MELVIN TOFF TOLD ME HE used to hate the sport of boxing for its pretensions to valor, grace, art, its “history” of “pageantry.” Then he confirmed what a glorious sewer, what an unapologetically sick practice, it had become in recent times, and called it cool. By the time we’d met, Melvin had taught himself all the most famous tragedies of the ring, not just the date and place but the purse involved, the amount each boxer was supposed to’ve made. He held that, “the value of each man is determined by the amount he would accept to receive a public beating.” He recounted vivid descriptions of brain-deadening blows which made millions, Jerry Quarry’s subdural hematomas, nerve damage to the brainstem of Frank “The Animal” Fletcher, gliding contusions inside Sugar Ray Leonard’s brain. Through Melvin’s eyes, boxing’s noble past was just a fast-forward collapse of noses, heads, spirits.
May 1995, Melvin and I pulled into Las Vegas; he intent on watching grown men slug one another, me intent on gambling most our money away. At the 21 table, my cocktail waitress had a ponytail, acne; I worked to turn her into an old love—someone I’d lost—without success. She was just another in the long line of somebodies I’d never get to know. She sized up my sad situation, inquired, “Is there anything more I can do for you?”—she drew a slow breath, reemphasized—“Anything at all?”
I could conceive of requesting only that she become someone else; instead I shook my head, “Of course not.”
The highlight of our visit was to be the battering of L.A.’s gorgeous golden boy De La Hoya as he went after the belt that belonged to brawling Rafael Ruelas. But first, on the undercard, Gabriel Ruelas, Rafael’s elder brother, defending his title against some tiny long-haired Colombian who wouldn’t fall down. The Colombian’s name: Jimmy Garcia. Though completely outpunched from second one, Garcia stood and stood, shaking off referees and physicians that he might accept more blows to the face and ribs. The flags, pennants, the streamers dripped red, the colorful floor slogans grew ruined from Garcia’s blood. After eleven rounds they called it. Garcia went over to his corner where, finally, he sat. I was relieved. He appeared disappointed. A moment passed, and Garcia lost consciousness. Melvin was thrilled. EMTS loaded Garcia onto a waiting ambulance. The next fight promptly began. For the next two weeks, Gabriel Ruelas prayed at Jimmy Garcia’s hospital bedside, but it achieved little. He succumbed to his brain injuries on the anniversary of Marie’s birth—May 19.
It was our second murder together, the first being Peter Tosh. Tosh always seemed a friend, keeping in close touch (via car stereo) until the bad luck day Melvin and I dashed through a motel in Gallup for a bucket of ice and afterwards, just like that, found his murder awaiting us at the top of the news hour. Our fault? Melvin Toff’s tenderness boiled away, never to return. His solution was to joke: Someone had, like, exploded Peter Tosh’s consciousness, man, literally blown his mind, had reshaped his head laterally, he’d got hisself kilt, a bepistoled individual had done to him what Listerine does to bad breath and now Tosh’s career was down the drain, he was all over, as in—hee hee—all over the drapes and carpets, &c. None of his jokes were effective, of course. I immediately flipped my Tosh tapes over, scanning their other sides; where, for example, on the back of my copy of Bush Doctor, I found Melvin had hometaped me some Warren Zevon.
I know it seems like a big deal leaping Tosh to Zevon in nothing flat, but I stink oh-so-bad at grieving. And I admit, devouring them in this order, with Tosh first as the palate cleanser, it took forever before I tasted “the thing” about Zevon; namely, that he oozed disloyalty, a Bel Air whistleblower who took enigmatic pride in running down the old order (himself right along with it), a self-loathing traitor to his Linda Ronstadt class. His characters, initially sympathetic, unveiled their true ugliness in a wink, gave themselves away with an inopportune sigh. So his sessions were in truth subversive (although they sounded SoCal bland, miked and mixed so that you could almost hear the coke-nosed engineers as they blithely unwrapped still more reels of overpriced two-inch recording tape).
Melvin always challenged me as to why there had been no musical yet about boxing, imagining librettos recounting Oliver McCall’s inner turmoil during the Lennox Lewis title bout or the aria potential of Golota’s castrato-inducing Bowe low-blows. He loved to point out how boxing and music are two such similar sports: the potential for ugliness, the standalone arrogance of each. Where else are your bare privates made so public, except (perhaps) when performing live sex acts for money?
The truth is, sensitive singer/songwriter types no longer lose sleep over what transpires in the boxing ring. The last such tune, the one that killed pugilistic anthems rather as The Searchers killed Westerns, was probably Warren Zevon’s “Boom Boom Mancini,” one of Melvin Toff’s favorites, in which Zevon’s infamous chilliness hits a fate-obsessed apex. At the outdoor arena of Caesar’s Palace (where thirteen years later we cheered the death of Jimmy Garcia), Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini had hammered blood clots loose in the head of Duk Koo Kim. It was the most vile thing any Mancini had performed, Melvin liked to hiss, since no-relation Henry directed the Pink Panther Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.
The sinister Cochise-on-the-warpath tribal blues of Zevon’s “Boom Boom Mancini,” said Melvin Toff, is the unresolvable drama of darkness eternally in our midst. Mancini is a hero troubled by nothing, least of all a conscience. “Hurry home early,” drily encourages the singer, perhaps quoting a boxing advertisement, “Hurry on home. Boom Boom Mancini is fighting Bobby Chacon.” To back up this advice Zevon spends two verses applauding Mancini’s ferocity. Then, out of nowhere, at the bridge, Mancini meets Death, in the form of the deceased former champion Kim. Mancini shrugs. We suddenly understand that this is where such courage always lands us; the true glory of boxing is callousness.
Bobby Chacon was our local favorite, former champion featherweight, former champion junior lightweight, the badass from Oroville. People I knew drove more than two hours into Reno that January night, 1984, to watch the ring fill with ghosts. The match would, it was widely believed, be well-attended by the spirit world. Not only was the expectation that Mancini would be distracted by a vision of his murder victim but Chacon was to be visited by his first wife, who’d killed herself two years prior rather than watch the man she loved continue to box (common lore had it she appeared still to enjoy popping up at such events now and again). And there was the small matter of the soul of Chacon’s unborn child which sat ringside in the belly of his second wife.
They near-rioted, chucked magazines and shoes, ice cubes and beer cans, they, the near-capacity crowd of 11,104, when referee Richard Steele stepped in, a minute seventeen into round three, before Chacon could even drop, before any of the planned-for ghosts showed up at all. Even the heavyweight champion, Larry Holmes, rarely a great enthusaist for things supernatural, complained it was too soon. “I had to almost kill Leon Spinks before Steele would stop it.”
But Chacon was so grateful he thanked the referee for intervening. “You said you were my friend but if you were my friend,” Chacon challenged Mancini afterwards, “why’d you have to beat me up so bad?” Chacon seemed to forget momentarily that this was Boom Boom Mancini, after all, and he could stagger anybody, friends or enemies, with successive jabs, whack their chins and cut their eyes, drop them with unseen left hooks which connected like thrown concrete, because he was Boom Boom Mancini . . . just as Holmes also hadn’t remembered the terrifically bad manners of bragging about nearly killing a man in the ring within earshot of a boxer who actually had. Warren Zevon remembered for both of them—but his “Boom Boom Mancini” is about something else, not the boxer or the sport but the futility of forgiveness. This singer won’t grant absolution, which is fine by Boom Boom Mancini; he knows better than to seek it. The value of a life has become exactly what Melvin Toff calculated; the price one accepts to be beaten in public.
Or maybe that’s not Zevon’s point at all. Maybe the point is the abruptness of the song’s shift—that a paean to a brave athlete can become, within a measure or two of music, a horror story. Every moment of life presents some opportunity to wreck—you miscalculate a shift in traffic or forget to pull out before coming. Somehow we find ourselves outside relationships, without love. Sometimes it’s not even a choice, just an unfair confluence, bad luck. Let’s say you uncharacteristically lose your temper—but it’s when the paparazzi are around; perhaps a lethal shot discharges from the pistol you were promised was unloaded. This was Mancini’s fate—in executing his job’s responsibilities he merely traveled one punch too far and spattered blood all over his formerly playful nickname. Now he’s hailed on the street as the guy who killed that Korean. Now Melvin Toff never tells me what he’s feeling. Zevon’s lumbering voice in “Boom Boom Mancini” says it all, his affect flattening as the batteries in his heart audibly peter out. Hearing this, I cannot help but admit how, given a second chance, we’d kill Jimmy Garcia all over again without even hesitating.