Robert Anasi
A slim black woman around forty stepped onto the subway car at the East Broadway station. My trainer scanned her anatomy from the floor on up and grinned.
“Hey,” Daryl said. “How you doing?”
She didn’t answer.
“You got a smile for me today?” he said.
Silence.
“C’mon, just a smile.”
The woman looked away, at the handrail, the tunnel, empty space, anything but us. Louie was sweating her just as hard: up . . . down; up . . . down; up . . . down.
Adam, my second for the night, turned to Daryl.
“Maybe,” Adam said, “she ain’t smiling ’cause she don’t got no teeth.”
The three of them laughed and high-fived over my head.
Adam was a Puerto Rican of the New York City variety, which meant his occasional Spanish was all of the Caribbean and Lower East Side away from lisping Madrid. At eighteen, his handsome was near pretty, baby fat still nesting under his smooth cheeks. Adam was finicky in a way that bordered on neurotic: he kept his gear spotless and was always stroking his fade in the gym mirrors. Yet he was by far the best of Daryl’s boxers, a lot better than me, even though we’d started at the same time. Adam could drop Wall Street Journal English when it suited him, but he was from Avenue D and had no problem flexing his street cred.
I didn’t raise my hand in salute to the male gaze: suppressed panic didn’t make for easy machismo. A black guy, a white guy, and two Nuyoricans (half-Italian Louie pledged allegiance to his father’s people) were going to a show at Gleason’s and it was the white guy who was fighting. That didn’t make any kind of sense.
The F train accelerated toward Brooklyn, and Daryl turned serious.
“In the first I want you to be careful,” he said. “Use your jab and work your defense. Remember, you can’t think about what he’s gonna do because you don’t know what he’s gonna do. You got to think about what you’re gonna do.”
I nodded. Jab? My jab was an ill-timed slap. Defense? I couldn’t slip a punch launched from Westchester. In the ring, I’d paw at some equally deficient sparring partner and when one of us finally landed a hard shot, completely by accident, we’d rush at each other, swinging to kill. After my most recent sparring session, Adam had caught me as I left the ring. “You looked like a zoo full of monkeys in there,” he said.
The only thing I could control was my weight. We’d signed up to fight at 132, and when I stepped on the medical scale at Julio’s Gym an hour earlier, I’d weighed 132 exactly. I’d starved for a week in fear of that number and since it was still hours before the fight, I ran around the corner to Ninth Street Falafel. When I stepped on the scale again, I was four ounces of chickpea and pita heavier: 132¼. Daryl shrugged at the news. “You can always jump rope in the dressing room and work it off,” he said. I didn’t understand his equanimity—what if I was disqualified? What if I had to fight in a higher weight class? The next weight class up was light welterweight, and light welter held giants: Thomas Hearns had been national Golden Gloves champ at light welter and he was six feet one. Six feet one! Tommy Hearns! What if I had to face his latest incarnation?
The train rose from East River muck, upward slope gently pressing us into the plastic seats. There was no escape. I didn’t want to fight, not right then, not that night. I’d changed my mind. Not today, thank you. It was one thing to get shoved in a bar and leap up in fury, another to count down the hours toward your execution. Time erodes courage like Chinese water torture—drip, drip, drip. I could have been talking to a pretty girl in my favorite café, working on an article, looking for a better job than part-time drywall framing. There was no obvious reason for me to be there. Boxing wasn’t a family tradition like it was for Louie. I didn’t plan on turning pro the way that Adam did. I was boxing because there was something wrong with me. And that night I was going to be punished for it.
Daryl tapped my arm, his eyes dark brown and oval, his lashes camel long. Bedroom eyes on a weathered face, a scar in a curving arc over his left brow, skin the color of milk chocolate and the first joint missing from the little finger of his right hand. His smile also lacked something—two front teeth catty-corner, top and bottom. Five feet three on a tall day, Daryl ran maintenance in a Midtown building and lived with a woman named Peaches who always answered his phone on the first ring. No matter the time of day, Peaches talked sweet and seemed gloriously inebriated. On my first day at Julio’s, Daryl had told me he “saw something” in me and that he’d train me for free. It was the tender coupling of twin delusions, but nine months later that something remained nothing. I’d put myself in his hands, and we’d failed each other.
When I first walked into a boxing gym sometime after my twenty-fourth birthday, I was only a casual fan. After my second viewing of Rocky at age twelve, I ran home with my brother shouting the theme song and punching air. I’d seen a couple of the great middleweight and welterweight fights of the 1980s and, along with the rest of my generation, absorbed the legend of Muhammad Ali. My uncle, a neighborhood tough guy, had boxed in the army and had a heavy bag in his garage, three houses away from mine. Sometimes I’d cross the street, put on his stiff bag gloves and whale away until my fists went numb. That was as far as it ever went, especially as I came to hate jock culture. Instead of going to practice for some sport after classes, I rode the bus downtown and hung out with the theater kids from the college-prep high school. In my college town, there was room for teenagers who had Mohawks, dropped acid, and hated Ronald Reagan. Theater geeks and punk rockers: those were my people; slam dancing: that was my contact sport. Boxing didn’t even register as an option until a bad year in San Francisco when I was twenty-four.
The subway car deposited us at the dreary York Street station. I had time to think on the long walk from the platform, up the corridor with dingy tiles bordered in purple. Banks of black-and-white video monitors provided views of the tracks and corridor, the monitors a weak placebo for commuter fears of robbery, rape, and murder. We left the drab yellow-brick ventilation tower and stepped into the night under the vast shadows of the Manhattan Bridge. Daryl was still coaching—I had to move to my right, away from the power hand, make sure my lead foot was on the outside. He said something about throwing combinations and something else about staying focused but the words buzzed away into white noise. I’d heard it all before, many times, but that didn’t mean I could do it. Adam interrupted with his usual encouragement.
“Just don’t go through the canvas,” he said.
That was the paralyzing fear—getting knocked out. Losing was bad but to have the referee count over you as you lay dazed or unconscious while the guy who’d dropped you pumped his gloves and preened before his friends, and people in the crowd laughed and nudged each other, yelling, “He fucked that kid up!” That fear lurked every time you stepped into the ring, even during sparring sessions. I’d seen it happen at Julio’s—a shout turning you away from the punching bag as some muscular teenager was led from the ring. Minutes earlier he’d been all speed and braggadocio, but now he wobbled on shaky legs like a toddler with a full diaper. Getting KO’d was castration with a blunt scalpel.
Dumbo was a new frontier in the Brooklyn real estate stampede but at night it remained an eerie place. Friends of mine had art studios in the warehouses along Water Street but two blocks north loomed the dark towers of the Farragut projects. When I took the bus to Gleason’s, I got off at the plaza in front of the highest tower as unfriendly eyes tracked the lone white boy with his gym bag moving south, past the only two legal neighborhood businesses—a C-Town supermarket gutted by arson and a liquor store with bottles behind bulletproof Plexiglas.
“You got to be the boss out there,” Daryl said, his voice loud in the vacant street. “Remember, this is only a kid you’re fighting. Seventeen, eighteen, probably. What are you, twenty-nine?”
I nodded.
“Well, there you go,” Daryl said, slapping me on the arm. “You got to run out there and . . .”
He pumped his fist into an imaginary midsection. “. . . Mess that child up!”
Adam and Louie snickered, and Daryl laughed.
“Am I right or am I right?” Daryl asked. “Kid’s probably a virgin. You ain’t a virgin. You’re a full-grown man!”
At our feet, asphalt ebbed away from nineteenth-century cobblestones, the warehouses shuttered for the night, the Manhattan Bridge on titanic columns roaring like an active volcano. Mist from the East River crept over the seawall, turning Dumbo into the Brooklyn waterfront of legend and the perfect site for a boxing gym.
We reached the unmarked entrance just as a van with the logo of a South Bronx boxing club pulled up and disgorged a cadre of Latin and black teenagers. The fighters wore green windbreakers blazoned with the same club logo; they had all the energy of a team before a match, talking loud and cracking wise in tough-guy poses as they pushed toward the door, a wizened trainer shouting in their wake.
Louie, Adam, Daryl, and I trailed them, no matching windbreakers, no team spirit. At the top of the wide warehouse staircase, I noticed a quote painted across the wall: “Now, whoever has courage and a strong and collected spirit in his breast let him come forward, lace on the gloves and put up his hands.—Virgil.”
Louie followed my gaze.
“Wow,” he said. “Virgil Hill talks as smart as he fights.”
This wasn’t some neighborhood club or church basement: my audition was at Gleason’s, New York City’s fistic omphalos since the city fathers shuttered the Times Square Gym in 1995. So many of the great old gyms had closed—Times Square, Stillman’s up on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-Fourth, Cus D’Amato’s Gramercy Gym, the Fifth Street Gym in Miami. By 1997, boxing had been expiring for a long time, a drawn-out death rattle as Americans gave up the blue-collar pastimes of cities for suburbs and the big-three team sports on television. Still, Gleason’s endured (although it had moved from the Bronx to Brooklyn). Every champion and contender who came to town climbed that staircase: Mike Tyson, Riddick Bowe, Julio Cesar Chavez, Hector Camacho; every New York pro headed for Madison Square Garden jumped rope, shadowboxed, and sparred there.
Gleason’s might have been the most famous boxing gym in the world, but it was makeshift and squalid: plumbing exposed, windows crusted with grime. Fluorescent strips hung over gouged pine floors and the heavily taped bags looked like they’d been stuffed with prosected torsos. After registering, I stripped to my briefs, weighed in at 132—the quarter pound fretted away—and put my clothes back on. The doctor checked my blood pressure and asked me if I’d been KO’d in the last six months: I hadn’t.
Back in the hall, the trainers greeted each other while the fighters hung quietly behind them. At the check-in table, officials and trainers juggled our “books.” In order to compete, amateur fighters have to buy a license from US Amateur Boxing, Inc., which provides a passport-size white “book” with a photo and a record in place of customs stamps. Each decision inked on the pages was another border you’d crossed. The trainers played three-dimensional chess with the books, trying to find easy marks.
Daryl sidled over to the table and eyeballed the fanned documents exactly like a flea-market rube afraid of being taken for a sucker. He’d promised not to match me against someone with more experience—a difficult promise to keep since that ruled out pretty much everyone. In our nine months together, Daryl hadn’t asked for a cent, motivated entirely by the fantasy that I’d become a champion. He paced the table, picking up books then slowly relinquishing them. One book lingered in his hand, and after a brief conversation with the officials he called me over.
“This OK?” he said, presenting the book.
I looked at a photo-booth glossy of a scowling Latino with a thick neck and zero fights. Brian Garcia had weighed in at 134, and I suddenly understood why Daryl didn’t care if I was over 132. This wasn’t a tournament but a show, and in shows fighters were matched by relative weights, not by weight class. Daryl had only told me to make ’32 to keep me away from McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme.
“Sure,” I said. It was the only answer I could give. Yet I was already worrying about the two-pound difference.
The other fighter’s trainer was still negotiating the table. The man had aged in the way the thin and fit do—by desiccating, his face and neck all ridged veins and parchment skin. A flattened nose said “former fighter.”
“So,” Daryl said, presenting my book. “Your guy hasn’t had a lot of junior fights, you know, like in the PAL [Police Athletic League]?”
The Mummy smiled beatifically.
“The kid,” he said, “is green as grass.”
I couldn’t guess the Mummy’s ethnicity—not with his version of English being more General American than mine. He could have been a light-skinned Nuyorican or a holdover from some ethnicity that preceded the Latinos and had all but faded away. (I never did find out why the trainer of a Bronx boxing team sounded like a newscaster from Tacoma.)
The two men exchanged polite words, nodded at each other, and we walked away.
“I know this guy from before,” Daryl muttered as we headed toward the dressing room. “And I don’t trust him.”
Daryl was not making me feel better.
His suspicion didn’t surprise me. Every trainer is always looking for an edge and would be more than happy to put a junior champion with two hundred fights into the ring with, say, me. An amateur boxer’s record resets to a clean 0–0 when he turns seventeen, no matter how many fights he’s had as a junior. And that’s just US fighters. Latin American boxers often turn pro by fifteen, and if you have thirty pro rounds under your belt in Oaxaca when you walk into a Harlem gym and claim to be a novice, well, your book will still read 0–0. I’d seen brutal mismatches at this level and did not want to be on the wrong end of one of them.
“He pulled some shit with me before,” Daryl said. “Got one of my guys messed up. Thing is, he’s a crap trainer. If I had all the guys he does . . .”
I’d never heard one New York trainer bestow a good word on another, at least not after the backslaps and smiles. As a relatively honest trainer put it to me, “I blow sunshine up their asses, just like they do up mine.” First came that puff of rectal effulgence, inevitably followed by the knife in the back—all of it as petty, hypocritical, and vicious as a small-town beauty pageant. The hostility made plenty of sense. In boxing, a conviction of invulnerability was essential: no amateur stepped through the ropes unless he thought he had a chance. The trainer did everything he could to convince you that he made the best fighters. If, god forbid, one of his guys lost, it was by ludicrous accident or base treachery at the hands of corrupt or incompetent officials. Yet this attitude made it nearly impossible to learn from mistakes and was the main reason why so many fighters were demolished in lopsided fights. The same conviction of superiority extended to the teammates, to the girlfriends and to all the hangers-on. Your guy was the greatest, until he wasn’t. Then a switch flipped and the team decided that their guy lacked heart, or didn’t listen, or was lazy, or didn’t have the killer instinct. He’d failed his crew and bruised the egos that had attached to his body. So they all walked away in disgust, forgetting who suffered the real injuries.
“Get changed and we’ll do a warm-up,” Daryl said. “Hurry. They could call us any time.”
I was lonely as I’d ever been as I walked back to the dressing room. Sitting on a wobbly two-plank bench, I donned my dime-store wife-beater and the tacky pair of blue-and-gold shorts I’d ordered from the Ringside catalog. The shorts were a decade out of style and exposed my cadaverous legs to mid-thigh. I might as well have been naked.
“I’m good,” I said.
Daryl eyed the shorts but didn’t say anything. It would be a few more fights until someone was kind enough to tell me how preposterous they were: “Rob,” I was succinctly informed, “if they ain’t long, they wrong.”
I didn’t start boxing because my old man made me or because I was from Mexico or Cuba where fighters were national icons; I started boxing because I was angry, and I was angry because I’d been castrated (figuratively, let me make clear). The castration, what Aristotle might have called the “material cause,” came from getting dumped by my beautiful, charming, spoiled college girlfriend. Her father, a Depression-forged Hollywood tough guy, decided after our first meeting that I was area codes away from being man enough for her. “I’ll take that boy seriously when he puts a fur coat on your back,” he said. She eventually agreed with daddy but then so did I—her father was only broadcasting what I whispered to myself, whispers that said I would always be a failure. When she ran off to LA to be an actress, I was devastated but not surprised: the whispers said that it was exactly what I deserved. All my boozing and yelling came down to a terror of having my inadequacy exposed, a reason Aristotle would consider the “formal cause.”
My fear went deep. As a toddler, I attacked my younger brothers because I thought my mother loved them more than she loved me. In nursery school, I bludgeoned other kids with the blocks and toys they wanted to share. By the third grade, I was spending as much time in the principal’s office as I was on the playground. My father was as threatened by his sons as I was by my brothers and ran our house like a North Korean labor camp: imprisoning us in our bedrooms, rationing our food, driving us to escape. Intimidating us was his avocation—shouting, staring, and shuffling his feet in irritation, along with the occasional smack-down while my mother temporized. I suffered the abuse because I couldn’t conceive of another option: his shadow circumscribed my universe.
Not growing to a size that befit my anger spared me a career as a first-class bully. By the sixth grade, most boys were bigger than me, often a lot bigger, and the bullies found their way to a natural target: Anasi, the bully manqué. Small and extremely nearsighted, I hid in books but even intellectual aggression provided a Day-Glo trail for the bullies to follow. In the sixth grade, I laughed when Sister Mary Catherine insisted that the moon was bigger than Mars. “But it is bigger,” she snapped. “You can tell that by looking at them in the sky.” When I proceeded to quote the approximate radii of both objects, the class fell silent. Every afternoon for the next three days, the largest boys in my class took turns jumping me. Not because of my disrespect to Sister MC per se, but because I didn’t know when to shut up; I didn’t know my place
By my sophomore year of high school, I was running every night after sit-ups and pull-ups, five to six miles on pavement in flat Chuck Taylors (yes, I got shin splints). Doing the most pull-ups in gym didn’t help with the bullies: a varsity hockey player marked me as the perfect victim and tracked me down to bounce me off lockers, break my fingers, choke me to the edge of blackout. Punishing kids like me was considered his perk by the school administration, never mind the two years, four inches, and thirty pounds between us. As I walked home one night in my neighborhood, I saw him standing in front of a local bar. “This is the time,” I decided. I’d heard the mantra that bullies are actually cowards, cowards who will wilt in the face of manly opposition. So I went up to him, shook his hand, and then asked him why he harassed me so much. My next memory was of rising from the pavement. The hockey player had disappeared. “I warned you not to do that,” a classmate said. As the previous five minutes had been erased, I had no idea of what he’d warned me not to do. I just laughed and said, “What an asshole.” I never found out what happened, but my jaw ached for a week.
When I walked into my first gym in San Francisco’s Tenderloin at twenty-four, the owner, old Bernie, planted me in front of a heavy bag. Bernie was as frail as a potato chip, but he’d been a solid club fighter in some remote past before the hippie days. That afternoon I hit the heavy bag until I couldn’t lift my arms and sweat inscribed a greasy circle around me on the floor. It was utterly satisfying, even though Bernie cackled at my ridiculous form. For me, it was a revelation: I didn’t just like hitting things; I loved hitting things. Over the following months, I went to the gym four days a week to follow Bernie’s parsimonious instruction—two steps forward, jab, two steps back—and looked up to see him still laughing from his glass-walled office. All the satisfaction of the heavy bag didn’t keep the stakes from rising. Once you start on the bags you want to spar, and once you start sparring you want to fight. My skills didn’t advance with my enthusiasm but I couldn’t resist doubling down after every half step forward. It was the only way that I wouldn’t despise myself when I said, “Oh yeah, I box a little.”
Over the next four years, I never complained. Not when I got knocked down for the first time by an Irish kickboxer with a ginger beard. Not when a Junior Olympian broke my ribs. I was determined to pay until I could pass the bill to someone else, but it was taking long enough to seem like forever.
“Keep moving around him,” Daryl said. “Don’t let him get inside of you. Bring your left back quick after you throw a punch. Move.”
It didn’t seem like he had ever stopped talking.
At shows, the fighters arrive early and languish in the dirty locker rooms. After the weigh-in and the doctor and the matchmaking there’s nothing left but the misery of waiting. Daryl told me to sit down, close my eyes, take a nap if I could. He chuckled.
“We’ve seen guys crumble before a fight,” he said. “Ain’t that right, Louie?”
Louie chuckled agreement. Slumped on the bench, I roller-coastered through frontiers of anticipation. A rush of adrenaline would come bringing thoughts of what I should do, visions of defeat, victory, random words coupled in nonsense rhymes. Then the wave would subside and I’d slump until the next hot surge set me shaking. It was like waiting for a firing squad, the only difference being that I’d volunteered to be executed.
On the bench beside me, Louie leafed through a back issue of Fangoria. A chunky twenty-three year-old with olive-gray skin and a perpetual grin, Louie was an interesting case. Although I’d never seen him train, he was in the gym almost every night. Two of his uncles had been local pros and he’d grown up around boxing. Like Adam, he was from the Avenue D projects and Julio’s offered him a social club and daytime soap opera.
“Check this out!” Louie said, almost shouting as he pointed to the magazine. “They used real pig intestines in the scene!”
I tried to focus on a sequence of stills from Dawn of the Dead that involved the disembowelment of an unfortunate Hell’s Angel in a shopping mall. As we marveled over George Romero’s sanguinary verisimilitude, Louie revealed his master plan: he, Louie Villegas, was on the verge of directing his first horror film.
“I’m finally putting it all together,” he said. “This summer I’m going to shoot a feature. It’s called Gangsta Zombies of the Lower East Side. I got the script. I got the camera. I got the crew.”
Louie’s grin reached out and grabbed his ears.
“You can be in it! I’ve got a part that will be perfect for you.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “I’ve actually done some acting.”
“It’s on!” Louie said and shook my hand.
Word dribbled back to the dressing room: all the muttering and plotting of the trainers had produced a total of six fights for the night. Six fights, despite the fact that five teams and a dozen unaffiliated strays had appeared at Gleason’s. With all their machinations, the trainers had outsmarted themselves. Anyone who paid the ten-dollar door fee would see fewer than twenty rounds of amateur fisticuffs. A few minutes later, a USA Boxing official dressed all in white limped over to Daryl.
“You guys are up first,” he said. “Ten minutes.”
Daryl bolted into motion. After massaging my fingers, he wrapped my hands tight, never stopping with the advice.
“Use the first round to figure him out,” he said. “After that, be more aggressive. You don’t have a lot of time so you want to throw. Don’t try for a one-punch KO. You need to score: punches in bunches.”
I nodded. I’d never figured anyone out. Telling me to “figure out” someone was like tossing a second grader Euclid’s Elements in first period and instructing him to derive ax = bc by recess.
I blamed Daryl because it was easier than blaming myself. The truth was, Daryl really cared; training us was what he did with the biggest part of his life that didn’t involve a paycheck. The first time I called his home number, Peaches already knew my name. “Robert!” she said. “This is Robert?!” Peaches was happy to hear from me. In the gym we never talked about our lives outside but Daryl, it seemed, went home and bragged on us. Somewhere in his late thirties, Daryl had accepted middle age, his muscular belly approaching second trimester in arc and size. He spent weeknights and all of Saturday at Julio’s, gossiping, arguing, and putting his motley team through the paces. Because his fighters—with the exception of Adam—didn’t win, the other trainers didn’t show him respect. The civilized ones stayed quiet but the shit talkers, the angry barbarians, shot him down every chance they got. “That guy has crap for fighters.” “He ruined that kid.” “Oh, not this clown again.” Always when he was out of earshot, but just. For any one of his fighters, he’d toddle off to the most distant corners of the five boroughs or even to the blue-collar suburbs of Long Island, all for a chance at a “W.” In his best moods, he’d deliver gruff advice about romance and deportment: “I know you young guys don’t like to wear T-shirts under your button-downs, but you can catch a chill that way. Plus the sweat stains will fuck up your Oxfords.”
Daryl did have an edge though, usually concealed but razor-sharp when it flashed—the edge you needed to grow up small in Harlem. One day he took that edge to my face, a lesson he must have thought I needed. Although he never mentioned his own boxing career, on that night he had me stand opposite him and told me to avoid his jab. Or try to, anyway. He had surprisingly long arms on his squat frame and his up-jab was sneaky fast. I tried to slip or block, but almost every one of his jabs punctured my guard and snapped my head back. I laughed and swore on the way to a bloody nose and went home impressed by his speed. Yet the experience was more performance than seminar. Daryl had demonstrated that he could yo-yo my head but I hadn’t learned a thing about slipping punches. Whatever lesson he was trying to impart, it was one that I couldn’t absorb.
Back out in the main hall, Daryl led me to the shadows under a staircase and pulled on a pair of training mitts.
“Let’s work some combinations,” he said.
Not only was it the first time he’d worked me with mitts, it was the first time I’d ever used them.
“Jab, two three,” he said. “Two three four. Double jab. Two three, two three! One two four!”
I tried to throw fast and hard, to catch a rhythm, but with every combination my punches went awry. After I hooked, Daryl swept a mitt toward my head expecting me to slip under it. Instead the mitt clanked against my head.
Behind me, I heard laughter. A few yards away, the Bronx-team soldiers were pointing out my struggles as they bumped shoulders and snickered. I didn’t understand why Daryl had picked that moment to do mitts for the first time.
“That’s enough for now,” Daryl said. My hands dropped to my sides. We were minutes away from the ring.
“Don’t worry about that,” Daryl whispered. “I made you look bad so that the other guy would be overconfident.”
You could have landed an Airbus in my open mouth. I didn’t know what was worse—the possibility that he’d made me look bad on purpose, or the possibility that I was so terrible my own trainer couldn’t make me look good and “I made you look bad” was the best lie he could come up with. Both options were equally devastating.
In a row of seats closest to the staircase, I saw the Mummy wrapping Brian Garcia’s hands. Instead of the standard-issue cotton hand wraps used for sparring, the Mummy was swaddling Garcia with gauze: gauze, the stuff of pros. I wanted to shake Daryl and demand the same treatment. Maybe gauze was the final part of the boxing equation, the secret weapon that would make my punches harder, straighter, faster. Not only was Garcia two pounds heavier than me, he also had a secret weapon hidden in his gloves, tightly wound gauze that would turn his fists into dynamite.
Then it was time.
I was helpless, something else moving my limbs as I floated toward the ring on noise from a house suddenly full, a house waiting for blood, their sacrifice, me. As we reached the ring apron, Adam shouted in my ear.
“Just fuck him up,” he said. “I hope you fucking kill him.”
The words comforted me. An arrogant punk from the Bronx had made me suffer and now I was allowed to hit him in the face as hard as I could and I wouldn’t get into trouble, not even if he died.
Garcia waited on the other side of the ring. He might have been an inch shorter than me, but his bulging pecs split the Puerto Rican flag on his wife-beater in two. As I stared across the ring, he boomed his gloves together.
“He’s just trying to scare you,” Daryl said with a snarl.
It worked: I was scared. Time had stopped, and all I could do was wait. I’d been carried to that point by a mechanism over which I had no control. Now the mechanism had halted and I would stumble into the spotlight on my own, chicken legs and all.
“Don’t go out and touch gloves with that motherfucker,” Daryl said. “That’s pro shit. You run out there and hit him as hard as you fucking can.”
As the referee spoke the ritual phrases at ring center—“clean fight,” “obey my orders”—Garcia tried to lock eyes with me. I looked back at him, as surprised by the stare as if a stranger on Fifth Avenue had tapped me on the shoulder; in New York City, you never stared into the eyes of a stranger because bad things could happen. Daryl had told me to focus on the space between his eyes if I couldn’t meet them. New York habit almost turned my gaze away but then I remembered, “I’m fighting this guy.” Our gazes met and meshed and ground together. Less than a second later, his shifted to the floor. Staring at his exposed face, I saw the tough guy I’d seen in the photo and a boy too young to be taken seriously (his book said he was nineteen; his face said he didn’t shave yet). I felt empathy—he was suffering as much as I was. But for the first time, I also felt strong.
The bell rang, and I trotted toward the center of the ring, straight into an overhand right. My nose detonated in a shower of blood and I reeled back in pain, shock, humiliation, the roar from the crowd an intense pressure vibrating in the air. Garcia followed up with wild punches but the big shot had erased my fears and I started to hit back. Thirty seconds into the round, I drove him into a corner. I wanted to kill the stranger who had been so rude. Trapped against the ropes, he covered his face with his gloves and crouched low.
“Break!” The referee shouted. “Break!”
Because Garcia wasn’t fighting back the referee wanted to give him a standing-eight count, but rage had made me a lunatic. I kept hitting Garcia until the referee hooked my left arm and marched me to a neutral corner. While I stood there seething, he deducted a point from me for not following instructions. Seconds later, I was on the kid again. It was like being in a nightmare and being the nightmare. Through the adrenaline whirl, idle thoughts drifted through my mind like slow clouds on a summer day: the blood dappling the back of Garcia’s shirt—was it his or mine? Would it be OK if I pretended to throw a hook and hit him with my elbow instead? Was Garcia just trying to make me overconfident? In this new articulation of time, a two-minute round seemed to go on for hours.
We did little boxing and much brawling. Garcia kept hitting me in the groin, and the referee deducted another point, this time from him. Great fights have dramatic tension that elevates the violence to something sacred. We spun like two roosters in a dusty yard until the round finally ended.
I went back to my corner, and Daryl swabbed blood from the mess of my face.
“This guy is nothing,” I said between gasps. “He’s mine.”
The words were stupid but true. The first shot had set me free from all fear, from anything but the next punch. My will was crushing Garcia as his will shrunk away. The punches I’d taken and the public spectacle had lifted me up to the Himalayas. I could keep hitting Brian Garcia and the more I hit him, the more people would cheer. I couldn’t wait for the next bell so I could run out and hit him again.
Daryl agreed.
“He don’t want to fight,” he said.
It turned out that he didn’t. The bell rang and I pummeled Garcia until the referee separated us and deducted another point for low blows, punches I never felt. We clinched and punched—throwing elbows, butting, shoving—until Garcia surrendered, crouching in his shell while I used him as a punching bag. The referee pulled me away but I didn’t know that I had won my first fight on a TKO even when I saw Louie leap into the air while boos descended from the Bronx team.
As I left the ring, Bruce Silverglade, Gleason’s Machiavelli, met me on the apron.
“Congratulations,” he said, handing me a watch with “Gleason’s Gym” inscribed on the face.
The trinket was a throwback to an era when amateur boxers received prizes of actual value after their matches—a good watch, cufflinks, silk ties. They didn’t call it “prize fighting” for nothing. In the Great Depression, there were so many amateur cards at so many clubs across the boroughs that teenagers could fight four or five nights a week. Many fighters delayed turning pro because their purses wouldn’t equal what they could get by selling or pawning the prizes.
I sent the watch to my father for his birthday. It never kept time and after a week it stopped.
In the steaming gray murk of the Gleason’s showers, I rinsed away sweat and blood. Back in the dressing room, Garcia and the Mummy were waiting at my stall.
“Good fight! Good fight!” Garcia repeated as he pumped my hand, a smile parked on his round face.
“You don’t want to come out slow like that,” he said. “It made you easy to hit.”
He wasn’t wrong but it seemed strange for him to be the person saying it.
I found my crew watching the fourth fight. Adam and Louie sat me down between them and took turns smacking my shoulders and called me “Killer.”
“Yeah,” Louie said. “That’s how you do.”
“It gets easier,” Adam said. “First is the worst.”
He presented his fist. We dapped and I was a monkey no more, one rung up the Ladder of Evolution. As always, winning was much better than losing.
When the fight ended, Daryl stood up.
“I have to take off,” he said. “Got to be in the office at seven.”
He grabbed my arm with the thirteen joints of his right hand.
“You did a great job out there,” he said.
Louie and Adam rose with him. They’d come out for the team, and it was time to move on. I felt displaced. I’d never won a fight before and didn’t know what happened next.
Daryl scanned the crowd and then leaned closed.
“Those guys on the other team are really fucking pissed,” he whispered.
“They’re talking about jumping you outside. You better take off before the last fight.”
I didn’t understand. I’d won. That was supposed to be the end. The Mummy and Garcia had shaken my hand. We were all friends now. Besides, if there was a real problem, then why didn’t Daryl tell me I should leave with him? The joy that came with victory was already turning into something else.
Through the first round of the next match, I scanned the room for threats. I couldn’t spot Garcia or the Mummy or any of the Bronx jackets. Maybe they were already outside waiting for me. When the bell rang for round three, I headed toward the street, looking over my shoulder until I reached the subway.
The F train took me to friends on Ludlow Street and I kept drinking margaritas even though the first sip tasted like piss. In the barroom mirrors, I noticed that someone had stuck a bright-red clown nose on my face. I looked like I’d been crying for hours. Five margaritas didn’t get me drunk and I felt too ugly to flirt so I sat watching my friends have fun. Past the polite “How did it go?” and the puzzled head shakes, none of them asked about the fight. Their world shared no connections to the world of boxing. For them, boxing was an idiosyncrasy, about on a level with collecting Star Wars action figures.
When I finally arrived home at 169th Street and Broadway, the phone was ringing.
“Yo Robert,” a voice said.
“Daryl?” I said. The missing teeth always skewed his speech, but his words were more slurred than usual.
“How you doing man?” he said.
“I’m OK.”
“I was feeling fine,” he said. “So I stopped for a nightcap. Now I’m feeling even better.”
Despite his dawn alarm, he’d managed to get drunk at his local on the block between the 6 train and his East Harlem apartment.
“You know,” he said. “You did a lot of good things out there. You showed me something. You showed everybody something tonight.”
“Thanks Daryl,” I said. “You’re the guy who made it all happen.”
The words were banal but we were close. I wondered if Peaches was sledding through Dreamland toward that dawn alarm, or if she was hovering in the background waiting for her man to come to bed. In the gym, Daryl and I shared a real intimacy but it ended there. When I invited him to my parties he didn’t come, and he didn’t invite me to his. A few months earlier, I’d given him a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue for New Year’s but there was a line between us that only failure or success could break. That night, we’d touched the line.
Daryl stayed on the phone, in the right mood to offer advice. That cute French girl I’d brought into the gym, well, it was all right to have fun, but I shouldn’t let women take up too much of my time. He said I needed to find a serious job, one with benefits, as long as it didn’t affect my training. He said there was no limit to what I could do in the world of boxing.
“You know the Olympic Trials are coming up,” he said. “A couple of more fights like that and you’ll be ready.”
I didn’t know much about boxing but I did know that Daryl was drunk. Still, the fact that I’d made him happy let me bask in his delusion. For once, I hadn’t been a disappointment. A couple of more fights, then the Olympic Trials, sure, why not? It had taken four years to make my way into the ring and I knew that at twenty-eight, I was an old man in boxing. But for the rest of the night, I wouldn’t let that worry me. No matter what happened next, I’d done it. I’d finally earned a stripe.