Shadow Boxer by Alan J. Gerstle

My father was 30 years old when I was born. The fact meant nothing to me for most of my young life, but took on a special meaning one day when I was fourteen. It was the day he decided to teach me to box.

You might think that transmitting this skill was evidence my father and I had a close relationship, but our bond was distant, ephemeral, and joined together by a single if resilient thread. My parents had divorced when I was a kid, and my father had “visitation rights.” He’d show up at our front door every other Sunday and take me out with him. Our destination might be the zoo, a park, a baseball game or, more usually, his house in Far Rockaway, a half-hour drive from my mother’s place in Brooklyn. But it wasn’t where we ended up that elated me. It was getting there that made it a thrill.

He wasn’t like the resident fathers of my neighborhood friends. Some seemed accepting and resigned that they had lost their youthful vigor. They worked in banks or delivered the mail. Others tried to maintain a certain urban toughness, but their deportment brought the image of discomfiting coarseness to my mind. I wasn’t too fond of either variety. On weekdays, around six, I’d see them amble home toward my apartment building, shoulders hung low, a folded copy of the Daily News pinched between thumb and forefinger.

My father’s energy was of an entirely different nature. He was quick, strong, and lean, with sloping shoulders and a narrow waist. He had a certain grace of movement that made me feel secure, even pleasant. Sometimes he’d visit after coming off work at the Brillo Soap Pad factory where he was employed as a machinist, and he seemed to be revved up enough to do a second shift. The way he talked complemented his movement. The personality behind his voice was casual, yet he spoke staccato-like, his words making a quick entry into a conversation and then withdrawing just a bit, sizing up the effect and, if necessary, getting prepared for another parry. It was like a polished boxer jabbing and then getting out of the way. In fact, he had been a boxer in one of his lives, so such mannerisms fit right in with my image of him. What’s more, beneath his ever-present white dress shirt, top button opened, sleeves rolled up, a pack of Camels tucked in the shirt cuff James Dean style, his upper body radiated the sort of strength you didn’t have to prove, something the swaggering bullies in my neighborhood didn’t know how about. I so much wanted to be close to and absorb his demeanor. But the intermittent nature of our contact always seemed to prevent the familiarity I craved and placed a shadow-thin barrier between our ability to connect like father and son.

When I sat beside him on our Sunday drives, his physical dynamism went into action. The slick way he shifted gears, the confident manner he had in leaning his crooked elbow out the driver-side window, the way he reached around and popped a cigarette from the pack, grasped it between his lips, then lit it with his Zippo lighter was pure choreography to me. Meanwhile, the briny scent of Long Island Sound to the right of the highway enveloped us, and I was transported to a world of safety and excitement. Little did my father know that just being himself made those moments magic.

On one of those trips around the Southern edge of Western Long Island (although no one from Brooklyn or Queens would give it such textbook terminology), the outing ended with the aforementioned boxing lesson. We had just finished playing a board game when he looked up at me and a eureka thought entered his head.

“Hey, you want to learn how to box?”

“Yes,” I said. So without delay he dashed down the steps that led to the basement, swerved to the right and flicked on a light switch. We entered a small square room, empty except for a dangling naked light bulb. My father smiled and nodded the way a painter might show satisfaction after completing a portrait.

We stood in the center of the room. He positioned my legs and arms. Fists up just below the eyes so you could see your opponent yet keep your face protected. Legs comfortably apart, then a brief lesson in foot movement: a slight toe to heel motion secure enough to stabilize yourself when you punched, but sufficiently nimble to keep moving to prevent yourself from being an easy target. I don’t recall ever seeing my father as happy as he “coached” me. On the surface, he wasn’t so intimidating because he wasn’t much taller than I. He was five feet seven, and thin, and my own height was catching up to his. But I knew there was power behind that loose fitting shirt and baggy wool pants.

“OK,’ he said, “Start boxing.” Just like that for he wasn’t one to waste words. At first, I was hesitant, stupidly thinking I might hurt him. Then I got a bit bolder and tried to give him a straight right. He easily parried my punch with his forearm. His simple block made my fist feel like it had just pounded steel. I was in shock. I was facing Superman.

“C’mon,” he laughed. He couldn’t figure out what was bothering me. He hadn’t even taken a swing at me yet. I reestablished myself. I looked for an opening. I tried to punch. I hit the metal rod of his arm again and grimaced in pain. I tried once more. He easily deflected my attempt to get in a shot. But the third time was all I could bear. My knuckles felt as though they had hit a hammer, even though he was merely warding off my meager blows.

“I have to stop,” I said as I lowered my arms.

“Why?” my father said. He was still smiling at the fun he thought we both were having.

“I just can’t,” I said. “It hurts.”

My father looked at me as if to say “What hurts?” But he didn’t say anything. He just shrugged. Not in a disappointed way but rather in puzzlement.

“OK.” He turned the light off and we went back upstairs. I was afraid that I had let him down. But back in the living room, it was as though nothing had ever happened downstairs. He didn’t judge. He didn’t question what hurt. Whatever did, he’d figured I had already recuperated. Outside in the yard, we played some catch with a baseball, and the boxing lesson was forgotten.

As usual, Sunday afternoon dwindled down and he drove me back home. And as usual, he was upbeat when we said goodbye. I realized that night my father had a whole life before he had ever had me. Thirty years of life. I tried to imagine some of those years. I tried to picture him in the ring. I appreciated how strong and agile he must have been and how the opponents he had faced must have been no less able. The significance of the fights my friends and I had, or the purported toughness of the punks in my neighborhood, suddenly diminished exponentially in my mind when I compared our juvenile bluster to my father. That’s when I really wanted to know him, to know what it was like for him before I was born. What it was like to grow up tough, on the streets of New York. I kept putting off asking him, though, and a couple of years later he moved to California, and eventually his shadow became far longer than his presence.

Years later, I went to a Broadway play with my mother. Robert DeNiro was starring in it, taking some time off between movies. He was playing a Puerto Rican father trying to raise a son. Seeing the actor in person—without the intermediary of the camera—gave him a different demeanor. He moved about the stage in quick yet graceful strides. Suddenly I had a eureka moment. DeNiro on stage was just like my father: same movement, same stature, same speech. I turned to my mother whose eyes were focused on the performance.

“Mother,” I said. “Doesn’t he remind you of my father?”

My mother looked at me, then to the stage to render her opinion.

“Yes,” she said. “He does. Like your father.”

It felt good to feel my father’s presence once again, even if it was second-hand. Of course, it would have been much more fulfilling to have had that conversation with him, the one where he’d tell me what it was like in the old days. But, like so many people both today and back then, I take what I can get.