Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  “Everybody’s calling, saying they’re surprised Larry looked so good at 52,” said Jay Newman, Holmes’s publicist, when I called him in Easton after the fight. I asked if that response was giving Holmes any crazy ideas about continuing his latest comeback. “It gives me crazy ideas,” admitted Newman, but he didn’t really expect Holmes to fight again. “Not unless there was a million dollars in it for him,” and that seemed unlikely. “It makes no sense to fight again for less.”

  After a pause, Newman added, “And even if Larry’s not feeling like he’s done, the guys in his corner have been with him a long time. They’re starting to get tired.” Holmes’s crew had lived significant portions of their lives vicariously through the body of their boss, watching him stretch and work out and shadowbox and spar; worrying about his meals and digestion, his bad eye and breakable right hand; making the ring walk at his side and dutifully urging him on from ringside as his weigh-in figures went up and his punch count went down. That was a heavy burden of lives and aspirations for one body to carry—too heavy, perhaps, for a 52-year-old body, even one that had retained a large measure of its competence and force. There were other, easier ways to make money.

  Newman said, “The niche market for us right now is grand openings. A Champs, a Circuit City, they fly Larry in, he signs some autographs, gets his fee, and that’s it.” A former champion of Holmes’s stature can work this circuit in perpetuity—not just in-store appearances, but also conventions, corporate functions, after-dinner speaking, motivational gigs. He moves through a landscape of hotel ballrooms, airport concourses, parking lots with grand-opening banners and knots of balloons fluttering in the breeze. He tells stories about forcing a way against adversity, about taking care of your assets. He laughs, he gets laughs; because he’s a boxer, it’s often okay if he tells an off-color anecdote or cusses a little. When he appears at ringside as a distinguished retiree, he’s announced to the crowd, which gives him a respectful hand. And if he’s Larry Holmes, he’s sizing up the young men in the ring and telling himself, with pride and regret, that he could still whup them.

  * * *

  Original publication: Washington Post Magazine, November 17, 2002.

  Bedtime Story

  I WAS IN A CITY far from home, working on a magazine story. I spent the day and evening going around asking questions, watching people do what they do, filling up a couple of pocket notebooks. Among other places, I visited the dog pound, a place of grimness even though—or because—the people who worked there seemed gentle and well-intentioned. All those pit bulls, muscled up with nowhere to go, flexing as we walked past on the other side of the bars. They were desperate and accommodating, and they knew that something was wrong. They could smell all the dogs that came before them. Where had they gone?

  Around midnight I retired to the dingy motel where I’d been put by the magazine that sent me out to do the story. In an effort to cut down on expenses, its travel office had found me a place where if you wanted to line up some crack or a prostitute all you had to do was hang out for a while in the parking lot. It had been a long day and evening, with drinking at the end of it. The pit bulls were on my mind. I don’t have much use for dogs but I kept coming back to the sight of the animals lined up in their cages, going all rigid and alert and eager to please when visitors came by. They had thought something was going to happen, even if they didn’t know what it might be, but it didn’t happen. Life would go on like that for a while until, I guessed, some were adopted and some were taken out and killed, and then other dogs would take their place, and soon it would be the new dogs’ turn to win the lottery or die.

  One thing to do in a dingy motel is to watch dingy TV. There was lots of it—tedious sports shows and talk shows, unfunny comedies, dumbass celebrity updates, bad movies of the ’80s, a charnel house of shitty writing and stale ideas. I ran aground for a while on an off-brand show or movie about the crew of a rocket ship who go around fighting space vampires. The heroes dashed from here to there shouting fakey jargon and toting futuristic weapons that looked like the weapons we have now with nonfunctional molded-plastic appendages glued to them. The vampires glowered, hissed, and suppurated. It kind of ruins the space-opera magic to wonder what the actors’ parents think when they see them on the screen, but that’s what I usually wonder about. The talented darling who starred in school plays and expectant local fantasies back in Elk Grove Village or Mamaroneck or wherever is now wearing fangs and slathered in gory makeup and being blown unconvincingly in half by a plasmoid megablaster. I picture the parents thinking, “Well, at least he is on TV.”

  The lameness of it all caught me just right—in that end-of-day, far-from-home, buzzed-from-work mood—and laid me low. Deep gloom descended.

  I went through the channels a few more times, only growing more despondent, until I happened upon round one of the middleweight title fight between Marvin Hagler and John Mugabi—held 22 years before, almost to the day. Hagler had his hands full, but he knew what to do about it. He was settling in to cope with Mugabi’s strength and power by taking him deep into the fight, wearing him out over the long haul and finishing him late. Mugabi, a blowout artist, had gone ten rounds just once and six only twice in his twenty-five fights, all wins. The turning point would come in the sixth round, when Hagler, having blunted the force of Mugabi’s early-round assault, would take over the fight by giving his man a spine-jellying pounding, then settle in to finish him inside the distance, KO’ing him in the eleventh.

  All of a sudden I felt a lot better. I turned down the sound and put out the light. On the screen, Goody Petronelli, Hagler’s trainer, radiated calm and ease as he talked to his fighter between rounds. Everything was going to be fine; Petronelli’s every gesture said as much. His main task was to create a recurring pocket of serenity to which Hagler could retreat between hard-fought rounds for rest and reflection. Demonstrating a for-example combination he wanted Hagler to throw, Petronelli moved his own hands as if arranging flowers. Let’s just fix a couple of little mechanical things, he was saying, and it’s your fight. Doesn’t matter how strong the other guy is. Doesn’t matter what he’s done before this or who he’s done it to. We know how to beat him. We know how to beat everybody. Hagler wasn’t exactly looking at his trainer and he didn’t exactly nod, but he heard him.

  I took off my glasses and put them on the cigarette-stained bedside table, put my head down on the pillow, and was dreamlessly asleep before either fighter struck a blow in the next round.

  Cities

  Ghosts

  MY DAUGHTER LING-LI, WHO is eight, has lately been menaced by ghosts. They begin gathering at bedtime, preparing to invade her dreams. Deep in the night, awakened by a particularly vivid nightmare after a string of lesser ones, she pads down the hall to my room and comes around to my side of the bed. “I’m having Bad Thoughts,” she says in the dark, her voice low. “Bring everything.” I am the resident expert on bad dreams, having had them all my life: half-seen, slavering beasts surging through doors that won’t lock and windows too small to fit the frame; a long walk down the corridors of hell with a baseball bat on my shoulder; the same unspeakably hideous movie on every channel and the TV won’t turn off and then, somehow, I’m in the movie. Technique is an antidote to fear, I’ve learned, so I taught Ling-li when she was very small that an ally can enter your dreams to bring you specialized equipment you can use to repel various menaces, and that eventually, as your powers as a dreamer grow, you can dispense with the ally’s intervention and train your sleeping mind to produce the equipment when you need it.

  Over the years, she and I have assembled an arsenal for her that includes a net for catching monsters; a fire extinguisher, added during her fire-fearing period; a flying castle, and a winged horse to get there; and the Slippery Suit, to foil the bad guys who forever yearn to grab her and spirit her away to their extravagantly unhappy lairs. We’ve recently added a small, smooth stone you keep in your pocket. When ghosts appear, you put your hand around t
he stone, which causes a strong wind to blow up, sending those diaphanous sons of bitches scudding away, howling in frustration. But I may have made the case for my own expertise a little too well; instead of training her own sleeping self to carry these items, she still prefers to wake me up and instruct me to bring them to her, as if I were her ectoplasmic gun bearer or attorney.

  Ling-li’s worries about ghosts date from a recent family outing to Georges Island, in Boston Harbor. We spent a few hours there exploring Fort Warren, in which Confederate prisoners were kept during the Civil War. No doubt some of them died there. In lightless galleries deep within the fort we held hands and shuffled blindly, feeling with our feet for irregularities in the naked stone floor, straining to make out even a faint shape in the blackness, immoderately relieved when up ahead another visitor’s cell phone cast a brief, greenish glow. On the return ride on the ferry, Ling-li and her little sister, Yuan (who is not afraid of ghosts), joined the crowd of kids hanging on the rail at the bow in the watery September sunlight, screaming happily into the wind as the boat sawed through the wakes of other craft. Back on the mainland, we walked past the offices of a company that conducts haunted house tours of Boston. Ling-li approached the guy in a top hat who was drumming up business at a lectern out front. Affecting an archaic accent and a dastardly manner, he at first refused to confirm or deny that ghosts were real, but eventually, upon further interrogation, told her that he himself was a ghost. She absorbed this news without comment, and we went on our way. The encounter with the mock-Victorian tour tout and the spookiness of the fort, reacting together, initiated the current ghost cycle in her dream life.

  When people ask me what I like about Boston I usually say that it’s old (for a New World city) and you can go almost everywhere on foot. Neither quality is typical of American city life. I grew up in Chicago, a city that now feels to me like an experiment, a cyclopean model train set scattered just the other day across the prairie. All the pyramids and cathedrals of my childhood rose and fell within living memory—the high-rise housing projects marching away along the verge of the expressway, the monumental ruins of steel mills and factories tumbling in slow motion into the high prairie grass that eventually reclaims a deserted lot in Chicago. And Chicago stretches across the flat Midwestern landscape on such an inhuman scale that on a windy February night it feels as if a destination eight blocks distant lies just over the curve of the earth.

  To a Chicago-trained sensibility, Boston feels jammed-in, as if long ago someone had gathered up a great deal of urban material—triple-deckers, college quadrangles, bridges of stone and steel, the golden dome of the State House, lawn chairs and trash cans placed in parking spaces to reserve them for whoever shoveled the snow out of them—and packed it all tightly into an oddly shaped location at the edge of the ocean. I live in Brookline, a separate town tucked into a concave depression in the boundaries of Boston proper; my neighborhood, my adopted landscape of home, is a collection of familiar wrinkles in the city’s scrunched-up fabric. The street I live on, a double row of duplex houses set nearly cheek to cheek, lies between higher ground on one side and train tracks on the other. At night from my windows I can watch the Green Line trains, lit up like excursion boats, passing behind the houses across the street. On winter nights, when I build a fire in the fireplace, the approaching and receding sound of trains comes down the chimney. Bracketed by two fingers of the Green Line track network’s handlike spread, the swelling contours of Aspinwall Hill and Fisher Hill, and the main thoroughfares of Beacon Street and Boylston Street, we’re holed up here like mice in a niche in an old stone wall.

  But coziness requires its own antidote: I like to run at night, after the girls have been put to bed with stories and stuffed bears and night lights. Starting off down the block, I leave the house behind me with the porch light on and another light up in the office window where my wife sits at her desk. I cross Beacon Street and enter Brighton, part of Boston proper, passing houses and then apartment buildings with windows blue-lit by TV. Warmed up and letting out my stride, I cross Washington Street on the diagonal by the police station, the presence of which does not entirely deter the city’s famously incompetent and irate drivers from running red lights right in front of it. I follow the gentle downslope of Market Street toward the river. The sidewalks are nearly empty and traffic is light.

  The river, lined on both banks with paved paths, is one of Boston’s longest, deepest wrinkles—an intimate natural alley, partially screened by trees and brush, that funnels you semisecretly through the city, intersecting with streets only where it comes to a bridge. I pick up speed on the riverside path, falling into long-haul rhythm, seized by a growing feeling of insubstantiality as I pass from a stretch of gloom through a better-lit patch and back into gloom again. The occasional rat darts across the path almost underfoot. Sentinel ducks and geese standing watch at the edges of sleeping flotillas of their kind sound an alarm at my approach and then the all-clear when they determine that it’s only me. A pale heron rises up with a start from the shallows and with a couple of sullen wingbeats glides away over the water. Once, as I went by a thicket of tall reeds that always stirs whisperingly at my passing, a coyote came out ahead of me into a bar of moonlight, looking back over its hunched shoulder as it crossed the empty road, and paced me for a while before disappearing into a dark wedge of marshy ground on the other side.

  I pass the occasional fellow runner or late dog-walker; in good weather, courting couples sit on benches overlooking the water. But the living are outnumbered along the river by relics of the dead: Richie Forte, killed in Vietnam, for whom a park in the Nonantum section of Newton is named; David Berray, who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and is remembered on a plaque next to a playground in Cambridge; Longfellow and Eliot and Weeks and Weld and all the other harrumphing old-timers who gave their names to bridges and boathouses; the legions of long-dead authors whose books gather dust in the stacks of the libraries of the universities that front on the water—Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University. Not far from the memorial to David Berray there’s an authoritative-looking granite marker inscribed with a fantastically untrue claim: “On this spot in the year 1000 Leif Erikson built his house in Vineland.” Ebenezer Norton Horsford, a nineteenth-century baking-powder entrepreneur with a passion for amateur archaeology of the most poetic sort, is responsible for the marker. He also had a fanciful Viking tower erected farther west on the river, and led the effort to commission the statue of Leif Erikson that peers out at ramp traffic, palm shading brow, from the grassy median of Commonwealth Avenue at the edge of Back Bay. Perhaps Horsford’s labors finally calmed the unquiet Viking ghosts that gathered at his bedside, although we’ll never know, because Horsford’s long dead, too, of course.

  Sometimes I try to explain to Ling-li my urge to be out at night, unencumbered, moving fast, fitting myself into the landscape’s seams and the cycle of its rhythms. She plainly thinks it foolhardy to choose to be so exposed and alone in the dark, but I try to make her see that the night run is a technique of belonging, of inscribing yourself into a place and the place into yourself. Repeating and varying your routes, you stitch yourself into the texture of your home ground so that you can’t be easily pulled from it—not by your enemies, and not even by those who love you. It’s true that when you run at night you feel the chill of the thinness of the world, the tenuous weakness of your connection to anyone or anything—especially in the cold and wet, and most especially on a Sunday night in the dead of winter—but she doesn’t yet understand how you also strike a blow against this loneliness precisely by seeking it out. As the city’s ghosts grow more familiar to you, by degrees you join their fellowship. For every half-seen figure at a second-floor window or in a passing car, for every phantom shape that flickers in your peripheral vision as you pass a stand of trees or a cemetery on a riverfront rise of ground, there are many more you don’t see, many more who, rather, catch a glimpse of you: a
strangely familiar shadow against the greater dark.

  When I return home, I stretch and shower and put on sweats, then pad through the quiet house, turning off lights, checking the stove and the locks on the doors, making sure all is well. My wife has gone off to bed already. Before I join her, I stop in the girls’ room to kiss them goodnight in their sleep. I often sit in their room for a minute, listening to their breathing, the house ticking over in the stillness, the muted rumble and whoosh of a late train. I’m the only spark of conscious life in the house, passing soundless and unseen among unheeding sleepers. Yuan once told me, “You’re like a bad guy who likes me and protects me from the other bad guys.” Sometimes I linger a little longer in the girls’ room, waiting to return fully to my body so that I can lie down next to my wife and sleep.

  * * *

  Original publication: My Town: Writers on American Cities, US State Department, 2010.

  The Elements of Providence

  SUNSET ON AN OVERCAST late October evening, shortly before the year’s final lighting of WaterFire. The tide is up, surging in from Narragansett Bay, temporarily reversing the direction in which the city’s rivers flow. Fallen leaves drift upstream on the Providence River, which passes between manmade walls through the heart of the city. Where the waters divide, some of the leaves wander to the right into the canal-straight Moshassuck River, but most of them pass to the left into the larger Woonasquatucket River and on into the great circle of the river basin by Waterplace Park, in front of the Providence Place Mall.

  Boat-borne volunteers, dressed all in black like Kabuki stagehands, have loaded logs and kindling into 100 braziers—steel-lattice containers shaped like three-foot-high martini glasses—that float, moored, in the three rivers. The reflected lights of the city, brightening in the deepening gloom, seem to rise up out of the depths to move just under the water’s surface. On a riverside walkway, a young man in a ball cap carries a stepladder from bridge to bridge, mounting it to light the candles in ornate chandeliers that hang from the spans’ undersides.