My record in street fights is 0-2-1. For those unfamiliar with boxing, the first number (zero) represents my victories. The second number is losses: one via walkover and one via technical knockout. The last number represents a draw.
The technical knockout happened last month, when I drifted too close to the edge of the herd at the Dekalb Avenue subway station. A mentally ill man, whose screaming monologue I had assumed to be emanating from a distant part of the platform, strode toward me, mid-rant. Something about me must have caught his attention, because he stopped and fixed me with an accusatory glare.
“You!” he shouted. “Never. Fucked. Nobody!”
My first thought was: clearly he doesn’t know me very well.
My second thought was more like a series of calculations. The tracks were at my back. He was about five feet in front of me. He was young and in outstanding physical condition, probably a super middleweight, and he had a good sweat going. I was a cold, faded featherweight.
I took a small step diagonally back. In boxing, they teach you to move obliquely. I put my hands in front of me, palms out, and I bowed my head so that I was not meeting his eyes but could still see him in my periphery.
He kept staring, and I could feel the heat of his gaze on the side of my face. I thought of being utterly nonprovoking, of letting any congruence between my body and his psychosis slide off.
He walked away.
Statistics are, of course, subjective. I score this a technical knockout in the man’s favor because skilled boxing referees stop a fight at any sign of submission, and my posture was broadcasting unwillingness to engage. When Roberto Duran said “no más” to Sugar Ray, this was also scored a TKO.
A few of my fellow commuters requested post-fight interviews. New Yorkers dislike intervening in assaults, but they will be kind to you if you survive. I said I felt fine, which was actually true. I bounce back quickly from major trauma. It’s the little stuff that gets me down, like my book sales.
Defeat via walkover usually happens when one fighter is sick, overweight, or too drunk to locate the venue. Mine happened in fifth grade, after I told a bully named Jane to stop picking on my runty friend Suzy. Jane suggested we step outside.
To my credit, I did show up at the appointed hour. Jane and I faced off, surrounded by a ring of delighted tweens. We attended a Quaker school, so this was a rare treat for everyone. I stood there, paralyzed with fear, gazing up at my opponent’s huge, pink head silhouetted against the Pennsylvania sky. She resembled a giant, malevolent Cyndi Lauper.
“Go ahead,” she said, gesturing to her chin. “Hit me.”
This was a master stroke. I turned and ran: through the ring of spectators, out across the soccer fields, and all the way to the bus stop home, as though I ever could outpace the shame.
Many years later, my cousin Nikki met Jane in drug rehab. When they discovered their shared connection, Jane expressed only delight.
“She said you were such a sweet kid and that you guys were friends,” Nikki reported.
It is possible Jane was lying or that she was too high to recall what happened. But I think she was telling the sober truth. We remember our losses better than our wins. If you ever have a perfect day that you want to remember forever, take something of great value and throw it in the East River.
Draws are rare in boxing. If two of the three judges seated at ringside award the same score to both combatants, this is called a “majority draw.” If one judge gives the nod to fighter A, another judge to fighter B, and the third scores it a tie, this is called a “split decision draw.”
My draw happened on a Prospect Heights street corner on December 30, 1999. I was on my way home from seeing a yoga student, who had just paid me cash for two sessions, and when I crossed the invisible border between his swanky part of Park Slope and my transitional neighborhood, I thought, “I should put this money in my shoe.”
I ignored this warning from my higher self, although as a concession to safety I did turn off the cassette of Steve Reich’s Different Trains that was blaring in my Walkman.
The mugger must have been following me for a while. When we got to a dark part of Vanderbilt Avenue, he zoomed up from behind on his bicycle and grabbed my purse. I did not make a conscious decision to resist. As with the subway confrontation, the animal part of my brain did fast math—he was about my size, middle-aged, derelict, unarmed—and I decided my cash was worth defending. I held on to my pocketbook and began to scream.
This particular pocketbook had a lot of sentimental value. I had bought it after my friend Victoria staged an intervention over brunch.
“You know, Sarah, women usually carry purses,” she had said gently, “not plastic bags.”
I got the plastic bag habit from my mother, who had taught me to scorn feminine adornment. Mom had been sexually assaulted by several male authority figures, and I think she believed that an intellectual, gender-neutral approach to parenting would protect me. In fact, it only rendered me more vulnerable to anyone who made me feel like a woman. It’s like what W. G. Sebald wrote about castles: “measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency towards paranoid elaboration…drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it.”
I had been shocked by the cost of my first grownup pocketbook. It was an over-the-shoulder bag in an earth-toned botanical print that made me think of Japanese scrolls. The leather handles were hardy, as evinced by their ability to endure the tug of war that ensued between me and my mugger. My Walkman fell out and hit the pavement. Different Trains shattered.
Both of my hands were gripping the purse, leaving my face bare. This was a mistake I would never have made in the boxing ring, but I had not been boxing very long. As Bruce Lee remarked, “In moments of duress, we do not rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” Forgetting everything I had learned in the gym, I reverted atavistically to something my mother once told me, which apparently saved her life in a Temple University bathroom: A woman’s greatest weapon is her scream.
Bare-knuckle punches feel different than ones from gloved hands. When the mugger’s fist hit my mouth, the searing pain made me drop the purse and crumple to the pavement, where I grabbed the frame of his bike to keep him from riding off.
Round two. He shook the frame of the bike, trying to dislodge me, but I held tight and stayed clear of his feet. Periodically I inhaled to fuel my continuous scream. This stalemate lasted for a while, until he executed a surprise maneuver: he dismounted and ran off, taking my purse with him.
I stayed crouched for a moment in shock, clenching the bike frame like prison bars. Then I gathered up the things that had fallen. The headphones could be salvaged, but the Walkman was shot. I wheeled my new bike to the nearest bodega.
Trauma distorts time, so I don’t know how long our match lasted, but it wasn’t short, and years of choral singing had taught me to project. I was left with a certain bitterness toward the bad Samaritans of Prospect Heights and the familiar disillusion when one of Mom’s maxims proved apocryphal.
“Oh yeah,” said the bodega owner vaguely. “We thought we heard a woman scream.”
I iced my face while I waited for the cops. My lip was badly split but my teeth were fine, and I was so hopped up on adrenaline I barely felt the pain. I had to clench my pocket lining to keep my hands from shaking.
“So, let me get this straight,” said the policeman. “You were riding your bike, when this guy comes along—”
“No, he was riding the bike.”
“You got his bike?” said his partner. “Nice.”
The cops took the case less seriously once they heard there hadn’t been a weapon. This hurt my feelings, because I thought it had been a pretty rousing mugging with a nice ebb and flow. They took me down to the station, where we paged through several albums of mug shots of African American men between the ages of thirty and fifty and under five foot six. This felt vaguely like internet dating. I was afraid to finger the wrong guy.
I convinced the cops to let me keep the bicycle, which had probably been stolen from someone else. It was a pretty nice mountain bike once I replaced the seat and did some Vedic chanting to remove the bad vibes. I rode it around and told people that I’d been mugged but that it had been a draw.
“I can’t believe you’re telling everybody you got robbed,” said my boxing trainer. “That’s so white.”
It was true that I talked a lot about the mugging. In the retelling, I became a comic hero, not a tragic mark. My tale drew general acclaim, in contrast to the usual reception for draws.
Boxing fans always boo a tie. Nobody goes to the fights in search of equivocal outcomes, and draws leave our bloodlust unsated. We prefer the brilliance of a knockout, which renders the judges irrelevant. Barring this, a unanimous decision will do. If we agree with the scorecards, we rejoice at seeing justice done. If we disagree—this is usually called “a robbery”—we are even happier. We get to bitch all the way home.
Sarah Deming, a New York City Golden Gloves Champion, is the author of the novels Gravity and Iris, Messenger.
