With the news conference about to start, the TV producer affected a jaded air of world-weariness. He wore a watch with six time zones and he was dropping place names like breadcrumbs in the forest. “When I was in Rwanda/Haiti/Davis Inlet . . .”
His cameraman, Carl, had a cellphone stuck in his Domke vest and all of his electronic toys spread out for the others to see. Reluctantly, Carl had left his flak jacket in the truck. It was a BCJ with neck collar and groin protector, six pounds of defence against mortar, grenade fragments, and handgun fire up to a .44 Magnum.
“Did we see him in L.A.?” The producer nodded at Smithers, wearing a Habs jersey.
Carl squinted through loonie-shaped glasses, took a geographical fix, and mouthed the word “Looocal.” He made it sound like a disease.
The brewery hall was filling with locals, network jocks, and two chirpy Brits named Lionel and Desmond who’d spent the night in a strip club. Supported by an updraft of gossip and gripes, the media was hovering over sandwiches. A thick man with fire engine red pants sidled up to the producer, the top three buttons of his shirt undone, showing a nest of gold. His mouth hung open like the lower hinge wasn’t working.
“What are you guys doing here?” Vance, who wrote a column for a complimentary TV guide, was known as the Scrumbuster for his uncanny ability to derail a scrum with off-track questions.
“National wants something.” The words floated from Carl’s mouth like a yawn. “National” was a codeword that set them apart, that gave them status, money, and access. The producer pulled away from Vance like a leech touched with salt, knowing there was a danger here. If you got too close, you might turn into one of Them; you could get lost in a grove of inconsequence and never escape. The producer pulled a sterling silver Tiffany’s yo-yo from his pocket, and turned his back on Vance, who was conveniently light-footed in bowling shoes.
“I thought you had an in here,” Smithers said petulantly to Scott.
MacKenzie had ordered a two-page spread on the fight, which had generated so much attention that even Boomer, the publisher, had asked for tickets. Smithers had been assigned to help Scott fill the pages.
“I do,” said Scott, pissed by the hockey reporter’s presence.
“Well, how come there’s no beer?” Smithers griped. “This is a brewery.”
“Shhh!” Scott nodded toward a weasly man with a bowl haircut, flotsam from a wave of Brits that had crashed ashore in the 1950s, flooding newsrooms. Linden Jones lived below the poverty line selling stories to trade magazines and rags. “STAG ENDS TRAGICALLY WHEN CAR DRIVES INTO LAKE AND GROOM DROWNS WITH BALL AND CHAIN AROUND HIS ANKLE.” Deep Throat for a local gossip sheet, he regularly infiltrated news conferences and reported journalistic lapses and overheard conversations.
“Yeah, well he can go fuck himself,” Smithers announced, then louder: “Fuck himself!” He stared at Linden, who smoked cheroots and wore ladies 10D pumps on weekends. “And I don’t like being watched by some asshole who thinks he’s one of Herman’s Hermits.”
Used to abuse, Linden pretended he didn’t hear.
“Whadda they let people like that in for?” Smithers demanded.
“Him?” Scott looked at Linden, sultry in grey eyeshadow.
“Nah,” Smithers scoffed. “I can’t even look at him. He gives me the creeps, like one of those half-human dancers in Cats.” He shuddered. “No, her,” he said, pointing at Constance, who was wearing leather boots under a flowing cabbage-covered dress. “All that Ali bullshit.”
Last week, Scott had seen Constance leaving her South End house, a country cottage with a lattice gazebo and a plaster dog she decorated each season, co-coordinating his bow with the other garnishes. He had heard that she was having an affair with a burnt-out radio producer, an alcoholic who had applauded her analysis of boxing’s rebirth (“It’s a bit like disco or bowling, platform shoes or Betty Crocker, so out that it’s in”). Scott shrugged. “She’s harmless.”
The news conference had started, the two fighters and their trainers seated at a table in the front of the room.
“He’s a much improved fighter.” Ownie fielded an early question. “Now he has something besides raw power; he’s dropped the wild swings and awkward footwork and added grace and smoothness.”
“Uh-huh.” A radio reporter nodded.
“I’m not gonna try to fool ya.” Ownie squinted from the TV lights and the effort of sounding sincere. “He’s still a hitter: Bob Fitzsimmons, Jack Dempsey, Max Baer, Rocky Marciano, with TNT in either fist.”
“Do you agree, Turmoil?” Radio man had a Sony slung across his chest like an old newsboy, one finger on the rewind button.
“Yes, mon.” Turmoil leaned in to the host mike, which drooped under a dozen heads: metal joy sticks strapped on with black tape. “Ahve learned how to box bettah and get away from punches, where before ahd take one to give one.”
Turmoil looked chic, Ownie concluded, in a beige, stretch-knit polo shirt with a dark collar and waistband, a clean, retro look that showed he was the good guy: Pat Boone meets Sugar Ray Robinson. Charcoal dress pants. The clothes worked with his short hair and churchgoing face; it showed his bowling ball biceps without getting ugly. Turmoil was handling himself well, Ownie allowed, glancing sideways at the fighter. He seemed okay.
Ownie had never met anyone, he told himself, who had been helped by a shrink. It was like pouring water on a grease fire. He worked with a guy once named Woof. Woof was all right, a bit gregarious, mind you, but fine, until he saw that shrink. “You have a rare psychiatric disorder,” the shrink informed Woof. “It makes you believe that everyone loves you. You misinterpret innocent gestures as overt signs of friendship; you form unnatural bonds with people you barely know. You are living in a delusional state.” That ruined Woof, whose delusions had made him the happiest man Ownie knew, giddy from the lust of unsuspecting waitresses and the promise of imminent promotions. How could you have a bad day if you thought that everyone loved you?
“What about you, Calvin, what are your strengths?” asked Smithers.
Calvin Mackey was slumped in his chair, legs spread, widening the gulf between him and the world with wraparounds and a grisly shirt that made strangers stare and then step back in shock. On his chest was a photo of an open grave of black bodies in cotton clothing, nameless victims stacked high as his grievances against the world, cut down by a death squad or a plague. Mackey’s head was covered by a skullcap.
Ownie wondered who had dreamed up Mackey’s macabre shirt. Bundini Brown got recognition for taking the bear trap to the Liston weigh-in, but Ownie didn’t give that much credit to Mackey’s trainer, who seemed wishy-washy, a charcoal drawing that hadn’t been fixed.
“You wahn to try me out?”
The room laughed as Smithers flushed.
In the back, Ownie could see two politicians — one was a senior cabinet minister — with their laundry fetchers. One of the fetchers had the same desperate look as the shakos from his childhood in Charlottetown, the guys who drank their four-bottle ration book in two days. Years ago, when they had a gym on Hollis Street, that guy had showed up unannounced and said he needed models “for an art group that meets each Thursday.” Archie Dibbs signed up — he was game for anything — and came back laughing. “I almost caught pneumonia, sitting there bare-assed.”
The fetcher was trying to distance himself from the Running Joke, who was making small talk while collecting free sandwiches.
The questions drifted until a kid from a weekly paper piped up, a journalism school grad with his own business cards and dreams of a foreign posting. (“I am ready to move at a moment’s notice,” he promised in a letter to potential employers. “I have a passport, international contacts. My favourite authors are Tim Page and John Kennedy Toole.”)
“What about the suggestion that Turmoil may be the son of Muhammad Ali?” The kid stuck out a hand-held recorder. “Is this some cheap publicity stunt?”
As Mackey sniffed in amusement, Constance frantically set her counter at 000. Resting his Evian on the floor, the producer gave Carl the nod to record.
“Turmoil would rather not discuss it,” Ownie sighed. “It’s too personal.”
The kid wanted to be tough, distanced from the faux journalists he had studied with, the timid mice who respected people’s space. For four years he had suffered at journalism school, one of only three males in a class of prudes who wrote tortured diary entries and sneered at his lust for the mainstream gig.
“But someone said —”
“Yes, but I think out of respect to Turmoil, we should let it drop.”
“You can’t just let it drop! I mean, if it’s a publicity stunt.” The kid was praying that someone from a real paper, someone who offered benefits and full-time employment, someone impressed by his tenacity and his willingness to expose these frauds, might see him and say, “Right on.”
“You might be right. I’m just saying it’s not important to this fight.”
“Let’s ask Turmoil.” The kid shook from his own boldness. “What do you think?”
Here we go, Ownie moaned, wondering how Turmoil was going to respond. Why did I let that woman with the freckly skin into the gym where Barney could feed her bullshit? Ownie asked himself. The same woman who turned around and spent two nights with Fred — professional sparring partner and ladies man — when she already had a husband and an alcoholic boyfriend. Why did I do it?
“Ah dohn know, mon. Ah know ah feel something special when ah watch movies of him fight. Ah feel som’tin comin out in me, som’tin ver-ver powerful.”
The kid stopped trembling, and Carl the cameraman clicked.