The Storm That Overtakes The Boy - Giving In (Patreon Magazine) (Patreon)

I hook my index finger around the string, which sounds a bell at the front of the bus to indicate to the driver that he should stop. There’s a long pause before the doors open and I have to kind of squeeze between three men to get down the stairs and onto the street, but then I’m there, standing on the pavement in Prinzlauer Berg, Berlin. I’ve been living in the city for maybe 5 months now, but I’ve never been to this district. It’s hip – almost painfully so – but not in the hipster way, more in a Punk Rock clinging with dirty fingernails to an era gone by kind of way. I look up the street, then down the street, and I still have no idea which way to go. So I just let my instinctual sense of direction pick a path and then head in the exact opposite way, as my sense of direction in cities is notoriously bad.

I’ve got a typed passage from one of my favorite books, folded in quarters, clutched in my hand and my mobile phone in the other. The screen on my mobile is tiny but it will have to do as the only image I have of what I want the tattoo artist to ink on me is a photograph snapped on that phone’s camera. I pass huge murals of beautiful graffiti art and gritty low walls with shitty spray-painted tags on them. It’s a mix. But eventually I find the tattoo shop I’ve been looking for and in I go, hoping to God my German is good enough by now that I don’t end up with a butterfly tattoo on my hip instead of the symbolic imagery I’m hoping for.

Franz looks like how Kurt Cobain might look if he’d been able to age into his 30’s, complete with heavy narcotic and smoking habits to really put the mileage in on his aging. But he’s got a great disposition and I like him right away. I show him the photograph on the phone, a statue of a naked boy riding on the back of a donkey, which is the centerpiece of the Rathaus (like, city hall) in my area of Berlin. Then I hand him the folded piece of paper and tell him to interpret it however he wants, visually. It’s a description of a storm, or rather a “coming storm,” as it creeps over a valley in beautiful, dark, foreboding, nearly Biblical language. I want the boy to be riding in front of the storm, but the storm is coming behind him; with him… after him, maybe. Franz takes a deep drag on his cigarette, his square-tipped fingers holding the page open in front of him. He asks me what it is, which I think he really is asking where did it come from?, and so I tell him that it’s from one of my favorite books, And the Ass Saw the Angel, by the musician Nick Cave. A smile kind of curls at the corner of Franz’s mouth and he nods, saying he’ll have something for me to look at tomorrow. So I go home, my mind full of the emptiness of having no idea what to expect.

The next day I see a beautiful stencil for the boy on the donkey and Franz tells me he’s going to freehand the storm. Okay. Franz suggests the placement on my lower leg, on the side, because “du bist doch sehr klein,” (you really are quite small) and it’s the biggest flat surface he can work on. Plus, he adds, if you put something terrestrial (like the donkey) up high, then you can’t really put anything below it. I really liked this explanation. It gave me confidence in his aesthetic senses. As I sat in an awkward, half-mermaid position for him to lay the stencil, Franz told me a joke he liked,  

there’s this wise man in town and so all the people go to ask him, “how do we find the Right Way?” The wise man says he’ll show them and gets up on his donkey, which he then proceeds to just ride around in circles until the sun goes down. Finally, people feel sorry for the wise man, thinking he’s just old and confused, and ask him what he’s doing. “I am looking for my donkey,” he says.

With that, Franz chuckled, this raspy, heavy smoker chuckle that was almost to himself. He didn’t even glance up at me to see if I registered the meaning of the joke, it was like he was just telling it for himself… or to himself. I’ve always remembered it. It had nothing to do with the meaning of this tattoo for me, but it got put into the ink by Franz. That’s why you have to choose your tattoo artists carefully, because they put themselves in their work. I’m happy to have kept Franz in this way, even though I no longer like the tattoo, aesthetically. I was shocked when he was finished, as the boy on the donkey was all so dark. The stencil, obviously, had only been an outline, so I was shocked that he’d shaded the whole thing so dark. But he only had the photograph as reference and the statue at the Rathaus is, in fact, all black. The storm that Franz freehanded is beautiful and perfect. I still love that part. And even though the boy and the donkey have become murky and indistinct over these years in my skin, I actually kind of love that the effect is basically that the storm has caught up with him. They are slowly being swallowed.  

A week ago I was in the ring at Sasakul Gym in Bangkok, trying to keep track of the various and plentiful games that legendary champion, Karuhat Supawan, is playing with me, teaching as he goes. He’s stepped up the pressure and intensity today and I’m just trying to keep up. It’s like I’m treading water in the last few minutes before it becomes drowning. Mentally, I mean. I’m trying to track his open side, but I’m also trying to corral him into the corner, while also not letting him escape along the ropes. I’m trying to force him to block so that I can punish his openings, but I’m also trying to sneak strikes in before he can block, all while being tagged over and over again with his weirdly slow-motion but also super fast kicks. It’s kind of like watching a man ride a donkey around in circles, except you’re trying to catch him or guide him or something.

A breeze that has been blowing through the open sides of the gym has gone from being a welcome reprieve from the heat to a more insistent gust. Plastic bottles are blown across the parking lot outside and the dogs, which usually are just lying around under cars to escape the heat, are agitated and running around on the wide, cement open space beyond the gym. There’s a roll of thunder and Karuhat looks up at the sky with a kind of concern that would make sense if he were outside, but from the safety of the gym it only comes off as a kind of boyishness. It’s a little charming, actually, a grown man who can dismantle any opponent in front of him acting scared of a little thunder. I was lost in my head, tensing my face and rounding my shoulders in a hunch as I berated myself internally for how terribly I was performing. The rain started, and then it really started, just blasting down and making the entire outside world a wall of sudden gray. One of Chatchai’s fighters rushed between the two open sides of the gym to pull these tarps down and keep the storm from blowing into the gym and out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the parking lot dogs run, full speed, around the corner of the building. There was a charge in the air that steadily drowned out my inner voice, like White Noise, and my mind got muted. Suddenly I was just moving. The storm had freed me from this arduous struggle. It’s like I’d suddenly been scooped up and placed on the back of the donkey, too. Quit looking for the donkey.

On my leg, the storm has caught up with and will eventually consume the boy on the donkey. In the ring with Karuhat, the storm muted my struggle and electrified Karuhat. There is only one compromise between these two things, for me. I don’t want to outrun the storm; I don’t want to stand passively in it and pretend I don’t mind getting wet. The answer is to be the storm. The storm doesn’t fear itself, it can’t outrun or avoid itself, and most importantly it doesn’t suffer itself. I, currently, do all those things and am always looking for a way out. This is like looking for my donkey, honestly. At any moment you are already on the path, you just have to be able to see it and recognize it. What snags me, and has been a battle for me throughout my whole life, is this false belief that emotions are something that happen to me, that I’m passive to and just suffer. Like the weather. It’s raining and you have no control over that. Sure, “rain is happening,” but that doesn’t mean you are affected by it. If you’re inside listening to Miles Davis (as I often was in my teenage years on rainy days), the consequence of rain is a joyful one. When I’m in the ring with Karuhat, getting frustrated and closing in on myself because I’m not doing what I think I should be doing, I’m suffering unnecessarily. I think of it as my frustration and my failing, feeling compressed by the gap between where I think I should be and where I think I am currently. Instead, “frustration is happening,” but it’s not my frustration. I don’t have to own it and hold it and nurture it and give it a voice. Let the rain fall; or be the rain fall.

You can watch the session that inspired this post here.

 If you enjoyed this article you may enjoy the others in the series:

ARTICLES - Patreon Magazine

• Patron Only Articles - These articles are written specially for my patrons and are my attempts to expand as a writer. They are full of richer descriptions, and take on themes not always talked about in the experience of being a fighter. At least one is published a month, if not two.

Insisting On Left - The Space Between Pi and Kru | The story of how it is a delicate balance with my Kru when insisting on changing my stance to southpaw read it here  

Arjan Surat: The Unbreakable Breaker of Bangkok | Maybe the toughest, hardest man in Thailand. Arjan Surat is 63 and made of the stuff that feels like it's from 100 years ago. The unbreakable breaker. read it here 

When I First Met Dieselnoi: A Giant in my Soul | The powerful impression the legendary Dieselnoi made on me right from the start, a resonating impact that has made on me as a person. read it here 

The Perfection of Festival Fights in Thailand | A trip to the clinic to receive a boosting IV leaves me drifting through thoughts of belonging, as I listen to my kru talk about me to the nurse. read it here 

Cheet Yaa - "if there were no cuts it wouldn't be Sylvie" | A trip to the clinic to receive a boosting IV leaves me drifting through thoughts of belonging, as I listen to my kru talk about me to the nurse. read it here 

The Hurting Game - The Psychology of Hurt | Even though I've fought over 200 times being the one who hurts others, that the game is hurting, is still a psychology I need to embrace. read it here 

A Girl and Her Bag - the Intimacy of Work | Every fighter who has spent a long amount of time in the gym has to fall in love with their bag - how bagwork contains its own beauty. read it here 

Jai Rohn - My Story of Blood, My Pride and Stitches | My heart was racing, I was upset at my performance, and then there was the pain of stitches, more painful than any stitches I've had before. read it here 

photo credit to glasschord