The Glowing Edge

Tag: urban

  • Boxing Training. With Chickens.

    Boxing Training. With Chickens.

    Urban ChickensI can’t decide what makes the chickens squawk and mutter on some days and be perfectly silent on others.

    For the past couple of months I’ve been doing boxing training in a mostly empty gravel lot (see photo below), located at the edge of a neighborhood of sagging student-housing Victorians. I’m sort of behind an ancient International House of Pancakes — with nice graffiti — near the railroad tracks.

    Oh, and chickens.

    I didn’t even realize the chickens were there at first, hidden away like they are in a tiny coop behind a two-story cinderblock apartment box, just past the dumpster. As I said, they were silent those first few times I got out there to train.

    The gravel lot is rarely used, but it does provide a handy cut-through to a sprawling urban park nearby, and I have had to get used to the periodic gawker, catcall, or unhelpful comment from the students hiking past.

    It’s weird to walk out in the middle of the dirt and gravel, sling gravel lotdown my gear bag, and start to shadowbox all by myself. Jay, who is training me, will quietly comment, “Just ignore them,” as people pass us by.

    So I work, and wipe the gritty sweat out of my eyes, and blink rapidly to clear my vision when we raise a cloud of dust with our sparring. I sprint from the blue dumpster to the metal shed and back, then shadowbox for my recovery period until Jay calls the next sprint in 30 seconds. And I ignore the occasional “Stick and move!” comment from passers-by.

    But one day I thought I heard a chicken crowing. An odd sound, to a woman who has lived much of her  life in the suburbs of one large city or another.

    I mean really, I learned what a chicken sounds like from a See ‘n Say.

    So at first I thought someone was imitating a chicken. Those wacky students. But it happened several times, and no matter how often Jay told me to stay focused and ignore everything outside our scuffmarks in the dust, I got distracted.

    One day a whole chorus of See ‘n Say chickens erupted. I dropped my guard and scanned the lot. I was damn lucky not to get dropped where I stood, because Jay kept throwing. “Focus,” he called over his mouthpiece.

    “There are chickens in this lot!” I cried, “I know there are.”

    “Oh. Yeah, over there,” he agreed, pointing with his chin. And sure enough, what I had mistaken for a haphazard pile of bamboo sticks, scrap wood, and mesh screening was an actual chicken coop. With ten chickens, no less!

    I was fascinated. I pulled loose my gloves and walked back behind the dumpster, past a tiny makeshift garden to the coop. The chickens stood purring (Sorry, I have cats: what is that low hum they make?) and tilting their heads at me as if I were the curiosity in their world.

    “Hi, you chickens,” I said, grinning like an idiot. Chickens!

    Now I can’t imagine training any other way.

    I bet you don’t have chickens in your training space. Too bad for you!

  • No Hand King

    On a recent early morning drive into downtown, I got to see the No Hand King, one of our city’s most famous people. No Hand King Rodney Hines, who rides his bike — you guessed it, with no hands — during most waking hours, has a new Evel Knievel-style full-face helmet, and was actually using his hands (gasp!) to execute a sharp u-turn on a tiny street corner: the first time I’ve ever seen the NHK with hands on his handlebars. Many of his bicycles don’t even have handlebars. I waved to him, he waved back, and all his American flags streamed out behind him as he got the light and headed up the street, hands lazily sculpting the air in front of him.

  • One-Way Ticket

    One-Way Ticket

    When I was nineteen years old my parents offered to pay $70 for a Greyhound bus ticket so I could come visit them. I would go from Knoxville, TN to Detroit, MI; a trip of about 500 miles that normally might take about 8 hours. By Greyhound it took just under 16 hours, thus negating any implications of speed the name might have suggested. I took a small army duffel bag and — to complete the cliché — a battered guitar that my grandfather had given me in high school.

    Getting my college friend Michael to drive me to the bus station was an event in itself. Michael was deaf, and loved to talk. The amount of time when his hands actually touched the steering wheel of his ancient compact car was far exceeded by the amount of time they flew expressively through the air, ever animating his declarations or calling for my own. He watched me closely for comments while I watched the road, signing tersely with my right hand, and keeping my left hand on his steering wheel. He loved to play the radio loud enough so that he could feel the bass thumping.

    Most of our road trips were marked for me by consistent minor anxiety relieved by intermittent panic attacks. When we arrived safely at the Greyhound station, I was exhausted.

    The two of us sat in the station on the orange plastic and chrome chairs, Michael looking like an impoverished angel with his long curls, pink flip-flops, and skinny ragged jeans. In those days I was experimenting with bleached-out crew cuts, and mostly wore rock shirts, camouflage, and unlaced high-tops, an image that now makes me wince. Michael’s hands floated through the air like magician’s scarves, while my own mimicked a two-year-old’s scribble, hardly recognizable. I kept a sharp lookout for creepy old men and wondered how long I could avoid the restroom.

    Once I had successfully forded the hot, lazy waves of diesel exhaust and entered the cool gloom of the bus I realized I had one great desire that I had not previously considered. I really, really did not want a seatmate. Growing up riding in the backseat of our Volkswagen Rabbit with my little sister was nothing compared to this. My sister and I practically had acres of seat space in which to squabble, compared to the Greyhound’s tall, thin seats with their armrests poking out like sharp black hyphens. I clutched my guitar tightly and slid into the first seat in the right-hand row, closest to the aisle. Anyone wishing to sit with me would have to climb over me and my guitar to sit in the twelve-inch-wide luxury accommodations next to the window.

    What I didn’t realize was that my bus station conversations with Michael had convinced my travel mates that, despite my guitar, I was deaf. Nobody offered to sit with me; I got a few pitying smiles from older black women, and most everyone else pretended I was invisible. Until our first stop, this worked out nicely for everyone.

    The reason it takes so much longer to get where you’re going on a bus is that if a town has a stoplight, Greyhound makes a detour to get there. My eyes had barely adjusted to the gloom of our narrow sanctuary when the driver pulled over in a cloud of dust and heat and yanked open the accordion doors so that everyone could file out to buy Slurpees and make use of the local gas station’s facilities while new travelers joined us. I remained jealously in my seat for at least five of these pit stops until I feared a bladder rupture, then gave in and exited the tomb, guitar in hand, like a demented Lazarus.

    As we made our way north the heat relented, the night swelled, and the characters on the bus came to life. Mothers spoke inappropriately to children and heard lectures or stories about childraising arise magically from a few seats behind. People spoke of homes, rehab, and relatives. Old women snored and men spat tobacco into Orange Crush cans. Nobody was fooled by my deaf act anymore, they’d all heard me respond to the cashier when I purchased my Nabs, and several times I’d had to holler “Just a minute” when someone rattled the restroom door. Seatmates came and went, leaving sour or flowery odors behind. I nodded off between stops and sometimes only pretended to sleep. Daylight arrived again, and the drive became an infinite hall of mirrors, every view looking and feeling the same.

    I arrived in Detroit in the magic time; the day was done, businesses had closed, and bars were waiting. Crisply uniformed wait staff strode toward back alley entrances, and neon flickered on across twilit windows. I was pale and buzzing, like a television screen after programming has gone off the air for the night.

    When I saw my clean suburban parents I knew myself to be just a bit more alien than I had been before; less carefully formed, more dislocated, and somewhat unraveled by more than the miles.

    Image by Arlo Bates