I noticed him right away from across the gym. Just like me he worked out alone, the elliptical before class, weights and shadowboxing after. The whiffle sounds he’d make with each punch annoyed me until such time that I grew into the habit myself. He was close in height to mine and possessed the most beautiful form, finesse and grace. He looked as though he was carved out of marble, with the kind of muscles a boi like me could only dream of, biceps curved like cartoon clouds, defined, but not overdone. I would watch him work the heavy bag, looking to him for improvements I could make, ways to move, ways to hit, whiffle sounds soon tipped with rapid fire HUH-HUH-HUHs the more he got into it, his dark brown eyes unbroken focus.
It would be weeks, months before we would speak - he enveloped always, that unbroken focus, myself never too eager to engage the other members of that bougie boxing gym. For reasons of class, for reasons of gender, I was never all that comfortable there, a couple of kick-ass instructors my remedy to that, their only concern push push pushing yourself. And I did. Harder than I ever had before. I was never one of those athletic kids, I was that klutzy, chubby kid, standing in the outfield, distracted by gophers while softballs whizzed by. I would find mine in boxing, though, all those years later. Working the heavy bag one night in class. Left-right-duck-left-right- duck-left-right…
“Hey.”
“Uh, hi.”
I stood there kind of not believing he was talking to me.
“Would you mind?”
You’d partner with someone in class, one to hold the bag while the other drilled.
“Not at all.”
He waited a couple of sets before he said anything.
“You’ve really improved all these months you’ve been coming.”
“Thanks. I take that as a compliment, coming from you.”
“Why’s that?”
“You just seem like you’ve. Been doing this for a while.”
“You ever think about sparring?”
I had, actually, thought about sparring. Was even excited to try it. Until I got into the ring for the first time ever, with an eighteen year old boy who thought it’d be funny to go solely for head punches, a white flash in my eyes with each connect. The round was one minute and felt like forever.
“Nah. Not really.”
“Ah, well I thought I’d give it a shot, seems like we get here around the same time. I really just prefer tagging…”
“Tagging?”
“Instead of full on punches with head gear…”
He taps me on the shoulder with his glove to show me what he means.
“I saw what that kid did that time you got in. Not cool. My name is Rami.”
It was from the other side of the bag that I got to know him. Snippets of conversation between the HUH-HUH-HUH-HUHs of our punches. At first just the basics - he an attorney, myself a p.a., the merits of living on the East side of Los Angeles (me) versus West side (him); his love of basketball and my love of baseball.
“What kind of law do you practice?”
“Corporate bullshit, not my passion, but it pays the bills. But that’s not why I do this. Eventually I’d like to move back home, use my degree and expertise to help my people there.”
“Where’s back home?”
“Palestine.”
A friend of mine at Arts high lived for a time in Israel and I asked her once what it was like to grow up there, with so much violence all around, explosions and bombings. She sounded almost nonchalant about it in her tone, explaining to me that it was something she just ended up getting used to, over time,
“Anything can be normalized, you know. Like the whole Army thing.”
“What’s the Army thing?”
“Everyone has to serve. Two years. No ifs, ands, or buts.”
“Why, though? Is there any way out?”
The thought of mandatory military service - a horror to my sixteeen year old self. This was the extent of my understanding of the conflict at the time, beyond what filtered through to me while I watched the nightly news with my father - Israel being the good guys while the rest of the Middle East is bad. And now, there I was, speaking with someone from Gaza - that constant them on the list of America’s ??
One night after class, him and I in the ring running our drills, tagging gloves as our targets, working slowly, on form and technique.
“Man, your footwork’s getting to be too fast for me. I can’t even see what you’re doing right there. What is that?”
“I can’t see what I’m doing right there, either, quite frankly. I just kind of. Go with it.”
“I’d like to see that twerp get in the ring with you now…”
“Thanks to you.”
“Hardly. I could see it in you. Even that time with the kid…”
“Hey Rami, would you mind if I asked you a question?”
“Of course not. Shoot.”
“Look, it’s just that. I kind of don’t know how I should even, like, ask this. But. You know. It’s just that I’ve never met anyone from Palestine before. And. I mean, you still wouldn’t mind if the question I wanted to ask you was about that?”
“Tell me first. What is your impression?”
“My impression is that Israel’s supposed to be the good guy.”
“And Palestine?”
“Palestine’s the bad guy.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think it feels like that’s what they want us to think. We only ever really get one side of things over here. At least that what it seems like. And I’m just wondering. I mean, now that I know you a little bit better. I get that the conflict centers around the land there. But, like, how did it happen?”
And so there, in the middle of this bougie boxing gym in West Los Angeles, is where I would be radicalized. And by radicalized I mean that I heard for the first time in my life - a Palestinian point of view.
It’s been churning there, just beneath the surface, as I’ve watched how things have progressed over all of these weeks. Part pang of empathy, in the core of my chest; part anger, despair, helplessness, sorrow - growing stronger and more plaintive as the days and lives pass by. I thought, first, of the ravers out in the desert together at Nova, the horror and magnitude and violence of Hamas’ attack on October 7th becoming clearer as testimonies emerge from witnesses and the taken, dreading what I knew was certain to be unleashed upon Gaza and its people, all the while listening, observing, taking it all in, the discourse, what people have to say - the despair I felt and feel rising with each dehumanizing post that I read, with the rhetoric, with the death toll. I had convinced myself for all of these weeks that it isn’t my place to speak. That I still don’t know enough.
I would read in The New York Times there now exists an official term used in the hospitals and camps throughout Gaza - unknown trauma child. An unknown trauma child is a child found with no adult caretaker and no identification, who is suffering from physical trauma, emotional trauma or both. They’re found by themselves, often bloodied and in shock, photographed sitting in a corridor while medics rush around them. And then another story recently, in the Washington Post I would read about four premature infants left behind in the incubators at a hospital in Gaza, the doctors having no choice but to leave them, their deaths certain outside of their tiny oxygen chambers. I will not write here what happened to those children, I will write here, though, that nothing. Nothing justifies the manner in which those children perished.
I know enough to know that the death toll in Israel has remained relatively fixed and the death toll in Gaza has not, both continue to rise. The goal, it is said, is to end Hamas. For every Hamas fighter, leader, member killed, how many unknown trauma children will be left in their stead? And how many, do you think, will make it out like Rami did?
I wonder how he’s doing, if he’s still boxing, if he ever got back to his people.
After it was all said and done, he asked, “So, what do you think?”
“I don’t know, Rami. It kind of seems to me that they’re doing to your people what once was done to them.”
photographs courtesy of eduardo acosta