Arms and the Man

LET
T
E
R
FRO
M
A
APPALACH
ARMS AND THE.MAN
Saturday night in West Virginia
By Kathy Dobie
I've
heard some
people call the
T oughman Contest
"redneck boxing,"
though
not, of
course, the rednecks
themselves. If they
called it anything
other than its proper name, I believe
they would call it a
good time. The
T oughman Contest
is a truly amateur
boxing contest, a
competition fornonprofessionals: no one can enter who
has won more than five amateur fights
in five years, and most of the contestants have never fought anywhere besides a schoolyard or a bar.
The fighters wear protective head
and groin gear and box with 16-ounce
gloves, and each bout consists of three
one-minute rounds. There are judges,
ring girls (often from the local strip
club), and a cash prize. The winner is
declared "The Toughest Man in
Town."
On any given month you can log
on to the T oughman website and find
at least three or four, and sometimes six
or seven, contests being held in different parts of the country-places like
Kathy Dobie's last article for Harper's
Magazine, "The Only Girl in the Car," appeared in the August 1996 issue. A book based
on that article will be published by Dial in
June.
Thicker Skin by Paul Mullins
Lubbock, Texas; and St. Clairsville,
Ohio; Fort Pierce, Florida; Macon,
Georgia; Enid, Oklahoma; and Fort
Wayne, Indiana. The contests are held
in coliseums and high school auditoriums, fairgrounds, casinos, and racetracks. And every winter, the world
championship, a glitzy affair, is broadcast on cable television with as much
hammy acting as a World Wrestling
Federation extravaganza.
The bold red-and-black posters advertising the event always ask
the same thing: "HOW TOUGH
ARE YOU? If You're TOUGH
ENOUGH, Sign Up Now!" And then
they give the same warning: "WIMPS
NEED NOT APPLY!"
I first heard of T oughman when a
friend, who had photographed one of
the smaller contests in Detroit, told
me that the crowd had hated an ArabAmerican fighter, calling out "camel
jockey" and "sand nigger," and that
one of the ring girls
was so skinny she
was booed every
time she took the
stage. The cruelty
drew me in, the potential for humiliation-the
risk
every fighter and
every skinny girl
takes in the ring.
West Virginia
seemed a perfect
place to watch a
Toughman Contest: it's very white
and deeply working-class.Winters here
are hard and long, the mountains and
forests reduced to shades of black and
white; they make you long for something bright and loud and warm-halfnaked smiling girls, cheering crowds,
and blood. Almost everyone I talked to
had done time in the military or had a
father or brother who did or all three.
The sons of coal miners and army
sergeants, they had become construction workers, truckdrivers, and lumberjacks;some had ended up, unhappily
it seemed to me, as hospital aides or
steakhouse waiters.
The Clarksburg contest, held every
January, draws participants from the
surrounding counties, from as far north
as Morgantown, a university town, and
as far south as Buckhannon, where I
met one fighter in her trailer-a girl
who worked at Hardees-and another fighter-a lumberjack-in his log
cabin up in the hills. It's a beautiful
LEITER FROM APPALACHIA
79
part of the country, a good home for
deer hunters and daredevils, a place
where men in their thirties say casually
that they don't expect to live long
enough to grow old, where no one gets
through life without broken bones and
scars. Clarksburg itself is an old, handsome town, built on hills and next to
a river, crisscrossedwith railroad tracks;
a stoic town, hale and hearty during
the day, but at night, when all the
shops and offices close down, it seems
to slip into itself, and one imagines
that, with all that daytime stoicism,
its dreams are always slightlysad.
S
evenry-six fighters registered for
the twenty-first annual Clarksburg
Toughman Contest, eight of them
women. So many people wanted to
fight that the contest lasted for two
days-Friday and Saturday nights at
the National Guard Armory. Half of
those seventy-six men and women won
their fights on Friday night and were
supposed to return on Saturday to fight
for the championship. Some didn't.
They'd had more than enough on Friday. They had fought and won, but
they never thought it was going to be
that hard,
On Friday the fighters picked their
ring names. They lined up at the registration table next to the ring, ordinary
men signing up to fight each other, almost every one of them looking glum.
Maybe the sullen masksprotected them
from their fear, or from the fact that
they were about to engage in something intimate with one of the strangers
standing near them-trade blows, draw
blood, bleed, stumble and fall onto
their knees, or make the other man go
down.
At the registration table they sat on
folding chairs, three at a time, opposite
three women who asked them to fill
out forms. The men leaned into the
table and listened closely, their faces
screwed up as if they suddenly had
gone a little deaf. They were asked if
they had picked a ring name, and if
they hadn't thought of one they were
given a sheet of paper with a long list
of names to choose from.
And so Friday night, "Crazy" Chris
Spencer, a bricklayer from Rosemont,
fought "Pondering" Phil Propst, an
equipment operator from Bartow. Chip
80
HARPER'S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2002
Streets, a twenty-five-vear-old carpenter, took on twenty-four-year-old
Travis "the Tyrant" Ferrel, a program
aide at a home for mentally retarded
adults. A nineteen-year-old construction worker fought a twenty-year-old
UPS loader. A forty-two-year-old retired Marine sergeant knocked out a
twenty-five-year-old, reversing the natural order of things. A turkey catcher
fought a hardware-store employee; a
c.P.A. fought a welder. A nineteenyear-old construction worker defeated
a twenty-four-year-old student from
West Virginia University, in Morgantown, and although the students who
had come down from Morgantown suddenly got very quiet, most of the audience wasgrateful, for it hardly would've
been bearable the other way around,
hardly fair-a collegeeducation, betterpaying job, better health, longer life
... and a winner in the ring roo?
Every man, every woman, for that
matter-college
student, housewife,
and welder-looked the same when
he or she was hit: there was an expression of astonishment, head jerked
back, skin seeming to fall sidewaysover
the face, hair flying, and then a flash of
something unbidden, something uncontrollable, a look of humiliation.
After that, you could see a fighter's individual temperament: some got angry or defiant, others looked like
they wanted to weep, some
grinned.
O
n Saturday night, the armory
isfilled to the rafters and quickly warming up under the bright, hot ring lights.
I've been told that there are more fights
in the stands than in the ring, which
may be why at the Clarksburg T oughman Contest all uniformed cops are
let in for free.
The event is sponsored by Budweiser,and it's Budweiserthey're drinking in plastic cups, high up in the balcony, pressed against the railing, four
deep, scanning the people below with
an eager, quick look, as if the entertainment could start anytime, anywhere, even in the milling crowd. The
ring is swathed in lots of red and white
and blue, the colors of America and
Budweiser.
I have a ringside seat along with the
judges and the local media and friends
of the fight promoter, Jerry Thomas,
the man who has owned the franchise
to all of the T oughman contests in
West Virginia since 1979. Disparate
elements seem to come together in
Thomas, so it's hard to focus on him.
He's very talkative, and the stories he's
fond of telling are of ringside brawls
and unlikely knockouts, though he tells
them in a soft voice. His posture is ramrod straight, a habit from his Army
days, but he sports a long, silky, blueblack mustache, a dandy's touch, and
his hair is parted far down the side and
lies flat on his head like a cap at a slant.
At seven o'clock the fighters are beginning to warm up. I hear that a couple of them are smashing their heads
against the locker-room walls trying
to let the other fighters know how
tough they are.
All of the Toughman bouts are
fought to music, so there's a romantic
and sometimes just plain antic atmosphere to them. The DJ plays the Rocky
theme, the William Tell Overture,
and Pearl Jam's "Alive." The entire
crowd claps along to "Thank God I'm
a Country Boy." The heavyweight female fighters are seen purely as entertainment. You can tell by the music
the DJ picks: "I Could've Danced All
Night," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and,
most often, Barney the dinosaur's song,
"1Love You."
As the bleachers fill up, women in
pastel-colored bikinis and fanny packs,
athletic socks, and sneakers walk up
and down the steep stairs selling raffle
tickets. One of the women, who's wearing a sky-blue two-piece bathing suit,
has gigantic breasts, and the older men
in the crowd are drawn to her. When
they buy tickets from her, they stand
close so that their arms brush hers
while they take the money out of their
wallets.
- They're big men, taller than she,
men with beer guts and crew cuts going gray, and, standing next to her
like that, they look both protective
and grateful, like it's been awhile
since someone got naked or even pretty for them and made them feel like
men. The woman has long straight
Barbie-doll hair, a tired face, and the
practical manner of someone who understands the exact value of large
breasts, not a bit more or less.
She climbs the bleachers collecting
money, her face blank, a shield against
the leers and the frowns, but she smiles
at the older men who treat her nicely.
It's a sad smile.
"And now here to sing our national
anthem-two lovely young ladies from
Liberty High School!" announces promoter Jerry Thomas, standing in the
ring in his suit and holding a microphone. The girls keep their eyes glued
to the floor of the ring, their hands
clasped in front of them. They look
scared to death. One is wearing a long
black skirt. The other girl, who has
honey-colored hair and wears black
pants and flats, licks her lips nervously.
They have no reason to be afraid.
They have the voices of angels. The
crowd listens so quietly that everyone
hears the one person who starts talking and the five who shush him. When
the girls are done, the crowd erupts in
whistles and hollers. These are THEIR
girls-I can feel their pride that they
have bred such sweetness and talent.
And this is THEIR national anthem.
The patriotism I hear, just in that silence during the singing, every cap off
every head, and then in the hard applause afterward, is unlike anything
I've heard before, neither sentimental
nor calculated. It's not the patriotism
of politicians or even the patriotism of
a recent immigrant who has been able
to send money home and his kids to
college. It isn't the patriotism of people
who love a country because it has given them so much. More intimate than
that, and confident, it's the emotion
of people who love this country because THEY have given to IT, through
hard work and generations
of military service.
"I
t's time to say hello to our lovely ringgg girrrrls!" The men in the audience are back on their feet again,
hollering.
Every T oughman fight begins with
the fighters' parade around the arena.
They're led by the three ring girls in
their bikinis and spike heels. These
three, Chastity, Nicole, and Shanna,
were chosen a few weeks ago at a separate contest at a local bar. Tonight,
the audience will pick their favorite
ring girl, and she'll be given a vacation
for two to sunny Miami.
Two of the girls, Chastity and
Nicole, both dark-haired, smoothskinned, and petite, are dancers at a 10-
cal strip club. They're wearing black
bikinis with the name of the club, Silk
Stockings, printed in pink on the bottoms of their suits and campaign buttons for the local prosecuting attorney pinned to their tops. Their
red-and-silver five-inch spike heels are
as shiny as a little boy's fire engine.
They have perfect teeth and seem very
comfortable with the crowd, used to
being adored and that adoration being
expressed by college boys calling out,
"Shake your ass!" Maybe they will,
maybe they won't.
Chastity and Nicole look like little
huggable dolls-they're that cutebut it's obvious that they know how to
control the crowd. The third girl,
Sharma, isn't polished and petitely
pretty but very game. She's just any
girl, not a professional girl, so to speak.
She has dark eyes, a ruddy face, large
thighs, and an aggressive way of walking with her belly pushed forward and
her legs far apart. She's wearing a silvery white bikini. She never stops
smiling and searching the crowd for its
approval.
With the houselights still on, the
fighters parade around the ring behind
the ring girls, who are holding the
round cards up over their heads, leaving their bodies entirely exposed. The
men hoot and holler, raising their plastic cups of beer in a salute to the ring
girls. Some of the women in the audience go grim, their lips pulled in and
suddenly aged, as if the girls in bikinis
are not girls in bikinis but Time itself
passing. Several of the fighters are
bunched so closely together that they
seem in danger of stepping on each
other's heels. They're not used to being
on display, and they look like they're
hurrying and hiding at the same time.
Whenever a fighter spots some of
his buddies or his family members in
the audience, he raiseshis fist in the air
or steps through seats to slap hands.
Men in the crowd lean over the seats
to yell at the fighters. They seem to
be cursing them, but they're only
yelling words of encouragement: "Kick
some ass, Danny!" "You show them
pussies, Paul!"
There are men of every shape and
size, men stumbling quickly around
the armory wearing baggy sweatpants
and old Tvshirts, looking like hapless
husbands called in from mowing the
lawn and forced to defend or attack
something, men who look like they
might be in a lot of trouble once
they're in the ring. There are big bruisers, I mean giants, who wear their muscle and their fat with equal pride, one
as good as the other for stomping on
someone-men
ready to brawl, not
box. There are bare-chested boys in
silky boxing shorts, summery in their
confidence; they have clean sharp
faces and taut muscles. There are fat
men and skinny men. One black fighter. One Puerto Rican. The youngest
fighter is eighteen.
I see John Hawkinberry, at fortyseven the oldest fighter here, making
his way around the ring, his chin jutting forward, his face pinkish, wirerimmed eyeglassesturning opaque under the bright lights. He's wearing a
stars-and-stripes baseball cap and a nylon jacket, and he's carrying his gym
bag and moving fast. He looks like he's
ready to leave.
John has suffered four concussions
from Toughman contests. He's a
crowd favorite because of his age and
because he keeps coming back not
only every year but from every
punch thrown at his tired old head.
He's known as "the Hawk" and admired simply for his capacity to endure pain.
Friday night, when John's tum to
fight came, Jerry Thomas introduced
him by shouting, "Forty-seven years
young!" and the crowd yelled back,
"Go Hawk!" John looked small in the
ring-at five feet seven, he was a good
head shorter than his opponent, John
"the Landlord" Raber-but he had a
solid stance and was tucked in hard
behind his gloves.
After the first round, John refused to
sit down. "The Landlord" was gulping
water and nodding rapidly to the two
comer men, who were giving him a
pep talk while they wiped him down.
John prowled his comer of the ring, impatient for the second round. It was
all bravado, and the audience loved
him for it.
When the bell for the third round
rang, John walked over to his opponent, entering the fight as casually as
if he were entering a conversation.
John got "the Landlord" on the ropes
and punched him until the ref broke it
up. John chased him around the ring.
LETTER FROM APPALACHIA
81
By unanimous decision, "the Hawk,"
the oldest fighter there, veteran of ten
Toughman contests and
four concussions, won.
O
n Saturday night I'm seated
ringside between one of the judges, a
big affable guy in a turtleneck sweater
named Gary Walden, a housing contractor, and the fight doctor, Allen
Saoud, who used to work emergency
medicine but is now a dermatologist
with several offices in the area. He's
also the county coroner.
Saoud has dark hair, faintly protruding eyes, and a busy manner. He's
a big man, wide and tall, and wearing
a dark suit. Immediately, he finds a
soft chair with arms and pulls it next
to our metal folding chairs. Saoud's
been a fight fan since Rocky Marciano,
he says, so this is the perfect job for
him. Besides Toughman, he's the fight
doctor for all of the amateur and proboxing bouts in the county. He's got an
eye for the fighters, a truly clinical
eye-not necessarily callous but not
overly sensitive either. Throughout
the night, he keeps up a steady, instructive narration: "This boy is as
tough as nails. Good right hand. He's
a barroom brawler. Helluva right hand.
Helluva right hand."
"Don't quit your day job, buddy,"
he saysof a stumbling fighter, tattooed
everywhere, with so much blood pouring from his nose that some of the faces
at ringside look disgusted.
A fighter with the ring name "The
Professor" battles the only black fighter here, Tony "the Tiger" Evans. Actually Tony the Tiger has to chase the
Professor all over the ring. The Professor gets knocked down and asks for
the fight to stop.
"That's why they call him the Professor-he knew he was getting his ass
kicked," the Judge pipes in merrily.
Now up there in the ring two huge,
blubbery men are fighting each other in
the ugliest manner possible. One is
6'8",280 pounds. His smaller opponent, at 6'2",210, breaks away and
dances around the ring; the crowd boos.
His black T-shirt reads STRESSED OUT.
In the third round, the big guy falls
into the ropes, causing everyone seated on that side of the ring to jump up,
knocking their chairs back in alarm.
"I bet that little old heart is beating
82
HARPER'S MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2002
like a tom-tom in that big old boy's
body," the Doc says calmly.
A "domestic engineer" fights a
housecleaner-two very large women
wearing sweats and Tvshirts as big as
dresses. There's no finesse to the fight;
no running away either. The women
just stand there and punch away at
each other, big, sloppy, windmill
punches-soft
but endless-to
the
head, the belly, the breasts. When the
ref separates the women, they circle
each other warily, their chests heaving,
hair dark with sweat. The DJ plays,
"You've lost that loving feeling ... "
When the forty-year-old housecleaner wins the prize she's so excited and happy you want to put your
arms around her. She tells me she'll
use the $ 750 to pay the bills first,
then buy something for her kids.
She's raising her two young sons
alone after her second husband took
off. One night after he had left, her
husband came back, broke into the
house, and beat her up. That was the
year she entered T oughman.
So does she fight to express her
rage? Her face looks so alive, cheeks
flushed a schoolgirl pink, that it's
easy to believe her when she says
simply, "I like fighting." And, like
anyone else, the forty-year-old
housecleaner likes winning.
A thirty-nine-year-old fighter with
a killer right hand has picked "Old
Man" as his ring name. Every time he
takes a hit, the young men in the audience cry out with glee, "Take
THAT, Old Man!"
The lean young men fight like tigers,
leaping toward their opponents at the
ring of the bell and never letting them
go. They prance all over the ring and
never stop jabbing, never stop trying to
destroy each other. The crowd loves
these fights. When the bell rings, the
fighters are parted, but their blood is
still high. Even at the third round,
they come back full force.
When I'd asked two of the young
men, Travis "the Tyrant" Ferrel and
Jonah "Whitey" Cogar, why they'd entered T oughman, they replied the same
way: "I had nothing better to do." They
sat hunched over their chairs in the
gym where I had interviewed them,
looking both uncomfortable and eager, like they were wishing they had
something to say.
"If you weren't spending your nights
in the gym training for T oughman,
what would you be doing?" I asked.
"Sitting home and watching TV
probably," Jonah said, sounding disgusted.
Jonah doesn't work. Travis is an aide
at a home for mentally retarded adults.
They teach the adults how to survive
in the real world, he told me: "We take
them shopping in the mall." He sounded slightly embarrassed by his job.
They were deeply self-effacing, almost scornful of their lives, like they
knew their lives weren't worth shit and
so they were going to throw themselves
into the ring, into some trouble, and see
what would happen. It was as if they
were hoping that by pushing themselves into Toughman, they would become real. Couldn't life, furious, fast
life, give you a definite self with plans
for the future and plen-
""
T
ty to say?
"alk-on
ring girls"-that is,
eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-yearolds from the audience wearing sweatshirts and bell-bottom jeans-jump up
into the ring and prance around it like
ponies, parodying the real ring girls.
They tum and wiggle their bony, littlegirl butts at the crowd. They put their
hands behind their heads and thrust
out their hard little-girl chests. They
don't smile at the audience. Their faces
have the hard sassiness of tomboys.
They're mocking the ring girls (and
the men in the audience), but they're
also trying the seduction on for size.
"Only in West Virginia," the Doc
says dryly.
Another doctor from the local emergency room leans over and says to me,
"Be kind to our state."
As the night goes on, the competition heats up between the ring girls
too. The two strippers are very confident, but the girl with the big thighs
keeps changing her bathing suit and
ups the ante by turning around and
shaking her ass at us.
"Well, lookee here, another bathing
suit," the Judge says when she comes
out wearing a polka-dot bikini.
"She must be a rich kid," the Doc
observes.
When the men applaud and shout
for her, the other two girls look at each
other in amazement. They take to
pouting whenever the third ring girl is
onstage. Now when they walk the ring,
they too stop and give a little shake of
their ass or their breasts"but a very restrained, very knowing shake, as if they
know that the ordinary ring girl could
take off all her clothes and still not be
as attractive as they are. It's funny to
see the professional strippers being
'more chaste than the everyday girl
who is so determined to please.
Jerry Thomas introduces a "walkon ring dude!" and the tiniest boy
climbs up into the ring wearing cuffed
blue jeans but no shirt. When he flexes his arm muscle, a bicep no bigger
than a walnut pops into view. The
crowd is quieter than they've been
since the national anthem. Maybe they
don't want their boys to be rhat cute.
When one fighter complains of a
dislocated shoulder, the Doc climbs
into the ring to examine him. After
some discussion, the ref calls the fight.
As the hurt fighter leaves the ring, the
sound of a baby crying is played over
the sound system.
"It's a trick shoulder," the Doc tells
me bluntly when he comes back from
examining the fighter. Apparently the
man is able to pop his shoulder out at
will, and he didn't want to fight anymore. He didn't fool anybody. Neither
did one of the other fighters who
dropped out of T oughman the day of
the fights. He said he'd broken a rib
sparring, but the trainers told me differently: they said that he'd come down
with a case of the "T oughman flu"and that it happens all the time. There
are no saving lies here. No one ready
to give you a good excuse. Either you're
a good fighter or you're someone who'd
better hold on to your day job. You're
either tough as nails or you're a sissy.
Perhaps life itself has a hard face,
and therein lie its beauty and truth.
Perhaps that's where the joy lies, too,
in facing the fact that there's really
no fooling around with life, no whittling or cajoling it into some shape
you like, no crying or talking it out
of itself. Every man and woman here
seems like someone put to the test, a
hard test but one they can understand
and at least have a shot at
passing.
J
ohn Hawkinberry has returned to
fight tonight. He just finished his eight-
hour shift at Ruby Memorial Hospital
up in Morgantown, where he works as
a "support associate," sweeping patient
rooms, bringing them their food trays,
emptying the garbage.
Tonight he has to fight Tony "the
Tiger" Evans. As soon as Tony is announced, the Doc leans over and says,
"They don't like black people around
here much."
Tony is a much faster, stronger,
younger fighter than John. He bounces
around the ring like he's on springs.
Somehow, though, you know that he
will win a few fights but never all of
them. In this milky-white galaxywhere
he whirls alone, he won't risk it, if not
for himself then for the two black men
who are in the audience-friends? farnily?-the only black faces there.
Tony gets John up against the ropes
and punches away at his head like he's
reshaping it. When the ref pulls Tony
off of him, John raises a gloved fist in
the air to show he's not hurt, but he
stumbles, almost falling forward.
In round three, John takes a hit,
seems to get tangled in his own feet,
whirls around, and falls face first into
the ropes. When he gets himself off
the ropes-he seems truly tangled in
them-he's
completely spent. He
doesn't have a single punch left in him.
He can barely stay on his feet, but he
puts his gloves up in front of his face
and marches heavily across the ring
and into Tony's fists,straight into them,
as if that's the one thing he can do in
his life-not to win, not to make things
righr, but to never run, to
always face everything.
S
aturday night ends with four
champions, five if you count the ring
girl. Clermont Gilbert, a deaf man who
works for the fBI and goes by the ring
name "Moose," has won the heavyweight title. He weeps as Jerry Thomas
fastens the gold belt on his waist, weeps
because, as he later explains, once you
win you cannot come back and fight in
T oughman again.
Tim "the Beaver" Carr wins the
light heavyweight title. Jennifer
"Everlast" Leister, a compact, ponytailed eighteen-year-old Marine who
fought one of the best fights of the
night, every punch connecting until
the audience was on its feet roaring,
wins the women's lightweight title.
As the cameras flash, Debbie "Farm
Girl" Shaffer, the forty-vear-old
housecleaner and winner of the women's heavyweight title, beams and raises her gloved fist in the air.
Chastity wins the two tickets to sunny Miami. As soon as it's announced,
boys from the audience start shouting,
"Take me with you!" The Doc, wise to
the ways of the world, leans over to
me and says, "She'll probably take her
girlfriend."
Outside, the roads have become
sheets of ice and snow is beginning
to fall, but the crowd that's spilling
out of the armory doors is in high
spirits. Boyfriends and girlfriends,
husbands and wives, wrap their arms
around each other as they tramp
through the snow to their trucks.
Small boys starr play-boxing, and
when they end up tussling on the
ground their fathers laugh. Everyone
seems warmed and satisfied, like we
all just had a good meal inside. They
can handle this ice, these slippery
roads, the bitter cold; they've been
handling it, and worse, for years.
Take a man, an ordinary man,
living somewhere, a half hour south
of Clarksburg, let's say, in lumberjack country. That man parks his
pickup truck outside the Dairy
Mart. Kicking snow from his boots,
he walks into the brightly lit store
to buy milk and Marlboros. He's
worked hard all day and he'll do the
same tomorrow and for the next
thirty years, but he can't say he
likes his job. Maybe he has kids and
loves them, but he wishes he had
time to go hunting. Maybe he and
his wife aren't getting along too
well anymore, or maybe they split
up six or seven years ago and now
he thinks he made a big mistake,
and that man sees the red-andblack poster on the Dairy Mart
door: "HOW TOUGH ARE YOU?"
It's a taunt, but it's also a most seductive invitation. For what if every
battle we ever fought, every spiritual or
emotional struggle, took on a physical form, something we could get our
hands on? What if we could race our
trouble to a finish line or chop it down
with an axe or woo it over to our side
with a song or sex, calm it, cook it a
good dinner, rub irs back, and tuck it
into bed?
_
LETTER FROM APPALACHIA
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