Carol Forget trains with Krudner “J.R.” Fiote, Jr., at the New York Sports Club on Mercer Street.
Knockout
By Carol Forget
I bought a pair of boxing gloves because punching a leather bag the size of a water heater calmed me down. Sitting on a yoga mat, the premenopausal woman’s panacea, didn’t work the same magic. I was unemployed, retooling for a new career, and living off my savings. A fear of poverty, exacerbated by an untamable hormone imbalance, gave me the mood swings of an ax murderer.
That was four years ago, when 159 pounds padded my cranky 5-foot-8-inch frame, and my jellied 48-year-old midsection defied dieting and regular exercise. It wasn’t cancer or running sores – just a few extra inches made impossible to lose by wacky body chemicals. Atop the flab floated excess water that came and went like a tide. Often I was more cantaloupe than human, and on any given day all or none of my bras would fit.
Then one day I was at the gym and saw a tall blonde sparring with her boxing trainer. Her gloves made a satisfying thwack when they hit his mitts. She was thin and strong, but what impressed me most was her “Don’t mess with me” expression. It mirrored how I felt, and I too wanted to throw punches in a controlled, choreographed rage. I signed up.
Pummeling another person seemed too violent, even while I felt myself drowning in an ocean of self-pity. But my trainer, J.R., assured me I’d work the speed bag, the double-end bag, and the heavy bag and wouldn’t have an opponent. This human butcher block of dense muscle wearing a black watch cap and diamond stud in his ear had fought neighborhood toughs as a kid in Harlem. Thanks, however, to a strict Haitian mother and a Catholic-school education, he was soft-spoken and sensitive at 25.
That’s not to say he went easy on me. We trained at the former World Gym on Mercer Street in a large, windowless basement with a boxing ring that smelled of damp cigars and sweat, set clearly apart from the over-scrubbed, brightly lit upper floors. Here I was a 52-year-old white woman from rural Massachusetts, but from the moment I stepped foot in that room I had a sense of being let in on a secret gym subculture. This was where the party was.
Though plenty of women availed themselves of the free boxing classes, I took pride in knowing that I was one of the few who trained one-on-one. There was also something cool about brushing up against the urban street cred of boxing – not to mention the good-natured, calendar-worthy, 20- and 30-something dark-skinned men who made the gym their clubhouse. Even if I didn’t drop a pound, steeping in that testosterone-heavy atmosphere made me so sassy I felt bulletproof.
I had joined the gym years before, never realizing there was anything beyond the staircase off the lobby but the men’s locker room. Now I descended those same stairs carrying my gloves and wraps, feeling like a gladiator entering the Coliseum. From the first day I put those gloves on I was curiously hooked; something just felt right.
Now that my once-reliable body was reduced to a foul cauldron of estrogen soup, I lived on the brink of irrational outbursts and unexplainable weeping episodes. The only solace I could find was in the boxing studio. Biology betrayed me the rest of the time, and I suspected my chatty, older girlfriends of enduring a similar treachery. Having once regaled me with the intimate details of their sex lives, they were now strangely mum about their ride through the Bitch and Bloat Theme Park.
Without my girlfriends as reference points, I had no sense of whether my blowtorch-like PMS flare-ups rated a 2 or a 10 on the psycho meter. My symptoms were especially rankling because as early as age 17 I had decided to remain childless, yet nature had issued me all the standard female equipment, not just the “fun” parts. I suffered the horror of heavy periods, blood-stained sheets, and cramps caused by uterine fibroids – benign mushroom-shaped lumps visible only on sonograms.
Catholic guilt had me imagining these fibroids were my penance for not wanting children until I realized that heredity was more to blame. When at last I complained to my mother over the phone, she promised that these vexations would shrink with menopause. It later occurred to me that her voice sounded a little too chipper, given that her own change of life didn’t happen until age 58.
If my mother’s experience was any indication of when menopause was likely to claim me (and the common wisdom was that it was as good as any), I was in for a long, miserable haul. How depressing to think that my only good years – lived free of womanly torment and anemia – covered roughly birth to age 14, and I had so little to show for them.
Along with my carefree youth I mourned the loss of a knockout figure that inspired whiplash on Manhattan’s busiest streets. Admitting defeat meant crawling to Eileen Fisher for a shapeless sack dress – over my dead body. I fantasized about floating free of my physical form, as in the Star Trek episode where Spock’s brain is held captive in a bell jar by rulers of a hostile planet. If I could still read and type on the computer, it might be the perfect solution until my own dark time passed.
Instead, every Tuesday morning J.R. would put a jazzy CD on the boom box and wrap yellow cloth around my wrists, over my knuckles, and between my fingers.
“How’re your hands?” he would ask.
“Good.”
Positioning a glove beneath my left hand, he said: “Straight down.” He fastened the Velcro strap around my wrist as I held it against his chest. He did the same with my right hand. J.R. performed this ritual with the solemn care of an attendant dressing a matador. His patience and respect made me, a novice, feel strong and confident – not to mention having survived the burn and fatigue of push-ups, jumping rope, and crunches.
The timer’s bell rang. “Hands up!”
I found the stance – right leg diagonally behind my left, abdomen tight, left fist shielding my nose, the other by my ear. J.R. called: “Double-jab, cross – I want to feel it.”
I aimed for the centers of his raised punch mitts. He tapped my navel when I dropped my right. “Get that hand up.” My blood pressure spiked at the physical needling.
After a few weeks with J.R., I had the nerve to study my new butch gym look in the mirror: Baseball cap, black tank top, and the beginnings of a waistline. Cardio boxing was rejuvenating my body, and at night boxing dreams repaired my bruised psyche.
My subconscious became a mental Rolodex of unresolved conflicts, fears, and injustices. Sometimes it was as minor as somebody cutting the line at the 99¢ Store. Other times a major issue without a face – the dread of getting breast cancer as my chances multiplied with age, say – took on the shape of a single, formidable protagonist like an al-Qaeda terrorist on the subway. Nothing that such a figure learned in the mountains of Afghanistan could have prepared him for the ferocious middle-aged woman in kitten heels who assailed him with no apparent regard for the good coat she was wearing. Other dreams were more straightforward, like the ones starring a lying ex-boyfriend or the sadistic gynecologist who, announcing that my monthly symptoms would worsen with age, offered no remedy.
The line-cutter, the terrorist, the ex, and the gynecologist all succumbed to a breakdown-the-house jab to the nose followed by a right cross to the temple. My opponents were always surprised, which added to my triumph because it was their limited expectations of me that killed them. I packed years of resentment at being polite and ladylike into every punch, and my form was always perfect.
I felt less addled after a few months and could imagine working on some of my symptoms. I visited a famous herbalist in Chinatown, who prescribed bags of dried flowers and roots to shrink my fibroids and pull the plug on the water weight. I boiled the junk into a smelly brown tea and drank it twice a day. It tasted awful, but I was determined to avoid carcinogenic hormone patches, or the radical yet routine hysterectomy. It was the 21st century; there had to be another way.
What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Premenopause, by John R. Lee, M.D., became my bible. On its advice I smeared progesterone “balancing cream” on my forearms until the dragon lady PMS was banished. Also recommended were lots of vitamin supplements, and giving up coffee and diet soda. I followed the last part by drinking green tea half the time, but I also learned to rest when I was tired instead of soldiering on, cranked up on caffeine.
The book told me to relax and get comfortable with my few extra pounds, but I was too vain to embrace the cosmic Earth Mother in me. My early identity was tied to the “knockout” image, and so was my self-esteem. When I felt especially low, I rented Margaret Cho videos for blasts of indignant, bitchy comedy, which helped as much as cutting portions, eating more protein, and increasing my cardio, to drop 14 pounds. Life got a little bit better.
I still feel incensed when I think that at my age periods still come as regularly as my Manhattan Mini Storage bill. But I’m leaner, stronger, and I’ve never had a hot flash. Some day soon (I hope) K-Mart’s feminine-hygiene aisle will become like Siberia to me – location known, but with no good reason to go there. On that great day I’m throwing a Merry Menopause party for my girlfriends and me at the Water Club. We’ll celebrate the retirement of my childbearing days by drinking champagne, eating lots of really good dark chocolate, and throwing flaming boxes of tampons into the East River.
Until then, I’ll manage by doing what I’ve done for the past four years: Punching the heavy bag so hard it vibrates the teeth in my head, because sometimes that’s all a girl can do.
