Things as They Are (11 page)

A sheep myself, I still managed to muster contempt for the others in Hiller’s flock, for their stupidity if nothing else. Didn’t they know what was going on? When Hiller made his speech about how we ought to show team spirit by each handing over to him five bucks to bet on Meinecke, I knew what was up. The bet wasn’t going on Kurt, it was going on Scutter. And when Scutter pounded the snot out of Meinecke those morons would believe their money was lost because Kurt had lost. Sure, lost. Lost in Hiller’s pockets. Still, I didn’t break ranks. He got my money too.

Five days before the fight Meinecke was christened. Hiller explained to us that his research proved there had never been a great fighter who didn’t have a great ring name. Check it out.
Archie Moore? The Mongoose. Beautiful. Jack Dempsey? The Manassa Mauler. A one. Robinson? Sugar Ray. Sweetness itself. Ingemar Johansson? The Hammer of Thor. You had to love it. Joe Louis? The Brown Bomber. Outstanding.

For days now, he confessed, he had been racking his brains to come up with a moniker that would elevate Meinecke into the same class as Robinson, Moore, Dempsey, etc. And now he had it.

There was a stir of anticipation. I glanced at Kurt who looked like he was about to come in his pants.

“Yeah?” said Murph, unable any longer to contain himself. “So what is it?”

“Gentlemen,” said Norman, making a sweeping gesture of introduction, “let me present, Kurt Meinecke, The Master of Disaster!”

Enthusiasm was unanimous. “Right on, like a mouse’s ear!” “Fucking, aye!” “Leave it to Hiller.” “The Master of Disaster! It’s pissing!”

Kurt beamed.

I did not bother to point out that the meaning of Master of Disaster was ambiguous. English Composition was never Norman’s strong suit. Psychology was.

The big night arrived. As Murph headed his Chev out of town for Kingdom Hall, the streetlights were flickering feebly into life and then, one after another, exploding full strength in the failing light. Norman sat up front beside Murph. Kurt, in running shoes, shorts, and boxing gloves, was in the back seat wedged between me and Hop Jump like a prisoner under escort. Nobody said anything during the short drive, although Meinecke kept nervously clearing his throat and striking his gloves together, one muffled pop after another. Deke and Dooey had gone on ahead to open the hall and sell admissions to what Norman predicted would be a standing-room-only crowd.

Hiller was correct, the turnout was prodigious. Forty-five
minutes before fight time and the parking lot was already crammed with cars, many with their engines running and their headlights left on to provide light to party by. When we pulled into the lot, guys with beers in their hands were lounging on fenders, perching on bumpers, saluting and insulting one another, drifting about from one milling, jostling gathering to the next. Nosing a car through the throng wasn’t easy. Norman stuck his head out the window and began to shout, “Make way! Make way! Fighter coming through! Out of the way, peckerheads!” Every couple of seconds he lunged impatiently across Murph to knock peremptory blats out of the horn with the heel of his hand when people didn’t hasten out of our path quickly enough for him. Slowly we crept around to the back of Kingdom Hall, pale, excited faces with bottles tipped into them looming out of the swiftly falling darkness; dust swaying and shaking like smoke in the white-hot tracks of high beams; figures doubling over to gape through the windows of the car at Meinecke huddled up between Hop Jump and me in the back seat. As we edged along they thumped the hood of the car, gave ear-splitting whoops and hollers, chanted a variation of Hiller’s announcement: “Corpse coming through! Make way! Dead man coming through!” Hiller had been wrong about one thing. No one passing by would have mistaken this congregation for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

At last Murph got us clear of the mob and drew the car up to the back door. Norman gave everybody orders to stay put in the vehicle and wait, except for me. I was to accompany him. Inside, the hall was filling rapidly, growing warm with the funky, animal heat of packed bodies; blue with cigarette smoke and yeasty with the smell of beer. Like any promoter worth his salt, Norman immediately made for the box office to check the take. As he peered over Dooey’s shoulder into the shoe box holding the money, Deke began to gripe and bitch about the behaviour of the crowd. Who had stolen the key? Who was going to take any of the shit coming down if the premises got damaged? Him. Deke. “They won’t stop
smoking,” he said to Norman in a whiny voice. “You got to lay the law down to them, Norman. I mean Jehovahs don’t smoke. You think they aren’t going to smell stale smoke and wonder how it got here? And somebody spilled a beer on the floor. Already the place stinks like a fucking brewery. You got to do something with them, Norman …”

Norman wasn’t listening. He turned to Dooey. “How much?”

Dooey gave a shake to the box. “Close to a hundred and twenty so far,” he said.

“All right,” said Norman. “Shoo those assholes in the parking lot in here. That fucking carnival out there is going to attract attention. I want this show on the road.” Norman had an afterthought. “And, Dooey, remember. No sticky fingers in the till. Sticky fingers are broken fingers.”

“Norman …” Deke began mournfully, trying to steer the conversation back to his complaint, but Hiller was moving off, double-time, flipping a roll of electrician’s tape from hand to hand. Lugging a plastic pail and a brown paper shopping bag stuffed with a corner man’s supplies, I trotted after him.

In the centre of the hall Norman commenced laying out the boundaries of a ring on the floor with the black tape. There were no ropes or posts, but he explained that if the crowd stood flush to the tape that would keep the fighters hemmed in. I set up chairs in opposing corners and unpacked the medical supplies Dooey had shoplifted: sponge, gauze pads, Vaseline.

Meanwhile Hiller had completed his chores and was on the prowl like a caged beast, pacing back and forth, jacking himself up on his tiptoes to scan late arrivals over the heads of the thick mob, muttering to himself. Scutter hadn’t shown yet. Donald Broward, half-drunk, wandered over to get instructions from Norman. For a six pack Hiller had hired him to referee, not because Broward knew anything about boxing, but, a lineman on the high school football team, he was big enough to pull Scutter off Meinecke and prevent a homicide if things got out of hand.

The multitude suddenly stirred and then there was a surprising drop in the volume of drunken noise. Scutter trooped into the hall, flanked by his brother and some other bad actors. As he advanced on the ring, a swell of encouraging murmurs trailed after him, accompanied by several shy pats to his shoulders and back which he, supremely indifferent, accepted without acknowledgment.

I heard Hiller whispering to himself as we watched him approach. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I’ve got you in my sights now.”

From this point on, everything went forward in a dizzy rush. Hiller ordered me off to collect and ready Kurt. As I swung open the back door I heard him throwing himself into his highly coloured impersonation of a Madison Square Garden ring announcer.

“Tonight, from Kingdom Hall, Norman Hiller Productions presents the fight extravaganza of the century. The Collision of the Titans –.” The closing door had choked him off.

In the last half hour all the headlights had been extinguished, night had overtaken us, and the yard was thick with darkness. After the brightness of the hall, it was difficult to see. All I could make out was the car parked at the bottom of the steps, more solidly black than the blackness which lapped it. I cast my words into this blackness, like a line into a pool. “Kurt, they’re almost ready for you.” There was movement near the car, a wrinkling of the skin of night. Then Hop Jump proclaimed, “He’s just finishing up losing his cookies. Be with you in a sec.” I waited. My eyes were becoming more and more accustomed to the darkness, I could make out Murph and Hop Jump now, their pale shirts focusing whatever light the dim air contained. Then Kurt stood up behind the car, his nakedness a white ghostly blur. Back in the hall, the din was increasing, growing stronger, more frantic, more violent.

“Hurry up,” I said. “It’s time.”

The three of them filed up the steps, Meinecke wiping at his mouth with the back of a glove. Striking a match I looked in his face. “Are you okay?” He nodded. “You’re sure?” He
nodded again. Even in the flare of the match his face had that dirty, grey-white colour that a sink in a public washroom acquires with time.

“All right,” I said. “You know the drill. Let’s do it right, just like Hiller wants it, just like we practised it.”

They bumbled into place. Murph in front, Kurt in the middle with his hands on Murph’s shoulders, Hop Jump behind him. I draped a towel over Meinecke’s head, just the way Sonny Liston had worn his towels, so as to give his face a hooded, menacing look. Then I took up my position, point man, three steps ahead of the procession. From inside the hall we heard an overwhelming roar, Scutter’s introduction was climaxing. I dodged catching Kurt’s eye, stepped quickly to the door and opened it a crack so I didn’t miss our cue. Norman’s voice came drilling into the night, strident, straining to clamour above the bedlam it had incited.

“Please welcome, in the red trunks,” he was shouting, “the challenger, your favourite and mine.” I hustled into the hall, Murph and Meinecke and Hop Jump shuffling forward just the way Hiller had taught them, hands laid on the shoulders of the man in front, eyes lowered. “Kurt Meinecke!” Hiller screamed. “The Maaassster of Diiisssassster! The Maaaassster of Diisssassster!” And right on cue, also as rehearsed, Deke and Dooey began to chant at the top of their lungs,
“MASTER! MASTER! MASTER!”

I flung myself into the melee, shoving and pushing, cleaving the pack for the three scuffling behind me in tandem. Ahead of me, Norman was hopping about the ring like a fiend, pounding the air with his fist, urging the crowd to join the chant. Here and there about the hall it was being taken up with a jokey, aimless excitement. “Master! Master!” they cried. And then more added their voices, on every side of us the crowd began to sway to the dull thunder of the refrain. “Master! Master! Master!” And there was Hiller, striding up and down the ring, grinning triumphantly, eyes glittering as he flourished his fist, whipping them into an even greater frenzy.

We fought through the crush and gained our corner.
Kurt seemed in a daze, a trance, he looked as if he scarcely knew where he was when Hiller took him by the wrist and led him like a child to the middle of the ring to be introduced to his opponent. Scutter had stripped off shirt, shoes and socks and was wearing only his pimples and blue jeans. While the referee stumblingly repeated what Norman had coached him to say, Scutter, who couldn’t hold a cigarette with boxing gloves on his hands, kept jerking his head at his brother, signalling for a drag on his. Each time his brother held the butt to his mouth for a pull, Scutter inhaled deeply, then expelled the smoke in Meinecke’s face with a thin-lipped smile.

Broward ended his little speech. “Let’s have a good one, boys,” he said.

“Yeah,” Scutter said, “let’s have a good one.” Even from where I stood it was unnerving.

The preliminaries done, Hiller led Meinecke back to the corner and pushed him down into the chair to wait for the bell. “Get him loose,” he said to me, gesturing impatiently. “Can’t you see he’s tight?” I proceeded to massage Kurt’s neck. It was like kneading banjo strings.

“Okay,” said Norman fiercely to Meinecke, “you know what to do. We’ve been over this like a thousand times. Scutter’s a street fighter. How does a street fighter go?”

“He does a couple of dekes and then takes a run at you,” said Meinecke reciting from memory. “He tries to knock you off your feet.”

“And you go?” coaxed Hiller.

Meinecke didn’t reply. He was staring across the ring where Scutter was cutting up, kicking out his bare feet right, left, right, left, as if he was booting somebody’s knackers off. His supporters were falling all over themselves laughing.

“Are you fucking listening to me or not?” demanded Hiller.

Kurt looked up at him, bewildered.

“You go how?” repeated Norman. “How?”

“I cover up,” said Kurt.

“That’s right. Elbows in tight to the ribs, chin down on the wishbone, gloves up high like Floyd Patterson,” said Hiller,
illustrating. “Be a bomb shelter. No way that dink can hurt you. And don’t hit back,” Norman emphasized. “Not until I say. You hit back – what happens?”

“I open up the defence.”

“Right. And peckerhead there puts your lights out. So remember our number one rule is – no hitting!”

The bell rang. Kurt stood like a zombie. “And don’t forget – laugh at him. Cool Hand Luke the fucker,” was Norman’s last bit of advice.

It happened just the way Hiller said it would. Cocky Scutter grinning, feinting, pecking at Meinecke’s gloves, skipping on his bare feet. Then the kamikaze rush. Meinecke ducking low to meet it. A storm of wild blows raining down on his back, his shoulders, uppercuts smacking into the forearms protecting his face, a punch skidding off the crown of his tipped skull. And then the fifteen-second flurry was spent and Scutter was left panting, momentarily winded.

Meinecke slowly straightened up, gingerly flexing his arms and revealing splotches of fiery red on his back and shoulders where he had been hit. There was an expression on his face I’d never seen before, a sort of puzzled exasperation, annoyance.

Norman was screaming his lungs out. “Defence! Defence!” A brief moment of hesitation, or regret, and then Kurt obediently lifted his gloves high and settled warily into the Floyd Patterson peekaboo crouch that Hiller had been coaching him in during the past week. For the remainder of the round he grimly and obediently followed Hiller’s fight plan, stayed a punching bag. At first Scutter was wary and cautiously circled Meinecke, flicking out jabs which bounced off Kurt’s forehead and bee-stung his ears. But realizing he had nothing to fear, Scutter went to work, throwing short, vicious hooks in behind the elbows (not quite kidney punches but close) which Kurt kept stubbornly pinned to his ribs the way Hiller had taught him. Every blow he absorbed screwed Meinecke’s mouth a little more crooked, drew his eyes into tighter slits. He was paying a price.