One birthday, his father appeared out of nowhere with a white rusty used BMX bike for him—still, it was the most beautiful bike my father had ever seen, because it was his! Papi had never received such a nice birthday gift from his father, so it came as quite a happy surprise. Maybe his father’s new underground job was paying off and things for his family were headed in the right direction.
But then his father told him he needed to share his bike with his little brother, which disappointed Papi. And because the bike didn’t come with training wheels, Papi had to learn how to ride it on his own without any aid.
My father never celebrated another birthday after that year.
* * *
WE DIDN’T MAKE a big deal about birthdays in our house—at least not like most families. Maybe it had something to do with my father’s childhood, but he was firm in never going overboard with those kinds of things.
“There’s no need to go crazy with birthdays,” he’d say. “We can celebrate each other every day, not just that one day.”
At school a girl once said to me, “My mom says your dad doesn’t throw birthday parties for you because men don’t know how to plan parties.”
I knew that was what some people thought. There are stereotypes about single dads raising their kids, and really big stereotypes about guys like my dad—Latino, night-shift guys, with tattoos. But some people were really wrong when it came to assuming things about other people. It always surprised visitors when they came over to my house and it was immaculate. The laundry was always folded perfectly. Meals were hot and fresh and yummy. Beds were made. For my father, our house was our kingdom, and he kept it pristine.
No, we didn’t do birthday parties with streamers and balloons like a lot of kids. Instead my father would take Jesiah and me and my uncle out to play video games and eat ice cream at Dave and Buster’s. I’d play Subway Surfers until kids yelled at me to get off. When the night was over, he’d hand me an envelope with birthday cash inside.
“Here, don’t spend it all in one place.”
“I won’t spend it anyplace,” I’d respond each time.
“That’s the right answer.”
I wanted to buy new boxing gloves. Then I thought about my sketch pad, every page filled with drawings of people and cartoon characters—mostly superheroes—and thought maybe I’d buy a new sketch pad, maybe some watercolor paints as well, since I’d started getting interested in painting and it would have been fun to have my own paint set. But instead I saved every penny. The only one in my family to ever go to college and graduate was my grandmother. I wanted to go to college, too. So I saved.
Birthday nights out, really any night out with Papi, were extra special for Jesiah and me. Most nights my father was getting ready to head out for work. When I began elementary school, he switched from a day job to working the night shift, which started at 11:00 p.m. and ended at 6:30 a.m. By 8:00 a.m. he was back home, showered, making breakfast, packing lunches, and taking us to school. By 9:00 a.m. he was in bed. He’d sleep until 2:00 p.m. so that he could be rested and ready to pick us up and take us to after-school activities, more and more often to the boxing gym. Then it would start all over again.
Poor Papi was tired a lot. My father’s chest pain began when he started working the night shift. Stress and lack of sleep can affect the body in dangerous ways, especially when you’re so busy caring for others that you forget to care for yourself.
Sometimes people asked me if being raised by a single dad was like being raised by a single mom. Sure, some people may have thought when I was younger that it was weird to have my father come check on me in the women’s bathroom at a restaurant, instead of a mom, but it just seemed like raising kids alone was hard work in general.
With eyes covered, he would yell from just inside the door, “Jesselyn, did you mummify the toilet seat?”
He had taught me early on to cover the toilet seat with enough toilet paper to protect myself from germs when I sat down. But we would laugh at the amount of protective covering he thought the seat needed. We called it “mummifying.”
“Papi! Yes!” I would holler back.
“Okay, don’t forget to mummify!”
He really was crazy about those kinds of things.
* * *
PAPI WORKED IN the sanitation department at a beef processing plant in New Jersey. He was responsible for cleaning the machines in the factory. If you were eating a burger in New York’s Lower East Side, chances are my father had bleached the grinders where that beef was processed. It wasn’t a pretty job—in fact my dad said it was the grossest job he’d ever had—but it was an important one that he took seriously. Without proper sterilization, an entire day’s production line of meat could be contaminated and make a lot of people very sick. Jesiah and I made up a song about salmonella that we’d sing—“Salmonella, salmonella, not ice cream vanilla”—but I don’t think Papi appreciated it very much. So he went to work on time and worked hard and got promoted from bucket washer to cleaning the largest machine in the processing plant—which, he was proud to say, when done the right way, took seven hours to clean stem to stern.
One night the bosses offered free burgers to the crew. Everyone headed toward the lounge area to eat. My father stayed behind.
“Hey, you coming?” asked one of his coworkers.
“Naw, you go ahead,” Papi said, scrubbing the inside of a bucket.
“What, you’re holding out for steak?”
“No . . . It’s just that the thought of eating this stuff makes me sick.” That caused everyone in the work area to laugh. A man who dedicated his evenings to a job that made him physically ill was tough to understand. But it allowed him to be with us during the day.
Sometimes when people asked me where I got my fighting spirit, I had another answer besides it running in my family. I would give them an answer that surprised them: “I fight because sometimes I get angry.”
I know I wasn’t supposed to talk like that. Maybe I could think it, but people don’t want to hear that you throw punches because you’re upset about stuff. It was true, though. Plenty of things in my life felt unfair and got me angry. And those were the things that powered me in the ring. I hit the bag a little harder on those days. Bad days outside the gym were my best days in the gym.
I found myself getting upset about the way some people treated my father as a single dad. It seemed like an endless battle. I would see it in little ways every day.
One morning my father came home from work and needed to go see a doctor. At the time he didn’t tell me he was having terrible chest pains and thought he was having a heart attack, because of course I would worry. He always said I had this crazy, irrational fear of him dying . . . which I did.
So he went to the hospital quietly and alone while my anxious grandmother played children’s songs on the CD player and then drove Jesiah and me to school that morning. As had sometimes happened in the past, Jesiah forgot his lunchbox in the car, so he went down to the school office and asked one of the administrators for a lunch voucher.
“No, Jesiah, I’m not giving you a lunch voucher this time,” she said. “Your father should have remembered to pack your lunch.”
“My father didn’t drive me today. Can you call my grandma?”
“No, Jesiah, I’m not calling your grandmother.”
“But my dad is seeing a doctor,” Jesiah said, starting to whimper.
After much pleading, the administrator finally called my grandmother. My grandmother owned a cleaning business and wasn’t able to leave her work, so she couldn’t bring Jesiah’s lunch to school. Then the administrator called my father in the hospital. They had a brief conversation.
“Well Jesiah, it looks like you’ll be able to have lunch today,” the woman said. “Because I just checked with the cafeteria, and they have an extra lunch available for you.”
The truth w
as, I think she was being a little tough on my brother to teach him a lesson, because he was always forgetting his lunch at home. But for some reason, because my father was in the hospital, this time it felt personal.
My father came home after the hospital (no heart attack, just stress), took one look at my angry face, and said, “Yes, I heard . . . he forgot his lunch again.”
“If you were a single mom, no one would have been mad if you’d forgotten to pack our lunches!”
“You don’t know that. Jesiah is always leaving his lunch at home and sometimes tough love is the only way to learn.”
Later he called the principal and made the administrators aware of the struggles of being a single father, and of how he worked just as hard as any mom would, managing the kids, the household, and a full-time job. And how he thought he was being discriminated against just because he was a man. Things at school changed after that—Jesiah was always given a lunch voucher without too much fuss on days he forgot his lunch.
What also drove my fighting spirit were the things that made me, like my DNA and being a girl, and the things around me, like my father’s annoying night-shift job, negativity about girl boxers, school stuff, you name it.
Sometimes what drove my fighting spirit were the things that weren’t around me, like my mother.
I wasn’t the only one in school being raised by one parent. A bunch of my friends came from single-parent households. But I was pretty sure I was the only kid being raised by a father instead of a mother. My mother and father separated two and a half years after my brother was born. Then my mom moved down to Florida for a while looking for better work opportunities. Even though we always stayed in contact, I really missed her. When she came back a few years later, it was incredible when she would visit on weekends. She’d take us to the movies, the trampoline park, pumpkin picking . . . all the things that moms do with their kids. By the time I had started boxing, she had just moved back to New Jersey.
“What’s new with you?” she asked during a trip to the zoo.
“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “I’ve started boxing.”
“Boxing? Why boxing?” she said in her no-nonsense way.
People said I was my mom’s mini-me. I took that as a compliment because she was the most beautiful woman I knew. Her mixed Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage gave her the prettiest traits, like thick dark hair and almond-shaped eyes. And man, was she strong! She never played a sport in her entire life, but she was all muscle. I loved hanging out with her.
When my mother asked, “Why boxing?” that day at the zoo, it was a good question I hadn’t really considered; after all, I was only seven years old. I mean, why not boxing. Truth is, it’s not like I got into boxing because I was a girl and wanted to blaze a trail . . . That hadn’t even occurred to me when I first picked up the gloves. I was just a kid and it looked fun! The part about proving myself as a girl boxer came a couple of years later, once I realized how few girl boxers there were in this male-dominated sport. And it wasn’t until I was even older that I came to see that I not only needed to make a place for myself in this sport, but a place for all girls of all ages. Somehow.
It wasn’t that I was drawn to boxing because I liked to get hit. I hated getting hit. But I loved throwing it back. And sometimes in life, especially as a little kid, and a lot of times as a girl, they don’t let you throw back punches—not in school, not at home, not on an actual playground. So I boxed because even if I felt like I didn’t belong there, I could fight to prove that there was a place for me.
I could fight to prove that there was a place for me.
Like my immigrant grandparents, I was learning a new language—the language of boxing. I was fighting to belong in a world that sometimes seemed strange and cold and unwelcoming. And once I got started boxing, I didn’t want to be just half in, half out of the ring. I wanted to be all in.
Maybe being a fighter was in my DNA, but the hardest part of proving my DNA was still to come.
Now all I had to do was learn how to fight.
CHAPTER THREE
FIRST FIGHT WITH A GIRL
I spent two more years at The Jim after my first crybaby sparring match with Greg. In those two years I never once fought in a sanctioned match against a girl. Not because I couldn’t, not because I didn’t want to, but because there were no girls my age to fight. All the boy boxers were getting fights scheduled, but not me. So I focused on training hard and knew that when the day of my first sanctioned match came, I would be ready. Almost every day except Sunday—Grandma wouldn’t allow me to skip church for anything. But I would have if I could have. I made a promise to myself in those two years that not only would I never shed a tear in the ring again (I had mostly kept that promise), but I would fight to win, not just defend. That meant long hours and commitment in the gym.
There were days during training that I would punch so hard, my wrists were red. Times I would beg my father to go out jogging with me so late that we ran with flashlights. In between homework and the gym I would shadowbox in my bedroom to music until Papi finally said lights-out. I must have done that hundreds of times. I sparred with boys in the gym on occasion when they were willing. In little ways I saw my body change; it was moving away from the punches faster, and my muscles were getting stronger and more defined. I was getting the basics of my technique down. Some days I felt like a ballerina learning to be graceful. Other days I felt like a bull learning to be powerful. As my skills improved, sparring with boys became a thrill, not something to fear. It made me want more. I came to like the challenge of boxing with boys who were bigger and faster. Paulie was a great trainer, and I liked him a lot. He would stop the action and explain what I was doing wrong during sparring sessions.
“Practice with your lead hand. Jab. Hook.”
Over and over again. Lead hand. Lead hand. Lead hand.
Power shift. Then move forward. One direction: ahead, not back.
My moves were getting tighter.
But after two years of training, I was getting frustrated. I wanted to get in the ring and show off my skills. Finally, when I was nine years old, I confronted my father. In the car ride to the gym one afternoon I said, “I want to be a boxer.”
“You are a boxer,” my dad said, laughing.
“No, like an actual boxer who fights in matches.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sick of sparring with boys. They go to actual boxing gyms and have boxing teammates and go to tournaments and get placed in divisions. And all I do is train to box but I don’t actually compete.”
We pulled into the parking lot of the gym, and Papi turned to me with a serious expression and asked, “How far do you want to go with this?”
I looked him straight in the eye and said, “I want to fight in the Junior Olympics.”
I had heard all the boys in the gym talk about training for the Junior Olympics. For amateur boxers in my age group, that was the ultimate national fighting competition. Only the best of the best fought in the Junior Olympics. If I worked hard, I could get there too.
My father nodded. For the first time, he understood how serious I was about this sport.
“You know what that means . . .” Papi’s voice trailed off.
“Yes.”
That meant we had to leave The Jim because it wasn’t registered under USA Boxing and because Paulie wasn’t a registered coach. The Jim was a training facility. They didn’t have a team of fighters like a registered boxing gym does; it was a place where boxers came for extra gym time. I would never be able to compete as an amateur boxer at the top level if I stayed there, because we wouldn’t be able to register for fights. So with heavy hearts, we left.
It was surprisingly difficult to find a good gym. We toured several. Most of the gyms we visited were dirty and crumbling or the equipment was old and unsafe. Lots of places didn’t want to train kids. And lots of traine
rs weren’t suited to training kids, especially girls. As Papi would say after meeting a particular trainer, “A little rough around the edges, that one.”
The second gym we decided to try, DMG in Paterson, New Jersey, closed within two months of my training there. The third gym kicked us out because Papi didn’t get along with some of the coaching staff.
One day at Boxing Warriors, the third gym, my dad was standing at the bag giving me some tips when one of the coaches yelled to him, “Hey, you can’t be on the floor where the boxers train.”
“I’m just watching my daughter.”
He yelled even louder. “I said you can’t be on the floor!”
“Are you really talking to me that way? Because it’s a little disrespectful,” Papi said, getting agitated.
“Yeah, you, get off the floor and sit down!”
“I don’t feel like sitting down.”
Papi and the coach started to move in closer. Like I said, fighting is in my DNA, and I knew my father wouldn’t back down if someone was being disrespectful.
“YOU! Sit down!” The coach moved quickly toward my father.
“No one tells me to sit down. Ever.” Papi wasn’t yelling, he was very calm and respectful.
Papi looked at me and back at the angry trainer and said, “We’re done here.” And with that, we left that gym for good with my gloves still on my hands.
Right about then I wondered if we’d ever find a gym that would take on a girl boxer . . . and my father.
* * *
THE BERGEN COUNTY Police Athletic League (PAL) in Hackensack, New Jersey, looked like a karate dojo from the outside. We’d driven by it many times because it’s close to my home. Someone had suggested it might have a boxing program. My father wasn’t convinced, but we stopped in one day after school.
My Corner of the Ring Page 3
