Everything Harder Than Everyone Else

Why Some of Us Push Ourselves to Extremes

Jenny Valentish

• Publisher: Apollo Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781954641013
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

A no-holds-barred, gonzo dive into the world of extreme behavior; from abstinence to ego, punishment to curiosity, obsession to reinvention, acclaimed journalist Jenny Valentish uncovers what drives those who push the limits of endurance.

What do extreme eaters, MMA fighters, ultra-marathon runners, and BDSM practitioners have in common? What drives some people to push their bodies and minds to the brink, putting everything on the line to test the bounds of their capacity? When Jenny Valentish worked through her own addictions, she became fascinated by extremes in their myriad and unexpected manifestations. In the darkly funny, brash, and irresistible Everything Harder Than Everyone Else, Valentish immerses herself in the lives of sex workers, body builders, and dedicated fighters and finds that many of the people she encounters have overcome addictions and trauma to find release and community where the stakes are at their highest.

Harnessing a journalistic approach that's equal parts brazenly curious and remarkably compassionate, Valentish finds herself neck-deep in her own investigation, embroiling herself in the world of competitive Muay Thai fighting and in the dark chambers of a BDSM dungeon. At every turn she stares unflinchingly into the darker corners of culture that polite society ignores and repudiates, asking readers and herself, how far are you willing to go?

Chapter Eight

Anger Is an Energy

Fighters

“Name a fighter that everybody could objectively agree is not attractive,” Eugene S. Robinson challenges me. “I’d be surprised; I can’t think of one. I’m not saying they’re all Calvin Klein models, but it’s rare for me to see a fighter that I don’t process as handsome.”

Eugene’s Skype handle is “Handsome Man.”

Since taking up Muay Thai, I’ve been wondering what the necessary attributes of a fighter are, as venturing into the ring seems to be the ultimate test of self. What powers a pugilist’s urge to go toe-­to-­toe with someone intent on knocking them out, thus risking serious injury, brain damage and even death? Maybe impulsivity. Maybe some spite. Maybe even a kind of death wish bravado, or a long-­held fear of having something to prove. But surely, more than in any other sport, all roads lead back to rage.

I decide that Eugene, the author of Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-­Kicking But Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking (2007), and a long-­time hyperbolic commentator on the world of biff, ought to know.

Eugene loves, loves, loves a fight, be it in the street, on the mat, in an underground fight club or on stage in his guise as front man for San Francisco experimental rock band Oxbow (just itching for a heckler to kick off). He writes with a fighter’s flair—“Topographical maps of the evening’s fun had spread out all over my suit in bloodied rivulets”—and acts as nimbly as he thinks, agreeing to an interview the moment he reads my message and participating in it on the fly, while driving home after a run.

Is his hypothesis right—that to be a fighter requires a lantern jaw rather than a burning grudge? In the past week I’ve seen two veteran fighters, Ken “The World’s Most Dangerous Man” Shamrock and Dan “The Beast” Severn, make cameos at a wrestling match. Ken and Dan are action-­figure handsome, all thrusting chins and barrel chests. Dan even has a Burt Reynolds-­style moustache. But they seem to be ridiculous outliers of masculinity. So instead I sift through a mental Rolodex of cauliflower-­eared, railroad-­nosed bad boys and choose Chris “The Crippler” Leben, whose wild benders have lent him quite the ruddy bloat.

“If I was a casting director, I would cast Chris all the time,” Eugene protests. “Classic Middle America look. Nobody would call him a bad-­looking guy.”

Many kids are drawn to martial arts because of their anxieties over not measuring up. By contrast, Eugene argues that combat athletes—boxers, kickboxers and MMA fighters—bear the burden of being too handsome, which naturally leads them to become targets in bar rooms and parking lots. “You have to develop a carapace so that people don’t fuck with you,” he explains. “I mean, that’s how I grew up.”

Which illustrates well that we all bring our own subjectivity and experiences to theories on why people fight.

Eugene was born into a complicated family and raised in Brooklyn in the 1970s. His grandmother became pregnant with his father at the age of thirteen, and her rapist—Eugene’s grandfather—was a lifelong criminal, up to the neck in extortion, gambling and loan-­sharking. Eugene’s troubled father disowned him, and his relationship with his mother was fraught. Sometimes she was “all Diana Ross cool”; other times she was hot-­tempered.

“I was a fairly good kid and stayed between the lines in a lot of ways, but then my mother’s relationship with my stepfather started to go down the toilet,” he says. “My mother wasn’t a hitter, but she was a ranter. She’d follow me from room to room, arguing about something or other, and if I looked upset she would go at me. I ended up suppressing and suppressing, developing an unhealthy relationship to anger.” Or, as he puts it in his book, “vast wellsprings of rage.”

For Eugene, “animal anger” became a calling, “but well before that, it started out as an emotional need.” And he gets seriously tetchy if he doesn’t see that same base instinct rampaging through the veins of other so-­called fighters.

Like the time he was loading out after a show in Maine and a couple of dudes tried to rile him in the parking lot, one of them hurling a can of beer. “I finally said, ‘If you want to fight me, there’s one thing you could do and one thing only: say one more word to me.’” When the man did, Eugene stepped down from the van onto the curb and the guy got a sense of his stature. “I saw fear in his eyes, and that’s when I got angry for the first time, because I wanted him to have the strength of his conviction,” Eugene says. “I want you to be fully fucking committed to this prospect.” Irked, Eugene knocked out that man, and the other ran off.

Or the time he took part in a jujitsu competition and was matched with a man clearly content with just winning a participation ribbon. On his way to the mat, Eugene heard the schmuck’s wife urging, “Come on baby, you can do it.”

“Like you do your best and that’s all that matters!” Eugene spits. “That half-­measure thing gets on my nerves. I just smashed the guy, threw him down, side control, got him in a Kimura, tapped him out. And I was like, Goddamn you. Stand up! Walk! Do not go gently into this good night!”

It’s a stance a million miles away from the dojos of traditional martial arts, upon whose walls there will usually be a pledge that the techniques learned within will not be exploited, and the ethos is to leave the world a better place, not smash it to smithereens. Eugene adds hastily, “But don’t mischaracterize my attitude as, Oh, I don’t have time for the weak. I just don’t like quitting. That’s why I’ve been in the same band since 1988. And the last five years of my marriage were like, ‘Fuck it. If she can take it, I can take it.’”

He laughs uproariously. “You can’t lose if you don’t quit.”

Throughout our conversation, Eugene refers to the “emotional content” of fighting, and yet when he talked to the famous interviewees in his book about “bloodlust” and “an emotional delight in domination,” he found them unwilling to deconstruct their urges. He puts that down to professional fighters being so accustomed to what they do that they no longer examine the emotional underpinnings; nor is there much time in their schedule for introspection. “And if there is, it’s not something that you’re going to share with the journalist,” he says.

So I’m lucky to find someone as frank as bare-­knuckle boxer Christine Ferea, who also has a long career in Muay Thai and MMA behind her. Christine agrees to an interview, but wants to know a few things first. Who am I? Why did I become a journalist? What is my interest in combat sports? How did I find her?

It’s a logical approach for someone who has to study an opponent so closely that it borders on obsession. Bare-­knuckle boxing is conducted over two-­minute rounds, so there’s no time to feel out the other fighter in the ring. Instead, Christine stalks an opponent for months beforehand by watching their old fights, observing their temperament and tics, and reading their insults on Instagram. It makes for a strange kind of intimacy.

With Christine having hit thirty-­seven, everything is riding on this bid for a legacy in bare-­knuckle, as her Instagram posts scouting for men to spar with in the Vegas area suggest. When we speak, her most pressing concern is Helen Peralta, a Dominican Republic native, raised in New York. The two last clashed in August 2019, at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum. Both ended with swollen faces: Helen in her gladiator-­style shorts and tight braids, with a cut at the corner of her eye that had already caused the lid to bulge into a slit; Christine with her MISFIT shorts, sharp undercut and a contusion on either cheekbone.

It was a close battle, but the unanimous decision in Helen’s favor marked Christine’s first loss in the sport. Naturally, she’s hungry for a rematch, but the event has been postponed because of the pandemic.

“What’s the plan?” I ask, meaning I assume it will be rescheduled.

“Kill her,” Christine says. “Make sure she doesn’t get up for about thirty seconds after I hit her.”

Christine has the backstory of a fighter in a telemovie: a street kid, in and out of trouble and eventually prison, who found her calling in a jailhouse fight gym and thus avoided her dismal destiny as a homicide or overdose statistic. Her aesthetic is still very much “street thug”—a hangover from childhood, when her family moved from San Jose to a neighborhood in Las Vegas where gang culture was rife. Local guys targeted her brother, and Christine found herself rising to the bait in his defense. “I would be like, ‘Dude! They’re going to keep fucking with you! I’m going with you—you roll with me and my homegirls.’ I didn’t know better, I just th...