I was best friends with Mato in grammar school, but I wouldn’t say we liked each other all that much. He always had to show everybody he was tougher, he could take me. We’d wrestle at recess and he’d get me in a headlock and wouldn’t let go till we drew a bigger crowd of classmates, a bigger bunch of laughing witnesses. Kids who wouldn’t dare laugh at me on their own would laugh along with Mato like he was just having some good fun with his best friend. After he’d finally let me go he’d throw an arm over my shoulder, and all I could do to save face was grin back at him, the good loser, my ear swollen, all the time just burning inside, wanting to smash his smile.
By the time we were in high school we were the toughest kids in San Antonio, and I’m including the Anglos, the biggest ones. We didn’t give a damn about size—we’d fight anybody, anytime, kick their ass. That’s when Rita came in the picture, a transfer from California. From L.A. First day there she had every guy in school walking into walls. Killer green eyes, hair like honey to her ass, great legs, skin more like a tan gringa than the Chicana she was. Sure as hell of herself, too, way cooler than most you’d ever find in Texas. Quick smart mouth on her. When the homecoming committee asked her to be one of the queen’s maids of honor, she said why not, the strapless gown would show off the spider tattoos over her titties real nice. They took back the offer and she laughed every time she told the story. She was like that. Loved to shock the straight arrows. She’d been in school about a month when her and a faculty guy, an English teacher, were spotted in a nightclub, drinking and dirty dancing. The school board got wind of it and it turned into a big deal in the newspapers. The guy ended up getting fired. Rita, she just beamed about the whole thing. I heard she taped the news clippings to her wall, next to the movie star pictures.
I know she’d seen me watching her sometimes in the halls between classes. One day I’m at my locker and I feel somebody blow on the back of my ear, I turn around and she says, “Hey, Rudy Cortes, you don’t look like such a Mister Bad-Ass to me.” Mister Bad-Ass was what the guys at school called me. Mato they called Killer. She was looking at me with nothing but daring in her face, those eyes like green fire. That night we parked out in the boonies and she let me touch her everywhere, but no more than that. She didn’t have a pair of tattoos like she’d said, just the one: a little blue heart on her left tit.
Mato usually preferred morenas, Mexican-looking ones, but when he saw how much I dug Rita he naturally started coming on to her too. We told each other we were scoring, but I don’t think he was getting anything I wasn’t, not then, not yet. But her teasing was driving me crazy. I was going around so revved up I picked a fight for no reason with a guy on the football team and whipped his ass in the lot behind Min’s Pharmacy, where all the after-school fights took place. Rita watched it, and that night in the car she used her mouth on me for the first time. I loved the look on Mato’s face when I told him about it the next day. He called me a bullshit artist but he knew it was true, and I could tell by his face she hadn’t done it for him. That afternoon in the locker room he made out like he was just horsing around but kept popping me good ones on the ass with a towel till I said cut the crap. He said why don’t I make him cut the crap behind Min’s at 3:15. I said you’re on. It’d been coming since way before Rita and we both knew it.
Most of the school turned out for it, even Coach Canellos, who was also the dean of boys and wanted to see this one as much as anybody. We both gave Rita our shirt to hold. She winked at me, smiled at Mato. I really thought I’d take him. We went at it for twenty minutes. I got in some good shots, but when my eyes were swollen nearly shut, Canellos stepped in and stopped it. Great fight, chachos, he said, then suspended us both for a week. Rita handed me my shirt and left with Mato. A few days later he stopped by the lumberyard where I was working and told me she’d left on a bus back to California to be a movie star. He thought the whole thing was pretty funny, and in spite of myself he got me laughing about the shiners we both still wore. But the truth is, even while I was laughing I wanted to put my fist through his face.
Around that time we both said the hell with school and took up training for the Legion smokers at Roberto Zavala’s Gym. Roberto put us up in the Nopales Hotel down the street with the rest of his fighters. It was a fleabag but it beat hell out of “home.” Ever since my folks were killed in a car crash when I was nine I’d been living with my Aunt Concha and her two pain-in-the-ass daughters, and I was happy to be shed of that house of nags. As for Mato, his old man vanished before he was born, and his mother was a boozer with a different bum in her bed every week. When he moved out he didn’t tell her where he was going and she didn’t ask.
We were both natural welterweights, but I was the better boxer. I had the sharper jab, the quicker feet. I could hit too, but Mato was the real puncher. His hook to the body was like a ball bat. In those days he was always coming at you, willing to take two to give one. Roberto predicted we’d end up against each other in the semifinals, and we did. Roberto always said a good boxer could beat a good slugger any day if he was careful not to get tagged, which is a pretty big if. Stick and move and keep your distance, he told me, and you can’t lose, not to a puncher, not even him. Roberto had trained us both but he worked my corner when we fought because I’d do like he told me. Mato always did things his own way.
I could’ve won it easy if I’d fought the last two rounds like the first, if I’d kept jabbing and staying away from his hooks. All the judges gave me the first. But in the middle of the second he dropped his hands and laughed at me, said Rita could give him a better fight. So I went at him. At the bell we were both whaling with both hands but he was landing the harder shots. Roberto was having a fit when I got back to the corner. Called me fool, pendejo, every name there is. Mato grinned across the ring and shook his head to let me know how little I’d hurt him. I knew Roberto was right, that I was a jerk to fight Mato’s fight, but I couldn’t help it. All I wanted was to smash his face. So we mixed it up again in the third and he wobbled me with a hook to the liver and an uppercut that broke my nose. I hung on to the end of the round, but the damage was done and the judges gave it to him. After the decision, he puts his arm around me and smiles for the cameras. The picture in the sports page next day called us “Amigo Maulers.” Jesus. I would’ve danced on him if he’d dropped dead. In the final, he put the other guy away in under two minutes of the first round.
A Dallas group gave him a pro contract and set him up at a training camp. I signed on with a manager who worked out of El Paso, so I went to live there. I roomed in a place on Stanton and trained in a good gym across the river in Juérez. A lot of the Mex fighters couldn’t speak English and called me pocho because I didn’t know but a dozen words in Spanish. But they smiled when they said it and we got along OK.
For the next two years Mato and me both kept winning and working our way up the ranks. Sometime in there I saw Rita in a skin magazine, a red-haired “starlet” now, calling herself Jill Somebody, five pages showing her titty tattoo and everything else to the world. I don’t know how to explain it, but the pictures made me horny and mad at the same time. I sent her a note in care of the magazine—“Looking good kid, Mr. Bad Ass”—and then felt like a jerk for mailing it.
They matched me and Mato in New Orleans on the undercard of a televised championship fight. They talked us up as dynamite comers with identical 14-0 pro records, 11 kayos each. Mato was already #4 in the federation rankings, I was #6, but the betting line had us even. He came down to the ring from the dressing room with a crowd around him, lights flashing, music on the PA, a whole show like he’s a champ already. Dances by my corner in his sequined robe and says, “Say goodnight, Rudy.” Smiles. For six rounds it was as close as the bookies thought it’d be. Then he butted and opened a hell of a cut over my eye. My guys couldn’t stop the blood. The ref called it accidental and the ring doctor wouldn’t let me go on. Mato was up by a point on two of the cards, so it was his fight. He comes to my corner and pats me on the shoulder, showing the crowd and the people in TV-land what a good sport he is. Leans in close and says, “Like they told us in school—use your head to get ahead.” I called him a bastard and meant it, and he laughed.
Fourteen months later we’d both won five more, and they signed us to fight again, this time for a shot at the champ. Mato was five-to-three favorite but there was talk the smart money was on me. I was training for that fight when one day I’m jogging past this adult video store and I slow down to check out the pictures and the new video boxes in the front window—and there’s Rita on the front of one called Lila’s Luscious Love, kneeling naked on a bed with a “don’t-you-wish” look on her face. I don’t know how long I stood there looking at it before I got back to my run. Every night for the next two weeks I thought about going down and checking out that video but I never did. It was bad enough just imagining what was on it. I wrote her a letter one night without mentioning the video, just, “Hey, how are you, what you been up to?” But I didn’t know where to mail it, so I stuck it in one of my bags.
The fight was in Atlantic City and it was another close one. Most everybody scored the first five rounds even. I was at my best but Mato had come a long way. He was faster and smoother than I thought he’d ever be. He’d learned to put a twist on his jab and to use it backing up, to jump in with a combination and dance quick out of counterpunch range. He’d learned to box is what I’m saying.
He talked a lot the first couple of rounds, telling me how slow I’d gotten, laughing and shaking his head whenever I landed a shot, letting the crowd know it didn’t do a thing. In the third I started talking back, giving him the same kind of trash. My corner told me to shut up, just fight, but I couldn’t help it. Maybe if I hadn’t been running my mouth so much he wouldn’t have been able to snake the right over my jab in the fourth like he did. Ripped the eye wide open—same eye as before. I couldn’t see squat with it for the blood. My corner worked like hell on the cut between rounds, but then he’d open it right up again. He’d tie me up against the ropes and roll his head on it, rub his glove across it, give it short twisting shots, keep working it bigger and bigger. My blood was all over us. The ref kept saying he was going to stop it after one more round, and I kept saying don’t do it. Then Mato connected with the eye again in the eighth and I started seeing double. At the end of the round the ring doc took another close look and shook his head. The ref waved his hands and that was it.
Mato came to my corner and held my hand up in a grand sporting gesture. Says to me, “Gave it your best, mano, got nothing to be shamed of.” Giving me that smile! I wanted to kill him. But then I suddenly knew the truth: I knew he was a better fighter than I was. And I knew I either learned to live with it or I’d be eating my guts out the rest of my life. So I shook his hand and I meant it, and his smile went sort of funny, like it was the last thing he expected. I don’t know why, but his look made me feel like I’d won something.
A few weeks later the doctors told me the eye was ruined for good and I couldn’t fight anymore.
Mato went on to win the title like everybody knew he would. He was a popular champ, too, always gave the fans their money’s worth. The first couple of years, he defended the title every two-three months. Fighting that often not only made him rich, it kept him in shape so he didn’t have to train much for a match. Some champs feel about training the way most good-looking women feel about housework—you know, it’s beneath them. But after he’d beaten the top contenders, he was fighting one bum after another and putting them away inside the first couple of rounds. Those quick kayos look great to the fans but you can’t stay sharp if you’re training half-assed and fighting nothing but palookas. Especially not if you’re playing the role all the time like Mato was doing—partying, knocking over the chicks, lapping up the attention.
Me, I became a ref. Third man in the ring. Turned out I had a flair for it, what some would call a naturally theatrical manner. I grew a bandido mustache and the fans liked the way I danced around the fighters and shook both index fingers at the fighters like pistols whenever I gave a warning. They loved the way I mugged it up big when I gestured for a fighter to keep his punches up or for a couple of huggers to knock off the waltzing and fight, goddamn it.
I took to chewing bubble gum while I worked and would blow a big bubble every now and then when the going was slow, just to give the fans a little entertainment and let the fighters know they were boring the hell out of all of us. When they heard a bubble pop they knew they’d best pick things up. Between rounds I’d feint and jab at the girl strutting around the ring with the round-card over her head, get a grin out of her and a laugh from the crowd. If she was showing her ass in one of those little thong numbers, I’d sometimes do a double-take and grab at my heart. That always broke the place up. Some of the sportswriters didn’t care for my clowning. Said it was “demeaning to the fight game” to have a referee carry on the way I did. Dig it: demeaning. To the fight game. Oh, man. The fact was, most of the fans and even most of the news-hacks got a kick out of my show, and the commission never did come down on me about it. Besides, I was a damn good ref. When I was in the ring I ran it. A fighter didn’t do as I said after I warned him once, I quick took the point. The pugs learned quick that when I said jump they better jump. One time a couple of sluggers kept hitting fast and furious after the bell and when I shoved between them to break them up I caught a wild one on the jaw. I just looked at the pug and gave him a big shrug—like, “That’s the best you got?”—and shook my head in disgust. The crowd loved it.
I traveled a lot, naturally, but home was in Houston. A buddy in real estate got me a good deal on a house on a bayou in Morgan’s Point. I took up sailing and every chance I got I was out on the bay in my boat. I’d have to say things were pretty fine.
Then out of the blue I get a phone call from Rita. She’d seen me ref a fight on TV, then tracked me down through a magazine sports guy in L.A. She was in town and wondered if maybe we could get together for dinner, talk about old times, have some laughs. Well yeah, sure. Talk about surprised. It’d been more than eight years. I was nervous as a kid as I drove to meet her at a steak house in Galena Park. She showed up in a cab, looking swell. She smiled big and warm when she saw me, gave me a tight hug, a kiss on the mouth. Turns out things had soured for her in L.A. It was practically a closed club out there, she said, strictly who you knew and who you blew. She’d been in a couple of “minor productions,” but her agent was straight from hell and she finally realized she was never going to get a break, not out there.
I didn’t bring up the skin magazine or Lila’s Luscious Love. What for? That was then, this was now. She was just passing through, she said, on her way to Atlanta to interview for a TV job. After dinner I drove her to the hotel and she asked me up for a drink on the terrace and a look at the great view she had of the city. One thing led to another. I wanted to sing after we made love. Next day she packed her bag and went home with me.
Over the next month I pulled out of a couple of fights just to stay home with her. We sailed, had picnics, went to the movies, talked a little, fooled around a lot. I’d say I was falling in love. Then one night we’re in a restaurant downtown and Mato shows up with his crowd. Sends a bottle of wine to our table, then comes over, all smiles and damn-small-world, long-time-no-see, how-the-hell-are-you. Wearing a white silk suit, Rolex, tie that probably cost two hundred bucks, his hair longer now, styled. But he looked fifteen pounds over the limit, and I figured he’d play hell making the weight for his next fight. He was in town for an athletic-shoe commercial they were shooting at the Astrodome. Get together sometime, he says, shaking my hand so-long and winking at Rita. It wasn’t till then I saw how she was looking at him, and my chest suddenly felt hollow.
I told myself it wouldn’t happen again, but I was just whistling. All the following week she already seemed more like a memory than somebody real and right there with me. I went off to Biloxi to work a fight, feeling empty, knowing she’d be gone when I got back. She was. Left a note on the fridge: “It was fun.” Fun. Not long afterwards I saw a picture of them in the papers. She was hanging on his arm at some charity thing in New York.
I wouldn’t say I got over it.
Two months later Mato signed to defend against Caballo Galvez in Vegas and I was picked for third man. I didn’t want a damn thing to do with Mato, but I figured he’d somehow be getting the best of me if I turned the job down, so I took it.
There were two other title fights on the card that night—flyweight and junior lightweight—but Mato’s was the main event, and the place was standing room only. Galvez was a brawler out of Guatemala who’d won his last seven by knockout and had come up the rankings like a rocket. He was no palooka, and Mato had his work cut out this time. Rita was ringside with a bunch of Mato’s high-roller pals. She wore diamonds and a black dress cut to here. She gave me a smile just like Mato’s, and when I didn’t smile back she laughed.
The crowd was almost all Latino, but except for a bunch of Guatemalans up in the cheap seats Galvez didn’t have a friend in the place. As he made his way to the ring, you could hardly hear his tico-tico music on the PA for the booing. This was Mato’s crowd and the cheers shook the walls when his people escorted him from the dressing room with the Rocky theme blasting out of the speakers. He made his customary strut around the ring with a fist raised high, blessing the faithful with that arrogant smile. We go through the booing and cheering all over again when the announcer makes the introductions—I got the usual good hand and gave the crowd a wave and an Ali shuffle—then they closed around me in the center of the ring for last-minute instructions. “Good clean fight,” I tell them. Mato smiles at me and gives Galvez a wink. When he’d heard Galvez owned a women’s cosmetics business in Guatemala, he started referring to him in the papers as Chiquita, and Galvez was red-eyed fury.
It was a street fight from the opening bell. Galvez was even more of a puncher than Mato, so Mato did his best to box him—using the jab, circling one way and then the other, weaving, keeping his distance. But the Guatemalan had been around the block too and knew all the tricks, including how to cut off the ring. He cornered Mato at least once in every round and forced him to slug it out. They were butting in the clinches, thumbing, using elbows, shoulders, rabbit-punching, you name it. Both corners kept getting on me about the other guy’s dirty tactics. I wasn’t blowing bubbles that night.
At the end of the fifth, they were in a corner and still punching after the bell, so I grabbed Galvez from behind and pulled him back—and when I did, Mato gave him a shot to the head. Galvez was so enraged he had to be wrestled back to his corner by his seconds. His fans were hollering bloody murder but Mato’s crowd easily drowned them out. I put a finger in Mato’s face and said I’d take a point next time. Just loud enough for me to hear, he said, “Goddamn, I guess that’ll make us even,” and smiled his bastard smile. He raised a fist at Rita as he went back to his corner and I couldn’t help looking her way. She gave me a look and a smile, blew him a kiss.
Something twisted under my chest bone and felt about to break. I could hardly breathe. I felt like I was smothering in a red haze. I stood in a neutral corner during the one-minute break and thought about nothing but breathing in and out.
Mato was a hair ahead on all three judges’ cards when the bell rang for the next round, but I don’t remember the first minute of it. I was dancing around the fighters and looking alert, but all I was really seeing were the smiles I’d gotten from Mato and Rita. All I was hearing was Mato’s “that’ll make us even” over and over in my head. Then I heard Mato grunt in pain and everything pulled into focus.
Galvez had him against the ropes and was banging him with body shots, trying to make him drop his hands so he could get at his head. The Guatemalan had pure murder in his eye—but he was too wound up, punching too wild. Mato countered with a flurry and got away from the ropes. But I could see he was tiring, the high life was catching up to him. He was flat-footed now, not moving as quick as before. They were fighting toe-to-toe, trading wicked shots, spraying sweat off each other’s head with every punch. The place was going crazy, Mato’s fans screaming for him to kill Galvez, kill him. Whoever said the real beast in the arena is the crowd knew what he was talking about.
With a minute-and-a-half to go Mato landed a hard combination, then tried to take Galvez’s head off with a right hand from the floor. But he missed—and Galvez countered with a monster hook that buckled Mato’s knees. Mato tried to cover up but the Guatemalan gave him two hard shots to the kidney to bring his hands down and then drilled him with a straight right that staggered him back into the ropes.
Now Galvez had him. He tore into him like a crazy man, punching with both hands as fast and hard as he could. He was just whimpering with rage. They say he landed 48 head shots in the next nine seconds. Mato’s hands dropped and his head was snapping every which way with the punches but Galvez had him pressed to the ropes and wouldn’t let him fall.
The crowd was on its feet and howling, some of them already yelling, “Stop it, stop it!” I gave a quick look at Rita standing at the ring apron directly under the fighters and looking up in horror, her face and hair getting spattered with Mato’s blood.
Through the quivering roar I heard them yelling, “Stop it! STOP IT!”
Stop it, hell. A towel came flapping into the ring but I made like I didn’t see it and let Galvez go on hammering.
I didn’t pull the Guatemalan away till Mato’s cornermen came tumbling through the ropes. As Mato slid down the ropes to the canvas his eyes were nearly shut but looking my way. I like to think he was still conscious, that he could still see. That he read my eyes.
The place sounded like a zoo on fire. Rita was looking a little loony. I wanted to give her a big smile, a wink, blow her a kiss. I never knew what became of her after that. Never much cared.
Mato died on the table. I caught a lot of heat, of course, in the press, on TV. A lot of stuff questioning my judgment. And the commission suspended my license.
But that was pretty much it.
I’d have to say it’s all about even.