Rope Burns - [SSC]

by F. X. Toole

  Shawrelle lay there twitching like a fit. Everyone in the gym back away, think he be dead. Fool with his foot on the penny take it off. Hymn hand me Danger wad of money and walk away. Shawrelle new trainer with his mouth all open go for ice water in a bottle he dump on Shawrelle. When Shawrelle sputter up on a elbow, I look down on him like he a pile of dog mess.

  I say, “Punk, get a job.”

  Shawrelle fall back, spit out a red tooth. Leg still be jerking.

  I go over to Hymn. I say, “Shawrelle Berry go to sleep wif Curtis Hymn Odom every night the res’ a his life.”

  “Somebody don’t stab him.”

  “What I do Danger money?”

  “Find him, give it back.”

  “What I can’t find him?”

  “Buy pussy with it, go fuck, I don’t care.” Hymn don’t talk like that, not Hymn.

  I run out for Danger but he gone. I check all around, but he disappear. Wait a couple days, he don’t come back. I think of ways to spend the money—buy a shirt, spend it on pussy and all, but somehow I can’t spend Danger money any way I try. I still got it in a coffee can behind my bed up my room waiting on the boy.

  Not long after Shawrelle and Danger, Hope Street close down and Hymn open up at 108th and Broadway in South Central, about ninety blocks south from Hope Street Gym. Long-ass way for somebody like Danger. He ain’t showed up, but you never can tell. If he do, I have all his money for him, have it all ready for old Dangerous Dillard Fightin Flippo Bam-Bam Barch, tell him he whip that Motor City Cobra Hit Man Tommy Hearns once Hearns stop ducking Danger and give him a title shot. Make old Danger feel good, get him hopping and pitty-pat jabbing again. And that Shawrelle Berry, he ever bring his common black ass in Hymn Gym try to put a hurt on my man Danger, I shoot the nigga.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Rope Burns

  T

  he winnah! In the blue cornah!” The tuxedoed ring announcer shouted into the microphone, his pounding voice echoing through the vast sports complex. “By knockout, at two-twenty of the third round! And the amateur fighter to represent the United States! In the Light-Heavyweight Division! At the 1992 Barcelona, Spain, Summer Olympics! Henry ‘Puddin’ Pye! Pye!”

  Joseph Mary “Mac” McGee sailed across the ring to his fighter. Mac was Puddin’s trainer, and he kissed the boy on both cheeks, the sweat as sweet to him as Puddin’s name. He removed the kid’s headgear and hoisted him halfway to the overhead lights. Puddin was all teeth and pumped veins after he scored the knockout. As he raised his gloved fists in victory, the yelling crowd cheered even louder. Puddin went to his groggy opponent, shook his hand, said, “Good fight, bro!” and then rein back to hug Mac. Their first goal, making it to the Olympics, had been achieved. Puddin would turn eighteen in May. He was six feet one and still growing. To make the 178-pound limit at the weigh-in, he’d trained down from 187. Mac marveled at the kid. He figured Puddin would be six-three or -four in two or three years and fighting at a perfect 225.

  Puddin’s mother, Willa, with his two younger brothers, Felcie and Yelcie, were in the stands, had shouted themselves hoarse. Tears glistened in Willa’s eyes. First she thanked God her baby man hadn’t been hurt, then for his victory, and then she turned to the spectators around her. Her voice rose above the noise of the crowd.

  “That my dream baby! That my angel child! That my Puddin!”

  Puddin’s postman father was in the ground. He’d been shot dead in 1985 while delivering mail in South Central Los Angeles, caught and killed in the drive-by crossfire between members of the rival Crips and Bloods. Puddin saw himself as the man in the family, the one responsible for his mother and his brothers. His next goal was the Gold Medal. Including Cubans, he’d already beaten the best in international competition, both in Europe and Latin America, and was considered a sure winner in Barcelona.

  But there was much to learn in the sweet science, so from the beginning Mac taught the kid to think in the ring, to fight pretty. The pretty fighter was the man, and fighting pretty meant you were slick in the way you moved, the way you threw punches, and the way you slipped punches; that you had defense as well as offense; and that you outsmarted your opponent; that you moved while you punched, so that you kept your opponent off balance and missing and without thump in his punches. So the first thing Mac taught Puddin was that balance meant leverage; that leverage meant speed; that it was speed that meant power, because balance and leverage were behind the speed, not muscle.

  But winning as an amateur also meant outsmarting biased judges, who would sometimes give a hometown decision to the fighter who was a favorite among the local amateur officials. It was lousy, but it was true, and much too often promising kids would go sour because of it and quit. It happened internationally, as well. The dirty judges at the Olympics held in Korea was a classic example.

  Puddin was jobbed in his eighth, tenth, and eleventh fights, when judges took fights from him that were clearly his. A knockout ends all debate, but the use of padded headgear and big gloves makes knockouts in the amateurs tougher to get than in the pros, which were tough enough, even with the smaller gloves and no headgear. Rules requiring headgear and big gloves were established to protect amateur fighters, and Mac was for that, but like all rules, amateur rules could be broken by people in power. Mac was tempted to train Puddin strictly as a pro, because he would put a lot of opponents to sleep. But a pro style would go against Puddin according to amateur rules, because it was the number of landed punches that counted, not the damage done by those punches-— unless there was a kayo.

  But just a knockdown in the amateurs only counted for one punch, where in a pro fight it usually meant a two-point round, the difference sometimes between winning and losing. In the amateurs, judges usually penalized a kid who fought like a pro, arguing that he didn’t throw enough punches. But a perfect amateur style could become a liability as well. Some great amateur fighters never went anywhere as pros because they couldn’t make the switch in styles, couldn’t “set” down on their punches.

  So Mac trained Puddin both ways. The kid would use primarily his punishing jab and the straight right, punching for the most part to the head during the first two rounds, typical amateur stuff. If Mac was sure Puddin had won the first and second rounds on points, then he’d have him switch to his pro style, punching to the body as well to the head, throwing power hooks and uppercuts, straight right-hands to the sweet spot on the jaw, and go for the knockout.

  “Remember, if you want to hit him in the body, you go to the head first, that’s to get him to lift his hands up, right? If you want to go to the head, hurt the body first to get the hands down. Trick him. Boxing is a game of lies.”

  “Boxing a game of lies.”

  Puddin put opponents to sleep with shots to the jaw, but he also put them down with body shots to the short rib, the solar plexus, and the liver. There were other legal punches that were terrible as well. On his way up from the juniors, Puddin lost a few fights fair and square to more experienced fighters, but winning by kayo meant Puddin couldn’t be robbed, even with a crooked judge. Going to the body also prepared Puddin for the pros.

  Kidney shots, rabbit punches, and low blows were illegal, both in the pros and the amateurs. Mac figured a hook to the sciatic nerve in the cheek of the ass was the best dirty punch in the business, because refs seldom if ever called them, and most people didn’t know you could cripple a fighter with shots to his ass. Mac had taught Puddin all the tricks because he would have to know how to fight dirty just as soon as the other guy started it, and someone sometime surely would. But only then.

  “You never start the shit, but when it happens, you do what you gotta do to get respect.”

  “Do what you gotta to get respec’.” Puddin repeated aloud things that were important, and never forgot.

  The kid’s double-trouble style would aggravate the officials, but once the first two rounds were already on record by the start of the third, and since Puddin had broken n
one of the rules, there wasn’t anything the judges could do to cancel out his lead. As Puddin Pye became an international amateur name, judges began to admire his work despite themselves, to sit back like everyone else to watch how pretty he was.

  Watching him fight was like watching chess with pain. He instilled fear in his opponents like the young Mike Tyson did, except Puddin did it with class, did it the way Sugar Ray Robinson did it. When Puddin stepped up the pressure in the third round, opponents often went down within the first two minutes—not always from a kayo punch that put them on their face, but down in fear of a Puddin kayo, one that could leave them rattled for days.

  With the Gold Medal in Barcelona, Puddin would have lawyers standing in line to back him. Promoters would be licking their chops. That was fine with Mac, who aimed to bring Puddin along slowly, maybe hang as a 195-pound cruiserweight for two years or so, no matter how much his backers wanted to move him up to heavy. Fill him out mentally and physically, get him the right kind of fights. Not stumblebums, but guys that would stretch Puddin, fighters with enough experience and grit to make him think, guys who wanted to win and could bang hard enough to teach him to keep his hands up. Guys who would make him put out fires.

  “The other guy gets hit, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Who’s the predator?”

  “I the predator!”

  From the beginning, it’s what Mac taught Puddin.

  “Predator is the one that eats, understand? When a zebra kicks a lion in the face, the lion’ll starve to death because his jaw is broke, right? Same with a wolf, he gets hurt he starves. Predator’s deal is win without getting hurt, or at least not hurt so bad he can’t eat what he takes down and go on. With fighters it’s the same. See, if you take too bad a beating in order to beat your opponent, then you ain’t gonna last long enough in the game to get anywhere. Or even if you do, you could end up walking on queer street and talking like you got a dead tongue. You understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mac wanted to make sure. “Let’s say he comes rushing on you, maybe lands a good shot. You don’t buck him, you don’t fight his toe-to-toe fight, get me? You slide to the side, pivot, move out of range, mess with his mind, turn him and make him miss, and when he’s tired, and he will be tired because by now he’s holding his breath as he strains to get to you, now you jump on him, now’s when you pound on him like he’s a nail.”

  “Uh-huh, like a nail, I hear what you sayin.”

  Mac’s goal wasn’t to turn the boy into an animal, just the opposite. The point was to give him power, the physical and mental power that would keep him from becoming an animal when pressure made him want to revert.

  “Fighting bulls, right?” said Mac. “Braver than a mama bear. They’ll charge a train if they get separated from their group. But brave ain’t enough when the train wins, right? And tough ain’t enough when you start taking so many shots that sooner or later you start to lose. Or your body quits, says that’s it, ain’t going for no more pain. It’s skill, and legs and speed and brains that get you through. Boxing’s a pure, clean thing up there in the ring. It’s about will and respect, but it couldn’t exist without the ref and the ropes, and the warrior’s mind.”

  “Uh-huh!”

  As Mac spoke, Puddin’s shoulders were rolling imperceptibly, the nerves from his spine sending messages to his fingers and toes.

  Mac said, “It’s having the moves, and knowing how to think like a predator, and staying out of the other guy’s pocket because you know how to breathe and he don’t.”

  “Think like a predator,” said Puddin.

  “That’s right.”

  “And breathe every time I throw a punch, every time I take that step,” said Puddin.

  “You got it, Toyota.”

  ~ * ~

  Mac McGee was a retired cop who’d fought as a kid in the Golden Gloves, had trained at the old Main Street Gym. He fought as a welterweight in the navy, became champ of the Pacific Fleet after he lied about his age in 1943 and signed up at seventeen. During the Battle of Leyte Gulf he won the Silver Star. He stayed in the navy for another hitch after World War II, but when he got married and finished out his time in 1951, he didn’t sign over. The LAPD took him on his first application. A daughter was born in 1955, a second in ‘57. A son, Brendan Patrick, stillborn two years later, was buried beneath a Celtic cross, buried with his father’s broken heart. After fifteen years on the force, rising to the rank of sergeant, Mac ruined a kneecap in a rolling firefight chasing bank robbers from Eagle Rock to San Pedro. Prior to that, he’d taught boxing to Mexican kids at the Boyle Heights police gym. He worked as a P.I. a few years after the kneecap, but his love of boxing took him back to the fight game full-time by 1968. Despite his knee, he could punch, he could always do that. And he could still slip punches better than most, still pivot off the front and back leg both, could turn you 180 degrees with a tap to the shoulder, a tug at the elbow.

  But his retirement money wasn’t enough to satisfy his wife, despite the periodic jolts of serious cash he made off the fights. Besides, she wasn’t happy with all the time he spent away from home, and she couldn’t relate to his friends, all of them cops or fight guys. One Sunday he returned home after three weeks from a 1971 Tokyo title fight. The lights were out and he found his house empty, a FOR sale sign stuck in the frontyard grass. His wife had moved out with the kids, the furniture, the station wagon, his cherry ‘57 T-Bird, everything. She left a note, along with her lawyer’s card, in his daughters’ room.

  Have your lawyer call mine. Half the house money goes to me. I want alimony and child support. You always said boxing was your life, bastard. Now boxing is your wife.

  Mac figured losing her was all part of growing up, but losing his two daughters nearly destroyed him. First he went on the sauce, but after a while whiskey stopped killing the pain and he needed something stronger. He passed on weed, because he didn’t like the stink, and moved on to the other stuff, using anything he could score that would disconnect his mind from his heart. In his arm, up his nose. The irony of being a doper cop hit him in the face like a slab of hog liver. All his police life he’d fought against enemies of decency, had busted dealers like they were rotten eggs. Then he became the enemy of himself. Friends avoided him on the street. It was his daughters’ love and his love for them that saved him finally, and now he’d been clean for fifteen years. Father Carey had been instrumental in bringing him back as well.

  ~ * ~

  “How much money these backer mens give me, you suppose?” asked Puddin, scooping up rice and beans and salsa with a tortilla.

  Mac and Puddin were eating, as they regularly did, at Señora Cabrera’s seafood café, Mariscos Acapulco. She was a squat and square Mexican lady with a long, thick braid laced with bright ribbons down her back. She looked after Puddin as if he were her chick, made him special refried beans without lard to keep down the fat in his diet. Her grandfather had been the lightweight champion of the world during the forties, when you fought fifteen rounds for the title, when many a fight was won in the thirteenth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth. On the wall above the cash register hung a twelve-by-eighteen tinted photograph of her grandfather, a handsome little guy, in his fighting togs. Next to it was an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white of Puddin when he won the regionals that took him to the nationals. The Señora was a widow. Her gardener husband and her thirteen-year-old son were killed when a drunk driver ran a red light and plowed into their pickup on Central Avenue. Neither her husband nor the drunk had insurance. She opened a little stand that grew into the Acapulco and made it possible for her to raise and send her twin daughters to nursing school. Both were in their early twenties and still lived with her. Both were nurses at Los Angeles County USC Medical Center. All lived in a little house a few blocks from the café. The Señora had been robbed once, by Mexicans, who came through a window of her house. Now her windows, like the windows in many of the houses in the neighborhood, had steel b
ars. Now she kept her grandfather’s .44 Mag pistola under her pillow. In two years she would be able to retire to her hometown, a village halfway down the west coast of Baja, Guerrero Negro, where whales frolicked and salt was made from the sea.

  The spring air was clear of smog, and Mac and Puddin sat at the outdoor counter because the dining room was full. Latinos and blacks kept the place crowded. It was located just off the corner of Vernon and Compton on the southeast side of Los Angeles, a crossover area populated by blacks and Latinos. Though gang members sometimes congregated on the corner, there was an armed truce between them in and around the café. The Señora never had fights in her place, or trouble with gangs or her black neighbors. She was too nice and the food was too good.

  It was two weeks after Puddin’s win at the nationals. He needed a rest, but soon it would be time to get back into the gym. To be in top shape for Barcelona, he needed to be in good shape when he got to the U.S. training camp in Colorado Springs. There he would be taken over and supervised by Olympic trainers. This was the part of their triumph that hurt, because Mac wouldn’t be allowed to work with Puddin in camp, or to be in Puddin’s corner in Spain. It was the way it was done. It was at this point that Olympic trainers, acting as front men for wealthy backers, sometimes stole fighters from the trainers who got the boys to the Olympics. But no matter what it cost, Mac would be sitting ringside for Puddin’s fights, where he’d be shouting up instructions. It would be Mac’s voice that Puddin heard over all others, and nobody could do a thing about it.