EVERYTHING IS BORROWED
Words from CBCS
Harley Flanagan is turning sixty in March.
He didn't expect to make twenty.
When we speak, he's back in Manhattan after five weeks in Europe and the UK. He estimates he's played more than six hundred shows since COVID. At this point, the places have started to collapse into one another.
“It’s really all just like a blender at this point.”
Playing isn't the difficult part.
“The traveling takes more of a toll on me than the actual playing. The playing I could do every day. That's just like an hour of jumping around and having fun. It's all the in-between shit. The lack of sleep, the bad eating and all that stuff, that catches up with you.”
The in-between.
The hours spent not moving.
On the road, Harley tries to get out of the car every couple of hours.
“Burpees, jumping jacks, forward rolls, backward rolls, shadowboxing. Just move around.”
He follows an 82-year-old boxing coach online. Frank's Noble Art. Harley says the man has more than four hundred fights behind him and still moves like someone decades younger.
“He's got power. He's got speed. That's what I'm looking forward to hopefully being like when I reach that age.”
Then, almost as an aside:
“Really it's just about movement.”
—
Movement has been there from the beginning.
When I ask Harley when he first understood himself as physical, he can't really locate a beginning. There is no first fight, first weight, first revelation about what his body could do.
There was just energy.
“I always was high maintenance. I like to do shit. I like to run it out. A lot of energy. I wasn't a lethargic child. Everything. I was just high energy, high driven. It's kinda just my nature.”
There weren't gyms available to him. He did push-ups. Sit-ups.
It would be wrong to call it discipline. Discipline implies intention.
The body came first.
As a young man, physicality was less something Harley controlled than a current running through his life. Music. Fighting. Violence. Performance. Whatever was happening, the body answered.
There wasn't much consideration for what that body might need later.
Later wasn't guaranteed.
“I had zero expectations to get past twenty.”
—
Harley talks differently about his body now.
There is still the same appetite for movement, but nearly sixty years into it there is more consideration about where the energy goes.
He thinks about endurance. Flexibility. Recovery. What his joints will tolerate. How to stay conditioned through weeks on the road.
Mass matters less.
“I've kind of switched my training more towards cardio because I find that if I get really big, if I put on mass, I go on tour and I lose it anyway. I lose like five or ten pounds every time I go on tour. So it's like a losing battle in a sense. And I'm finding the older I get, cardio is more important. You can be as strong as you want. If you don't have the gas tank, it really doesn't matter much.”
He means this literally. In fighting, strength becomes useless when the lungs go.
But the gas tank has become a longer proposition.
Harley is training for tonight.
He is also, whether he puts it this way or not, training for eighty.
The kid who didn't expect twenty now studies an old boxer because he wants to know what might still be possible when he gets there.
—
There is a line Harley gives me later that makes the distance between those two versions of himself feel smaller.
“Not a lot's changed, man. I'm still the same beast. I just have a slightly more evolved approach.”
The same beast.
The evolution isn't the disappearance of whatever drove him when he was young.
It's some measure of authority over it.
Knowing where to put it.
—
There was a time when he lost that.
Harley fell into drugs. He describes the period without romance: getting sidetracked by his own bullshit.
Jiu-jitsu brought something back.
“What it did was it reconnected me to something that had become dormant. It brought me back to the physical. I had fallen into drugs and gotten sidetracked by my own bullshit, and it kind of reawakened, you know, the warrior that was asleep at the wheel.”
The warrior was asleep at the wheel.
Not dead.
Asleep.
The distinction feels important.
Whatever Harley calls the warrior was there before jiu-jitsu. It was there before there was language for any of this. In the kid who needed to run it out. In music. In fighting. In the reflex to answer the world physically.
For a while, it was still there and nobody was driving.
Jiu-jitsu returned structure to the instinct.
“It keeps me grounded. It's my social life outside of music. I don't really connect too much with people in the world. Jiu-jitsu connects me to people, and it connects me to myself. It motivates me to stay in shape. Now I'm going to have this surgery and I'm going to be out of training for a little while, but I'll be back.”
It connects me to myself.
Harley's physical life isn't an accessory to the rest of him. Again and again, it is how he gets back.
—
Music can produce a similar state.
Harley doesn't meditate in any traditional sense. Music comes closest. Something that puts him completely where he is.
Fighting does it too.
I ask whether performing and fighting feel alike.
“Absolutely. Because you're in the moment. You know what you're doing, but there's variables. You never know one hundred percent what's going to happen. You're always adjusting. You're always multitasking. Your brain is covering a lot of different territory all at once. I get the same type of excitement. It's just different. But it probably stimulates a lot of the same parts of the brain.”
Always adjusting.
The phrase could sit over much of his life.
The world moves.
Harley responds.
What has changed is the space between those two things.
—
Children gave him a future.
“When I had kids and stuff I started realizing that I was probably gonna be around for some time.”
It is an almost casual way to describe a profound shift.
The person with zero expectation of making twenty suddenly had a reason to consider what forty or fifty or sixty might require.
“I always exercised, but that's when I started going to the gym and shit like that more. I wanted to be around and set an example of health and taking care of your body. Be strong enough to maintain life.”
Be strong enough to maintain life.
Not the strength of mythology.
Not the strength of being the hardest person in a room.
Maintenance.
Enough strength to remain.
The body was no longer only something to spend.
It became something to keep.
—
The problem is that by the time Harley learned how to keep it, the body had already kept its own record.
Decades of headbanging. Stage diving. Fighting. Car accidents. Almost thirty years of jiu-jitsu.
“I've had decades of headbanging and stage diving and getting my head kicked around, car accidents, almost thirty years of jiu-jitsu. It catches up to you. It's hard living. It catches up to you. But I don't plan on quitting. I just know how to recover. I know what recovery is like. I had eight screws put in my neck and I got back to training and touring.”
Eight screws in his neck.
An elbow operated on.
A wrist.
More work coming for his back.
There is an irony in gaining greater command of the body at the exact moment it becomes more insistent about its limits.
Harley can choose how he trains.
He can't choose what forty years of use have already done.
So the control becomes adaptation.
“Injuries are part of life. Challenges are part of life. Anything you're passionate about is going to cost something. Everything comes at a cost. You just have to figure out how to adjust.”
Heavy work becomes calisthenics.
Mass becomes cardio.
Injury changes the movement.
The movement continues.
—
In December, it stops.
At least for a while.
The last major surgery left Harley bedridden for around three months. There was nerve damage. Muscle atrophy. He had to build his way back.
This time he calls the operation a tune-up.
“I'm looking at it as a tune-up so that I can move forward for the next stage of my life in a better condition than I left this stage. Last time I had nerve damage, muscle atrophy, and I had to work my way back. Hopefully this time the recovery is shorter. But anything can go south.”
For someone whose life has been organized by movement, surgery presents a particular kind of violence.
Stillness.
And no amount of discipline can completely determine what waits on the other side.
—
Near the end of our conversation, Harley tells me he has to get to an appointment.
I try to explain what I've been circling: the connection between music and jiu-jitsu, training and identity, the way the physical seems to run underneath all of it.
“Well dude, I mean that's it, man. You pretty much summed it. Jiu-jitsu, music—it's a certain type of person, a certain type of mindset.”
So I ask him what happens if the physical part disappears.
Who is Harley Flanagan without the strength? Without the conditioning? Without the body as he's known it?
“I don't know. I will find out because we can't be physical forever. Everything is borrowed, so hopefully I will handle it well.”
I ask whether losing it would mean losing some part of himself.
“You hope to find something else, right? Everything's borrowed. So if you lose one thing that makes you happy, you have to learn to find happiness some other way. Everything is borrowed, man. We can't rely on any one thing to complete us. It just doesn't work that way.”
—
Everything is borrowed.
Harley spent the first part of his life being driven by something he didn't entirely direct.
Then he learned how to direct it.
Training gave it form.
Jiu-jitsu gave it discipline.
Children gave it a future.
Age gave it consequence.
He knows more about his body now than he ever has.
He knows how to build it.
How to protect it.
How to work around it.
How to bring it back.
He knows what he wants it to be capable of at eighty.
And none of that makes it his.
—
Before we hang up, I ask what happens if the next recovery doesn't return everything.
“Even if I lost the ability to do one thing I'd find some other way to do it.”
The answer comes quickly.
Then Harley says something else.
“Poor people learn how to make the best bad bargain and life is a lot of bad bargains. I have a way of rising to the occasion.”
Maybe that's the thing that has actually survived intact.
Not the body.
Not strength.
Not any particular way of moving.
The response.
—
Harley Flanagan will be sixty in March.
Before that comes surgery.
Then a period without the mat. Without training as he knows it. Without complete certainty about what the body will give back.
After that, he'll see.
The kid who needed to run it out is still there.
The warrior is awake.
The beast is the same.
Only the approach has changed.
And now, after a lifetime spent learning what to do with all that force, Harley understands the one thing he can't bring under his control.
Everything is borrowed.
