“Just being able to do what I want to do,” he says, is what he thinks of the most. “Appreciate the freedom we have so willfully given up by doing stupid things.” It turns out that those “stupid things” are other shifting details. “Conspiracy to distribute narcotics” is not what the prison records say. They say robbery. Burglary. Theft.
Gently asked about that, Monroe begins to sweat. Mopping his face with a blue shop towel, he mumbles something about being “caught doing the theft of taking back something that was mine,” and getting the charges reduced for a shorter sentence.
Months later, after considerable digging, an old newspaper story will turn up another set of facts. It will name Monroe as a suspect known as the “Live-to-go-home bank robber.” Accused of robbing five San Francisco banks in five months, the suspect allegedly brandished no weapon—only a note. The note promised tellers they would “live to go home” if they gave him the money he asked for. In court, Artis Renard Monroe plead not guilty to 13 felonies, including robbery and burglary. The DA’s office confirmed his case had nothing to do with drugs.
What happens when the facts don’t line up? Where does that leave the truth?
We know this much is true: A prisoner fixed bikes. The bikes helped people. This may or may not add up to redemption. But it matters.
Monroe has a bike set aside for himself. He parks it near his desk, where it leans on a rusty kickstand. It’s a red-and-black Genesis RoadTech with a triple chainring and a gel-padded saddle. Walmart sells it new for $129. It may not be much of a bike, but it has been his constant companion in a world where everything else seems to flow in one direction: out.
He has been told he can keep it when he leaves. Maybe he will. He hasn’t decided. Maybe that gives him something to think about for four months and seven days before he walks out of the prison gates. Every day after work Monroe rides 15 laps around the shed. He may be going in circles, but it feels like moving forward.
* * *
A few blocks from the prison, in a park with playgrounds and bike trails, a little girl smiles shyly at the Vista Torino 400. Her name is Amaya. She is seven years old. She has big brown eyes and red earrings. She knows how to ride a bicycle, but this one seems foreign. Not what she expected.
“You can touch it,” says her mother, Tresa Andrews. “It’s yours! Touch it, baby!”
Her old bike was purple, with princess stickers. But both tires are flat, and besides, it’s too small. This one looks and feels a little weird. The handlebar is a funny shape. Her new helmet, donated by a stranger, won’t fit over her braids. The seat looks like nothing she has ever seen.
“This is a banana seat,” her mother says. “See how it’s long and skinny? That’s exactly what Mommy used to have when I was growing up!”
The bike reminds Amaya’s mom of the yellow-and-white Schwinn she’d shared with her little brother. Tresa rode it barefoot, in a bathing suit, all summer. For a minute, she’s that girl again: missing teeth, freckled cheeks, sun-kissed hair flying behind her. It took Tresa’s mom months to save up for that bike. Her brother got a pink hand-me-down. A few nights before Christmas, Tresa helped her mom spray-paint it blue. He didn’t know it was a girl’s bike, but the other boys informed him. He didn’t care. It was his.
That freckled girl is now a single working mom. Photos of her kids—two girls, two boys—are taped to her waitress’s notebook. Her oldest child is about to make her a grandmother. Her youngest is smiling with shy confusion at the bike she couldn’t afford, a gift from the local prison.
The Vista Torino 400 is a little too big for Amaya. She has to balance on the tips of her toes and sit on the nose of the seat. She scooters around, afraid to lift both feet. Then she pedals, timid and wobbly. The front wheel wags back and forth. Her mother runs next to her, holding on. Amaya keeps looking at the ground. Suddenly Amaya’s gaze moves from the ground to the horizon. She pedals fiercely, steady now. Her shy smile transforms into something else. Her mother lets go.
Postscript: By the time he was released on February 24, 2017, Monroe had restored more than 800 bikes. He did not take the one he’d set aside for himself.
John M. Glionna
Who’s Lookin’ for a Fight?
from California Sunday Magazine
* * *
Microphone in hand, Michael John Karaitiana stands atop a narrow wooden plank seven feet off the ground. Behind him is a circus tent with mustard-yellow banners that read ALL WEIGHTS. NOBODY BARRED! and WE CHALLENGE ALL COMERS. CASH PRIZES. With his graying hair tied in a neat ponytail, wearing an embroidered Western shirt and a beaver-skinned cowboy hat, he resembles a range hand dressed up for a night on the town. His body is muscular, his stomach taut, even at age 54. Broken knuckles jut like bony spikes from his oversize fists.
Flanking Michael are six boxers dressed in satin robes. Two have been with him for decades. Part Aboriginal, they are distant relatives from the cotton-growing town of Moree, their lives marked by anger and prison time. Brendan Prince, who is 49, fights as the “Moree Mauler,” his large face flattened by too many punches. He bangs a bass drum with a boom-ba-boom beat. To his left is Michael John Jenkins, known to everyone as “Fugzi,” who is 53 and missing his front teeth. He rings an old cowbell in a ragged rhythm.
“Shake ’em up, boys. Give ’em a good rally!” Michael tells the pair over a tinny sound system. “Let’s show ’em that Roy Bell’s Touring Stadium is back in town!”
It’s 3 p.m. on a cloudy July day in Alice Springs, an isolated dot of humanity located at the center of Australia. Michael and his boxing tent are part of the annual agricultural fair, the biggest event of the year for this frontier town. He’s driven 1,400 miles from his home in New South Wales to get here. Boxing tents have enlivened rural Australia since the early 1900s, when tent fighters faced off against challengers from small communities across the Outback. Michael’s grandfather Roy Bell first came to Alice Springs in 1924, his father joined the troupe in 1957, and Michael has been running the tent for the past 36 years.
The drum-and-bell racket draws a crowd that’s a cross-section of the unpeopled Northern Territory, where 244,000 residents inhabit an area twice the size of Texas. The audience is predominantly Aboriginal: elders in bush hats and flannel shirts, teens in hoodies clutching rugby balls, and women with baby strollers. There’s a scattering of whites, mostly men, some toting sons on their shoulders, others with trucker caps and sagging bellies.
“Holda! Holda! Holda!” Michael says to halt the beat, waving a wooden cane and flashing two gold front teeth, mementos from a crashing tent pole. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, if ya cast your eyes along, you’ll see all those girlie rides and bouncy things. But you’re not gonna find an old-time boxing tent like this. My men are here to challenge all comers, so if ya have any fighters in the crowd, have ’em ready.”
Michael is a “spruiker,” a carnival barker, whose twangy auctioneer’s patter has a loose relationship with the truth. His task is to lure fairgoers inside the tent to take on his fighters. Winners can earn as much as $200 and a year’s worth of bragging rights. Losers can at least claim they had the gumption to strap on the gloves. “Take a look at this big joker here, folks,” he says, pointing to Mauler. “He once did a nude shot for Playboy and used to fight in the pubs and clubs. He fought with the tent for 35 years before he left to have heart surgery. Now he runs on batteries.”
The boxing tent reached its heyday in the two decades after World War II, when half a dozen troupes crisscrossed the country. Nowadays, Michael says, the working-class men who once clamored to the mat have given way to “soft kids who fiddle with smartphones.” By the time the spectacle faded in the 1970s, many Australians associated tent boxing with a shadowy and violent past they would rather forget. Michael’s tent is one of only two that’s still going, and neither tours full-time.
“Okay now, fellas, put your hands up,” he tells the crowd. “Who’s lookin’ for a fight?”
Michael summons a hand
ful of volunteers to the plank, known as the lineup board, and assigns each one a nickname. He dubs a slender man “The Fishing Rod.” Another he christens “Hendrix” for his Afro. A third he calls “The Alien.” “You sober, son?” he asks him. “Do you know what you’re doin’?” When asked what he does for work, The Alien raises his hand to his mouth as though taking a drink, making the crowd cackle.
Two hundred spectators file into the boxing tent, paying $20 apiece to witness a six-bout card. They pass fading canvas posters of long-dead fighters crouched in their pugilist poses. Rather than a roped-off ring, large mats are laid at the center of the tent, allowing spectators to press in so close that when boxers are hit hard, they’re sent reeling into the crowd. Between rounds, the fighters rest on milk crates.
During each match, Michael offers a running commentary that celebrates challengers whose punches land anywhere near their target. These are decidedly amateur fights with three two-minute-long rounds and bulky 16-ounce gloves—twice the weight that professional boxers use—to slow the speed of blows and to provide additional cushion. The challengers see the bouts as a serious test, but for the tent fighters, they are part theater. Michael tells his boxers that bashing a local would discourage volunteers, so Mauler and Fugzi give each a chance to prove himself in the first two rounds, then go for a knockout in the third after their opponent is exhausted.
Fugzi takes on an undersized challenger named Justin, whose head barely reaches the tent fighter’s shoulders. Both men tap gloves. “Box on!” Michael says. The bout is a mismatch, even with Fugzi fighting barefoot. With a straight-backed posture that harks back to boxers of another era, he glides and jabs, orbiting his foe, using his superior reach to swat away any attack. Justin’s punches are undisciplined, his defense nonexistent. Seconds into the fight, Fugzi lands a blow to the jaw, dropping Justin to his knees. A woman screams in delight.
“Let him throw a few punches, Fugz,” Michael rasps over the microphone. “Good boy. That’s the way.” But Fugzi’s benevolence doesn’t last. He soon lands two quick strikes to Justin’s midsection, and the challenger is helped to his milk crate. “Stay away from him, Fugzi,” Michael scolds at the beginning of the final round. “We don’t want to see the little fella get hurt.” As a quick left jab sends a spray of sweat from Justin’s head, Michael ends the fight.
Hours later, Michael paces his tour bus. The Alice Springs fair lasts only two days, a small window to earn money for petrol, food, and salaries. He needs an evening fight card to make ends meet, but only if the crowd is large enough for a decent profit. One last look, though, confirms the fairgrounds have emptied. He gives Mauler and Fugzi the news: there will be no fights tonight.
* * *
A tattoo on Michael’s back depicts a white boxer facing off against a grass-skirted Māori warrior wielding a spear. On his left temple, Māori tribal marks morph into a snake, for him a symbol of Australia, its long tail curling around his ear. It’s no coincidence the country’s fraught history of race relations plays out on Michael’s body: the narrative of Australia’s mistreatment of its indigenous people, the story of the boxing tent, and Michael’s travails with his own extended family are intertwined.
Tent fighting got its start just a decade after Australia became a nation. At the time, almost all indigenous people were confined to remote “missions,” or reservations, could not travel without government permission, and were not considered citizens. It wouldn’t be until 1965 that indigenous people throughout Australia were allowed to vote and another six years before an indigenous person was elected to Parliament. For most of the past 50 years, the prevailing view in Australia has been that the boxing tent didn’t just reflect the country’s systemic racism but perpetuated it. Aboriginal boxers were paid less than whites and sometimes not at all, and they were often presented on the lineup board with the invitation of “Who wants to fight the darkie?”
Recently, though, historians have taken a more nuanced view. The boxing tent, they point out, was also a rare public place where races mixed. The boxers who traveled with Roy Bell and others were both white and Aboriginal, as were the audiences. Richard Broome, who teaches Aboriginal history in Melbourne, believes that the boxing tent offered indigenous Australians a sense of empowerment in a nation that denied them basic rights. “They became heroes to their own people,” he writes. Michael agrees. The tent, he says, was the one arena where a black man dared raise a fist against a white man and knock him to the mat.
Michael’s father, Lester, was a Māori who emigrated from New Zealand in 1956 and joined Roy Bell’s caravan soon after. It was the golden age of the boxing tent. Bell’s fighters traveled year-round, making 100 stops in towns and work camps that were among the most desolate places on the continent. Fighting under the name the “Māori Chief,” Lester performed the haka war dance before each bout, often facing the toughest challengers, known as “takes.” Within the country’s strict racial hierarchy, he existed in an in-between space—a cut above indigenous Australians but well below whites, a man of color who was still subject to the country’s pervasive racism. Reliable, hardworking, and a nondrinker, he eventually became Bell’s camp boss, responsible for keeping the fighters in line.
Trouble came when he and Bell’s teenage daughter, Nita, started a secret romance and she became pregnant. Bell banished them. The way he saw it, Lester had risen above his station: the black men who fought under him were employees, not sons-in-law. He vowed never to speak to his daughter again. After seven years, they reconciled, and the family rejoined the tent, but the old man’s relationship with Lester remained strained, even though he was the star of the show. Bell insisted on calling him not by his name but as “Māori.”
Michael, Lester and Nita’s second-born son, talks about growing up among the “showies,” carnival men and women, with almost dreamy reverence. He helped handle snakes in the reptile act and at night wandered Sideshow Alley to watch Sampson the Strong Man, Vanessa the Undresser, Pygmy performers, and Indian rope-trick artists. He also learned to box—his first tent bout, at the age of six, made the local newspaper—and for years scrambled for the coins spectators tossed onto the mat to award boys who had the spunk to fight.
In 1971, Bell retired the troupe in the wake of new laws that restricted boxing tents in all but two federal territories. When he died the following year, he left nothing to Lester. In the end, Michael says, his father was treated no better than the hired help. “Lester was a good man, but he worked for us,” says Elwin Bell, Roy’s youngest son. “Michael might take offense to that, but that’s how it was.”
A decade after his grandfather’s death, Michael decided to revive the boxing tent. “It was in my blood,” he says. “I had thought about it at school. I had always thought about it.” He studied videos of the old man spruiking to memorize his words, inflection, and movements. He went to a shed and retrieved the musty tent equipment—gloves, mats, and canvas portraits—and took Roy Bell’s Touring Stadium back on the road. In the early years, the show was a family affair: Lester fought; Nita managed the money. Michael soon married a girl who had also grown up on the show circuit, and their children romped the fairgrounds.
Michael quickly learned just how much the tent-boxing circuit had shrunk since Roy Bell’s death. By then, television had come to the Outback, and entertainment like the boxing tent suddenly seemed antiquated. To make money, he traveled to Aboriginal missions in the equatorial jungles of northern Queensland, far beyond where most showies had ventured.
Fighting as “The Afghan” (“His mother was a full-blooded Aboriginal, his father, an Afghan camel driver”), Michael took on the takes, as Lester once did. He fought two men at once, even on his knees, anything to draw customers.
When the tent was down for the season, Michael trained as a professional boxer. His career was short-lived, but he continued to fight in the tent into his late forties until a skull-rattling blow stopped him cold. For months, he couldn’t focus or make decisions, and he sti
ll worries that boxing has made him punch-drunk. An earlier hit left him with so much pain that a doctor had recommended he have a steel plate inserted into his jaw. To bring in steady income, Michael has worked as a truck driver and a mechanic and, in recent years, has hunted wild goats—a task he calls “a mongrel of a job.” Supporting his wife and five children has kept him from taking the tent out every season, and the past decade has been especially hard, with several years passing between tours.
Roy Bell’s sons, who remain fixtures on the carnival circuit operating thrill rides, are baffled by Michael’s insistence to prolong an entertainment they believe has had its day. “The boxing tent died with my father,” says Arnold Bell, Roy’s oldest son. “It should have been left in the shed where it belongs.”
Michael, though, relishes being an outlier. He has always considered himself more Lester’s son than Roy’s grandson, proud of being on the dark-skinned side of the Bell clan. He keeps the tent alive, he says, in honor of his father. At Lester’s funeral in 2003, dozens of Māori performed the haka dance. A spruiker challenged mourners to raise a hand if they wanted to step up and fight the big man. The casket was lowered to rest on a section of boxing mat covered by a swath of Roy Bell’s canvas tent. Lester’s second-born son had seen to that.
* * *
Behind the wheel of his bus, Michael leads his convoy north along the Stuart Highway. Known as “The Track,” it is the interior’s principal north-south route, stretching more than 1,750 miles along the path forged by Scottish explorer John McDouall Stuart, who in 1861 led the first successful expedition across the nation’s then-uncharted center. The two-lane road runs ramrod straight past fields of termite mounds towering like desert cathedrals and settlements whose names seem pulled from a children’s storybook: Cutta Cutta Caves, Banka Banka Station, Jingaloo, Mungkarta, Amoonguna, and Humpty Doo.
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