by Teddy Atlas
The old man was frozen, looking at me, holding the phone. Billy jumped over the counter and grabbed the receiver out of his hand. He called 911. “A cop’s been shot,” he yelled into the mouthpiece.
Less than five minutes later, half a dozen cop cars and an ambulance were there. I could hear a helicopter’s blades beating up above. In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, one of the cops with me said, “The kid might bleed to death before we get there.” When I heard that, I was afraid to close my eyes or let go of consciousness. “My father,” I mumbled. “You gotta get my father. He’s a famous doctor….”
They took me to Marine Hospital (now called Bailey Seton), the place I’d worked as a janitor. As they were wheeling me in, I kept saying, “Let my father do it.” The last thing I remember thinking about before I lost consciousness was his schedule.
It wasn’t my father who sewed me up; it was an Asian physician, Dr. Lee. It took four hundred stitches. Two hundred on the outside, two hundred on the inside. My father showed up later that night. I opened my eyes and there he was.
“How is it?” I asked.
“The cut will heal, but you’re going to have a scar for the rest of your life.” He looked at his hand. There were notes written on his skin. Appointments, prescriptions, phone numbers, things like that.
“I have to go,” he said.
I wanted to say something to him, or have him say something to me. But neither of us seemed to know how.
“Good night, Teddy.”
Later that night some of my buddies came to visit me in the hospital. Bruce Spicer, Mousey, and some other guys I knew from the corner. They were all worked up. They were gonna get the guys who had done this. I didn’t care about that. I was fixated on something else entirely: the gold ring that I always wore around my neck on a chain was gone.
“Bruce, you have to find that ring,” I said. “The chain must have broken during the fight.”
“Teddy, it’ll never be there. It’s Broad Street. Forget about it.” He and the rest continued talking about finding the guys in the Caddy.
“No, the ring,” I said. “You gotta get the ring.”
They stopped talking and looked at me. My voice was so full of intensity, all they could do was kind of shrug, like, all right, we’ll go look for it.
The reason the ring had such importance to me was that it had belonged to my childhood friend Sean Timpone, who had died the year before. Sean and I had always been close; we had a real comradeship. When we were young kids, he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and confined to a wheelchair. I used to go take him out and wheel him around the parks in Staten Island. He loved nature and animals, and he was always reading up on various wildlife, talking about how the animals needed to be protected or they’d become extinct. Out in the woods in these parks, we’d pretend that we were seeing all these extinct animals from the prehistoric era. He loved to fantasize about things like that.
When I had left for Catskill, Sean’s condition was deteriorating. Sometime during the year I was up there, I got a call from his father that Sean was in the hospital and very sick. I took the next train back. He was in Doctor’s Hospital, one of the two hospitals my father founded. Even though it was past visiting hours, all the nurses knew me, and they let me in. I found Sean in an oxygen tent. He could barely talk. One of the things he had told me, after he realized that he wasn’t going to be cured, was that he didn’t want to die in a hospital. I put my hand underneath the tent and took his hand and began reading him this poem that Cus always gave to all of his fighters. It was called “Don’t Quit,” and the last couple of lines went, “You can never tell how close you are / It may be near when it seems afar / So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit / It’s when things go wrong that you must not quit!”
I didn’t even know if Sean could hear it, but I just kept reading the poem to him. Over and over, I don’t know how many times. The next morning, someone touched me and I opened my eyes. It was Sean’s father.
“Teddy, the nurses told me you’ve been here since last night!”
“Yeah, I guess I fell asleep.”
He was amazed. He told me how much it meant to him that I was such a loyal friend. “Now you should go back home,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do here.”
I traveled back to Catskill, and when I got there, Sean’s father called and thanked me again, saying whatever I’d said to Sean had helped, because he’d made a small recovery. “Enough so that he could come home.”
“That’s what he wanted,” I said.
“He always hated cages,” his father said.
Two days later, Sean died. His parents asked me to be one of the pallbearers. At the funeral, they had an open casket. Sean’s mother slid the ring off his finger while I was standing there—his fingers had gotten so thin in his illness that it just came right off—and she gave it to me.
That’s the reason why, even with four hundred stitches in my face, I was concerned about finding that ring. I knew there was only a slim chance that my buddies would find it—I mean, a gold ring lying on the street in that neighborhood?
When they came back a few hours later, they looked grim. Then Bruce Spicer smiled and opened his palm. The ring!
“I’m as surprised as you are, Teddy. I never thought we’d find it. Not there. I mean, there was dried blood all over the street. But there it was, lying on the yellow line.”
That wasn’t the end of the story with the ring. A couple of months later, I was hanging on the corner with Spicer and Mousey and Ronnie Sabino. I had this big scar now, running from my scalp down to my jaw. It matched the person I was becoming. On this particular day, these guys, who weren’t as rough as some of the guys I was running with, decided they wanted to go camping. They wanted me to go with them.
“Camping?” I said. “You gotta be kidding.”
“Nah, it’ll be great.”
They pooled some money together, went to the army surplus store, bought sleeping bags, canteens, canned food, the whole thing. My attitude was, I’m not going. I’d rather go rob a delicatessen. But they dragged me along. We went to Lake Minnewaska, upstate. As soon as we got out of the car, these guys were into it. They got their hatchets out, started chopping branches, looking at their compasses, everything. “Who do you guys think you are,” I said, “Grizzly Adams?”
I might have been making jokes, but what I was really thinking about was Sean, how this was really his world, how he would have loved it. It made me miss him. Meanwhile, these wackos were shooting slingshots and trying to start a fire with two sticks.
We ended up going on this long hike to the top of this mountain. It was beautiful. You have to understand, I was living a bad life, and this was the cleanest, nicest thing I’d done in a while. There was no question that if I hadn’t been there, I would have been robbing places with Billy.
On the hike back, a branch hit me in the neck, and a moment later I felt my neck and realized the ring was gone.
“The ring!” I yelled.
“Oh no, not the ring again!”
These guys all knew what it meant. We looked all over the place, retracing our steps, turning over rocks, sifting through leaves. We couldn’t find it. “It’s gotta be here,” I said. It was getting dark by then.
“Teddy,” Spicer said. “We’ll come back. We’ll bring metal detectors. We’ll find it.” At last, I relented and we gave up the search. We marked the trees in the area with the hatchets, and made our way back to the car. It’s hard to explain, but in some way I felt that Sean had taken the ring away from me. I know it sounds crazy, but I began to think that he was trying to tell me that he didn’t approve of the way I was living. I’ll never know if that was true (I never went back to look for the ring), but not long after that trip something did actually happen that wound up pushing me in a positive direction: I was approached by these two kids who asked me to train them, Joe “the Blade” Slattery and Freddie Koop.
They just came up to me
one day while I was standing on the corner and said they needed someone to train them, could I do it? I thought, Did Cus send these guys to me?
I knew Cus had never lost hope that he was going to get me to go back to Catskill to work with him. I knew he had tried with the Ohio State Fair. At the same time, I also knew it wasn’t Cus actually sending these kids; that would have been a bit farfetched, even for him.
Joe and Freddie were fifteen or sixteen years old. They were both thin, but Joe, especially, was on the skinny side. He was tall, about six feet three, maybe 175 pounds, with dark hair, olive skin, and dark, melancholy eyes. The reason they called him “the Blade” had less to do with how skinny he was than with his proficiency at using the 007 flick knife—the same kind that I’d gotten cut with. He came from a messed-up family—one brother was a methadone addict and had stabbed him, another brother had hit him with a baseball bat—I mean, he was lucky to have survived. Freddie had his own problems, though not nearly as bad. They were both looking for something, I guess, some kind of structure and discipline. The fact that they came to me blew my mind. But I said yes.
I took them over to a gym in the basement of the church that was run by my old mentor from the PAL, Ray Rivera. He was the same as ever, still having the kids put their mouthpieces in the communal jar by the door. I’d been one of his toughest kids, and he had a soft spot for me. He helped me out, let us use some of his equipment, gloves and wraps, jump ropes and other stuff. This was in the springtime. A month later, the church closed the basement for the summer. I didn’t consider stopping; I asked Ray if we could borrow some equipment for a few months. He had an extra pair of gloves he could spare, a pair of hand pads, and a few other things he let us have.
We trained outdoors, in Silverlake Park, near the reservoir, every day from two to five in the afternoon. Ray had been able to spare only one pair of boxing gloves, but we were okay so long as we were just working on conditioning, footwork, and technique. Once we started sparring, though, I needed another pair of gloves. Hanging on my bedroom wall, I had these gold-colored gloves that my friend Johnny “the Heat” Verderosa had worn the night he won the New York Golden Gloves. The reason he’d given them to me was that I’d helped him out when he was preparing for the finals, even though I was sick with a 102-degree fever and had to get out of bed to spar with him. My doing that had meant so much to Johnny that he tried to give me the golden gloves the Daily News had awarded him. Of course, I wouldn’t take them. Instead, he gave me the gloves he had fought with that night. So that’s what we were using.
People in the park would stop to watch us. We didn’t have a ring. We were sparring on the open grass. And they would watch: old people, kids, parkies, junkies, pigeons, couples holding hands. We were oblivious to everything, caught up in what we were doing. Sometimes, at the end of the day, when it was particularly hot, we’d jump in the reservoir to cool off. We weren’t supposed to—it was illegal—but we did it anyway.
One time, the cops caught us. They drove their car down across the grass. Freddie and I were near the shore, but Joe was in the middle of the reservoir, and when he saw them, his street instincts took over. He swam away from them, all the way to the other side. They drove around to intercept him. Joe turned around and swam back. They drove around again, he swam back again. Finally, they got out of the car. Joe was on the other shore, lying in the shallows, exhausted. They said, “Well, you finished or you want to swim some more laps?” It was like they knew we weren’t bad; they had that soft edge to them. They said to me, “You’re not going to make him do his roadwork today, are you?”
“I guess not.”
“Listen, we don’t wanna have to give you a summons, so don’t go in the water on our shift, okay? See what time it is?”
It was a quarter to four.
“We change shifts in fifteen minutes, and the other guys don’t get here right away.” They were basically telling us when it would be okay to swim. They could see we were all right, that we were doing something positive.
There was one guy who walked by every day at the same hour. I never knew who he was at the time because he wasn’t wearing his collar, but I found out that it was this priest, Father Murphy. Years later, after I had started becoming well known as a trainer, he told my mother, “One of the things, Mary, I always felt good about, is that I would take my evening constitutionals knowing that your son and his young charges were there to watch me.”
The park was changing. There were more and more drugs around, and it wasn’t as safe as it once had been. Father Murphy told my mother, “I adjusted my walks to coincide with the hours Teddy and his boys were going to be there because I knew if something happened, they’d look out for me.” Every once in a while, he would stop, look, and make a comment. He’d say something like, “Keep the left up,” and then continue walking.
I was a stern taskmaster. I made rules for Joe and Freddie that extended beyond our workouts. They couldn’t stay out on the corner too late. They couldn’t be around drugs. They couldn’t drink. Meanwhile, I was going out at night, after our training sessions, and robbing people. I knew it was screwed up—I mean, I would not let these kids do one thing wrong, and yet there I was doing what I was doing.
What changed everything started one night at this low-life bar down on Bay Street by the waterfront. It was a place called Mandia’s. They had a late crowd there. People would come in around one, two in the morning. Screwed-up, lost souls, the kind of people who gravitate to places like that. I guess I was one of them. I’d go there looking for trouble, and more often than not I’d find it. On this particular night, trouble started over a game of pool. I put my quarter up on the table, and when it came my turn, some asshole tried to cut in front of me. He was with two other guys. One thing led to another, and I cracked the guy with a pool ball. One of his friends hit me with a pool stick. By the time it spilled out onto the sidewalk, I had broken one guy’s jaw and another guy’s nose. They kind of quit at that point, and I went home.
Four in the morning at the end of what was a long night, I was in bed, half asleep, and I got a call from Billy Sullivan. “Teddy, we got big problems. Those guys that you beat up found out where you live and they’re saying they’re going to burn your house down.”
Burn my house down? It was my parents’ house.
“They realize they’re all going to die if that happens,” I said.
“I’m just telling you what they said.”
“You made it very clear to them that they’re going to die?”
“Yes.”
“All right. You tell them they can meet me somewhere and we’ll straighten this thing out.”
Billy said he’d get the word to them.
Half an hour later, I drove over to Teckie’s Bar on Gordon Street. When I got there, they were already there. One of them couldn’t fight because his jaw was broken, but the other two were ready to go. When you were fighting two guys at once, the key thing was to nail one guy good right away, because then the other guy tended to lose a little courage. So I hit this one guy a shot before he even knew what was happening, and he went down. His head hit the ground and bounced. The other guy saw that and took off. Everyone took off. My instinct was to get out of there, too. I jumped in my car and drove off.
About a block away, I started thinking about the fact that everybody just left the one guy there on the street. His friends, everyone, they just left him. I turned around and drove back. I knew I couldn’t afford to get in trouble. I was still on parole. But I went back.
At first, I tried to revive the guy. When that didn’t work, I dragged him down the street and into the backseat of my car. I took him to Marine Hospital. I went into the emergency room and told them at the desk that I had a guy who was unconscious in my car and I needed them to bring a stretcher out. So they wheeled the guy in. I was about to leave when the nurse at the desk said, “Wait, you can’t leave. We need some information. Where did you find him?”
“I found him on th
e street.”
“What do you mean you found him on the street? Was he drinking? Was there a fight?”
I said, “Yeah, there was a fight. I saw guys running.” I wasn’t even thinking about how I must have looked. That I had bruises and marks on me. “Just do me a favor,” I said. “Tell me if he came to.” I was a little worried because he was still unconscious when I brought him in.
“They’re working on him now. He’s still unconscious. Sit down and we’ll let you know.”
I was uneasy about it, but I sat down. After about five minutes, I realized what was going on. I got up and ran for the door. Too late. The cops were coming in. It’s not a good sign when the cops see you and say, “Hello, Teddy.” It was the same pair that had arrested me in the bar with Billy Sullivan.
They handcuffed me and then brought me back inside. Meanwhile, the guy had come to, and he identified me. I knew I was screwed. The guy’s orbital bone—the bone right below the eye—was fractured. They had to do surgery, take the eye out, repair the bone, and then put the eye back in the socket. With something like that, it was going to be a minimum of first-degree assault. Put that on top of my previous record, and the outlook was grim.
They put me in lockup, and a few days later I went before a grand jury, which is the step in the justice process where they ask you a lot of questions and then decide whether to indict you. My lawyer prepared me well. “Don’t deny anything,” he said. “You tell them you didn’t want to fight, but you had to, it was self-defense. When they say, ‘You’ve been arrested. You’re out on parole,’ you say, ‘Yes, that’s the reason I did not want this to happen.’” I did exactly what he said, and it worked (or at least I thought so until I found out what had really happened), and they didn’t indict me. The DA came up to me afterward and said, “You’re a very lucky guy. But you better start making some different choices in your life. Otherwise, you’re going to wind up dead or in prison.”
