hungry?” he asked.
“Not for food.”
He took her plate away and pressed her back into the tangled sheets, and they shared a garlicky kiss while Pryor and Argüello kept trading blows and Lefty’s latest track played on endless repeat. Just as he was sliding his hands inside her shirt, his door burst open and two boys came in.
“Yo, what’s up?” Lefty said, pulling his hands away from her breasts without seeming embarrassed. She tried to imitate his nonchalance.
“ ’Sup?” said the bigger of the two, nodding to her.
They were obviously Lefty’s big brothers. They had his same handsome baby face, but on them it looked harder. Lefty introduced her as his girlfriend, which gave her a rush of pride.
The bigger one, whose name was José, set a package of cigars on the nightstand and plopped down next to them on the bed.
He peered at the laptop. “So. What are we watching?”
“The first Pryor-Argüello,” she said.
“The Hawk!” said the other brother, Edgar, rising in Gravity’s estimation by knowing Aaron Pryor’s ring nickname. He crowded onto the bed too. Lefty put his arm around her.
Aaron Pyror was boxing behind the jab now. He circled beautifully, light on his tasseled boots. The change of tactics seemed to confuse Argüello.
“Aaron Pryor is slick,” said Lefty.
“Yeah, he is,” she agreed.
Gravity had watched this fight countless times. Both fighters were admirable for different reasons. Pryor switched directions, and his right cross drew blood. She looked away. She never liked to watch Argüello bleed.
“Smell this,” said José, holding out an open baggie of marijuana.
Lefty whistled and said it was good shit.
Gravity thought it smelled like a dead skunk. José broke up the buds with his fingers so they made a stinky mound on the newspaper he’d laid across his lap. The boys leaned in over it, discussing the features of this particular strain. Their enthusiasm was a total mystery to her.
“Boxers aren’t supposed to smoke,” she said, looking at Lefty.
He lifted his sad eyes to hers. “I’m not a boxer, boo. I’m a artist.”
She frowned. She wasn’t so sure it was good for artists, either, but that was between him and his rhymes.
José sliced open one of the cigars. “You never smoked before, mami?” he asked her.
“No.”
“Gravity’s a good girl,” said Lefty.
He sounded proud of her, which made her happy, but it was weird that he was proud of her for not smoking but thought it was okay for him to smoke. José scooped up the green hill and funneled it into a thin line down the middle of the gutted cigar.
“My brother rolls the best blunts in the Bronx, Gravity,” Lefty said. “You’re in the presence of greatness.”
“Mmm,” she said. “I’ll just sit in the other room while you smoke, okay?”
She didn’t want to be rude, because it was their house, but she couldn’t afford to take any chances with USADA. She got randomly drug tested now, and you could get disqualified just for taking the wrong kind of cough syrup. But Edgar and José waved her off.
“Nah, nah. We’ll go to the roof.”
With a jingle of chains and snapping shut of folding knives, the brothers gathered their things and left, kissing Gravity on the cheek on the way out. She watched Lefty debate whether he wanted to remain with her or follow the weed. It looked like she won by a split decision. She ignored the tendril of fear that snaked through her: if there was a rematch, she would lose.
On the laptop, Pryor and Argüello were still battling away. Gravity forgot all about Lefty as she lost herself in admiration for the two legendary warriors. The crowd at Miami’s Orange Bowl roared as the tall Nicaraguan advanced, landing a hard right just before the bell that ended round thirteen.
She settled back into Lefty’s lap, keeping her eyes on the screen. This YouTube upload cut away from the corners during the round breaks, so you couldn’t see the famous water bottle incident, but she had already watched it many times: Aaron Pryor’s trainer, Panama Lewis, yelling at one of his seconds, “Not that water bottle! Get me the one I mixed.”
Nobody knew what was in that bottle. A year later, Panama Lewis got caught taking stuffing out of one of his fighter’s gloves. The opponent in that bout went partially blind.
BOXINGFORGIRLS.COM
UNDISPUTED HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE BLOGOSPHERE
Carmen Cruz, Independent Journalist
March 20, 2016
US Women’s National Team Set in Box-Off
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.—This week in Colorado Springs, six boxers who were unsuccessful at the US Women’s Boxing Olympic Trials moved up or down in weight to clinch titles in the non-Olympic classes.
For those just joining us, only three women’s weight classes are represented in the Rio Olympics, as opposed to ten weight classes for men. (Why? Because sexism.) Although these six women will not be eligible for Rio, they will proudly represent the US at the Women’s Continental Championships next month in Cornwall, Ontario, and the Women’s World Boxing Championships in Qinhuangdao, China, in May.
Meet your new US team:
Light flyweight (106 lb) Marisol Bonilla, 22, Austin, Texas. It’s all in the family for Bonilla, who began training at age 8 at her father’s gym. A fast, defensively minded boxer, Bonilla cites the great “El Finito” López as her inspiration: “I want to prove to people that women can box as technically as men.”
OLYMPIC WEIGHT Flyweight (112 lb) Kaylee Miller, 23, Los Angeles. See our coverage of the Olympic Trials for more on this courageous scholar-athlete.
Bantamweight (119 lb) Aisha Johnson, 26, Washington, D.C. A bob-and-weave brawler, Johnson found boxing five years ago while living at a women’s shelter in Baltimore. She represented the US in the London Olympics. Johnson says, “Boxing is life or death to me. I always fought to survive.”
Featherweight (125 lb) Paloma Gonzales, 25, Sacramento. The most famous name on this roster, the bronze medalist from London has served as an inspiration to young Latina athletes everywhere and used to boast a list of corporate sponsors longer than her knee-length brown hair. Just a few have stayed with her after her upset loss this year at Trials. A well-rounded boxer-puncher, Gonzales should be a powerhouse at featherweight and a top contender for hardware in China. Says Gonzales, “The refereeing and judging at Trials was bullshit, but I’m not going to let down my fans. The best is yet to come for Paloma Gonzales.”
OLYMPIC WEIGHT Lightweight (132 lb) Gravity Delgado, 16, Brooklyn. This protégée of the legendary boxing sage Jefferson Thomas pulled off the upset of the Trials.
Light welterweight (141 lb) Aaliyah Williams, 32, Seattle. Owner of one of the best jabs in the women’s game, the powerful Williams boxed beautifully at this higher weight. Williams is a proud member of the Seattle Dockworkers Local 21 and volunteer counselor at Strong Heart, a center for LGBTQ sexual abuse survivors. She says, “I’m not just fighting for me but for all the women who never got the chance.”
Welterweight (152 lb) Nakima Fanning, 26, Newark. Fanning was a starter in basketball at Rutgers but dropped out after a knee injury ended her athletic scholarship. Now waiting tables at IHOP and attending night school for speech pathology, Fanning picked up boxing just three years ago: “I was really down after I had to quit playing ball. Boxing gave me hope.”
OLYMPIC WEIGHT Middleweight (165 lb) Sacred Jones, 21, Detroit. The magnificent middleweight has not lost a bout in four years.
Light heavyweight (178 lb) Kiki Mailer, 26, Philadelphia. Mailer is imposing at this higher weight. One of the best infighters in the women’s game, she trained alongside the great Bernard Hopkins and always has a trick up her sleeve, picked up in the legendary gyms of Philly. When we asked Mailer for a quote, she replied, “I got nothing more to say. I said it all in the ring.”
Heavyweight (178+ lb) Bettina Rosario, 33, San Diego. Rosario won the box-off unopposed. Women heavyweights are rare, and she has only managed to have six amateur bouts in four years of boxing. She says she often drives five hours for sparring: “I hope I get some fights in Canada and China.”
Gravity’s eyelids fluttered open as Ms. Laventhol said her name.
“People think gravity is just this glue holding us on to the earth,” she was saying. “But it’s not. Gravity is not that things fall down.”
Ms. Laventhol tucked a strand of her dark, limp hair behind one ear. “See, we feel stuck to the earth, but that’s only because the earth is so much incredibly more massive than we are!” She spread her arms as wide as they could go, and her dangly earrings jingled.
On the blackboard was a diagram of an inclined plane with a little cart rolling down it. She had written “F = ma” above it, and there were arrows going in different directions, labeled with Greek letters and words like “sin” and “cos” that Gravity was pretty sure nobody in class understood.
Sometimes Ms. Laventhol taught stuff that went way over their heads, but that was okay because she never tested them on it or anything. Her tests were always really easy: plugging things into equations and matching words with their definitions. But every once in a while, she would get kind of emotional and go off on some topic like black holes or the Big Bang.
“What people don’t realize about gravity,” she said, stabbing the blackboard with her chalk, “is that everything pulls on everything. Everything falls toward everything. We are all just drifting through space, slowly falling toward each other. And the closer we get to each other, the faster we go. That’s the universal law of attraction!”
A hand shot up.
Ms. Laventhol smiled and pointed with the chalk. “Yes! Nevaeh?”
“Can I have a bathroom pass?”
Ms. Laventhol’s shoulders slumped.
Gravity felt bad for her sometimes. She probably should have been teaching at Lincoln or somewhere else more academic.
She gave Nevaeh the bathroom pass and picked up an apple off her desk. She held it up. “The universality of gravity was the breakthrough that Newton had. When the apple fell on his head, Newton was like, ‘Oh, snap!’ ”
A few kids giggled. Sometimes Ms. Laventhol tried to use slang to relate to them, but it just sounded funny. She ignored this and forged on.
“He was like, ‘Dude! It’s not just a property of planets. It’s a property of everything!’ And that was a breakthrough. It was a unification and a simplification, a property independent of the quality of the objects.”
A property independent of the quality of the objects.
That reminded Gravity of Coach’s advice to her before her very first fight: “Everybody goes down if you hit them right.” Coach had told Gravity to run to the other girl as soon as the bell rang. Just run as fast as she could and start punching her in the face. Gravity had done that, and the other girl had done it too. But the other girl had closed her eyes, whereas Gravity kept hers wide open. That made all the difference. Gravity smiled, remembering how good it had felt to win that first time.
Ms. Laventhol met her eyes and smiled too, exclaiming, “It’s just so elegant!”
Gravity heard a snicker behind her and turned to see Brandon and Bart, two knuckleheads who barely ever came to school, cracking up. Brandon was making a V with his fingers and wiggling his tongue in the middle of it.
Gravity shook her head and turned back to the front of the class. Some kids made fun of Ms. Laventhol because she was married to Ms. Lee, who taught gym, and neither of them made any attempt to hide it. Gravity didn’t see what the big deal was.
When Gravity had left the casino disco that night with Lefty, Aaliyah Williams and Aisha Johnson had been making out in one corner. And Nakima was going out with one of the flyweight girls
who lost in the prelims. You couldn’t get very far in women’s boxing if you had a problem with stuff like that.
Last year, Gravity had stood up for Ms. Laventhol when some dumb sophomores were telling nasty jokes in the lunchroom. Ever since then, everybody thought Gravity was gay. This was irritating, but whatever. It wasn’t like she wanted to date the guys from school anyway. Nobody was as cute as Lefty or D-Minus or Boo Boo, and a lot of them made dumb comments about her boxing, like saying, “Ooh, don’t beat me up!” or asking what happened when she got punched in the breasts.
“What happens when you get punched in the breasts?” was the most common question men asked her about boxing.
The fact was, the chest wasn’t a big target area, not like the face or the liver or the solar plexus. Some girls wore chest protectors, but Gravity found them bulky, and her breasts weren’t that sensitive anyway. It was just a nonissue, but the first few times she had tried to explain this, she realized that the men who asked this question were not really interested in her answer. They just wanted to bring up breasts to her. It turned them on. Or else maybe they felt it cut her down to size. Boys were so stupid sometimes.
She put her head down on her desk and dozed until the bell.
After school, she headed home to pick up some more clothes and see if the stipend check had arrived yet for March. She was hoping her mother would be out for happy hour, but to her dismay, she could hear through the door the Curtis Mayfield album blasting on her mom’s old turntable. The LP must have warped in the sun, because Curtis’s voice was swaying nauseously in a way that made Gravity want to crawl out of her skin.
She let herself in and stood in the doorway, surveying the terrain. Her mother was lounging on the couch in a peach satin robe, leafing through a high school yearbook from the fancy school she had gone to in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Light slanted in the window and lit up her auburn hair. On the coffee table were a half-empty bottle of vodka, a can of V8, and a jar of pickles. The house was neat, and something smelled good.
