Some men; you can read their lives by the scars on their knuckles. Gabriel Cooper’s hands were
like a language and they told his story. All the fights were right there. You just needed to be able
to read it. The zipper across the 1st and 2nd knuckles on his right hand finally read the end.
It’s hard to be a boxer when you keep driving the bones of your hand through the skin that’s
supposed to mark the boundary between fist and glove. Twice that had happened. A compound
fracture is not the type of injury around which myths are made. It is more the type of injury
around which retirements are made.
Gabriel didn’t really love the ferocity or even the competition of the sport. What he most loved
though was the routine. Routine was bliss. One, two, three to the heavy bag. One, two, three. Jab,
jab, right hand. Jab, jab, right hand as he circled the bag first clockwise. Like the rocking of a
bassinet or counting highway mile markers. It was a comfort. One, two, three. One, two, three.
Any combination was peace. It didn’t need to be one, two, three. In bed at night, back to the
mattress, unseen opponent in the air; it was jab, jab, right, duck, uppercut. Five beats. Over and
over again until he fell asleep and then all the next day for real in the gym. It was his life’s
rhythm and his life’s salvation. When you know what life is supposed to be, a planned,
syncopated rhythm, again and again, then you can relax and live the rhythm. The repetition
defined his life and became his life. Living that rhythm was life.
He was a pretty promising boxer at one point. The guys in the gym said they’d never seen a guy
so focused during training. Gabe, do 500 sit-ups. Work the speed bag-so fast and so crisp that it
looked like he was juggling on meth. Now the heavy bag. What are we doing today? What’s the
rhythm, what’s the plan?
No one saw it as abnormal. Gabe was just dedicated. Obedient. They didn’t realize that the
constant work, the sequential pattern he was sewing was the only thing that kept him sane. It was
okay to let your mind race as long as it raced in sequence. But, what did you do when you had to
float. Do you turn left or right? There was no pattern. If you needed to turn right, you turned
right. Not Gabe. He needed to know that he was supposed to turn right, or left, everyday at that
time at that place. It was the routine.
The pounding of the fists wasn’t designed to ebb his anger. It ebbed his anxiousness and his fear
of a life without the salve of routine. And life without routine was unthinkable. Even to someone
who tried not to think.
That routine paid off in the ring. As long as he didn’t have to improvise, he was fine. Get into it.
Jab, jab, right. Jab, jab, right. G-d it was so pure.
But his hands just wouldn’t hold up. He finished four of his first seventeen fights, mostly wins,
with a break or a bulge somewhere on his hands. He did everything to toughen his hands. Iced
them. Held them in an oven. Soaked them in brine. Any of the old remedies. The one thing he
needed to count on to keep things in control; he couldn’t control. Some guys could hit like a mule
and never have to worry. Half the time, they had to cut Gabe’s gloves off of him the pain and
swelling were so bad. His hands were shot and it was all coming apart. Why did his hands
always let him down?
When he finally had to quit boxing he was lost. He had a couple of bucks in the bank and a
couple of tortuous ruminations in his head. He quickly lost all focus. He wandered. He stayed in
his apartment. Comfortable nowhere and content no place. No one in the gym saw him for over a
year. Good. They wouldn’t have recognized him. He was filthy and purposeless and miserable
and so very unhappy.
The nights were always the worst? One long night in a chain of long nights, he lay tense with his
head on his stiff pillow and it started. He viciously started throwing fists into the air. Somehow it
started. Jab, jab, right, duck, uppercut. It was back. Like taking a long, slow, wonderful deep
breath.
If he wasn’t in the boxing for the violence or the victories, why couldn’t he train? Why couldn’t
he go back to the gym? That was someplace to start. Maybe it wouldn’t be much for someone
else, but for Gabriel life began with the routine. It was just hard to remember the routine without
the routine. In a lucid moment, he realized he could build on this. It was the first clear thought
he’d had in so long.
Jab, jab, right, duck, uppercut. Jab, jab, right, duck, uppercut. It turned out to be not so bad a
night.