The Chief

by Robert Lipsyte

  When we got back to the hotel, Jake and Alfred and Robin were waiting for us in a suite. There was food and champagne on the table.

  “Nothing to celebrate,” grumbled Sonny.

  “Hubbard sent them,” said Alfred. “You’re the big winner tonight.”

  “Every TV station in the country ran you stopping the fight,” said Robin.

  “Gotta go,” said Sonny. He turned away.

  “Where?” asked Alfred.

  “Gotta run.” He was out the door.

  We talked for a while, about Sonny’s killer hook, John L.’s condition. We ate some food and zapped the TV for glimpses of Sonny stopping the fight. It would be on everybody’s yearend reel. After a while Alfred went off to bed; you could see on his face he was fighting pain. Robin made plans with Jake to go up to the Res with her crew. Then Jake drifted away. I sat there with Robin and not much to talk about.

  “So. You’re going to shoot the roots thing.”

  “I’ll want to interview you, too, how you met Sonny, the Rocky bit. But I’ll do that at Donatelli’s.”

  “What makes you so sure I want to be interviewed?”

  She smiled, all teeth, no warmth. “Good pub for your book.”

  “I don’t need some documentary in the middle of the night on educational television to sell a book on the heavyweight champion of the world.”

  “Right. All you need is the champion. And I can see you’re sticking pretty close.”

  “He’s my friend.” I stood up.

  “And you saw him first.” She stood up. “Look, Marty, there’s plenty of room for both of us. We’re doing different things.”

  “I need to get back so I can write all that down.” I wanted to leave before she gave me the eyebrows.

  “We can help each other. I think I understand how you feel.” Her voice was softer, warmer. The eyebrows never moved. “You paid your dues for two years on the road, all those crappy little towns, and now I waltz in when things look hot. Right?”

  “Wrong,” I lied.

  Now the eyebrows rose. She really pushed my buttons, but I wasn’t sure if it was the alarms or the warms. I was trying to think of an exit line when Hubbard made his entrance. Just burst into the suite, talking.

  “I like this, the writer and the filmmaker, plotting out how to carve the facts into legend.” He was wearing a T-shirt that bore the words. THE BIG BANG: JUNIOR HUBBARD COLLIDES WITH SONNY BEAR. “Press conference at ten A.M. in the ballroom downstairs. Announce the next fight. Make sure Sonny’s there.” He poked himself in the chest. “Ordered this shirt as The Fave went down.”

  “You talk to Alfred about this?”

  “Details. Got to have the big vision. You can always work out the details.”

  “Like getting a tape of Sonny stopping the Solomon fight for my documentary?” asked Robin.

  “Just a detail,” said Hubbard. “You know, I never been happy with my video people. We got to talk.”

  “I’m ready.”

  I don’t think they noticed me leaving the room.

  Sonny didn’t come back until after sunup. He looked as though he had run for hours. His eyes were buried in his head, his clothes were black with sweat. The only other time I remembered him looking so wild was the night Alfred got shot and we went hunting the guy who did it. “You okay?”

  They’re selling T-shirts downstairs. THE BIG BANG.” He collapsed on the bed. “I’d like to take that sonuvabitch right now.”

  18

  I WROTE HARD. TRIED to stick to a schedule. Up early, write for three hours, down to Donatelli’s for lunch with Henry or one of the other trainers to check out facts, then back for another three or four hours at the computer. I’d fall asleep watching TV.

  After a few days I began taking longer and longer TV breaks, then naps in the afternoon, and then I’d stay up all night pounding the keyboard and be too tired to go to the gym. I started bringing in pizza and fried chicken. I had the apartment to myself—Denise was a counselor at a camp for retarded kids for the summer and my folks were traveling—so it was easy to live around the clock.

  It was in the back of my mind to have some people over—a girl I liked from school was in town—but I was in a writing mode, hammering out pages, eating, sleeping, watching some TV to chill, then back to the hammer. My pants were getting tighter from too much takeout.

  I wasn’t sure if my pages were good. Some days I liked them and some days they read like Dead White Male meets Oreo Kid. I’d get panicky then and listen to rap on TV or go talk with the school-yard ball players and dope dealers I knew from elementary school. I never had much trouble with them; my father was a neighborhood hero who made it and stayed in the community, and since Las Vegas, I’d started to get a little respect on my own. Everybody figured I had my own gangsta connections.

  I never worked so hard in my life. Writing was always fun for me, especially when I was making up stories, but this had to be just right: The facts and the observations had to be true because these were real people I was writing about, and the sentences had to sing and dance because I wanted those real people to think I was a contender, too. Sometimes I felt like I was training for my own Big Bang.

  It took two weeks, nonstop, to get the chapters in shape for Professor Marks. I left the early chapters in the present tense because I liked the way it gets you right into the story. Besides, I wasn’t going to roll over for him.

  I thought I might have made the cut over Sonny’s left eye more of a mythical wound, like an Achilles’ heel, the symbol for his tragic flaw. Professors usually are suckers for pseudointellectual Greek stuff. Maybe not Marks. Weren’t the Greeks your classic dead white males? Besides, what was Sonny’s tragic flaw, other than he didn’t know who he was yet?

  Who did?

  Not me.

  But by chapter 5 I thought I was emerging as a character in my own book. Marks was right about that being necessary. I began to feel better about the pages as I read on. The reservation stuff was okay, particularly the scenes with Sonny in chapter 9.

  Vegas took off for me. The little comments to Marks seemed like childish graffiti, but they had helped me keep an attitude while I wrote. It was like the scaffolding outside a building under construction, something to stand on while you were working. You tore it down when the building was finished. I could always delete those remarks in the final draft. Marks would surely want a polish, those guys always do. It’s a power thing.

  I wondered if I should have reported more on the trouble brewing on the Res. Always time to deal with that if it boils over. I thought I showed that boxing stank without getting preachy about it. It was all there, except maybe I hadn’t really spelled out my feelings about Sonny. Did it read as if I was just hanging on for the big payday, my best-seller?

  I mailed the chapters to Rumson Lake, New York, where Marks was spending the summer. Talk about coincidence—forty years ago my dad spent a couple of weeks with a white family up there as a Fresh Air kid.

  I thought I’d feel great, relieved and light, after I sent out the chapters, but I felt empty and tired. Hung over.

  I took a bus up to the Res, looking forward to a few days of relaxing in the sunny quiet. I’d never seen the place so crowded and noisy. First of all, there wasn’t even room for me to sleep at Jake’s. Robin and her crew had filled the little yellow house with TV gear. I had to bunk with three little kids in the house of Alice Benton, the Stump Clan Mother.

  The afternoon I got to the Res, Robin was directing a scene in which Sonny and Jake walked through the junkyard, searching for an auto part someone from Sparta had ordered. They worked together a lot when Sonny was a kid. Because the sun kept reflecting off the windshields of the old wrecks and into the camera, Robin and her crew shot the scene over and over.

  Finally, I said, “What’s this, a documentary or a major motion picture?”

  “Relax,” said Sonny. “We haven’t sold the book rights, still yours.”

  Everybody laughed. But jus
t him saying that stressed me out. Sonny never thought of things like that. Was Robin looking to snag the book, too?

  I felt shut out. That night, when I went back to the Clan Mother’s house, Robin and Sonny were still planning the next day’s shoot. I wondered if she and Sonny were getting it on.

  In the morning, Jake came out in his old leather breechcloth and demonstrated the stick dance, kicking twigs from instep to instep for the camera. He’d taught that to Sonny to improve his footwork and coordination.

  And then, while Robin smiled and nodded him on, he babbled away about the old days on the Res when he hunted for food, about the Running Braves, about corrupt chiefs who had sold out the Nation, all the stories I’d worked so hard to coax out of him when I used to come up here with my notebooks and tape recorder, following Jake for hours, begging him to sit down and be interviewed.

  During a break, I said to Robin, “Amazing how everybody loves to be on TV.”

  She arched the famous eyebrows. “Different media, Marty. You can be a fly on the wall, but I have to have pictures. Believe me, we are not in competition.” She looked at her watch. “We’re going up to Stonebird this afternoon, you should come along.”

  That’s when I decided to go home. The three-day solo of survival and meditation had become a three-hour mob-scene shoot.

  When I stopped to get my bag, Alice Benton was standing over the stove in a fragrant cloud of steam. The house was quiet; her three grandkids were still in school.

  “Thanks for your hospitality,” I said. “I’m leaving now.”

  “I’ll drive you to town. After you eat.”

  By the time I washed up and sat down, there was a big bowl of soup on the table, and a hunk of bread.

  “It’s great.” The soup had different tastes on different parts of my tongue.

  “Traditional recipe. Long-distance runners carried it in leather flasks.”

  “The Running Braves?”

  “Jake tell you about them?”

  “Says we need them.” I wondered why I said “we.”

  “Need something. Gonna be trouble.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I’ve never seen the Moscondaga people so split. The people who leased their land to the gambling company think it’s their right. And that it’s their only chance for a good life. The people who think all the land belongs to all the people think that gambling will destroy the Nation.”

  “You think gambling’s a bad thing?”

  “Good or bad, might be too late to stop it. Question is How we going to control it so it doesn’t destroy the Nation? People are ready to shoot each other over this.”

  On the ride out of the Res, I heard bulldozers and backhoes snarling, saw trucks and construction trailers and a glittery circle of barbed wire. Guards with guns and dogs and walkie-talkies patrolled inside the fence while workers mounted closed-circuit TV cameras on a watch-tower.

  “Wait’ll Jake sees this,” I said.

  “He better be careful,” said Alice Benton.

  I bought a pile of magazines at the bus station, so I wouldn’t have to think about Robin and Sonny and the Moscondaga for a few hours. But whenever I finished a magazine article, I’d think about being alone and feel sad. I kept reminding myself that at least tilings couldn’t get much worse.

  Wrong again. At home, there was a message on the answering machine from Professor Marks. “Register for classes.” He’d turned down my chapters. No independent study. It was over for me.

  It’s time to hang it up. Who wants to be a writer anyway? This is how Sonny must have felt after the Viera fight. I thought I should make notes on how I was feeling, so I could understand him better, but then I remembered that I wasn’t a writer anymore.

  19

  I WAS BACK AT SCHOOL feeling sorry for myself when some guy I hardly knew sat down next to me in the Morris Dining Hall and asked, “What’s your favorite kosher vegetable?”

  “Huh?”

  “John L. Solomon.” When nobody at the table laughed, he said, “Didn’t hear the news?”

  “Martin knows him,” said one of the other guys.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean…”

  “What happened?” I’d been in the library all day.

  “He’s in a coma. Something burst in his brain.”

  Big story that night. The news programs had their doctor reporters explaining what happened inside John L.’s head and their commentators arguing whether or not boxing should be abolished. John L. had seemed all right after the Hubbard fight; he’d made some appearances and started talking about another fight. He even began training again. While he was jogging along the boardwalk near his house, he collapsed. One reporter stood on the spot where he fell. Someone had stuck flowers between the gray wooden boards.

  I wanted to talk to someone that night, but Jake and Sonny were already driving down from the Res. Alice said they’d heard the news. Alfred was in the hospital; the chronic bowel infection some paraplegics get had flared. My folks were at meetings, and Robin’s machine said she’d call right back but she didn’t.

  I didn’t want to talk to other kids at school. I felt superior to them in some ways—they’d never carried a spit bucket and wiped blood—but inferior, too. I was back at school because I was a loser.

  Before I thought it through, I called Professor Marks. I hadn’t seen him since I got back to school.

  “Yes?” He sounded as if I had interrupted him.

  “Sorry to bother you. This is Martin Witherspoon…”

  “I have office hours tomorrow. Two to three.”

  “Uh, okay…I, er, you hear about John L. Solomon?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s on the news—he’s in a coma, he…”

  “Come on over right now,” said Professor Marks. He gave me his address.

  He lived in a dumpy apartment a few blocks from the dorms. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and he was barefoot. I followed him into a small living room. Books and papers were scattered over soft chairs.

  “Coffee, soda?”

  “Nothing, thanks, sure, anything.” I suddenly wondered why I was here.

  “There’s no alcohol. I’m, uh, writing dry this year.” He cracked open two bottles of some kind of natural fruit drink I’d never seen before. It didn’t taste very good.

  “Your John L. chapters were interesting. His confusion about his Jewishness.”

  “He didn’t seem confused to me.”

  “Sure he was. He wore his Jewishness instead of living it. Good parallel to Sonny’s emerging sense of himself as a Moscondaga.”

  “But you rejected it.”

  “I rejected your leaving school to try to write a best-seller before you were ready.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got talent. I’ve read your stories in the literary magazine. The stuff you did in the screenplay class.”

  “Then why did you…”

  “You’ve got to finish school. You need the training, the little fights. Keep writing your book. A real writer writes, in school, in jail, underwater, whatever. Most people quit. That’s the truth. The people who win aren’t necessarily the ones with the most talent. They’re the ones who never stopped coming.”

  I felt confused. “What should I do?”

  “You want to be where the action is.” He looked at his watch. “Probably make the last train to New York. Take notes. Don’t miss too many classes. Get back as soon as you can.”

  20

  SONNY WAS THERE when John L. died. He was in the hospital room with Richie and John L.’s second ex-wife and their daughters when John L. opened his eyes, smiled, and closed them again. There were stories in the paper that John L. died with his fist inside Sonny’s fist, and that his last words were “Take Hubbard for me,” but Sonny said that was just Hubbard Senior hyping the next fight.

  Jews get buried right away. Sonny and Richie were honorary pallbearers along with some bearded men in black cloth coats. TV cam
eras pushed in on the coffin. Sonny was cool. He said that John L. was a great champion and a great friend, but that he didn’t blame anybody for his death, certainly not Elston Hubbard, Junior. It was a risk that fighters took.

  Senior was all over that funeral. He said he understood that Sonny needed to avenge John L.’s death and fight Junior. “It’s nothing personal. When a man’s chief falls, there must be satisfaction. That is the way of the warrior.”

  The press ate that up, and started writing about a “grudge match,” and how the fight might not even get licensed if the commission thought Sonny was out for revenge. Sonny stayed at my folks’ apartment for a few days, and the phone never stopped ringing with calls from the press. After a while, Sonny started getting impatient with the reporters asking the same questions over and over. He said he might want revenge on Senior for talking trash. When that was quoted, Junior said he was going to knock out Sonny for bad-mouthing his dad. After that, I handled the press calls. No comment. Thanks. No comment.

  Sonny ran in the mornings in the park along the Hudson River, and I followed him on my bike. Neighborhood kids started trailing us. Sonny got a kick out of that, which surprised me. He’d fool around with them, show them some footwork, how to throw the hook. He was even getting more relaxed with adults. He liked being recognized on the street. Women were hitting on him all the time. A few nights he didn’t come home, but we never asked him about it. Denise said she thought he might have stayed at Robin’s house, but she might have said that to needle me.

  Every day we worked on Rocky. Sonny made that sucker dance, snapping out the jab, straight as a line drive, twisting his fist on impact.

  “Jab…five. Hook…seven.”

  We mixed punches, built combinations, using the jab to keep the opponent off balance, the hook and the right for power blows.

  “Jab…five. Hook…seven.”

  Start a pattern, let the opponent get into a rhythm of what to expect.