Tom Schreck - On the Ropes

Whatever this was, it needed to be exorcised and I knew how. It was going to mean something I’d never done before but knew how to do. I might not be a top-ten fighter, but I’ve spent years in inner-city gyms paying the tuition of this game. I knew boxing in and out, and that included the underbelly of what was sometimes a cruel and unforgiving game. Suggs had the strength, he had the talent, but he hadn’t paid for his tuition like I had. He was brought along, managed, and taken care of, and he didn’t know about the respect that was due to another fighter.

I’ve seen and known some fighters who the average guy on the street would think were the biggest assholes in the world. A lot of those guys understood the gym and understood the code fighters lived by, and I respected them. Maybe they wouldn’t be getting citizen-of-the-year awards, but around gyms they had integrity. Suggs pissed on that integrity, he pissed on me and a man like Smitty, a man who should be revered in this. He also hated people for the sake of hate, and I decided then and there that he had to be taught a lesson-Duffy Dombrowski, judge, jury, and executioner.

When Smitty came to my room, I stared straight ahead with nothing but a scowl. I’m usually loose before a bout, cracking wise and making jokes, but this was different and Smitty didn’t like it at all.

“Boy, where’s your head at?” Smitty said.

“I’m good, Smitty, let’s get there,” I said.

“Son,” Smitty almost begged. “It’s about the movement, remember?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

We waited for the preliminaries, and with two fights to go before the bout, Smitty wrapped my hands. He kept looking up at me with a worried expression on his face. He was concerned, even baffled, because after fifteen years together he’d never seen me like this. When it was time to go, I stared straight ahead and when they announced me, I walked out instead of jogging with my usual bouncing and trotting.

I had on my custom-made trunks, which blended the Irish, Polish, and American flags together. Usually, I come out to Elvis’s opening, the Space Odyssey theme, but tonight I changed it to Elvis’s song “Trouble.” The King was screaming a challenge about whether another man had the guts to look me right in my eye, and I knew that this guy was about to get the trouble he seemed so eager to find.

The crowd booed and heckled, but it sounded like it was detached from me. Soon after I made it into the ring, the crowd erupted as Suggs made his entrance to some goofy country song about kickin’ ass. He was thumping his chest and acting like he was coming to a coronation rather than a fight. He danced past me when he entered the ring.

“You’re getting hurt, you nigger-lovin’ Mick Polack,” he said.

I stared straight ahead, just barely shuffling my legs to stay loose. When the ref called us together for the final instructions, I stared right through Suggs. He said some bullshit that I didn’t hear. I just looked through his eyes. I could taste it.

The bell rang, and I came out in my southpaw stance. I studied the ref’s movement, noticed he was inexperienced, and right from the opening bell I could see he was easy to get out of position. Suggs threw a hook that I partially blocked and partially took on the side of the head. He could hit and it wobbled me.

The crowd cheered like Suggs was the second coming of Joe Louis and Ali mixed together, and I decided to do what I had to do sooner rather than later. The tuition I spent in gyms for years paid for a lot, and not all of it on the square. Tonight, it didn’t matter. Tonight was about something else.

I moved to my right, making sure the ref was behind my left shoulder. I gave Suggs a stutter step to get him on his heels and then I threw my right jab as hard as I could. The jab is the best thing I throw, but tonight I gave it something extra. In the split second before it was to land on Suggs’s face, I snapped my right hand down counterclockwise and I stretched my thumb out as far as I could. My thumb landed solidly into Suggs’s eye and I felt his eyeball give slightly and then bounce against the back of the bony orbital. It was thrown perfectly.

Suggs gasped and then grabbed his eye, temporarily blinded while I threw a wicked body shot into his left side. That made him drop his guard, which was exactly what I wanted. Then, I stepped closer to him and threw an uppercut with my left, except I deliberately made my fist miss his chin and instead connected with my elbow. My elbow came directly in contact with his jawbone and it made a sick crackly sound. His knees crumpled and he went through the ropes.

As Suggs lay on the ring apron going in and out of consciousness, I called to him.

“Hey, asshole- nis govia and top of the mornin’ to you!” I figured he liked my heritage so much I wished him good health in Polish and good luck in Irish.

Then I spit on him.

The crowd and the ref hadn’t picked up the thumb and the elbow, but they did catch me spitting on him, and that’s when the bedlam started. Beer cups started to fly, Suggs’s corner started to yell at me and Smitty, and the crowd, which was made up of a bunch of toothless Deliverance extras, were getting nuts. There were about two thousand fans there and not a single one for me. It was definitely time to go.

Smitty grabbed me and we ran straight out the exit for the car, getting pelted with beer and popcorn and everything else on the way out. Whatever we had in the locker room wasn’t worth going back for. We started the car and hit the gas and got out of there as fast as we could. We got back to the Ramada, packed whatever shit we had, and got back in the car. Smitty drove us about twenty miles to a nameless motor inn where no one could find us, checking all the way to make sure no one was following us.

It wasn’t until we had checked in to the new motel that we had a chance to say anything to each other. We checked in to separate rooms and for the longest time I just stared into the mirror looking at myself like I was going to find some sense in what had happened. I feared Smitty wouldn’t want anything to do with me, that I violated everything he held dear, and that I was going to lose him and, more importantly, his respect, forever. I needed Smitty; he’d been my anchor since I was a zit-faced teen, and the thought of losing his respect made me feel sick. I couldn’t take that now, not with everything else swirling.

I wasn’t real confident about my mental state. I mean, I knew what I just did and I did it on purpose. I’m glad I did it, but that worried me. Something… something to do with the mess of Walanda’s lost life, the potential of her stepdaughter losing hers, and the bullshit cruelty Mikey and Eli were suffering was eating at me. Maybe it was that existential angst bullshit about the cold cruel world, or maybe that thinking was just a convenient way of categorizing it to cover up the fact that I let Walanda down. She asked for help and I didn’t give it.

Then there was Mikey and Eli, and even with all my day-in and day-out touchy-feely social work bullshit, they were in hospital beds. Hey, they may be in excruciating pain, inches from death, but they can identify their feelings.

Fuck me.

I didn’t know what to do. I stared into the mirror for I don’t know how long and lost track of time.

A knock at the door brought me out of it. A quick look at the clock told me I had been in this motel for an hour and a half. I carefully cracked the door with the chain still on. It was Smitty. I let him in.

“I don’t know about you, Duff,” he cracked a smile, “but I need a beer.”

“Where’d you find the Schlitz?” I said.

“Right across the street there’s a beer distributor,” he said, pulling two cans out of the twelver.