I had watched some boxing videos in the days before the fight. Not a smart idea I realized, they had showed me plenty of moves I couldn’t make, but I was feeling fine as I climbed into the ring at Overthrow, the fight club at 9, Bleecker Street in New York City, the former HQ of John Sinclair, manager of the great pre-punk band, MC5. This fight was to celebrate my birthday. Many had been telling me the fight wasn’t a smart idea either. You’re 85. But I’m fit, reflexes in full working order, and I wasn’t going to be taking shots to the head.
David Leslie, my opponent, was in his corner, wearing a mask representing the COVID-19 virus. Does this suggest an element of performance art? Yes. But were the punches going to be real? Yes to that too. Leslie, a performance artist, has been part of this narrative since I met him in the late ’90s. It was while I was working on an article about Josh Harris, who was using a pot of dotcom gold to become a cultural presence in New York, most notably through We Live In Public, a project during which a hundred volunteers were surveilled and taped non-stop in his Lower Broadway townhouse.
A further Harris wheeze was the setting up of a boxing ring in this same space, staffing it with a winner of the Golden Globes, who ran it and would fight anybody who wanted to take a shot. That’s where I met Leslie, who was curating We Live In Public and would shortly use that same space to launch Box Opera, a name which perfectly caught his intention, which was to present boxing in the manner of pro wrestling, namely dishing up both theater and real combat.
ADVERTISEMENT
A friend coaxed me to have a go. Up into the ring I went, for the first time since school, but I was soon feeling oddly at ease in a space which was at once fenced-in and visible, like a picture frame. I was declared a winner by a TKO in the third round. Luck. So much for that, I thought. But David Leslie told me I should fight again. I got in touch with Doug DeWitt, a former champion middleweight I had met on a story, trained with him in Scarsdale, and had a few white collar bouts. DeWitt said I had acquitted myself OK. That was surely that.
Not so. I did have another fight for my 80th birthday. The origins are dark. One evening in 1996, myself and a friend were stabbed and attacked by a man, whose assault I only stopped by hitting him with a wooden club.
The relevance to the boxing? Well, my friend that night was also a fitness pro, and she got me started on a routine of exercises at 58. These have only become more stringent as time has marched on.
Hence the fight at 80, a three-rounder at Overthrow. My opponent in the first two was a city judge I sparred with from time to time. He was unexpectedly replaced in the third round by a fighter, who climbed into the ring masked as the newly elected Donald Trump. He allowed me a theatrical KO. Yes, it was David Leslie.
Leslie is a career performance artist. His first action, which had been in 1986, was to take off in a little rocket from a ramp on Broome Street, intending to fly over a thousand heaped watermelons into a net. “That split second that the rocket left the ramp and I was airborne I felt a great euphoria, a release, a relief, a liberty,” he says. Instead he crashed. But so what? “It was a passage, a coming-out,” he says. “Or rather a coming-into who I was.”
The following year he jumped from two stories up onto a steel plate in the courtyard, sheathed in bubble wrap and Christmas-tree lights.
Had he researched the wrap for safety?
Leslie laughed. “You should test-drive these things before you do them,” he said. “But I only had enough money to do it once. So I had to hope I knew what I was doing. There were five layers of bubble wrap. And between the first and the second layer it was all Christmas lights. And the reason there were Christmas lights was to look fantastic under bubble wrap You know, the whole suit was glowing beautifully, it was gorgeous.”
That was the performance that earned Leslie his title, the Impact Addict.
Leslie later fought another heavyweight champ, Gerry Cooney, who did concuss him. In 1989 he threw himself off the roof of P.S. 122 dressed up as Julie Andrews playing Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music, and went into freefall for 80 feet, punching a hole through the plywood roof when he landed. This, he says, was the closest he has been to a really dangerous injury.
“I was pretty sure that I could possibly die,” he said. “It was shocking. But it’s been like that with other things I have done. There is this moment you have to pass through, a potential death moment, you are either going to survive it or not going to survive it. I knew that I owed it not only to myself and my own existence but also to my audience even more so. I don’t want to have all the people come and see something horrific, see someone die. That would be really bad art. I was interested in making great art.”
I had a personal question. Way back, after the sparring session in the Josh Harris townhouse, why had Leslie surprised me by telling me that I should fight again? “For the same reason you fought at 80 and again at 85,” he said. “I saw that in you”.
So, as time continues on its march, just why did I fight again at 85? Well, I am involved in projects, enterprises which require utter reliability, and the people I work with can be beady-eyed. Drop something in your twenties, trip on a sidewalk in your thirties, forget a dental appointment in your forties, silly you! But eff up in your eighties, and you’re likely to get worried looks and a network of nagging tongues. Few spaces are more merciless, more transparent, than a boxing ring, though, an arena designed to show whether an individual has what Tom Wolfe ascribed to astronauts: the Right Stuff.
So how the fight at Overpower go? Admission: I chat to my body when I start to work out. It’s kind of a joke but I do believe in other forms of intelligence, lower and higher, and I like to think my body responds. Certainly my body was behaving itself here. Could David Leslie, a seasoned warrior in his early sixties, have taken me out? Absolutely. But he made the match work, both as a show and as a happening IRL, a doubleness which was nicely captured by the photograph of his bloodied lower face that he sent me after the fight.
So I’m a tough guy, huh? Well, not exactly. His cuts had not been caused by my flying fists but by the fragmentation of his COVID-19 mask.
