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.
Kurt’s performance was not going down well with the crowd. Their mood was changing, the chant of “Master! Master!” died away as disappointment seized them. Someone yelled “Fight!” and someone else, “Chickenshit!” When Dooey clanged on the pie plate to end the round, Kurt Meinecke’s return to the corner was greeted, here and there, with boos.
Norman was all over him as soon as his ass dropped on the chair. “Goddamn it,” he hissed, “you aren’t Cool Handing him. Laugh at the fucker! Tease him! Tell him he hits like a homo! You’re forgetting what I said. What’d I say? ‘Ninety per cent of boxing is mental.’ You’re overlooking the mental. Laugh at him!”
“You can laugh at him,” said Kurt, probing his rib cage with the thumb of his glove. “You got no idea how hard he hits.”
Norman slapped the glove away. “Stop that!” he said. “He’s watching you.” It was true. Scutter was pointing in our direction and making smirking asides to his brother.
“Look at him,” Kurt said, brooding. “Acts a
s if I’m nothing. Thinks he’s so smart.”
Dooey beat the pie plate. Norman caught Meinecke by the hairs on the nape of his neck as he was rising. “Remember,” he said, tugging them for emphasis, “Cool Hand Luke him. And no hitting back! I’m warning you, Meinecke, no hitting!”
For the next three rounds Kurt did exactly as he was told. There was plenty of hitting and none of it was done by him. When Scutter did his ham-handed Ali imitations, dancing circles around Meinecke, inviting attack, parading and flaunting his jaw within easy range of the Master of Disaster who inexplicably declined to strike, this incited the bloodthirsty mob into more taunts and jeers, the cue for Scutter to stop dead in his tracks and pepper Meinecke with a storm of punches.
Each time Kurt came back to the corner, he added another injury to the catalogue, a mouse swelling under the left eye, a cut inside the mouth that kept him drooling pink saliva into the plastic bucket, a raw lace scrape on the side of the neck, knots and eggs popping up all over his head.
It was the humiliation that worked the change in him. He began to beg, really beg Hiller to let him hit back. Kurt had always been so mild, nice was maybe the word for him, that I would never have guessed he had the stuff in him to hate. But the look on his face told me he’d found it, or, rather, Hiller had found it for him. He was like one of those neglected dogs tied in a backyard which you know has taken one kick too many and wants to sink its teeth into somebody. Kurt wanted a bite, too, but Hiller wouldn’t give it to him. He kept telling him to do what he was told, stick to the plan, and Meinecke kept asking when, when, when do I get to hit him?
By the end of the seventh round Meinecke was in bad shape, blood leaking out of both nostrils, an eye swollen shut, a split lip. I put my mouth to his ear and said, “Get it over, Kurt. Next time he hits you – drop. Fuck this noise.”
“I got to get my chance. All of them laughing at me. It isn’t that I don’t want to hit him. If Norman would just let me hit him. When Norman says – then look out.” He was staring across the ring at Scutter.
Norman shoved me roughly to one side. “How many fucking times I got to say it!” he shouted at Meinecke. “You’re supposed to be lipping him and you stand there like a goddamn dummy! Yap at him! Tell him he’s a pussy! Do something!”
“I can’t. I get mixed up. It’s the noise. I can’t remember what I’m supposed to say,” Meinecke said, on the verge of tears. “Just let me hit him, Norman.”
“You got to earn the right to hit him,” said Hiller. “I want you to be professional. You think I invested all this time in you so’s you can go out there and make me look like a loser? You get him mad, really mad, I’ll let you hit him. For Christ’s sake we got a plan here.” He paused. “Be a fucking man, Meinecke.”
Meinecke went out and took another battering. He stood there with his gloves up, elbows clamped down hard on his ribs, chin ducked into his chest, and took his beating. Wobbling and staggering, he took it. He was flinching now before he was even hit, out of fear of being hit. But he didn’t try to run from it. And when the bell rang and Scutter turned to stalk back to his corner he tried more. There he stood with his arms hanging helplessly at his sides, his mouth working. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to take hold of those things that Hiller wanted him to say and fling them after Scutter, but his rage and his shame were obstacles to his finding them. Or perhaps he didn’t have mean, dirty taunts in him, only blind, suffocating rage. He stuttered, he stammered. “Yyy-ou,” he said. “Yyy-ou …” But it was useless, hopeless. The crowd was whooping and caterwauling. “Pardon me?” they shouted. “Come again?” “Take a seat, harelip!”
Defeated, he blundered back to the rest of The Magnificent Seven in conference in his corner. Norman was not sympathetic. “I couldn’t believe my ears,” he said. “Who holds your fucking hand when you cross the street, Meinecke?” Kurt didn’t say anything. He dropped on the chair and covered his face with the gloves. I could only guess what was going on behind them. The sight of Meinecke sitting there with his face covered was quieting the hall.
Norman exploited the hush for his own purposes. “Hey,” I heard him shout across the ring to Scutter. “Meinecke says for you to pull all the stops out. Either that or get a dress. He says you’re a pussy puncher, Scutter! And he eats pussy!”
Scutter squinted, the mask of acne darkened. “Yeah?” he shouted back. “Yeah?”
“Fucking right.” Hiller poked Meinecke. “Do I speak the truth, or do I speak the truth? Is that pussy over there, or is that pussy over there?” Meinecke slowly raised his face from his gloves. He scanned the hall with glazed eyes. “Pussy,” he said in a quiet, muffled voice.
Hiller cupped his hand behind his ear. “What’s that? I’m not getting that.”
“Pussy,” Meinecke said, loudly this time. “Definitely pussy.”
“You heard it from the horse’s mouth,” shouted Hiller. “Go home and put a rag on, Scutter. Get ready to bleed.”
“That flabby fuck is dead,” Scutter said. “Right where he sits he’s dead.”
But Hiller wasn’t listening. Already he was squatting down directly before Meinecke, hands on his fighter’s knees, looking up into his face, speaking urgently. “Listen, he’s mad. We got him mad. The bell goes, he’s going to take a run at you. Just like round one. Take four steps into the ring and then wait. Wait for him. He’s coming on, he’s coming on hard, and you cold cock him. Same as hitting the heavy bag. Same punch. He’s bowling in, he doesn’t expect nothing, and you stiff him. Understand?”
“You mean hit him?” Kurt asked. He didn’t seem to understand he was finally getting the green light.
“Not hit him,” said Norman. “Kill the fucker.”
Meinecke thudded his gloves together. He’d got it.
I was holding my breath. I let it out when Dooey clanged the pie plate. Scutter was coming in, hard. Kurt stopped, braced himself per instructions, swung. Swung like he’d done a thousand times at the heavy bag, one of those economical, sweet punches with the hip and the shoulder behind it and something added to the physics of it – pure hate. All that and Scutter collided right in front of my eyes. I heard a sound like knuckles cracking, saw a head snapping back, the whites of eyes flashing as they rolled in their sockets, heels skittering, and down he went, head bouncing off the floor with a leaden clunk.
You could have heard a pin drop. Scutter rolled over, got his hands and knees under him. Dark red drops of blood splashed onto the floor from his nose, swept back and forth in a fine spray when he shook his head, trying to clear it.
“Count! Count, fuck face!” Norman screamed at Broward. He did. The first two numbers into a stunned silence; the next two into the kind of hysterical uproar occasioned by the death of one god and the birth of another. At five, Scutter began to creep about on all fours like some old blind dog trying to find the scent home. He crawled over to Broward’s legs, clutched one, and shakily started to pull himself up.
Scutter was reeling, one arm clasped around Broward’s waist, when Meinecke stepped in and chopped two hard, desperate blows into his temple, sending him crashing. It didn’t quite stop there either. The Master of Disaster, sobbing uncontrollably, kept pounding Scutter where he lay on the floor until Broward, Hiller, and me managed to drag him off.
For months afterward Hiller told and retold the story of how he had engineered the greatest upset in boxing history since Cassius Clay whipped Sonny Liston.
“I trained him perfect,” he’d say. “I brought him along just so. As soon as I seen him hit the heavy bag, well, there was no question but he could hit. The problem was making him want to hit. Fucking guy was too nice for his own good. So I took the mental approach because if he seen the damage he could do hitting somebody – he wouldn’t want to hit people any more. That’s where Hop Jump came in. Somebody to dance the night away with because no way, Jose, was Hop Jump going to let himself get hit.
“Scutter I was worried about. For him I designed the Cool Hand Luke def
ence. After a couple of rounds of that, Scutter figured he didn’t have nothing to worry about. And Meinecke – the pounding he was taking – that had to get to him, that had to piss him off. And everybody laughing at him, that twisted him, and me sitting on him, not letting him hit, that twisted him more. Psychology. He had to blow. I loaded him, I cocked him, I pulled the trigger.”
Kurt was never the same guy after the fight. Deke, Hop Jump, Murph, everybody in Hiller’s gang began to notice that he was avoiding them. He avoided me too. No more long conversations late at night after the pool room closed down, walking those empty streets and talking about how, just around the corner, things were going to fall into place for us. When we ran into each other, we nodded, said a few words about nothing, and then edged away from each other like people who share a secret they would sooner forget.
There were other changes. His hair grew longer. He quit the football team, didn’t bother to go out for wrestling. He began to hang around with strange types, two or three assholes who had published poems in the yearbook about Vietnam and babies crying in Watts. Deke said he had heard that Meinecke was taking acoustic guitar lessons. Hiller said, “Fuck him. You can drag a person up to your level but if they don’t make an effort they’ll sink back to where they naturally belong.” Meinecke and his new friends cut a lot of classes and spent afternoons at the house of a girl whose mother worked, listening to records, smoking grass. Finally, with only three months of school to go before graduation, Kurt dropped out.
The last that was seen of Kurt Meinecke he was standing at the edge of the highway at five o’clock on a Sunday morning with his thumb stuck out. When those that had spotted him passed that way again a few hours later, he was gone.
Ray
IT WAS RAY’S WIFE WHO WAS responsible for planting in him the notion that something had been askew in his childhood, wrong in his upbringing. He didn’t want to believe this was true and Pam’s persistence in claiming it was led to their first fight as a married couple.
Things As They Are? Page 8
