“I'll be there. Sure enough. Thanks a lot, Mr. Luther.”
For six weeks Oliver ran around the yard five mornings a week with the rest of the boxing team. He started out running a mile, the second week two miles, then three, until he could easily run five miles in forty-five minutes. Every afternoon he left his job in the school to go to the gym and work out. The training was agonizing, but he savored every minute of every drill and exercise Luther put him through. He loved, too, the attention and respect he was earning from the other boxers. Every one of them encouraged him and gave him pointers. On the day of his first sparring session, he was feeling ten feet tall when the prisoner he had shown how to do algebra came up to him and said, “You're sparring with my homeboy Disco Bob today. You ever sparred before, white boy?”
“Well, not in the ring.”
“Keep your hands up and jab. Don't stand in the middle of the ring and let that niggah tee off on you. You'll be all right.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot, Champ.”
Oliver chewed nervously on his mouthpiece while Luther pulled the sixteen-ounce gloves over his hands, tied them and taped the laces. Then Luther adjusted his head gear and tightened the strap under his chin. “You ready, Priddy?” Oliver nodded.
He stepped between the ropes and looked around like a cat in a dog pound. The onlookers were staring at him, pointing and talking under their breath. When he saw the same prisoner who had been following him everywhere he went since he left the Home Block walk through the front door, Oliver's stomach churned and he thought he was going to throw up.
Luther admonished him to keep his hands up and stay loose. “Are you listening, boy?”
Oliver nodded and smiled nervously. Disco Bob stepped into the ring, then leaned back and forth against the ropes to test their slack before he danced around the ring one time. When he stopped at his corner, Champ stood behind him, whispering in his ear.
Moose yelled, “Time!”
The two boxers met in the center of the ring and smacked gloves. Oliver moved to the right, flicking his jab to find his range. Disco Bob moved forward, leaned to the side and shot a quick jab into Oliver's stomach. Oliver countered with two jabs of his own; the first one landed but Bob weaved under the second one. Oliver landed another stiff jab and Disco Bob countered with a solid left-right combination to Oliver's head. He stepped back and adjusted his headgear and as Disco Bob came forward, feigning a jab, bobbing and weaving, Oliver threw a straight right cross that landed on the button of Disco Bob's chin. He followed it up with a left hook to the head that landed and then Bob leaned on Oliver and tied him up. Moose told them to break and Disco Bob nodded to Oliver, acknowledging the power in his punches.
“Time!”
On the way back to his corner Oliver looked outside the ring and stared right into the eyes of Winfield “Fat Daddy” Petaway. “Look at me!” Luther said as Oliver slumped down on the stool. “Are you all right?”
“Hell, yeah, Luther! I feel good.”
“Keep your damn hands up and throw more punches. You're waiting on him. You're not a counterpuncher. When you see the motherfucker coming in, set up and get your combinations off before he does.”
“Okay. Did you see that, Luther? I got him good twice.”
“I saw it. Rinse your mouth out. You tired?”
“Just a little.”
“Time!”
As soon as they touched gloves again, Disco Bob threw a right hand that landed with a thump in the middle of Oliver's chest. Oliver blocked the next punch, a left hook to the body, but he wasn't quick enough to block the second hook that landed square on his right temple. Oliver fell back against the rope and covered up in a shell the way he had seen other boxers do a thousand times. Between the stars he saw each time he blinked, he could see the faces of the ringside hecklers who were shouting instructions and throwing punches of their own.
“Knock him out, Bob! Knock that cracker out! I'll take him from there!”
Disco Bob let Oliver off the ropes and the two fighters moved to the center of the ring, circled one another and calculated. Bob did the Ali shuffle and faked like he was going to move in. Oliver went for the fake, lunged and missed wildly with his right. For the rest of the round, Bob danced and jabbed and kept his distance.
In the third and final round Oliver connected with two jackhammer jabs that snapped Disco Bob's head back. Dead tired, he dropped his hands to his side and asked Bob if he was all right. Bob shook his head from side to side, stared wide eyed and moved forward, hitting Oliver with a three punch combination that knocked him senseless. This time when he tried to cover up, Disco Bob applied the pressure, throwing a flurry of precision punches that landed. When it was obvious that Oliver was out on his feet, Moose shouted, “Time!”
Oliver sat on the bench against the wall and stared at the dirty floor as Luther waved smelling salts back and forth under his nose. “You did real good for your first time, Priddy. Lift your head up. You all right? Where are you? What's my name?”
“Come on, Luther. I'm okay.” Oliver saw others coming toward him.
“That's a hell of a jab you got,” Disco Bob said, tapping Oliver on the shoulder.
“You're gonna be all right, white boy,” said another boxer named Shotgun.
“You got a lot of heart, young buck,” a welterweight named Sweet Tooth said.
“A lot of motherfuckers didn't think you were going to show up today,” said Luther. He draped a towel over Oliver's head. “I'm proud of you, Priddy. Now go get yourself a hot shower.”
After Luther walked away, Oliver sat there wondering where the fear had gone. From the instant he had touched gloves with Disco Bob, his fear laid down as though a cage had dropped over it. From there his concentration had been like a seasoned musician playing sixteenth notes at a fast tempo. Intense and effortless. Without thinking about it, he had known what punches to throw and when to throw them. It was a beautiful experience and he was exhilarated. Now he knew what he would tell Early Greer the next time Early asked why he wanted to take up boxing. He would tell him it was the zone, the same zone his brother Skip had once told a sports reporter about when the reporter had asked Skip what he was thinking each time he stepped to the plate and hit the nastiest curve balls for doubles and triples. He would tell Early about it and as sagacious as Early was, he would understand, but he would still frown the way he had weeks ago when Oliver told him he had joined the team. “Well dammit, be careful, Oliver,” he had said. “There's a lot of rotten guys over there. Whatever you do, stay out of that shower room. Just don't go in there.” He never said why; he didn't have to. Oliver knew.
What he knew was now staring back at him through the ropes on the far side of the ring. Oliver ignored him for now, but kept him in his peripheral vision. He waited until the crowd thinned out before he hooked his long fingers through the handles of his gym bag. Then he slung the bag over his shoulder and headed for the door. He took three steps before he turned sideways and stopped. “You following me, man?” He stared at Fat Daddy with unflinching eyes.
Fat Daddy's smile revealed crooked white teeth. “We going the same way,” Fat Daddy said. “I've been meaning to holler at you since we had that little run-in last summer.”
Oliver looked up into the clear blue sky and watched a platoon of blackbirds light on the barbed wire over the chapel fence. The afternoon breeze felt cool against his skin as it dried his sweat. He was still feeling exhilarated from his sparring session and the last thing he wanted was a confrontation. “That's over and done with as far as I'm concerned,” Oliver said. “So what do you want to talk about?”
“I 'preciate that, letting bygones be bygones. You may not know it, but we have a lot in common, you and me. I'm a lifer too, and I used to box until I tore my shoulder up. I held the welterweight title for two years.” His legs were shorter than Oliver's and he had to walk fast to keep up. “I saw something when you were sparring today. Something that could take you a long way in the game.”
“Yeah? What'd you see?”
“Heart. You got some heart. Now there's only one question?”
“What's that?”
“Can you take a punch?”
“I took Bob's best shot and didn't go down, so what's that tell you?”
“Bob doesn't hit that hard. You ain't been hit hard yet.”
Oliver paused at the front door of the little St. Regis. “I've been hit by guys who could punch a lot harder than Disco Bob and I didn't go down.”
“I don't know about that. All I know is I barely hit you last summer and I knocked you on your ass.”
“Come on, man. That was a sucker punch. I wasn't expecting you to hit me.”
Fat Daddy leaned into Oliver, his hound-dog face twisted with malice as he tugged on two of his corn-rows. “I could have knocked you out, but I gave you a break.”
“I doubt that. But what's your point with all this, Fat Daddy?”
“My point is I'm a better trainer than old man Luther. If you join my stable, I'll show you how to take a punch.”
“Is that right? Look, man. I don't want any trouble. I'm fine with Luther.”
“You think I'm trying to cause you trouble?”
“I don't know, man.”
“That's right, you don't. Cause if I was, you wouldn't know it. Trouble's like a sucker punch. You never know when it's coming.”
“I'll keep that in mind. Meanwhile, I appreciate your offer, but I'm going to stay with Luther.”
“Suit yourself. Just remember what I said, Priddy. It's the punch you don't see coming that spells trouble every time.” He winked at Oliver and strolled inside the block.
Oliver was certain he knew the difference between advice and a threat and he was sure Fat Daddy wasn't giving him advice. He walked inside the block and stopped at the sergeant's desk to see if he had mail. While the guard checked, he watched Fat Daddy climb the front stairwell all the way to the fifth tier and when he didn't see him walking down F-tier, he knew the low-life lived somewhere on the riverside.
chapter four
LIFE IMPROVED ENORMOUSLY for Oliver after he began working in the Education Department. Pushing a broom around the halls gave him leave to look through the glass walls of the classrooms and read the chalkboard lecture notes on Shakespearean tragedies, the seventh president's war on nullification, and Freud's Oedipus complex. Oliver was young and handsome and he was friendly, and the professors felt free to tease him when they walked to the water fountain during the ten-minute break they gave the students halfway through their three hour lectures.
“Are you writing down my lecture notes and selling them, young man? They're not free, you know?” said one professor.
“No, sir. I wouldn't do that.”
“There'll be a quiz next week,” said another. “Any questions?”
“Well, since you asked, that self-fulfilling prophecy can work for you or against you, can't it?”
“Absolutely. As in, if you tell yourself enough times that you're going to be successful, you will be.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He loved watching the classrooms fill up every morning, afternoon and evening. Each professor brought up to six campus students to every class and they were usually bright, curious girls wearing blue sweaters, yellow blouses, plaid skirts, tight blue jeans and lipstick. Spoiled by his tea and peppermint candy, they talked freely to him about their love lives: Okay, you're a guy so tell me what you think. He didn't call me for a week so I called him and he wanted to come right over. See? So he does care. Yeah, right. When he got there, I wanted to talk and he wanted to undress me. He practically ripped off my nightgown. You can't blame him for that. You're as beautiful as all outdoors, you know? All he had to do was listen until you made your point, then he could have used his own tongue. Are you seeing anyone else? Not really. He wants to take me
home to meet his parents during spring break. I really like him, but spring break? I don't think so. Can't blame you there. You're young. Live and have fun while you can. You want another cup of tea? Want to smoke a joint? Meet me in the Xerox room.
The smell of pine sol, old books and perfume kept Oliver in the building during all of his free time. He painted classrooms, answered telephones and made fresh pots of coffee; he typed memos and put away files and books for the teachers and counselors, and once a week he walked down Turk's Street, crossed Tom's Way and followed the street with no name all the way to the back door of the bake shop where his order was waiting for him. He paid in Kools and returned with sweet nutty rolls, bear claws and donuts. The staff loved him for it. They loved him too, every time he put his mop down to help a student who was preparing for the high school equivalency examination. He knew the rules of grammar and punctuation better than the teachers did, and he was a wiz at math.
At night, alone in his cell, he read books until his eyes crossed and then he laid there thinking about all the new ideas he was gathering. Rather than memorize the meaning of new words, he made a game out of learning them. Quaint was the little professor in the green bow-tie, with the flattop haircut and the caterpillar mustache crawling across his upper lip. Serendipity was the feeling he got every time one of the campus girls smiled at him early in the morning and said, “There you are!” And esoteric was between the lines of the passages he read in a Saul Bellow novel, Herzog: “With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life: 'Don't cry you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything.'” When he read those words it had been as if they were his very own. In his mind's eye he had seen the person speaking and the person spoken to, the watcher and the watched. This moment marked the dawn of his self-awareness and he was excited to tears at the vein of hope that opened up inside him. Now he read like a man in search of a cure for his own terminal illness: stories, novels, biographies, philosophy. He took notes on Emerson, Pascal, James, Husserl, Sartre, and Plato. After he had gone through all the books in Albert's cell, he began finding them in the education building, on window ledges, in storage rooms and cabinets, and on the heaps of garbage. The psychologist he was seeing gave him two self-help books to read and he “got it.” He understood that his life script was tragic rather than banal, and he genuinely believed that his life position was, I'm okay, you're okay. When the psychologist suggested that he could improve his conditions by taking up a hobby like drawing or learning to play a musical instrument or enrolling in a college class, it took another year of coaxing from Albert and Early and his boss, Mr. Sommers, before he associated what they were all telling him with the long-term goal he once had.
AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS of teaching behind bars, Professor Stanley Manners told his class of literature students why he continued to volunteer his time to prisoners. He was a free thinker, he said, and he wanted to open rather than close doors. He acknowledged his compassion, but in the same breath he said he was not a bleeding heart liberal. He never got up close and personal into the lives of his students; he merely planted seeds. His goal for the semester was to introduce them to the art of juxtaposing old points of view and new ones, and then determining for themselves which perspective has greater personal value. Professor Stanley Manners had Oliver sitting on the edge of his seat not just because he was blown away by the man's elocution. Oliver was also stunned by the man's physical appearance and one unusual tic he possessed. He was fiftyish, tall and lean, with round shoulders. His gray hair was long and ponytailed and his cheeks were sunken. He had a waxed mustache fanned across his bony face, and chin fuzz. He wore a wrinkled cream linen suit, a pink button-down shirt, and a bottle green bow tie. Cordovan leather wing tips graced his narrow feet, and when he was standing before the chalkboard his left foot never stopped tapping the floor. Rapidly. The tapping seemed as natural to the man as the hand he waved in front of him to emphasize a point. Oliver had enough natural elegance not to stare directly down at the man's foot, but it didn't matter. As he looked intently at the professor's face, he developed a temp
orary tic of his own. He couldn't stop himself from looking rapidly at the man's foot and then back up at one of his facial features--the chin fuzz, the bright gray eyes, the sunken cheeks, the waxy mustache.
Then he said something that shook Oliver to his core. “The stories we're going to read this semester can touch us as gently as a baby's breath, and, if given the chance, they can encourage us to extend our boundaries and comfort zones, and rattle these bars as fiercely as a caged lion.” Oliver was smitten with inspiration.
For the first three weeks of class Oliver listened to his fellow students and learned how the upperclassmen responded to Professor Stanley Manners' questions. He liked the fact that most questions required reflection and elaboration, and some had no right or wrong answers. When the professor asked about the central conflict in D.H. Lawrence's “The Blind Man,” Oliver raised his hand for the first time. The professor nodded to him and he rose from his seat but sat right back down after the professor told him he didn't need to stand. “Well, actually,” he began. “Isn't there really more than one conflict in this story?”
Professor Manners extended his hands, palms up, his left foot tapping spasmodically. “You tell me.”
“Well, actually, yes. You have the conflict of man versus the environment in that Maurice struggles in the world every day with his blindness. Then there's the conflict of man versus self with Maurice's friend Bertie who is very uncomfortable with intimacy.”
“Yeah, but that's the central conflict,” an upperclassman chimed in. “Not the environment conflict. That's a given. There's only one real conflict in this story, Professor Manners, and that's man versus self.”
Eureka Man: A Novel Page 5