Townie (14 page)

One Thursday, after a three-hour workout, we drove up to Bobby’s father’s store for Bobby’s weekly pay. It was a small, musty shop, blue uniform pants and shirts hanging from racks. Under a glass case were silver handcuffs and black regulation billy clubs. Bobby’s father was in the back office sitting at a desk cluttered with catalogues, a telephone, and Rolodex under a flickering fluorescent lamp.

Saul was talking on the phone when we walked in. He nodded at his son, his eyes passing over me, then he squeezed the receiver between his neck and shoulder and leaned back and reached into his front pocket and pulled out more cash than I’d ever seen before, fifties, twenties, tens, all in a wad three inches thick. Clipped to his belt was a semiautomatic pistol in a leather holster.

“Yeah?” he said into the phone. “Well fuck him, too.” And he fingered some bills away from the fold and handed them to Bobby. He winked at him, then nodded at me as if we’d known each other a long time. He pushed the money back into his pocket. On the way out of his office, we passed another glass case, this one lined with brass knuckles and weighted black saps and boot knives.

Bobby saw me looking. “You didn’t see those.” He smiled. “Cops carry ’em, but they’re not ’sposed to.”

LATELY, EVEN
though the weather was warm, I’d been wearing my leather jacket more. All I ever seemed to do was work out, but whatever muscles I’d begun to build in the last year were getting smaller. I was tired all the time and never felt like walking the two miles down to the gym or even having Bobby pull up to my house in his pickup. Still, I’d go.

One September afternoon, I had gotten to Connolly’s ahead of Bobby and lay down on the incline sit up board, waiting for him. Outside there was a soft rain ticking against the glass. I could hear the transistor radio Bill sometimes played out back where he slept—talk radio, men speaking heatedly about some kind of game. Around the corner where the heavy bag hung, somebody was punching it, the shots coming hard but far apart.

“That’s good,” Bill’s voice said. “That’s good, Tommy.”

My eyes were closed and I began to drift off, all the sounds becoming one sound I was floating away on.

“Hey.”

I sat up. Bill was standing a few feet away looking at me, a pair of red Everlast hitting gloves in his hand. He smiled and held them up. “Get over here.”

Then I was around the corner, this part of the gym unfinished, the walls naked brick, the floor concrete. It was cool and damp and smelled like sweat and rust.

“I know you want to be a muscle man, but let me show you a couple things, all right?” Bill was wrapping my wrists with two-inch-wide strips of what felt like Ace bandage. “This is sho you don’t hurt yourshelf. Watch me.” Bill pulled on the hitting gloves. They were made only for punching the bag, not for sparring, and they fit the hand close to the skin. Sewed inside the palm was a small iron bar. He raised his hand and shot his left fist into the bag. “That’s a jab to throw ’em off balance.” He threw two more, the bag jerking on its chain, then he threw a punch from his right shoulder, his back foot pivoting on his toes. There was a loud
whop
and the bag swung back three feet and Bill followed it, both hands up at his ears, and he dropped his left shoulder and got off two more quick lefts that jerked the bag to the right. He weaved to the left and shot another right, the bag jolting to a stop.

He was breathing hard, sweat breaking out just above his thick eyebrows. “Shee what I’m doin’? The jab shets you up for your combinations. I just threw three jabs, then a right crosh, a double left hook, then a shtraight right. Here, put these on.”

I did. I liked the feel of the iron bar in my fists. Bill told me to raise my hands up and to turn more to the side, to put my weight on my back foot. “Now bring your elbows into your midsection and throw a jab.”

I punched the bag. It was heavier than it looked. It barely moved.

“Rotate your fist as you throw it. That’ll cut your opponent up good. Now jab three times, then throw a right.”

I punched the bag three times, then threw the right as hard as I could, an ache jolting up my arm into my shoulder, the bag swaying away from me.

“Good power, but do it with your legs, too, Andre. Just like shwingin’ a bat in baseball. You squash the bug with your back foot.” I nodded like I knew what he meant. He raised his fists up. “Look at my feet.” He threw a slow-motion right, his weight on his back foot, his toes corkscrewing with the punch. “A knockout comes from the legs, Andre. You try it.”

I stood in front of the bag, my hands up, my body turned sideways to it.

“Put your weight on your back foot.”

I did and could feel the concrete under the ball of my foot, my heel up. I threw a right, my back foot like a spring, the bag swinging away nearly as far as when Bill had punched it. It swung back and hit me in the knee. Bill steadied the bag and looked at me. He took in my chest and shoulders, my small arms. “Andre, you are deshieving. You are a lot shtronger than you look. You hit shomebody in the shtreet like that, they’re going down.”

I nodded and smiled. It’d felt good to hit the bag. I wanted to do it again. I wanted to find other ways to do it.

Bill said, “Give me them gloves.”

For the next thirty minutes, he showed me how to throw a left hook, a right hook, the uppercut and straight right. He showed me how to weave away from the bag, then counterpunch. He showed me how to combine different shots, how to set my opponent up with pesky jabs, all while putting myself at the perfect distance to set my feet, then let go with a fight-ending right cross.

I was sweating and breathing hard, and when Bobby came in wanting to get to our chest workout, I was slow to unwrap my hands and wrists. I wanted to learn more, to keep punching that bag that began to look like Tommy J. and Cody Perkins, Clay Whelan, and Dennis Murphy and all the rest, the worn Everlast label on the canvas not letters, but eyes and a nose and a mouthful of teeth.

BOBBY GOT
himself a new girlfriend. She had brown eyes and long shiny brown hair and she worked at a restaurant down the river in Newburyport. He started missing a lot of workouts, and I went back to my old routine of three days a week. Right away my energy came back. In a month my shirts were getting tight in the shoulders and upper back again, and before and after every weight workout I did three to four rounds on the heavy bag.

I was looking forward to going to the gym now. I was getting faster and trying new combinations, though I really liked going from the jab, then weaving to the left where I’d throw two left hooks to the body, then a right uppercut, a left hook to the head, then I’d find my range, set my weight down onto the ball of my foot, and throw a right cross that would shoot the bag backwards, Bill usually standing there shaking his head.

“You
are
desheivin’. A real shleeper.”

This was brand new, a grown man taking note of me. It felt good, and I wanted more of it.

BY MID-FALL,
Connolly had paid a carpenter to come and build a ring. It was just a plywood platform on two-by-fours on concrete, but he had the carpenter put in four posts and he padded them and ran regulation boxing rope from one to the other. In the corner was a crate of old leather boxing gloves, most of them the smaller eight ounces used in fights, but no headgear, and he told us that unless we wanted to lose some teeth we should go buy our own mouthguards.

Word got out Connolly had built a ring, and now boxers from the Y or other towns were stopping in to look at it. I was usually lifting out on the floor when they came in, their noses flattened, their eyes narrowed under punch-thickened eyebrows. One was Ray Duffy. Everybody said the Duffys were crazy as the Murphy brothers but tougher. There was the story of Ray down in a bar on Washington Street. Two men slighted him somehow and he stood there listening, then knocked them both out, one punch each.

Now Ray was coming in a few days a week. He rarely hit the heavy bag or lifted weights. Instead he’d step into the ring in his street clothes and shadowbox, his punches clean and efficient.

THE FIRST
one I boxed in the ring was Bill Connolly’s nephew Brent. Brent was ten or twelve pounds heavier than I was, and he had straight black hair and olive skin, acne scars on his cheeks. Except for Bill, he hit the bag better than anyone, his punches hard and crisp, his combinations fluid, his footwork and bobbing and weaving like some masculine dance. Because we were close to the same weight, and because Bill wanted to see how each of us would do, he matched us up on a gray Friday afternoon in October.

He wrapped our wrists and hands, helped us lace our gloves, made sure we had mouthguards, then ducked out of the ring. He studied his wristwatch and called, “Time!”

I expected to get beaten up, my heart pulsing hard in my temples as Brent and I raised our gloves and moved to the center of the ring. Bill had taught me to keep the right up to block any head shots, to jab, then move constantly to avoid being a target, to wait for my opening. Brent jabbed first and I blocked it with my left, then jabbed back and popped him in the forehead. His eyes blinked and I blinked too, a ripple of heat passing through my cheeks at what I’d just done. He jabbed again and as I blocked it, a right slammed into my right glove and smashed me in the eyebrow. I moved to the left and jabbed him two more times in the forehead, his eyes tearing up. His mouth looked swollen from the mouthguard and I knew mine did too and it was harder to breathe with it. Brent stepped in and threw a straight right I weaved away from, then got off a left hook into his ribs, bright green flashing through my brain. I brought my left back up from where I’d dropped it, from where Brent had seen his opening and connected with a right.

“Shtick and move, Andre! Shtick and move! Brent, keep your right up, kid!”

I jabbed again and again, trying to do it from my feet up, putting some kind of snap into it, and maybe because I was an inch or two taller than Brent, it wasn’t hard to hit him, his eyes pink and wet now, as if he was about to yell or cry, and I did not feel badly about what I was doing to him. I only wanted to keep jabbing and scoring points, to get him so frustrated he’d throw a wild punch and leave himself open for something more dangerous than a jab.

“Time!”

Brent turned and walked back to his corner, pulling at the laces with his teeth. He ducked between the ropes and yanked off his gloves, and Bill followed him. “Where’re you goin’, Brent? That was only one round, kid.”

“I gotta go to work.” Brent dropped his gloves in the crate and unwrapped his hands and walked out.

I was still in the ring, sweating, my breathing back down to normal again. Ray Duffy stood from where he’d been sitting against the wall. I hadn’t known he was there. He said to Bill, “The bag don’t hit back.”

Bill nodded once. He smiled over at me. “That was a good shtart. I think you got the killer instinct, kid.”

Which meant it didn’t bother me too much to hurt somebody, that seeing his pain did not make me slow down or stop.

TWO OR
three times a week I’d spar whoever was around. Many times it was Bobby, who’d come back to the gym and was doing his own lifting routine. He’d gained some weight, but he looked happy and in love, and sparring him was like fighting somebody crazy. He fought with both hands down at his sides, smiling at you even after you’d popped him in the face, then he’d shift to the side and his right would swing up hard and fast, and once I wasn’t able to avoid it and it caught me in the cheek and knocked me four feet back against the ropes. Bobby moved in to finish me off, but Bill blew the whistle to stop it. He did that often because we still didn’t have any headgear and now guys were climbing into the ring with others not even close to their weight, and he was afraid of getting sued. “I could lose this place, boys, sho take it eashy, all right?”

He was in danger of losing it anyway. Except for Sam and me, Bobby Schwartz and six or seven other guys from the neighborhood, his gym just didn’t have that many members. He didn’t have the cash to take out an ad in the paper, and he wasn’t even in the phone book. He often looked worried about this, walking around the floor holding his membership notebook, its pages largely empty.

One afternoon I walked by the room where he slept. Usually a couple of sheets hung over the opening, but now they were down and I could see the mattress on the floor, the unzipped sleeping bag, a stained pillow. There was a mini-fridge and a hot plate, a jar of instant coffee, a box of Lucky Charms and a can of Campbell’s soup.

By late winter, Bill Connolly’s gym would go out of business, and he would close his doors and move north to Maine. Years later, we would hear he’d died, something to do with his liver or kidneys. But none of that had happened yet, and it was a Saturday morning in the fall of 1976, I’d just turned seventeen, and Bill had arranged an exhibition of his fighters and his new ring. He’d had flyers made up, and he walked all over downtown, dropping them off at shops and barrooms. That morning, he bought a coffeemaker and brewed a pot and set it on a card table beside a bucket of doughnuts. Maybe this was his way of drumming up business, or maybe he was just proud of us and his new ring and wanted to show it off, or both, but he laughed a lot, and slapped people hard on the back, eight or nine real boxers from real gyms in other towns along the river like Lawrence and Lowell.

One of the first fights was Bill’s nephew Brent and Sam Dolan. Sam had his shirt off and looked like carved ice and made the rest of us look good. Next to him Brent looked puffy, his olive skin yellow. Bill called “Time!” and they danced around each other, trading jabs before Brent threw a left hook and missed and Sam hit him hard in the face with two short rights, Brent falling back, his eyes wide, his mouthguard loose, and Bill called “Time!” though the round had just begun. “Eashy, boys, it’s just an exhibition. Andre, you go next.”

“Who with?”

“Sam.”

I didn’t want to fight him. I was sure he would kill me, and even if he didn’t, I did not want to punch the face of my friend. But we couldn’t embarrass Bill in front of the few who had come, so I stepped into the ring, eight-ounce gloves laced tightly over my wrapped hands and wrists, and Bill called “Time!”