Craig Davidson - The Fighter

Tommy’s professional record was 28-62-7. It once stood at 22-1, belted out against tomato cans handpicked by his brother and manager, Reuben, Rob’s father. He’d fought in local clubs throughout the state and across state lines in Akron, Scranton, Hartford. His only big-money fight had been at Madison Square Garden, on the under-card of the Holmes-Cooney tilt in ’83. Tommy squared off against Sammy “Night Train” Layne, a slippery southpaw from east Philly; Tommy’s shove-and-slug style, effective against unskilled biffers, was badly exposed by the ducking and weaving Layne. By the end of the eleventh round Tommy’s face was cut into ribbons, a severed artery above his left eye bringing forth blood in spurts. After that matchmakers lost interest and Reuben had a rough time lining up fights.

From there Tommy turned into a trial horse, the sort of workman who’ll take a stiff belt without folding. A good horse will give you ten solid rounds but never pose a serious threat to a contender. Tommy was in demand due to his rep as a bleeder: by the end of a fight he was a mess and his opponents came off looking like executioners. Until a mandatory pre-fight CAT scan showed a blood vessel had snapped inside his head. The NY boxing commission revoked its sanctioning license, citing medical unfitness.

Reuben Tully poked his head into the change room. Squat and potbellied, he was the polar opposite of his younger brother. He wore a rumpled button-down shirt and snap-brim hat; his short hair was shaved up the side of his head like a zek in some Russian internment camp.

“What’s this, social hour?” Reuben banged a fist on the lockers, set the brass locks jumping. “Ass in gear, Robbie. And Tommy, that big shitkicker from Buffalo’s waiting.”

“Tell him to hold his water.” Tommy snapped off a few ponderous jabs and smiled over at his nephew. “Time to make the donuts.”

Rob rose to the sink and studied his face hemmed by a red hood: unbroken nose, forehead peppered with acne, eyes of such pale blue his father joked they must be unscrewed nightly and soaked in bleach. Some days he felt handsome, or at least that he was working his way toward it. Yet he knew he was one hard punch away from a busted nose or split brow or knocked-out tooth. No way you can eat leather round after round and expect to keep your looks.

Fruit bats squeaked and fluttered in the dark roost between locker-room ceiling and furniture-store floor. Rob stared down at his hands: thick and calloused, joints swollen from all the rough treatment. Old man’s hands. He was only sixteen, but at times felt years older.

“Robbie!”

“Keep your shirt on,” he whispered to the mirror. Then: “Coming!”

Top Rank lit up now, vapor tubes popping and fritzing as they warmed. Three huge ceiling fans with oarlike blades stirred stale air around. A pair of middleweights skipped before a long mirror. Beyond them a young Mexie straw-weight performed burpees with a fifteen-pound medicine ball. A two-hundred-pound anvil with the words that bitchpainted on its side sat beside him; boxers in a dick-swinging mood occasionally goaded each other, “Go on — lift that bitch!”

The gym was dominated by its ring: twenty feet by twenty feet and enclosed by sagging red ropes. The canvas stank of blood and sweat; to the best of anyone’s knowledge it had not been replaced in thirty years. Spitbuckets were strapped to opposite ring posts: wide-mouthed funnels attached to flexible PVC hose trailing down to five-gallon drums once containing oleo lard. The walls were hung with cobwebbed Golden Gloves belts and framed photos of young boxers who now made their living as plumbers or foremen or short-order cooks. Handwritten signs rife with misspellings: club dews must be paid at the STARTof the MONTH!!!CLUB TOWULS ARE FOR SWET ONLY,not BLOOD!!!use lockers at own risk — not responsibul for LOSTgear!!!

Written above the wall-length mirror in neat block letters:

WE ARE EDUCATED IN PAIN.

Top Rank was operated by a consortium of managers and trainers — Reuben Tully was one of them — who collected dues to pay the rent and sent whatever was left over to an absentee landlord in Boca Raton. In exchange for this stewardship, they were given free rein to train their own prospects.

The club office was a glassed-in cube accessible by a short flight of stairs. Its door split horizontally and opened in two portions; the trainers hung out up there and kept the top portion open so that they could holler directions at their charges. Reuben sold sodas, snacks, and gum out of the office. Prices were gratifyingly archaic: 50¢ for a bottle of Coke, 40¢ for a Snickers bar, 25¢ bought you a pack of Wrigley’s, and Cracker Jack set you back 35¢. Reuben iced the sodas in an ancient cooler and popped the tops off with an opener in the shape of a naked lady, cap slotted between her spread legs.

“Hit the rope, Rob,” Reuben called down. “Five rounds warm-up, then five hard.”

Rob unsnarled a skipping rope from the pile and took a spot beside the middleweights. After three minutes the buzzer sounded; the middleweights rested but Rob kept on, sweat coming back now, trickling down the knobs of his spine.

When the buzzer went again he kicked it up: running in place, double passes, crossovers. The middleweights matched his pace. In boxing gyms, an undercurrent of competition underlay all things: I can skip rope faster, run farther, move slicker, punch harder, fight prettier, absorb more punishment; my mind-body-heart is made of sterner stuff than yours. I can take you down any old time I want, better believe that.

Rob spied two of Top Rank’s gym bums perched on the worn bleachers overlooking the ring. Gym bums were a common sight in boxing clubs: old trainers and managers, distinguished by their gray hair, chicken chests, and outrageous tales. You’ll find the same breed in barber shops and Legion halls, anyplace men can get away with telling barefaced lies. Today’s bums were a pair of grizzled fogies, one black, the other white. Rob never saw the two of them enter or leave, nor did he catch them singly: he’d break from training and see them rowed along a bench that’d stood empty moments before, huddled together as though coalesced from stale gym air.

“Now take a look at that,” the white bum said, nodding at the heavyweight, Scarpella. “He’s got a punch, yessir, I’ll grant you. But now I trained a light-heavy, Johnny Paycheck, once knocked out a horse. Johnny had to pose with this racing horse, a photo op for his upcoming fight; he was smoking a cigar.

Smoke must’ve upset the horse ’cause it blew snot all over Johnny’s herringbone blazer. Wellsir Johnny near about knocked the poor beast into horsey heaven.” He raised his right hand solemnly. “My hand to God.”

Reuben Tully hammered the office window. “Two hundred sit-ups,” he hollered down at his son, “and a hundred push-ups!”

Rob grabbed a medicine ball and sat on a mat worn to wafer-thinness over the years. He performed the sit-ups, twisting to work his adductor muscles. Then he flipped over and burned off knuckle push-ups, woofing out breath on each pop.

In the ring Tommy and Scarpella got to work. Scarpella was in his early twenties with ham-sized fists and a shovel-shaped head. He moved as though the ring were a town whose geography he sought to familiarize himself with, pushing his jab out with all the zip of a funeral dirge. Tommy let the kid maneuver him into a corner and bang his body before dropping his right fist, bringing it up through Scarpella’s sloppy guard to thump him under the heart. Tommy was going to hit him again when the buzzer went. Like a factory worker who punches out the minute the whistle blows, he lowered his hands.