Notes From the Underground
The faux battle for the secret crown of New York
by Brin-Jonathan Butler
I
One day before Halloween, Oct. 30, 2015, 11 p.m., 9 Bleecker St., New York—
Bathed in a vaguely hellish infernal glow emanating from red light bulbs burning in protective caging, Overthrow Boxing owner Joey Goodwin, dressed as Donald Trump, climbs between the ropes to announce tonight’s “underground” main event. Despite the wardrobe and socio-economic status of the mob around me, it’s demonstrably clear we’re all mainlining a dear and familiar narcotic from my childhood: 1980s WWF professional wrestling. What was the most obvious feature of wrestling back then? The same one anyone on the WWF payroll was forbidden to mention—that it was fake. But what an incomparable high to suspend disbelief and buy into it all anyway. And model underground boxing—an only in NEW York cottage industry featuring male fashion models posing as fighters—is to boxing what the soap opera of spandex was to Olympic wrestling, only without the wink. Here the cream of New York’s Millennial society rises to the surface, rich and thick.
Having been flown across the continent for a guaranteed purse of $200, a real fighter, North Vancouver’s “Maharajah” Mac, with an unblemished record of 1-0 in the Canadian amateur ranks, is led half-naked and by spotlight through the cramped, costumed, mostly fashionista-esque (and by now quite intoxicated by event-sponsored liquor) invite-only crowd of 200 to the ring. I feel like I am visiting a boutique-style sideshow, a performance art boxing tent offering at Burning Man. After climbing through the ropes, the Maharajah stands, nervously panting, under a chandelier awaiting the arrival of tonight’s centerpiece of underground boxing. He laughed, telling me beforehand in Overthrow’s impromptu dressing room that he expected to lose.
Suddenly, “Rockstar Charlie” is announced over the speakers to roars from the audience as the lights dim and cameras pop and an ESPN E60 film crew follows the lanky, former nursery school teacher turned model-boxer, somehow both as bouncy as Tigger and serene as a lullaby, throughout his ring entrance, preening before the crowd with his tats and Sid Vicious chain-and-lock necklace while models squeal out his name. A girl in a red wig and white Ray-Bans, screaming his name next to me, has makeup applied over her face to give the impression of a drug overdose, blood running down from her nostril. Or maybe she just had some shitty cocaine or meth after enduring the previous bout, one featuring two feisty midgets squaring off with a referee earnestly delivering his fight instructions on his knees. One of the little people had DOPE scrawled across his trunks. Having trouble seeing over the crowd, I originally mistook him for a mildly distasteful Halloween-inspired costume of a pugilistic Dope-y, a Disney hallucination. I arrived late and missed the opening act with breakdancers and a DJ performing in the ring.
As the opening bell tolls to the first of three one-minute rounds—it’s model-boxing after all—my first “underground” event, more or less billed as New York’s answer to Fight Club,sure feels a whole helluva lot closer to Zoolander. A little more intriguing, nobody seems to care. Or notice. They’re all too busy posing for the cameras, whether there are any cameras or not.
II
So who the fuck is Charlie Himmelstein? At first blush, I had him pegged as a modern, updated Edie Sedgwick, New York City’s mascot frog preening and posing for a selfie while being publicly boiled to death in our pot of water. From what I’ve learned of Charlie so far, he’s a social savant and devious knuckle ball thrown down the middle of the plate, but what does he really stand for? Hell, what does New York stand for these days?
Nearly every week, instead of getting on a New York City subway train, somebody decides to jump in front of one. If you buy a handgun here or anywhere else in this country, statistically you’re more likely to shoot yourself than anyone else. When the Twin Towers fell, our president used his first public address after 9-11 to state, “I encourage you all to go shopping more.”
Fourteen years later, New York recalibrated as the world’s favorite shopping mall, and gave birth to this 25-year-old Renaissance man “Rockstar” Charlie, a veritable private-petting zoo for media consumption. The sacred and the profane were always Siamese twins to begin with, but this manically hair-triggered commodification of self has a way of making those twins seem in heat for each other. Even with all our technology and government spying ensuring that it is impossible for anyone to get lost in America ever again, since Charlie Himmelstein came on my radar, somehow I’ve managed to lose myself anyway.
One night late last spring, I was urgently marching up the Lower Eastside of Manhattan, 10 minutes late to give a talk on Cuba at an NYU MFA program when a flier, scotch-taped to the side of an old local dive bar that had gone out of business, caught my eye. At first I thought some wacky sequel to the bizarre (and, according to various media reports, apparently wildly successful) “Looking for a girlfriend” ubiquitous New York City flier.
I was wrong. Very wrong, it turned out. This flier had its own unique undertow of meaning.
Beneath the crinkled-up photograph of a lanky, blank-faced hipster kid, hilariously bare-chested under a leather jacket with cartoonishly-oversized boxing gloves hanging down like lobster claws over his spread-apart skinny-jeans in the pose of a would-be, rough-trade, rent-boy, sat the amusing invitation: “Meet CHARLIE.”
I tore the flier off the wall and studied it closer under a flickering street lamp while undergoing some kind of satori gazing into Charlie’s Bermuda Triangle stare.
Charlie was leaning back against the sepia mural of a sweaty, heavily tattooed half-naked boxer lighting up a cigarette in some fashion-usurped karaoke of anarchy-inspired underground ring.
At first I wasn’t sure if it was performance art or simply a cruel prank at some local kid’s expense. I mean, even in today’s New York-as-shopping-mall experience, could anyone actually intend to project this image?
I squinted to read the text and discovered Charlie, born and raised in the city, had been boxing since he was a kid, fought as a novice in the 2012 Daily News Golden Gloves, and was now offering his services as a boxing trainer. In addition to his boxing exploits, Charlie had modeled for Marc Jacobs and was a photographer for the Andy Warhol founded Interview Magazine. And then the final sentence of the flier brought home Charlie’s most curious third-person selling point: “Oh, and he’ll f*ck you up if that’s what you’re into.”
It was like being confronted with an invitation for a Tijuana donkey and chica show on some gigantic digital billboard in the middle of Times Square.
I teach private boxing lessons around New York City myself, and the biggest money I’ve ever been offered—by far—was $250 an hour to “beat to a pulp” a prospective lawyer client who proposed signing any legal paperwork I felt necessary before beginning regular sessions. Clearly, Charlie was an infinitely better businessman than I was in seeking out this kind of well-heeled, masochistic demographic.
I read Charlie’s last line over again to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated it when my phone began to vibrate in my pocket with the crossfire of three simultaneous texts. They all addressed the same pressing issue: Who thefuck is Charlie Himmelstein?
“Have you seen this fucking guy’s poster yet?” three more texts asked, accompanied by photos taken of the same flier I held in my hand, but from other points around the East Village and Lower East Side where friends had encountered it.
And when I got to NYU and apologized for being late, I couldn’t help but ask the kids in the crowd if anyone had ever heard of Charlie Himmelstein. It started a laughing fit.
“Rockstar Charlie?” one girl giggled.
“Ummm,” I shrugged. “Yeah, that’s him.”
“Of course. Before he started fucking that Sports Illustrated model he tried to fuck half my friends at school.”
That night I went home and did some research. I learned 24-year-old Charlie was already something of a cottage industry operating out of his parents’ Park Slope home. The subject of numerous local articles already, he had promotional videos, a considerable Instagram following, and, of course, those fliers strung up like some kind of vaguely sinister, highly sexualized cobweb to lure fame, all before it was clear precisely on what substance fame should come calling.
If Don Quixote and Lolita were caged and forced to breed, I was convinced New York City’s “Rockstar” Charlie Himmelstein—underground boxer, model, photographer, and burgeoning “celebrity”—would encompass every last chromosome of that arresting creature’s DNA. With America in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown (our suicide rate surpasses even our murder rate, if there was any doubt on that score), the American Dream has been reduced to a mental patient strapped into an electroshock therapy bed clenching our flag between gritting teeth.
Something behind Charlie’s eyes gives every impression—provided he could post the selfie on Instagram and Tinder—that he’d love nothing more than to ride it to climax like some haywire mechanical bull. It’s not so much that Charlie treats life like theater, it’s that he treats New York as his own private art gallery, with himself as the centerpiece exhibit. As the late art critic Robert Hughes once pointed out, “The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.” Charlie’s doing that, and like all the best stuff at the MET, everyone can take their own selfie with him, too. With coverage in The New York Times, Vice, New York Magazine, Papermag, and, soon, ESPN’s E60 documentary series, his Quixotic quest isn’t just being taken seriously; like all good copy, he’s being egged on. And, who knows, maybe he’s onto something. All it took for Paris Hilton was a name, a night cam and oral sex. Charlie’s powder keg to launch into the celebrity stratosphere seemed to have a lot more fuses ready to ignite.
Losing our innocence every 10 minutes seems to be the new national pastime, and today’s New York seems to consist of the rich, the help, the destitute, and a whirlpool of distraction to keep you from noticing. Charlie’s ingeniously constructed identity incorporates a healthy portion from each of these segments into his stew and gives the ingredients a devious stir. Maybe he’s recognized if you gaze long enough into America’s cultural abyss, the cultural abyss refuses to simply stare back. Instead, fully loaded with enough ammunition to mow down a generation, it’s gleefully taking aim. More illuminating still, according to several studies going back to UCLA in 2007, for the first time in American history, an entire generation of children has nearly entirely abandoned any other ambition apart from fiendishly clamoring to be caught in fame’s crosshairs. Within contemporary New York, Charlie’s in the right place at the right time, and with as much premeditation as preternatural instinct, entirely calibrated into the right state of mind to hit the motherlode. But the competition has never been more fierce.
It was Andy Warhol who in the early 1960s first put the virus under the microscope, identified what we’re really dealing with and jotted down his findings in his diary before infecting the collective water supply:
“The people I loved were … the leftovers of show business, turned down at auditions all over town. They couldn’t do something more than once, but their once was better than anyone else’s. They had star quality but no star ego. They didn’t know how to push themselves. They were too gifted to lead ‘regular lives,’ but they were also too unsure of themselves to ever become real professionals.”
An Instagram photo of Charlie posing on the subway in a pair of American flag speedos and what looks like an L. Ron Hubbard Sea Org captain’s hat suggests, regardless of whether he’s sure or unsure of himself, he’s absolutely certain about us.
P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. Charlie has his head up the birth canal and is chewing at the placenta for all it’s worth.
III
Before Andy Warhol was anyone in New York society, he used to mercilessly stalk Truman Capote all over town and leave endless embarrassing notes and letters in his mailbox and under his door in a desperate bid to befriend him. He pretended to be Capote and even insinuated he’d been mistaken for him now and then. Warhol, despite all his gifts, never had any for narrative, but soon enough he made up for that shortcoming with his genius for immediacy. Capote wanted nothing to do with him. He sized him up, as did New York’s art world, as exactly the kind of loser who would never amount to anything.
After discovering gravity along with a host of other scientific breakthroughs, Isaac Newton spent the last 20 years of his life believing in the Philosopher’s Stone and researching alchemy along with calculating the dimensions of Noah’s Ark based on close biblical observation.
Which is just to illustrate that even some pretty clever people, with the best of intentions, often still get it horribly wrong after an initial scratch and sniff.
The same week I followed up with “Rockstar” Charlie, Kim Kardashian was on the cover of Rolling Stone. I learned this because Charlie had posted a heartfelt objection as a harbinger of cultural doom on social media.
I gave the star of the 2012 viral sensation “Boxing Lessons with Eric Kelly” video a call. Kelly, aside from still training well-heeled white-collar Wall Street types and working for Vice Sports as a host, had been a four-time US national amateur champion. More than anyone I’ve ever met since I moved to New York in 2010, Kelly’s constitutionally incapable of not telling the truth to powerful people. Somehow he even managed to turn that into a lucrative selling point for himself as a boxing trainer. If we throw in the towel on democracy—and with barely half of Americans bothering to vote, perhaps we already have—and go back to a having a king, for my money we could scale back our expenses on hiring a court jester and poet and nominate Kelly to occupy both roles. His fame and notoriety around the city has been built on that genius. Since I profiled him here in early 2013, we’ve become friends.
“You ever heard of a guy named Charlie Himmel—” I asked.
“Sure,” Kelly laughed. “Charlie’s my nigga.”
“Whoa.” This was a curveball. “You sure we’re talking about the same Charlie here?”
“Rockstar Charlie?”
“That’s him,” I sighed.
“Yeah, he’s my boy,” Kelly snorted. “I worked his corner a couple times with those bullshit underground model fights.”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
“Don’t get me wrong, he’s a crazy motherfucker. But I dig him.”
“Seriously?”
“Serious as cancer. He’s cool.”
“Can he fight?”
“Is he better than I was? I got four kids, but if a motherfucker was stupid enough to ask me that to my face I’d knock them out where they stood and serve my time in prison. This of course includes you. Is he gonna become the next light-heavyweight champion of the world? You’re out of your fucking mind. But is he good enough to win the Golden Gloves?”
“Is he?” I asked.
“If his heart was in boxing I’d say he’d have a decent chance. That goofy motherfucker on all those posters around town that everybody and their little sister thinks they could beat the shit out of has the skills to win the gloves. Facts.”
“Jesus Christ. Will you come and meet him with me this weekend?” I asked.
“I’ll text his punk ass right now. He’s dating a Sports Illustrated model these days so he’s up in that. When he comes up for air we’ll make it happen.”
Kelly texted me the next morning with a time and place to meet Charlie: Washington Square Park at noon under the arch. From there we could walk over to his new gym on the Lower Eastside, the Overthrow Underground Boxing Club, and walk up the stairs to his photo studio one floor above. Drenched in a red glow and candlelight, Charlie taught $34/hr classes in the basement, including Friday’s “Box and Booze social.” Overthrow’s building, at 9 Bleecker Street, had once been home to the Yippies (the 1960s counter-cultural free speech and anti-war group), a coffee shop, and comedy theater in the basement. Someone named Joey “the Soho Kid” Goodwin, had taken over the lease after the previous tenants, the Yippies and the National Aids Brigade, couldn’t keep up the payments and were evicted. Oh well. New York Magazine confessed that to the casual observer, Charlie’s fighting lessons appeared “like we’re all learning choreography for Boxing! The Musical.”
I arrived under the arch at noon and Charlie, posing like an ambassador for an anarchy-chic Gucci campaign while leaning against a fire hydrant, a choker with a $3 swimming pool lock around his neck, was smoking and pouting for some unseen set of Truman Show cameras, his suspenders flung down limp over his skinny jeans. Standing nearly 6’4 and weighing around 180 pounds, Charlie was built more like Michael Phelps after a couple months vacationing from Olympic training than most active fighters I’ve encountered. There aren’t many light heavyweights that tall. Or skinny. Then again, I’d never met a “model boxer” or an “underground” fighter before. As Charlie had pointed out in his promotional videos, “I’m not your typical boxer who’s gonna spar and go home and have a protein shake and take a nap. I’m gonna go outside and have a cigarette and go get wasted that night and show up the next day hungover and still kick someone’s ass. I’m addicted to the nightlife and the wildest available is Friday Night Throw Down.”
“Hey Charlie,” I said, offering my hand.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little out of it. There’s this fucking English guy on social media whose been calling me out and posting videos of himself training on a heavy bag to kick my ass. He tags Vice and HBO on these videos. He’s offering me $4,000 if I can kick his ass. Wanna see his video on my phone?”
We watch the video of this English guy attacking a heavy bag like an old woman fighting off a thief via hurling her grocery bags and purse.
“How many of these kinds of videos are out there calling you out?” I ask.
“More and more. I’ve got a bullseye on my back with all this publicity bullshit going on.”
We both spot Eric Kelly down the block talking up a girl and some of her friends. They all smile and both Charlie and I do, too. Just then Kelly spots us out of the corner of his one good eye, the other having never recovered from a bar fight where a pool cue was cracked over it in exchange for a wisecrack. Kelly was an alternate at the Olympics and then his professional career was over before it started. But now, many years later, his viral video led him into being repped by the William Morris Agency.
As we walk over to the East Village, Charlie retells his genesis into New York’s consciousness. His dad took him to a Stones concert when he was a little boy and he was hooked becoming Mick Jagger. His dad has been to over 24 Stones concerts in all, and both father and son have matching Andy Warhol-designed Rolling Stones mouth tattoos on their shoulder. Charlie is interrupted telling his story by a few gorgeous modeling friends he knows and, it turns out, they’re both on the way to Overthrow as well.
When we arrive at the gym, Charlie gives me a tour while Kelly makes the rounds greeting everyone. There’s a chandelier hanging over the ring on the main floor. Charlie tells me that pro fighter Alicia Napoleon also trains people here. He shows me some of his photography on the walls that he shot upstairs in his studio and on the building’s roof. I’m steered toward a collage of maybe 60 impossibly beautiful women with bags over their heads bent over the edge of the roof with their pants pulled down exposing their asses to the camera. Beneath each picture is a caption offering their Instagram hashtags.
Eric Kelly comes over and directs my attention to one photo in particular.
“Recognize that ass?” he slaps my shoulder.
I look where he’s pointing and it’s a freakishly appealing portion of some girl’s anatomy, but no, I can’t place it.
“You directed a movie on the girl and you don’t even recognize her?”
I looked below the pose at the caption and recognized the name: Mel. As in former world champion female boxer Melissa St. Vil. I’d directed a documentary short profiling her for Vice largely based on her courage overcoming nearly being murdered by Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s uncle Roger, along with a slew of horrific abuses, both sexual and physical, she’d endured growing up in her family home.
“C’mon,” Charlie says. “I’ll take you up stairs to my studio and we can talk.”
As we walk up the stairs the gym’s owner, Joey “the Soho Kid” Goodwin—who has fought a couple underground fights himself—greets Charlie and introduces himself to me. Charlie’s studio is enormous and well equipped, and after inspecting his pack of cigarettes and finding it empty, he asks to bum one off me before we start the interview. I motion toward the open window, revealing an ample fire escape for us to smoke on and he waves me off.
“Fuck that,” he says. “We can smoke in here.”
“I guess I’m still trying to get my bearings with all this, man.”
Eric Kelly enters the room and bats the smoke out of his face. A year younger than me at 35, he’s still never touched tobacco, booze, or any drug. “Loving the hood,” he once explained to me, “was always my vice.”
And yet, with our shared addiction to boxing, we’ve both ended up here.
“Look,” Charlie begins. “I guess in terms of where I’m at right now? You can’t be a sex addict, ridiculous person, and expect everything to go right. Losing friends and dying going on around you and getting fucked up the night before a fight? But in the end? Am I happy right now? Yeah. I am.”
“I guess I’m trying to figure out what you’re fighting for.”
“The secret crown of New York, man,” he smiles wide.
“How did that come about? What planted the seed?”
“The Golden Gloves. After my first fight at the New York Gloves, literally the next week, I was partying and got invited to do this underground fighting. I shouldn’t have been partying in between the Golden Gloves. But what it got me was the underground fights back several years ago. And what the underground fights got me was a modeling career. What the modeling career got me was a photography career and all these beautiful friends I have now around me. What photography got me was a photo studio and an income. The photo studio landed me in this building above my boxing gym.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“With my parents right near Park Slope.”
“Not exactly your typical background for a fighter.”
“In a couple years, I see myself owning three or four more photo studios. Quadrupling my income. Being a part owner of some more gyms. Continuing underground fights and hosting them. You know, sticking to my roots.”
“I asked Eric to come down here because when I saw your poster he was the first person I called to figure out what you and underground fighting were all about.”
“What did he say?”
“He vouched for you.”
“I told him this goofy nigga can fight,” Kelly smiled.
“That’s one of the biggest compliments I’ve ever had, having someone like Eric vouch for me. I started this underground shit when I was 18. I can’t stop boxing. It’s not in my blood to stop fighting. I’ve had my nose broken. I’ve shit myself in the ring after getting hit with a body shot. Had my jaw broken. I’m a counter puncher. I don’t fear the pain. Every moment could be the last you remember in a ring. After my next fight the last thing I remember could be talking to you and Eric right now. I’m a 6’4, lanky, goofy, dickhead. I enjoy being laughed at and laughed with. But this shit ain’t no joke.”
“Where did that flier come from?” I asked.
“I didn’t make that. Joey made that to advertise the gym. I look like a fucking idiot. Did my poster bother you?”
“It intrigued me. Because I didn’t know if there was something wrong with you or if you were inviting what seemed like a pretty negative response to offering to fuck people up given how you looked. Like a bored rich kid from Park Slope, frankly. I mean, maybe I’m way off, but what does your dad do?”
“He’s a partner at a law firm. But he defends tenants against slum-lords. I mean, you’re right. I’m getting challenges for some serious money from around the world based on the attention I’m getting these days. But I’m confident about what I can do in the ring. All the great rockstars of boxing were cocky. But let the numbers speak for me. Look at my videos. Nobody in the boxing community has seen anything like this. But they watch me fight and I’m not a joke.”
“Are you gonna fight that English guy who challenged you in the video?”
“Who? GR7?”
“Who the fuck is GR7?”
“The guy in the video calls himself GR7. He speaks about himself in the third person.”
Kelly gets Charlie’s attention and slaps me on the shoulder. “If that punkass makes it over here and I work your corner and we beat his ass, I want you to ask him something after.”
“What’s that?” Charlie laughs.
“How does it feel to lose to a Jewish model?”
“I’ll wear my American flag speedo and maybe I could bring a bagel and lox into the ring before the bell.”
“See,” Kelly slaps his knee and turns to me. “I tol’ja you’d love this corny motherfucker.”
“I’m not sitting here talking to you because I fought in the Golden Gloves. I’m sitting here talking to you because I’ve won a helluva lot of underground fights. I’ve traveled to Texas and in Miami I fought in the Versace mansion against a pro fighter. They lowered the fucking ring from a 300-foot crane into the backyard of the mansion. We were the only fight. It was fucking hilarious. The guy I fought had 23 pro fights.”
“How’d you do?” I asked.
“That was the most nervous I’ve ever been. I was like 21 and there were hundreds of Miami’s most famous and moneyed people all around me watching. The guy hit me so hard in the face I actually forgot where I was and said, ‘Yo, chill.’ I have no idea how that even came out. This guy I was fighting was like, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Forget it.”’
IV
After I’d asked Charlie about interviewing his parents at their home in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, he laughed and gave me his mother’s phone number. Charlie still lives with Mom and Dad in the family home a block away from Prospect Park, in a three-storey house his parents had bought in the mid-1980s, shortly before Charlie, their second son, was born. Sam Himmelstein, a Brooklyn-native who grew up in low-income tenements, now defends New York City tenants. His wife, Amy Herrick, teaches nursery school and writes books for children.
Amy texted back promptly after I suggested an evening to possibly meet her and her husband:
“We will show you baby pictures and tell you how close to the edge of insanity Charles has driven us.”
I took the F-train over to their sleepy neighborhood. They’d left the porch light on for me and its friendly glow illuminated a Bernie Sanders yard-poster behind the gate and a retro-motorcycle I safely assumed belonged to their youngest son. Amy warmly answered the door and introduced me to their sweet and arthritic dog, Autumn, whom Charlie had originally picked out as a puppy at a shelter. She pointed out Charlie’s room on the main floor—nothing too see here—before leading me up the stairs to her kitchen where her husband—who looked like Bernie Sanders only 20 years or so younger—had just gotten home from work and was waiting with a bottle of wine on the dinner table. Chicken soup was on the stove.
“Charlie worked in nursery school for a while,” Amy began, shaking her head as she and her husband smiled. “Several years in fact. He liked it. I guess you could say he was a very interesting nursery school teacher. But I don’t think he ever considered it as a career path. Then it all just veered off into this other world.”
“Did you see it coming?” I asked.
“Charlie,” Sam Himmelstein—who it could now be confirmed also sounded eerily similar to Bernie Sanders—paused and laughed, “from a very young age, had issues with aggression. We felt he needed to channel it elsewhere. So we tried martial arts. He was diagnosed with ADD. Somehow he got involved in boxing and he had some talent at that. He’s fast, agile, and he’s very long. He’s almost 6-foot-4 yet he’s only 175 pounds. He’s this nimble guy and opponents just can’t reach him. When I watch him fight it’s almost as if people are jumping up to reach him.”
“You’ve seen his fights?” I asked.
“I’ve been to all his fights except when I had tickets to the World Series. I’ve been to all the underground fights even though, you know, I’m a lawyer. I’m on the stream so when they announce where the fights will be, I’m there. There’s videos of him hugging me after the fights. My wife went to one of his fights.”
“I went to his first underground fight,” Amy confirmed. “I couldn’t bear to go to any more.”
“He’s done pretty well so far from what I hear,” I said.
Amy reached over and rubbed my elbow. “No mother really wants her son to be a boxer. And I have a different take on his aggression. He’s the kind of person, the kind of male, who right from childhood had this very strong need to, like a dog, pee on every hydrant and leave his mark. He needs to make sure he’s paid attention to. It was always about bringing attention for himself. His temper was quick and he’d easily get riled up and he always and still has poor impulse control, but it was more about attention than aggression. And combined with all his other aspects of odd, frenetic, ADD-type behavior, he ended up in boxing. I think part of the boxing, whatever it is with his chemistry, the ADD-ness, that there’s something about boxing that gives a great deal of immediate feedback. That feedback-loop was very satisfying to him and I think that’s why he took off on it.”
Sam got up and poured himself a glass of cranberry juice and topped it off with some vodka. After he’d screwed on the cap he scratched his face. “He’s told us stories over the years where he’ll get into confrontations on the subway or on the street or on a bus. You know, the way he looks and his swagger can rub people the wrong way. He attracts attention, negative and positive. He’s been assaulted several times on the subway.”
“It just happened last week!” Amy hollered.
“She’s right,” Sam laughed.
“He was assaulted in Chinatown by a gang of kids or something.”
“They often don’t realize because of how goofy he looks, this tall model-looking white guy, that he can actually take care of himself physically the way he can. He’s a trained fighter. When these altercations happen, he always comes home and tells us about it.”
“I mean,” Amy sighed heavily, “you never know when he tells stories about himself. He embroiders and embellishes everything. We never really quite know. And he can tell some real whoppers. I don’t think he looks for this kind of trouble, but of course the swagger kind of brings it on.”
“There’s this theatrical aspect to how he interacts with people that’s a big part of him. He’s not been easy to raise. It’s been hard with him and we worry about him despite him lately making this kind of splash in the world. We worry about where he’s eventually going to land with all this.”
Amy refilled her glass of wine and shared an uneasy silence with her husband for a brief moment.
“My father was bi-polar,” she said. “My husband is very social and really likes people to pay attention to him. Charlie has that aspect to him in spades.”
“But I think what’s somewhat disturbing to both of us is that we’re both fairly academic. Amy has an MFA and I’m a lawyer, right? So we both got graduate degrees and are successful professionals. So, you know, to have a son who is not exactly academically inclined? He dropped out of college fairly quickly and we aren’t exactly expecting him to go back and get a degree. If he navigates the world it will probably be through some other means.”
“Chutzpah most likely,” Amy laughs.
“He’s incredibly entrepreneurial and smart and I still worry about him. He has all these talents. He models. He’s a photographer. Maybe he’ll make it! When I describe him to people a lot of them respond, ‘Holy shit! He must be making a lot of money!’ And here and there he does. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. He’s still living at home at 25. Despite his amazing talents he’s not able to pay his own way which leads to a lot of parental nervousness.”
“There’s something very primitive in his desire to make a mark and then it fastened itself on celebrity. I don’t know how much he consciously thinks about the fame thing, but he loves entertaining people and getting people to react to him. He’ll do the stupidest 8-year-old kind of things.”
I asked Charlie’s father how hard it was to watch his boy get hit.
“It’s hard to watch him get hit. But, you know, on the other hand I feel very proud of him. It’s a mixed bag. We all know that boxing and people getting hit, concussions, it’s dangerous. He doesn’t get hit much. But the few times I’ve seen him really get hit, it’s very, very hard to watch. I hope he doesn’t do this much longer.”
“Do you think he will?” I ask.
“We think boxing is a way to help promote his modeling and photography for the most part,” Sam smiled. “I’m hoping the boxing doesn’t go on that much longer.”
“Charles is a very cheerful person,” Amy smiles sympathetically. “I envy his temperament and, at the same time, I wish a great deal he’d just worry more. He moves through life with this great good cheer about him.”
“But he’s got a girlfriend now, who models in Sports Illustrated. He’s been a terrible womanizer. A lot of models have passed through our house. But we really like this girl. She’s smart and doing really well.”
“We adore Charles,” Amy laughs, rubbing her husband’s shoulder. “But of course he also drives us absolutely bat shit crazy most of the time.”
V
Looking for meaning in Charlie’s story reminds me of that military exercise where they blindfold you and shove you into a pool to swim around and try to find the bricks down at the bottom.
Charlie Himmelstein was 19, lived in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn, a nursery school teacher and college dropout, when he lost in the novice division of the New York Golden Gloves. Then another door opened when Bekim Trenova, a serious player in the underground model-boxing scene, invited him inside. “Hey man,” Trenova said to Charlie. “We like kids like you. Fight for me.”
Six months later, Trenova finally followed up with a phone call. Charlie had already forgotten who Trenova was.
“Hey kid, you’re fighting in three days.”
They hired off-duty police officers to work security at secret locations across New York City. “For the last five years I’ve been building a backstory that you can’t deny,” Trenova was quoted as saying in Bedford and Bowery in 2014. “It’s like a traveling circus … I think that’s what helps it. We’re pioneering something new to the entertainment world that combines performance art, boxing, sport, music. It’s literally anything.” He’s saving “the genesis” of the Friday Night Throwdown he founded for a documentary film he’s been producing, showcasing the fights and after parties. He’d like the film to make the festival circuit. It’s a set piece for a Hollywood sendoff, the same way Warhol intended to use his coterie of edgy “superstars” from his “factory,” fodder for his own grab at fame. Maybe it would work out better for him than it did for Warhol.
Going through all of Charlie Himmelstein’s oeuvre—interviews, promotional videos, Instagram photos, and shared material on Facebook, it’s clear he’s identified and harnessed the abiding obsession of our age to his every advantage: gaze. My guess is his hyper-sexualized posture masks the fundamental, almost fairytale purity and innocence of the need even his parents have identified: pay attention to me. And, obviously, he’s far from alone in that longing. Living more and more in a surveillance-addicted society, the friction between privacy and publicity is an internal struggle each of us confronts every second of our lives. Candid Camera popped society’s cherry and it turned out we were more than hungry for another roll in the hay. The blueprint was laid for reality TV and it hasn’t evolved much since. The Truman Show was a dystopian look at a fraudulent-utopia, a modern Greek tragedy about a baby not yet having left the womb, already condemned to the fate of an entire lifetime under the glare of thousands of cameras’ 24-hour, 7-day-a-week siege. Whereas Truman finally risked death to break free, now a generation of kids will do and risk anything to break in. J.D. Salinger was considered a nut for rejecting fame and celebrity. Now he looks like he may have been the last private citizen in American life, and maybe the last sane one.
Working backwards from a desire to be seen is the fear of being invisible. A desire’s deepest fear is to be content. Our bucket is leaking and instead of fixing the hole, we need more and more to perpetually keep refilling it. Facebook has turned well over a billion lives into aquariums on display, but we’re fresh water fish guzzling seawater to quench a thirst.
That’s where I wonder if “Rockstar” Charlie’s labyrinth has a center. Leaving aside the shallowness of his pathological narcissism, his depth arrives the moment you ponder the emotional riptide that awaits him after he’s run out of ideas to keep the culture’s notoriously brief attention satiated. He needs some hits while he’s young to underwrite bringing the band back together 30 years from now for the arthritic, comb-over reunion tour and inevitable memoir.
What’s next? Where can he go? In some ways Charlie’s quest reminds me a lot of the little boy in the movie of The NeverEnding Story. Reeling after the death of his mom, the child protagonist takes refuge inside the pages of a stolen book, lost in a magical and cursed world called Fantasia with “The Nothing” threatening to consume and erase all existence forever.
“We all need someone to look at us,” Milan Kundera observed in Unbearable Lightness of Being. He goes on to identify four categories of gaze human beings long for. The first is the infinite number of anonymous, unknown eyes—the public. The Internet? The second category is comprised of people with the need to be seen by known eyes. Next are the people who need to be held in the gaze of the person they love. And, lastly, in the fourth category, are those, like Charlie I think, who “live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.”
I interviewed Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek over the summer when he came to New York to teach at NYU. He repeated an observation that seems germane, “Fantasy is for those who can’t cope with reality while reality is for those who can’t cope with their fantasies.”
It’s tough to know with Charlie, or the legion behind him embarking on his quest, whether reality or fantasy is responsible for the real lasting damage.
Leading up to Charlie’s main event fight on Oct. 30 at 9 Bleecker St., I got spooked just before the “midget fight,” when I spotted who I then thought was “Dopey”—given what was visible sprawled across his trunks—rest his forearm on the ropes before being allowed to enter. Dopey’s hands were wrapped up in the same stars and stripes hand wraps that several of the combatants wore that night. Charlie likes to drape himself in the American flag after Friday Night Throwdown fights. It looks good in photos and catches the eye and tosses up meaningful alley-oops to greedy, groping little meaning-perverts like me. The boxing photographer I’d hired took some photos of him looking dejected and sad and showed me some from her camera with a frown. “What the hell is all this?” Marilyn asked me. “I shoot boxing. What the fuck kind of event have you taken me to?” Of the 200 or so people on the list to be let in building that night, Dopey was noticeably the only one who seemed genuinely embarrassed to be there.
I ducked out of the crowd and climbed the stairs to Charlie’s photo studio where an open window offered access to a fire escape for a quiet cigarette break to regain my bearings.
Right then Eric Kelly gave me a call and asked how everything was going. He was unable to attend.
“What is this thing?” I asked him.
“Charlie’s gotta ride this wave for as long as he can and then get the fuck off, because they’re real sharks in the water out in the depths. I was a flavor of the month when my video dropped with those Wall Street boxing lessons and maybe I’ve done a few things since. But that was the first time people saw what I was dealing with.”
“What the hell does any of this have to do with boxing?”
“Nothin’,” he growled, like he’d finally just figured that out and was mad it had taken so long. “All of it is just making a mockery of my sport. Charlie’s just using it for his own thing. For a fighter, the worst thing you can do in life is just live. Charlie’s life is taking over with a lotta girls, popularity, partying, drinking, basically a lot of fun. A lotta the devil and flirting with disaster. A fighter is a complete 180 off that shit. You gotta be stern and Spartan. Otherwise temptation is killing you and it’s coming from all over and all angles. It’s raining down like a tropical fucking storm and if you ain’t right, that storm of envy, temptation, greed, spotlight, sex, booze and drugs is gotta batter your poor little ass umbrella until your ass is soaked wet.”
I watched it all and I still don’t remember if Charlie Himmelstein even won his fight that night at Overthrow Underground Boxing Club on 9 Bleecker St. Maybe the outcome was beside the point all along. All I could think about watching him move around the ring, cautiously counter-punching from his lanky frame as models squealed and cameras popped was something he’d told me—a stock quote of his, but a good one—about the initial germ biting him. He was nine and his dad took him to watch The Rolling Stones. He realized he sucked at singing, couldn’t play guitar, and needed to find another way to be a rockstar. Then, during his first real fist fight, he was losing and someone yelled out to him, “C’mon Mick Jagger!” Everything changed. He’d found his path. More importantly, he’d found his role.
Oscar Wilde once observed, “The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.” A strange thing to remember is that it was the inventor of modern boxing, the Marquis of Queensbury, who sent Wilde to prison for sleeping with his son. I’d asked Charlie if the character he played on stage felt like a Warhol invention and he laughed it off, countering, “I’d never wanna be a Warhol superstar. I’d wanna be Warhol, man.”
Whether he won, lost, or drew, “Rockstar” Charlie’s fight against “Maharajah” Mac, from a boxing standpoint at least, didn’t arouse much enthusiasm with the crowd. I’m not sure if anyone in attendance especially cared about experiencing the evening so much as being able to say they attended, just another box to check.
But after the fight was over—all three, 60-second rounds of it—I will never forget Charlie impishly staring out across the room, his face completely unmarked, coyly waiting for the decibel level to reach fever pitch. A costumed Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan were standing next to me along with Goose and Maverick from Top Gun. What a strange sandbox this whole ordeal had been to witness.Whatever void or gaping hole was at the heart of this annexed colony of Never-Never Land, you could feel a chilling breeze leaking out of it that gave me a shiver. Underneath everything sprung an innocent primal urge to conquer reality, an unchecked power to never grow up. Finally Charlie slung himself off the top rope like a human crossbow bolt out into a crowd of drunk, flamingo-limbed models, all of them spilling their drinks and laughing with their legs spread out wide as they collapsed helplessly to the floor, not trying to catch him or even break his fall as he fell to the ground.
It was the sure money shot for whatever trailer the ESPN film crew will create to market whatever it was we witnessed on Friday night. I’m sure it will look great, even 20 or 30 years from now.
But all boxing stories end the same, don’t they? And maybe somehow, miraculously, that’s how this one will, too. Already, you can almost hear the ghost of Charlie’s future while watching the footage of himself “boxing” that night at Overthrow and lamenting: You don’t understand … I coulda been somebody!