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would call him “indifferent.” My mom might think of herself as someone who “takes care of business.” My dad might say she’s a total nag. Opposites may attract, but differences more than likely will ultimately divide.
    This may sound too cut-and-dried and it may make me sound closed off, but that’s how I feel. If you were to ask the eight-year-old version of me how he felt about his parents splitting, he would probably feel much differently from how I do now. My life is not defined by my parents’ ill-fated relationship, nor was my childhood defined by it. My life has been divided by it, meaning the history of my childhood is split into three parts: before the divorce; during the divorce, when we lived at my grandmother’s house for those two-plus years; and after the divorce. But ultimately, it is something that happened and it was something that was overcome.
    My parents got married because they were in love. They got divorced because they couldn’t live with each other, which may have caused them to fall out of love. Now they’re friends. There is no great mystery here. I remember everything. I carry it with me. I don’t obsess about it. I don’t even think about it. And I won’t use it as an excuse for how I turned out, for my behavior, or for any flaws that I might have.
    And tonight, I’m headed out to party with my new buddy, Carl. I met Carl at a recent mixer organized by the New York Society of Damaged Individuals and, as it turns out, his parents are divorced, too. He suggested that we hit up a titty bar. I like the cut of his jib.

Chapter Five
    Athletics, Sports, and Crap
    F rom an early age, my dad encouraged me to get involved in sports. My dad was an athlete himself—though not an exceptional one—and he realized the importance of athletics and wanted to make sure that sports played a large role in his own firstborn son’s life. My mom supported him on this, mostly because she wanted to get me out of the house, and to make me stop watching cartoons and/or playing video games. But the first sport that my dad would try to teach me about was not outdoors. Instead he and I would head down to the basement, where a blue punching bag hung from one of the beams.
    Boxing, my dad reckoned, was the best sport to teach a young boy. Not only would it keep him fit and in shape, it would teach him self-defense. Learning the art of boxing wasn’t so that I could hurt others, however. And it wasn’t really about making me a tough guy. Just as he wasn’t an exceptional athlete, my dad wasn’t really a tough guy—at least compared to the some of the other dads in the neighborhood who’d go out drinking on Saturday nights and get in fistfights with guys they’d known since grade school, only to make up a few hours later. It was very important in the neighborhood (and by extension, in life) to not take shit from anybody. Neighborhood logic went something like: “If you take shit, you aren’t respected. And if you don’t have respect, you don’t have anything.” So you’d better learn how to throw hands.
    When I was about five, my dad and I went down to the basement for the first time to face that punching bag. There he would teach me (or at least try to teach me) about the mechanics of pugilism. The goal was that after two years of weekly sessions, I would be a lean, mean fighting machine.
    My lessons lasted five weeks.
    “The first step is learning how to throw a punch,” my father said in the first week. “Let’s see what you got.” That was my cue to unleash a hail of mania and fury the likes of which that punching bag had never seen. I started punching with abandon, tiny fists flailing in rage, but after a while I got tired of the punching, and would kick, elbow, shoulder, and bite the big blue bag, while my dad stood nearby, smoking a cigarette and shaking his head. He had his work cut out for him.
    Over the next few weeks, my dad tried to impart his boxing wisdom to me. How you move your