HANGIN’ WITH IRON MIKE, by Stan Trybulski

1

I had just finished playing hoops and was walking off the asphalt court when Nia came running down the street toward me. Even though she was still up the block I could hear her screaming and crying.

“They killed Arnold,” she sobbed, running into my arms and holding me.

“Who?”

“That big thug Iraq! Him and his crew.”

Nia was my little sister, at thirteen, two years younger than me, and Arnold was our pet pigeon. We didn’t live in the projects but in a three-story building that was better than a tenement. It had clean apartments and the front door had good locks. We could even use the roof and Ma let me raise a pigeon up there. I let Nia name him. She called him Arnold. I didn’t like the name too much but hey, Nia’s my little sister and has the prettiest smile in Brooklyn so the bird was named Arnold.

2

When I saw the bird lying on the tar paper roof, its neck all twisted and its tiny eyes looking up at nothing I wanted to cry too. But I just stared blankly at the bird. Iraq and two of his buddies were there laughing at the bird and at me. They didn’t care about front door locks; they had scaled the backyard fence and climbed up the fire escape.

“I killed your bird, punk,” Iraq said. “Want to fight me?”

They call him Iraq because that’s where he says his father was killed while in the Army. I know the true story; the one where Iraq’s mother, pregnant with him, called the cops after her babydaddy broke her arm. She had him arrested but he booked before the court date and nobody has seen him since. At least that’s what Ma told me when I asked her about it.

Iraq was a year older than me and heavier and training to become a boxer. I didn’t want to fight him, I wanted to kill him and if I had a nine of my own or even a pipe I would have but I knew that at fifteen I could be tried as an adult for murder and even if I was tried as a juvenile they could send me to Spofford and then to Coxsackie until I was twenty-one. That was six years and who would protect Nia while I was gone? So I just kept staring at the bird and saying nothing.

“See you around, sweet thing,” Iraq said to Nia, rubbing his hand along her arm as he walked by. I wanted to kill him more than ever but I still kept staring at Arnold.

After Iraq and his crew swaggered off, I put my arm around Nia and wiped her tears and promised we would get another pigeon and that she could name that one too.

We buried Arnold in the vacant lot next door but I didn’t bury my hate.

3

I used my allowance to buy another pigeon and some gorilla glue. I gave the pigeon to Nia as a birthday present. I told her that it was all hers and she would have to feed and care for it and she cried and hugged me.

I paid a homeless man five cents each for some beer bottles he had taken from a street corner trash basket and I took them up to the roof of our building. I put a towel on the tar paper and broke the bottles. Then I took the sharpest, most jagged pieces I could find and used the gorilla glue to paste them on the parapet around the top of the fire escape. The glass was dark brown like the brick of the parapet and you couldn’t really see it. I was hoping Iraq and his crew would come back but they never did. That was okay I decided because I knew I would find another way.

4

I went down to the precinct stationhouse. Not to file a complaint against Iraq for killing my bird. I had heard that the Police Athletic League had a boxing program and I wanted to join. The administrative aide at the desk told me it was on Pennsylvania Avenue in Brownsville and told me to ask for Detective McDermott. I went there straight away.

I told McDermott that there was this kid named Iraq in my school who was supposed to be a pretty boxer and that I wanted to learn to box like him. McDermott said that Iraq was a good boxer and that he would be fighting in the Golden Gloves next year, but that he didn’t train with the PAL. I said I didn’t care; I wanted to learn enough to fight in the Golden Gloves too. He said he would teach me how to fight but the rest, the discipline and the heart I had to have. I just nodded and thought of Arnold.

The detective called boxing the sweet science and said I had to study it just like I was in school. I never was much good in school, Nia was the smart one in the family, and we knew she was going to college, going somewhere big in life. No one had ever said that about me. But I listened and I studied. McDermott taught me how to jab and throw a hook and a straight right; showed me how I needed to stick and move.

“This isn’t the street,” he said. “You’re going to meet guys in the ring that are faster than you and hit harder. You won’t be able to use a bat or knife or a gun. You won’t be able to block all their punches.”

So he taught me how to move from side to side, to slip punches and counter, how to roll my head and body away when I was hit to lessen the impact. And all the time he had me moving around the ring, running, skipping rope, building up my wind. I could have taken the subway to the PAL gym but I ran there and back every day instead.

5

When I turned sixteen I got a job in the supermarket. I gave Ma money every week and saved the rest. This was the same year I saw Mike Tyson fight for the first time. Everybody in Brooklyn knew Iron Mike and his rep but us kids were too young to have ever have seen him fight live in the ring. Then they started showing his greatest knockouts on television and I watched them all. He was packing C-4 in both hands. I wanted to be just like him and take Iraq out but I knew that I had to have a special plan, a special program beyond the PAL gym.

As soon as I had saved enough, I bought a heavy bag, a set of free weights and a bench and set them up in the basement. Ma didn’t mind, she was happy to see me not watching TV all night long. I knew I had to work hard. Iraq had stopped Nia on the street one day and told her how good she looked and that she about ready for her first man and that she should start hanging with him. She spit in his face and moved back just as he tried to slap her.

He wiped the spit off his face and laughed an evil laugh. “Bitch, the next time I see you, you’ll do the wiping,” he warned her. Nia came home crying and said she was scared of him but I told her not worry, just stay out of his way for a while and I’ll take care of everything.

I bought a poster of Iron Mike and put it up on the basement wall so I could always see his scowl when I worked out. I decided that if boxing was a science like McDermott said then this was my own personal lab. So after working out at the PAL gym, I would go home and watch DVD’s of Iron Mike. Afterwards, I would go down in the basement and throw left hooks at the heavy bags, imagining where Iraq’s liver and temple and jaw were. One day while watching a sports show on ESPN, I saw an old interview of Iron Mike where he said he was going to drive his opponent’s nose bone up into his brain. I smiled.

6

I asked Nia where I could buy some books and she took me to the Barnes & Noble store downtown on Court Street. It was cool inside and they had a Starbucks café upstairs. So I let Nia get some books and bought her an iced lemonade drink and left her at a little round table with a high bar-type chair in the café while I searched for what I needed. I didn’t know my way around the store so I asked a clerk and he sent me to the sports section. There was a whole collection of books about martial arts and I looked through them until I found the one I wanted. It described in detail how to break someone’s nose with a punch and then drive the broken bone up into the skull by using the heel of your hand. I didn’t even have to read it because there was a series of photos that showed me exactly what to do. I studied them very carefully.

When I came back to the café Nia was still reading at the little round table where I had left her. Even with her long kid braids and her thin legs dangling down from the high stool, she looked grown up. I was so proud of her that I wished I could have taken a picture for Ma to keep.

7

As soon as we got home Nia went to her room to do her homework and I went down to the basement and wrapped my hands and hung out with Iron Mike. I saw the photos from the martial arts books in my mind and practiced the punches over and over again. First the left hook to the liver—my money punch—and then what the book said. I swear that once when I looked up at the poster of Iron Mike, he wasn’t scowling, he was smiling. I smiled back.

The Golden Gloves is almost as good as the pros, at least if you make it to the finals. Then you get to fight in the Garden. By the time the tournament rolled around, McDermott said I was ready and he was right. I was going to fight as a novice just like Iraq and I had put on enough pounds and muscle so that we would be in the same weight class. He wasn’t planning on losing and neither was I, so sooner or later we would meet up. I hooked and jabbed my way to the final and Iraq slugged his way to the top as well. McDermott told me I would have to punch more, use my right hand behind my jab and after the left hook if I wanted to beat Iraq.

I just nodded my head and said I won’t let you down. He smiled, never knowing that I was really speaking to Nia.

8

I looked over the ropes at Iraq bouncing down the aisle like he was a champ and I smiled. When he got in the ring he smirked at me. “I’m going break your neck just like I did to your pigeon, punk.”

I just kept smiling.

The fight only lasted one round. I came out jabbing like I always do but Iraq was so damn street anxious to hurt me that he threw a wild right. I slipped it easily and ripped a vicious left hook to his liver. He half bent over, almost paralyzed, and I threw my right and connected. It wasn’t the straight right to the jaw that McDermott had taught me to throw after the hook, it was the downward chopping punch I learned from the martial arts book and it landed on the bridge of Iraq’s nose and right between the eyes. Even with the boxing glove covering my fist, the side of my hand was like a steel bar. I could hear Iraq’s nose bone splinter. I clinched and spun Iraq so the ref was behind him and didn’t have a clear view. I looked right into Iraq’s eyes and smiled. Then I rammed the heel of my hand up against the tip of his nose, sending the shards of broken bone deep into his brain. He shuddered and keeled over.

I was happy. After tonight Iraq would never bother Nia again. No one would. They can’t send you upstate for killing a kid in the ring, can they?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stan Trybulski, who wrote One Trick Pony and other crime novels, was a Brooklyn felony trial prosecutor before he went into private practice. Before he entered the legal profession, he was a newspaper reporter, college administrator, and bartender (not all at the same time). He says that he now divides his time between France and “two acres of Connecticut tranquility.”