Pound for Pound

by F. X. Toole

  Pound

  for

  Pound

  a novel

  F. X. TOOLE

  For God,

  and for my children—

  Erin Patricia,

  Gannon Michael,

  Ethan Patrick—

  whom I knew and loved in the womb,

  and who saved me from an early death

  And since I may not live long enough

  to write and dedicate another one of these things,

  allow me to express my great gratitude to, and respect

  for, that distinguished man of letters himself,

  Daniel Patrick O’Halpern,

  the Ecco Kid.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  FOREWORD

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  ALSO BY F. X. TOOLE

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  LET ME AT LEAST NOT DIE WITHOUT A STRUGGLE, INGLORIOUS, BUT HAVING DONE SOME BIG THING FIRST, FOR MEN TO COME TO KNOW OF.

  —HECTOR

  And when ye come and all the flowers are dying If I am dead, as dead I well may be You’ll come and find the place where I am lying And kneel and say an Ave there for me.

  —”DANNY BOY”

  FOREWORD

  Boxing tempts writers.

  It bids them to riff on the contained savagery of the prizefight. It entices them to explore the endeavor in terms of masculinity, race, and class. It lures them into an unapologetically all-male world. It taunts them with the knowledge that they do not and will not ever belong. It humbles them with the knowledge that they must remain circumspect and explicate that world from an outsider’s perspective.

  Writers approach boxing as idolaters, inquisitors, wannabes, and manqués. They see boxing as an enclosed society and a groovy, blood-and-guts lifestyle. The entry price is high. Non-combatants endure tedium and hitch themselves to stars that never shine. The fighters themselves chase an always-fleeting glory through the sustained cultivation and infliction of pain. Boxing levies high dues in return for short payoffs. Writers want to visit, but not live there. They come for the pathos and drama, then move on.

  F. X. Toole was the exception. He worked as a trainer and cut man. He backstopped stiffs, trial horses, journeymen, and fringe contenders. He never brought up a titlist or cable-TV stud. He loved the fight game. He came to it as a non-writer and left it as the best boxing writer of his era. The fight world seduced him. He paid his dues and lucked into a high-end payoff. His fight-world transit led him to write—from the inside out.

  His subject matter was preordained and rigorously circumscribed. He understood specific fight-game truths and their symbolic underpinnings as outside writers could not. The Fight World is the Outside World condensed and refracted. It is a world of great toil and pain. Definable laurels rarely accrue. Dubious laurels pale behind the heavy human cost. The satisfactions are prosaic and known only to the participants in the craft. The dividends are wholly those of witness. Perseverance, stamina, fidelity, and bravery come with the job.

  F. X. Toole knew all this. I met him once, and knew that he knew it.

  My literary agent and close friend, Nat Sobel, introduced me. We had lunch at the Argyle Hotel in Los Angeles. Nat knew that I was a longtime and fanatical fight fan. He had just sold Toole’s short-story collection, Rope Burns, to an American publisher and wanted to hit me up for a blurb. I arrived for lunch. Toole and I talked fights for two hours—insider to outsider.

  We discussed the craft. We covered great body punchers, shit-for-brains headhunters, our Mexican bantamweight–featherweight ten-best lists. We dissected vexing southpaws of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and mourned the early death of Salvador Sánchez. I brought up the first Archie Moore–Yvon Durelle fight.

  It was December‘58. I was ten years old. Moore defended his light-heavyweight crown in Montreal. Moore’s age was up for speculation. He was at least forty-three. Durelle was a brutally strong Quebecois, down from heavyweight. He floored Moore four times in round one. Moore came back and stopped him in six. Their war made me a fight fiend for life.

  Toole was thrilled that I knew the fight. I asked him what he was doing then. He dodged the question. He told me his fight career commenced years later. He only wanted to talk Fights. The Fights comprised his entire dialogue with the world. The World was the Fights and the Fights were the World. The Fights mediated everything that he saw and felt. The Fights were the fulcrum for and the basis of all his notions of human drama. I read the stories in Rope Burns, and saw this single-mindedness strike gold. The book was dead rich in details that only a fight man could know. The book was savage and melancholy, and somehow heartbreakingly sweet.

  I queried some fight-game acquaintances. They told me Toole’s real name was Jerry Boyd, and he might have had some moniker before that. He looked fifty-five. He was closer to seventy. He held his mud. He didn’t trash-talk other trainers or fighters. He might have a bum ticker. Close-to-the-vest didn’t say it. With Jerry or F. X. or whoever he was, you never knew shit.

  Rope Burns was well-published. It exceeded sales expectations and received fine reviews. The story “Million Dollar Baby” was turned into an Academy Award–winning film that won Oscars for all the principals. F. X. Toole did not live to visit the set or hug the stars at the premiere. The rumor was true. He had a bum ticker. He died with a single short-story collection behind him—and one big, fat, unfinished novel manuscript.

  He carried it to the hospital. He was scheduled for emergency surgery and knew he might not survive. He was desperate to finish the book. He didn’t. He bequeathed nine hundred pages to his three children and Nat Sobel. Nat and a freelance editor named James Wade shaped the draft into the finished novel you are about to read.

  Toole’s savage and melancholy tone only deepens here. It’s a fully realized work, with a grace note of loss and elegy. It’s musical that way. It’s unaccountably soft. It’s an unfinished symphony trailing off in minor chords.

  F. X. Toole is dead. His short literary life was a notable one, and all about the Fights. To him, the World was the Fights and the Fights were the World. If there’s an afterlife, I hope there’s an 18-foot punchers’ ring there just for him.

  JAMES ELLROY

  9/26/05

  DAN

  Chapter 1

  In one way or another, Dan Cooley and Earl Daw had been partners for twenty years in the fight game, and co-owners for twelve in the body-and-fender business. Dan had opened the shop—Shamrock Auto Body—more than twenty years before Earl became a partner. Because of Earl’s bad hands, and because his wife had urged him to stop fighting, Earl hung up his gloves permanently when his first daughter was born. Earl’s deal with Dan was fifty-fifty,
and they’d sealed it with a handshake. Like their friendship, the deal had lasted.

  Earl Daw was a lean, dark-skinned black man who’d been born in the Nickerson Gardens projects in Watts. As a middleweight, with Dan as his trainer, he’d fought his way out of the projects and made money doing it. Because of Earl’s many one-punch knockouts, he was given the fighting name “Captain Hook” by sportswriters who recognized the devastating power in his left hand. But fight guys, guys on the inside, knew that Earl had soft hands, hands that would break under the tremendous force fighters can generate. Fight guys are known for being realists. Earl’s name in the gym went from Captain Hook to Softhand, but, because fight guys are also known to simplify, the nickname was shortened to Soff, and that stuck, as in, “Say, Soff!” What many didn’t know was that Earl was a converted southpaw, and that under his father’s, Shortcake’s, instruction, he’d changed his stance to move his power from his rear, or defensive hand, to the hand closer to his opponent, his offensive hand. That change in stance often explained the knockout power of a big left-hooker.

  Dan Cooley’s skin was Irish skin, still had freckles on his arms if folks bothered to look, though age and the Los Angeles sun had darkened him some. If you looked closely at his face, you could see that something wasn’t quite right with one eye, the result of an injury that had put him out of the ring as a boxer and into the corner as a trainer. Some fight guys called Dan and Earl Salt and Peppa.

  Dan would answer, “Yeah, but I’m tired of this Salt bullshit. I wanna be Peppa.”

  Earl would add, “Yeah, an’ I be tired a bein Peppa. I wanna be Salt so I can get all that white pussy out there.”

  “No good, Earl, I been with white women all my life,” Dan would say, and point to his white hair. “Look at what they done to me, and I’m only twenty-eight years of age.”

  It was a show they’d put on, and fight guys, black and white, loved it no matter how many times they watched it.

  Earl stood just inside the big roll-up door of the body shop and watched Dan get out of his truck, his movements slow and stiff, like an old man’s. These days Dan would be fiddling with paperwork in his office upstairs one minute and then suddenly gone, destination unknown. Trouble was, Earl never knew when Dan might return. If indeed he would return—that worried Earl a lot, each time. But he kept his mouth shut. And waited.

  That day it was hot and dusty, a typical early fall day in Los Angeles, but the grass was green inside St. Athanasius Cemetery. Greener still the Connemara marble base of the Cooley family gravestone. Dan stood there just staring at it, his eyes moving from one name down to the next. All those dates were burned into his memory, as ineradicable as the letters incised in the stone.

  BRENDAN CONNOR COOLEY 1963–1964

  TERRANCE DECLAN COOLEY 1961–1985

  MARY CATHERINE MARKEY 1965–1992

  EAMON DERMONT MARKEY 1960–1992

  Little Brendan, his second son, dead of acute lymphoblastic leukemia before his second birthday. Terry, his fireman son, buried alive when a retaining wall at a construction site collapsed as he worked to remove a trapped laborer. His daughter, Mary Cat, three months’ pregnant with her second child, and her husband, both killed when their plane missed the runway in Acapulco.

  He could still see the little boy, standing rigid as he looked at the two rose-covered coffins, his eyes aching and dry.

  “But why did they put my mom and dad inside those long boxes?” Timothy Patrick Markey asked.

  “Shhh, lad,” said his grandmother Brigid. Her voice still had a trace of old-country brogue, thick and rich as Irish brown bread, and her eyes were so green they often looked purple. “Wait until after Father Joe’s done.”

  The charred bodies of Tim Pat’s mother and father had been flown back from Mexico in sealed aluminum tubes by the very same airline that had interrupted their second honeymoon when one of its aircraft crashed on final approach.

  Tim Pat was six, bright as a new penny and full of life, but once he’d been told of his parents’ death, the tears Dan expected him to shed never came, just a frightening stillness. It had taken over four weeks for the Mexican authorities to identify and return the bodies to Dan and Brigid, Tim Pat’s grandparents. They moved Tim Pat’s bed into their bedroom, where he’d slept fitfully. He hardly spoke once he knew the bodies had arrived, and had said nothing at the rosary or at the funeral mass, but now he shivered like a cold pup and wanted answers.

  The priest finished at the grave site, and Brigid had Tim Pat sprinkle a pinch of dark earth on each coffin. As they walked away, Dan gave the aging priest an envelope with the same thousand-dollar donation for a Tijuana orphanage he’d made too often, and then rejoined his wife and Tim Pat. The priest, Father José Capetillo, was pastor at Christ the King Church, a refuge for the soul located near the Cooleys’ home in old Hollywood. Father Joe had lived and worked with his wetback mojado parents in Steinbeck’s Salinas, but he had been born in the Spanish-colonial city of Guanajuato, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. His family had made sure that he would not spend the rest of his life in stoop labor in fields owned by other people. The Jesuits took him in hand when he was in high school and put him on the straight and narrow path to the seminary.

  Father Joe would join the Cooleys at their home for the wake, as he had joined so many others at their homes, as he knew he would join yet more to come. He lowered his head. Almost daily, he went to what Miguel de Unamuno called the bottom of the abyss. Lord, there is so much I cannot explain to my flock. From whence do they come? Why are they here? Where are they going? Faith and hope would lift him from despair. Lord, I love you with my whole heart and soul and with all of my mind.

  Dan Cooley wasn’t so sure that he had any love left for the Lord. Maybe it had died along with all those he had loved and lost.

  Once they had angled their way through the other gravestones and arrived at the mortician’s limousine, Brigid cleaned the dirt off Tim Pat’s hand with a white linen handkerchief. The boy turned and looked back. He saw but did not want to believe. Gravediggers were pulling away the squares of fake grass from the dark rectangles in the ground.

  Tim Pat said, “Grandma, they’re not going to put my momma and daddy in those holes, are they?”

  Brigid had just buried her third and last child, her only daughter. Faith was all she had left to hang on to.

  “They must,” she said. “Yer mam and daddy’ve gone to God.”

  “The one up in heaven?” Tim Pat asked.

  “The same,” Brigid assured him.

  “Will God send them back to me?”

  His grandmother began to weep, her first tears since the call from Acapulco. “No, little one, He will not.”

  Tim Pat had an edge of something like anger in his voice. “But why not?”

  Dan put his arm around the boy’s frail shoulders. “Because that’s not how it works.”

  Tim Pat looked up at his grandfather. “How does it work?”

  Dan said, “Ah, God, I don’t know how it works.”

  Brigid and Dan approached their new task of raising their grandson guardedly. They were careful not to coddle him, though that was hard, now that they had lost all of their own children. Both knew that safeguarding Tim Pat in a sealed bubble of their dread could be as lethal for him as a gunshot. They allowed him to remain in his old school up by Sunset Boulevard at first, but a few weeks following the funeral, they enrolled him at Christ the King. For two weeks, either Brigid or Dan walked him the four and a half blocks from their house on Cahuenga to his new school. Both explained that he should go by way of Melrose Avenue; both taught him how to use crosswalks and to obey the signal at Rossmore; and for another week, one or the other would walk a half block behind him to make sure he got to school safely. He was quick to learn, and enjoyed meeting other kids along the way and walking with them on to school.

  Tim Pat had grown solemn, and having him walk to school alone was part of Brigid’s plan to help the downhearted little bo
y back into the world. Dan took him to the shop and taught him how to spread body filler and use sandpaper, to clean spray guns. The plan began to work. The nuns were helpful, and Sister Mary Virginia excitedly phoned Brigid the day Tim Pat had his first scuffle over who would be pitcher during a noontime ball game. And while he continued to be Tim Pat at home, the growing-up part of him insisted on just Tim in school and the great world beyond.

  Tim Pat’s second journey to St. Athanasius was to bury Brigid two years later, dead from cancer. He knew to sprinkle soil on his grandmother’s coffin, and as he stood up with the dirt between his fingers, he said, “Grandma won’t be back either, will she?”

  Dan could barely speak. “No.”

  Both of them stared at the name freshly incised into the gleaming green stone.

  BRIGID ANNE MANAHAN COOLEY 1940–1994

  Then Tim Pat asked, “But she’s with Mom and Dad, and Uncle Brendan and Terry, and they’re watching over us, right?”

  Dan took ten steps before he could speak, and then it was his mother’s, Nora’s words, not his, that came from his mouth. “Sure, and why wouldn’t they be?”

  Dan sprinkled a few grains of loose soil on the green gravestone and hobbled to his truck. He dropped back down North Broadway to Chávez, hooked a right, and passed under the Pasadena Freeway, where Chávez becomes the Sunset Boulevard that leads west through Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and on to the Pacific Ocean. Dan stayed on Sunset until the fork at Santa Monica Boulevard, and then took it on into his part of Hollywood. Instead of pulling into the shop on Cole, he forced himself to drive past it a half block to Melrose, where he turned right after a block, to Wilcox, and circled back to park in front of the gym beneath the eucalyptus tree.

  The gym was in an old building that had survived earthquakes that had destroyed prettier, newer buildings, and had knocked down segments of freeways, wrecked bridges, and tumbled hospitals. Behind the boarded-up windows at the front was an interior of high ceilings and exposed metal beams. Like a fighter’s body, it was lean and spare. Places on the hardwood floor showed smooth, bare wood through worn varnish where fighters down the years had shadowboxed or jumped rope. There were circles of bare wood around the body bags and beneath the speed bags. There were sixteen-inch spit funnels crusted with years of dry mucous. Hoses ran from the funnels to five-gallon white plastic spit buckets on the floor. Neither ring had padding beneath its slick canvas. These were boxers’ rings, no padding meant fast. A workout timer against one wall would mark off three-minute rounds and one-minute rest periods. Once fighters had been in the game for a while, they knew instinctively when the warning buzzer should sound, when the bell would ring. There were no stools to rest on. Fighters don’t sit between rounds when sparring.