Fight Club for Lovers

Imagine, if you will, Plato, a tight red spandex wrestling singlet stripped suggestively to just below his waist, R. Kellyesque, sweaty, chest heaving, the curved outline of a fresh erection. Socrates, undressed in similar fashion, equally aroused and perspiring, has him in a classic full-nelson while Aristotle, sporting no more than lowrise briefs?black, of course, and cotton?throws ham-handed punches into Plato's ribcage and shoulders, pausing every third or fourth blow to kiss his mouth and suck his nipples before resuming the pummel. Socrates squeezes and moans ecstatically.

The scene takes place in a narrow black cinderblock cell, candlelit red, behind thick steel bars. On the floor next to them, separated by a two-foot brick wall and more steel, grappling aggressively, as if in a pit, before an appreciative audience packed man to man on and around a Harley in hot, tight, close quarters, dominant and submissive, on a midnight blue two-inch thick compressed foam rubber wrestling mat, a fat guy styling a brushy brown mustache?it's Aristophanes?hairy, huffin' 'n' puffin', pins a skinny guy?let's say it's you?his slippery knees on your sore, aching shoulders, his crotch hovering inches from your face, and he's slappin' you, sneering, "Give? Give? Give?"

Two other erotically charged wrestling matches choreograph themselves on identical mats in the center of the main room, in front of a small oval bar?not famous philosophers or playwrights, but common men of the Republic, shopkeepers and artisans, soldiers and smiths. Spectators on vinyl car seats and sofas, attired in various kinds of fighting garb?old-school basketball shorts, ripped t's, white towels?converse, comment and casually masturbate, intermittently illuminated by a whirring, flashing red police light. They sip carrot juice, Coke and Kaliber. There's pizza in one corner, a glass case collection of whips, prods and a cat-o'-nine-tails in another, and a chains-and-rubber suspension device swinging between them. Six video screens play tapes of extreme fighting matches from around the known world: Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Troy. In a back room, a naked man, maybe 40, grinds spread-eagle into the rounded top of a hard leather rubdown table. A thick-muscled older man, 60ish, rugged in the way of an ironworker or retired Spartan footsoldier, stripped to his khaki pants, pinches, pushes, pulls and feverishly rubs baby oil into the younger man's flesh, focusing on the ass crack and groin, stretching, stretching the penis and snapping it like a rubber band. He growls and spits at a groping interloper, who scurries away like a roach.

A narrow alley snakes deeper into the back room, like a street through the Casbah, several sets of eyeballs visible from darker nooks and crannies, fighters moaning before or after matches, starting up or finishing off. Edgy rap and metal float softly through the heavily perfumed blanket of funky aroma so thick with man sweat, Lysol and 20 years of come on the walls only a true devotee could inhale deeply without choking or fainting.

?

Brawlers Fight Club NYC blew my mind. It's a restrained contemporary approximation of an ancient Greek symposium, with a strong fetish overtone, the Greek psyche having existed in a much more no-holds-barred, male-on-top society than ours. You couldn't get away with a true symposium today. Besides the requisite intellectual discourse, the old Greeks publicly indulged in male and female hookers, pornographic storytelling, hardcore onanism, drunkenness and drug-taking, nude wrestling, infibulation and pederasty. Even Bloomberg might object. Too much psychic damage over the centuries. Oh, and women. Women had their place in Greek life; it just wasn't in the senate, or, unless they were hookers, or entertainers, the symposium.

Compared to most ancient cultures, we're uptight, puritan analists, timid and feminized. There is Greek pottery; picture stories of organized rape, homosexual intercrural copulation (between the thighs), dads and boys, scatology?priceless, precious artifacts, which if you tried to sell them over the Internet might get you a visit from an FBI mole.

The point is: I was shocked by what I found here. Disillusioned on the one hand (I was hoping for good old American bonethumping violence), but enlightened and encouraged on the other.

?

A couple months back my guy Sheldon tells me about "this Fight Club-type scene." Sheldon knows everything. He's got contacts and acquaintances all over lowlife and underground New York. Born and raised on the Lower East Side, he works at the post office and keeps his nose in the street. He hears something curious, something he thinks I might be interested in, he touches base.

"Yo, DJ."

"Hey, Sheldon. What's happenin'?"

"Two words: blood and guts."

My ears prick up. I love violence, chaos, mayhem. Don't ask. Big fight fan. Ali, Leonard, Foreman, Chuvalo, Tyson. Sheldon knows.

"Go on."

"Bareknuckle boxing..."

I grabbed my pen and cut him off. "Where?"

"Got a website. Ready?"

"Go ahead."

The website ([www.Brawlersfightclubnyc.com](http://www.brawlersfightclubnyc.com)) isn't explicit about gay, but I ain't stupid and I'm past giving a fuck about who eats what. Eat what you can. Make life a feast. I scroll through homoerotic wrestling photos a bit disappointed until I come to the magic words: Gutpunching! Bareknuckles! Gouging! Oh shit. It's on.

I call Johnny Art and Big Mike the Union Mook. They both get hard-ons. We hook up at Flannery's on 14th St. for pints and joints and amble on over to the Meatpackin' District, where the Manhole plays host to Brawlers. It's Wednesday, June 12, the Nets are about to get swept and a cool breeze quietly, discreetly comforts the city.

We descend 20 steps to the basement, lay out $15 a man and fall into the opening paragraphs of this essay. I ain't much on gay clubs and scenes so I don't see a lot of this. I'm fascinated and intimidated. It's like the first AA meeting I ever attended. Here was a group of adult males being honest with themselves and each other, except in a physical, erotically choreographed way. The heat, the smell, the grunts, smack-smack, the heavy breathing, low light, the soft pulsing music. It was sultry, like a locker room in purgatory.

There's a tiny black guy in tiny black shorts and an open white shirt cradling a clipboard and adding names and addresses to a mailing list. Johnny and the Mook plant themselves at the bar while I ask the clipboard guy who's in charge. His face lights up when he hears I'm looking to do a story on the club. He disappears in a flash and returns just as quick with John Mazza, the promoter, who has his lookalike boyfriend, Joe, draped across his back. John and Joe are panting, sweating and smiling, tanned, muscled, short and bald. They're wearing matching singlets upholstered to the waist, and they paw, slap and punch each other like lusty teenagers. Maybe they're 30, 35. I get right to the point.

"I hear there's bareknuckle boxing here. That true?"

The fellas giggle as John elbows Joe off his back. Joe slugs John in the chest. John grabs Joe's wrist and twists him into a half-nelson and bites his neck. They break.

"We're a fetish club," John says, stepping away from Joe, who slaps his ass. "We've had 14 Brawlers nights. We usually get 100, 150 men. Most wrestle, but we have gloves, headgear, jocks and these beautiful mats, as you can see. They cost me $1200."

John's very enthusiastic and proud. He smiles a lot.

"Is there bareknuckle boxing?" I stay focused.

"We were starting to get too many watchers so I shut it down for a while. It's a fetish club. Very erotic. Lots of guys get started fighting and end up dry humpin' and kissing. Things can get hot. I met Joe here in March. We wrestled for three hours then ended up sucking each other's dick until dawn. Been together ever since."

"That was after closing up," Joe interjects, punching John in the arm.

"Yeah, sucking cock and fucking are not allowed. Everything else is encouraged. We're a fetish club."

"Yeah, I see that, but does anybody ever, you know, just start wailing, punching, real fights? Do you schedule anything?"

"No schedule. Everything is spontaneous. Lots of guys come together. It can get out of hand, though."

"You mean bareknuckle?"

"It's happened. It's not encouraged. That's why we don't serve alcohol. Alcohol-induced rage, somebody could get hurt. We're a fetish club."

I ask about photos but John says no. He offers some of his own but I'm not interested. The ones on the website are too tame.

More people have arrived and, like any good promoter, John & Joe need to work the crowd.

"Hang out, get comfortable. If you need anything, holler. Have a wrestle if you want."

I'd love that backroom rubdown from an angry six-foot Valkyrie but I don't know about a wrestle. I slip back to the bar and grab a stool with Johnny and the Mook. Three straight guys in a gay fetish club stand out like the spots on a domino. One of us could have blended. Two, perhaps. Not three.

The place is filling now and I notice more watchers than fighters. There's a definite cruise element to this thing. Four separate matches play out simultaneously and about 75 men are in the club. That means 67 watchers. The bouts are more belligerent passion dance than violence. Nobody seems as interested in kicking ass as kissing it. I had come hoping for blood and guts, pure, raw street fights and bareknuckle bonecrushing, only to encounter sweaty, stinky, pseudo-sexual homoerotic bonding.

As I watch, though, I begin thinking of all the horny evenings I've spent fantasizing and masturbating as much to quell my aggression as out of any sexual needs. I remember what David Wojnarowicz wrote in Close to the Knives about the promiscuous instability of desire as "a bundle of contradictions that shift constantly," and that "sexual desire is neither for a thing...nor for a person, but for a fantasy?the mnemonic traces of a lost object."

Is that not the definition of fetish? You can't deny the sexual charge in violence, but true violence is so quick and extreme you seldom experience the pleasure of it, except, perhaps, in its passing. Sitting there, I see that you can experience real pleasure, sexual pleasure, in the simulation of violence. I see it and feel it in the room. Two black guys, tall, wonderfully built, vigorously throw each other to the mat, squirm and knee and grind ample hard-ons against each other. Not a sound save for heavy breathing. And I have a revelation: I've read s&m literature from Anonymous to De Sade to Stephen King and Anne Rice, I've watched dominant/submissive pornos, I've slapped girlfriends' asses and lightly pinched their nipples, none of it, really, all that sexually satisfying. But if I could get down to nothing but my squeezers and get sweaty wrestling with a woman who could match me in an environment like this, maybe even beat me?the leather, the steel, the funk and music, the flashing lights and excited "watchers"?oh shit...and for 15 fucking dollars!

I search (cruise?) the Manhole looking for John Mazza. I find him talking with a bartender I watched fight earlier. I pull him aside.

"Hey John, you ever think of getting women in on this?"

"Oh yeah," he says, laughing. "I'm trying to set something up for September."

"You're shittin' me..."

"Noooo," he sings, "a lot of women have called. They want to fight the guys."

"You mean like everything would be the same, just that women would be added to the mix?"

"Yeah, there's a lot of interest. Gonna try it in September."

"Thanks, John," I take his hand and shake it. "That's a great idea. Great idea. Where's the mailing list?"

?

Johnny Art, the Mook and I finish the night off at some new jazz joint on Greenwich. It's bright with high ceilings and a polished mahogany bar, and the sound of women laughing blends perfectly with the high pitch of the saxophone and the tinkling of piano keys. There are flowers and white linen and a soft breeze off the Hudson riffles the yellow curtains through slightly open windows. It smells like fresh cotton panties.

"Yo, DJ," the Mook intones thoughtfully, sucking foam from his pint, "that was interesting."

"You think so?"

"Yeah," he says, "like the fuckin' Greeks or something, y'know."

"The Greeks were wilder than that," Johnny Art jumps in. "Those guys were pussies next to the Greeks."

"Here's to the Greeks," I say, as we crash glass, "and to the Golden Age of Civilization."

See you in September.