Whereupon I prove my street cred
Three years after I quit boxing, I found out my old sparring partner died from a drug overdose. A month later, an old skateboarding friend was arrested for murder. Meanwhile, the friends from high school linked by nothing but the skater identity had morphed into skater/stoners, into drug dealers, into highly connected drug dealers trying to flare up some Compton connection--in Spokane.

So yeah. I was hardcore. Or rather, I was embedded in a pseudo-hardcore environment, all meek and smug with my detachment, proving my worth with kickflips and railslides. And while they were mixing bags and bragging about drive-bys, I was calmly playing Tekken and listening to Sunny Day Real Estate. When someone had to step over the controller wires to reach the pipe, I hit the pause button. It struck me that I was out of place, but I had no one else to skate with, and maybe the residual power was comforting. Some Gortex hood shoves me in the hall, and Kyle mentions that he has a shotgun under the seat of his low rider. Yeah, there's nothing sadder than a puffed up wannabe, but let me tell you, there's nothing more dangerous than a wannabe with a gun.

Then there were the boxing matches. Usually it was Kyle's backyard with sixteen ounce gloves, and not only was I the only sober one, but the only one with any training. Occasionally I took a hit so they wouldn't, I don't know, get paranoid and pull out a stun gun. But I could fight. Though I was never good at chess or Risk, I had some spatial mapping concept of fists and feints, how to lunge with a low jab and chamber a round kick in the same fluid motion, when to lean back and breathe, to put a heel to the kneecap just to prove it could have broken. What was proven here is still uncertain. All I wanted was a justified posture, not to condone anything, but to counter alienation, to observe.

Gradually, I drifted toward theater and found a new crowd. I broke three skateboards, splintered over handrails or broken at the axle, and gave the last one away to a friend's twelve-year-old son. I quit kickboxing to focus on college. Oddly, my discovery of Eastern religion came from the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, which led to Zen studies, which led to nonviolence. I was never violent outside the ring, anyway, but that's what settled it. As for the old gangsta crowd, I heard one went to work in wholesale jewelry, one started and folded an exotic fish shop, one kept dealing, and at least one ended up in prison.

Did I dodge a bullet? Not really. I stepped over a few bullets on my way to the kitchen, but I don't think I ever had the palate for the cult, the soft knuckles of thug fantasies and rolling bass down Riverside. If there is any pride, any proof of cred sifted from all of this, then it's tempered by a vague regret of complacency and a moderate pitch loss in my last audiology exam. I can still hear the N.W.A. beats and the scraping, high-ended lowrider on a manhole cover. We had to get out and push.