I did what I always did when my stress climbed into the red zone-I went to the gym. I’ve been fighting since I was a teenager, first as a karate guy and then as a boxer. I had gotten my black belt as a teenager, and one day I felt ultra-confident going in the boxing ring against a guy with a few amateur fights. He hit me in the stomach and I puked all over myself. As soon as I stopped tossin’ my Cheerios, I started training as a boxer and I’ve never looked back.
It’s funny-karate gets all the hype as this quasi-spiritual thing for deep-thinking ponderers while boxing gets portrayed as something for guys who just learned to walk upright. Yet both involve the science of assaulting someone to unconsciousness or maiming them into submission. Just because karate guys yell things out in Japanese and wear pajamas with no shoes while they’re learning to kill you, it gets more of a New Age rep. The real deal is there’s something spiritual to fighting, something at our very core that most people don’t understand. I believe it’s something that’s inside every person and it gets sublimated in boardrooms and bedrooms and every place else you can think of. I also believe if people got in the ring once in a while, then they wouldn’t have to be such pains in the asses with their bullshit competitiveness in life. Of course, there would probably be a gigantic dip in the sales of SUVs.
I’m what’s known in the boxing trade as a professional opponent. I fight ham-and-egg guys who stink and I beat them, which gives me enough wins to make my record credible. Then, I get put in the ring with some up-and-comer whose manager wants a W for his fighter, and more often than not I get my ass kicked. The ironic thing is that the ass-kicked money is way more lucrative than beating some guy who’s as big-or bigger-a nobody as I am.
I train at the Crawford Y, where the boxing gym is in the smelly old basement. The equipment is old and worn just like it should be, and you rarely see anyone dressed in spandex in the basement. The “boxercise” movement hasn’t reached the basement, and even though every now and then somebody who watched a couple of exercise videos comes in and thinks he can box, he usually doesn’t last long-thank God.
The best part of the fight game is that you can’t fight and really think of anything else. If you do, you get smacked in the head and that has a way of interrupting irrational thought patterns. That type of meditative step was exactly what I was looking for today, and I was hoping the sweat would exorcise the Michelin Woman from my soul.
I wrapped my hands and moved around enough to break a sweat so that when Smitty motioned me into the ring, I’d be ready. Smitty worked everyone through the mitts, and you did it on his schedule-it was understood that you didn’t leave him waiting. Nothing was ever said, but it got around the gym with the fighters real quick what expectations were. Smitty had been my only trainer and he believed in repetition. He would tailor your training for an upcoming fight, but before you got working on your strategy he would run you through the same fundamental drills.
You could tell a fighter trained by Smitty. One way was by conditioning-if you weren’t in shape you didn’t fight. That was all there was to that. The second way was we all had superb defense. Smitty used this drill to make sure that your punching hand went back to protect your head so much that I couldn’t not recoil my punch because it was simply ingrained into my nervous system. I’ve been knocked out more than a few times, but every single one of them came when I was throwing at the same time as my opponent. It was never because I dropped my guard.
“I got a call about a short-notice fight,” Smitty said after he took me through five rounds.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“Money’s good. It’s on the undercard of the lightweight title fight with the Irish champ, what’s his name…?”
“Mulrooney.”
“That’s it. The guy you’re fighting was the ’04 Olympic Team heavyweight. The name’s Marquason.”
“Is he good?” I said.
“Real good.” Smitty’s expression never changed and you knew he didn’t bullshit. “Hits hard, moves well. He’s 12 and 0 with eleven knockouts. He’s coming off an eight-month layoff because of a cut he got from a butt.”
“How good’s the money?”
“Fifteen grand.”
“Shit-whose he got backing him?” I asked.
“You know who, with the spiky hair.” Smitty rolled his eyes.
“Where’s the fight?”
“The Garden.”
“The theater?”
“Nope, the main arena.”
“I’m in,” I said.
A chance to fight in Madison Square Garden was like getting to take batting practice with the Yankees. I’ve fought in the small theater, the Felt Forum, a few times but that wasn’t the same. This was a chance to fight in the same room, even the same ring, where Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Willie Pep, Joe Frazier, and Muhammad Ali fought.
The fight was only four days away, which meant I wasn’t going to have a lot of time to train. I was better off warming up every day, eating right, and working on a specific strategy for the guy. The next five days would be like final-exam week in college. Smitty would drill me over and over on what the guy does, how he moves, how he sets up his punches. By the end of the week I’d want to kill Smitty, but it was what I needed.
Knowing he had a serious cut in his last fight was important. Smitty told me that the contract specified the popular Mexican style gloves for the bout. They were known as the “puncher’s gloves” because they had very little padding over the knuckles. They also had a slight seam running up the side, and that seam would be an important part of my strategy. I would spend the next five days throwing my jab just to the right and dragging that seam across the bag.
I set up a schedule with Smitty and headed up the stairs to the locker room. On my way I took a peek in the auxiliary gym to check out the karate club. The guys who ran it when I was a kid didn’t run it anymore; it had changed hands a bunch of times. Through the little square window I saw a class of about fifteen, mostly guys in their late teens or early twenties.
The two black belts were shouting orders in Japanese and strutting in between the lined-up formation of the students. They swaggered back and forth and tucked their thumbs inside their black belts, occasionally making eye contact with a student after eying him up and down. Their black and red gi s were professionally pressed, and they had their names embroidered on the left sides of their uniforms.
The shorter one, Mitchell, had a thick mop of black hair, oversized biceps, and a mouth that went crooked as he barked out his orders. Harter was taller and wirier with his blond hair pulled into a Steven Seagal-inspired ponytail. Both of them had had dragons tattooed on their forearms-Mitchell’s was red and Harter’s was green. Hey, individuality is everything.
They were obviously pumping iron besides their karate training. Their biceps and pectorals were oversized in proportion to the rest of their bodies in that way that bodybuilders create their physiques. It always looked out of proportion to me and not the least bit functional. If you look at pictures of the bodies of Muhammad Ali, Ray Robinson, or, for that matter, Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee, you’ll see physique in perfect proportion and built for function.
Mitchell had four stripes on his black belt and Harter had three, so I guessed Mitchell was one degree of douchebag above Harter. Harter, with his ultra-cool green dragon tattoo displayed under his expertly folded uniform sleeve, was going off on this one scrawny kid in the back row. The kid looked like he weighed 140 pounds soaking wet, and he had a wicked pizza face. He was on his knuckles, counting out pushups in between gasps while the black belt stood over him, smirking and letting him know he didn’t have what it took to ever be a black belt.
I hated watching jerkoffs like this get their abusive shit off under the guise of martial arts discipline. It made no sense, and karate had more than its share of assholes who thrived in it because they wanted to be in charge of someone and feel powerful. It pissed me off, but that’s how a lot of karate classes worked. The goal was to break students down before you built their spirit back up. The problem was that I didn’t see the building of anything going on. What I did see was one zit-faced kid shaking and crying from pushups. Not my issue, I told myself.
I showered and hit AJ’s. A lot of people shake their heads when they hear I don’t forgo the Schlitzes when I’m training for a fight. Well, I cut back, lay off the Jim Beam, and I watch what I eat a little better. I’m a heavyweight and I don’t have to make a certain weight, and a few beers aren’t going to harm me. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
“Hey, fellas,” I said, walking toward my seat just to the left of the taps.
“Rocco’s all bound up,” TC said.
“Bound up?” I made the mistake of asking.
“What’s he seeing, some dominatrix with a fetish for ropes?” Jerry Number Two said.
“I’m fuckin’ constipated again,” a very uncheerful Rocco said.
“Again… or should we say still?” Jerry Number One said.
“How about you’re an asshole again and still?” Rocco retorted.
“Isn’t that the problem?” Jerry Number Two asked. “That your asshole is still again and again?”
“Man, you did too many drugs…,” Rocco said through a grimace.
“You should lay off the cheese,” TC said. “You eat a brick of that Cracker Barrel every fuckin’ day.”
“Talk about shittin’ a brick… or not shittin’ a brick,” Jerry Number Two said, somewhat rhetorically.
“You know, I read that when John Wayne died they found forty pounds of impacted fecal material in his colon,” TC said.
“Fecal?” Jerry Number One asked.
“You know… shit,” TC said.
“What kind of shit?” Jerry Number One asked.
“Shit shit, regular shit… you know, poo,” TC said.
“No way the Duke had forty pounds of shit in him when he died.” Rocco sounded annoyed. “You’re full of shit,” Rocco said.
“Not like the Duke,” said Jerry Number Two.
“Fuck you, Jerry,” Rocco said.
Kelley was in with his back turned away from the Foursome, drinking his Coors Light and watching Notre Dame run out the clock against Michigan State in 1966 on ESPN Classic.
“Never understood Parseghian’s move here,” he said.
“Probably impacted fecal material,” I said.
“Please don’t… they’ve been on that for two hours. It’s making me sick.”
“Howard called me,” I said.
“What?”
“The other day, it was on the machine. All he said was he didn’t do it and hung up,” I said.
“And you waited to tell me this because…”
“I don’t know. I believe him and I think no one else does.”
“You’re nuts, you know that, don’t you? A serial killer disappears after two murders and you get around to telling me the next day?” Kelley said. He looked disgusted, but then again Kelley always looked disgusted. “You’ve got to call the precinct ASAP. They’ll want to check your lines and see if they can trace it.”
“That’s fine, I’ll take care of it. Relax,” I said.
“Is there anything else you’re holding back?”
“No, that’s it.”
“You sure, or is there something I’ll find out tomorrow in between discussions of how much shit John Wayne was packing?”
“No, that’s it.”
“It’s all over the national news now, you know. It’s going to be a circus. MSNBC is going to do a live remote, and they got that asshole shrink on who used to be a forensic profiler doing commentary.”
“Oh fun,” I said.
I got off the topic and had a few Schlitzes before heading home. I told the fellas about the fight in the Garden and they congratulated me. On the drive home I listened to Elvis’s ’68 Comeback Special and gave some thought to Howard and why I felt strongly about protecting him. I didn’t know much about him, he didn’t know much about me, and he really only confided in me once. Elvis was singing “Where Could I Go But to the Lord” and segued into “I’m Saved” as I hit 9R. The one thing I was sure about with Howard was that he had no one else in the world who would vouch for him.
Maybe I just answered my own question.
Al kicked me in the nuts when I came to the door and he barked for five minutes straight. It wasn’t clear what point he was trying to make, but clearly he felt strong about it. I fixed him a dish of lamb and rice and topped it with half a can of sardines and he calmed down. My trailer smelled like the combination of hound, hound flatulence, and canned sardines-aromatherapy.
I had two messages.
“Duffy.” It was Marcia and she was sniffling. “I had a bad day. There’s too much sadness in the world. Call me,” she said.
She was a barrel of laughs.
I hit the button for the second message.
“Duffy, you gotta help me.” It was Howard and that’s all he said.