A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  Benitez next fought Mustafa Hamsho. Hamsho was a capable fighter, as evidenced by the trouble he had given Hagler two years earlier before being stopped in the eleventh on cuts, but Benitez had every reason to be confident he would post a meaningful win that would reinstall him at the forefront of his sport. Instead Benitez lost a clear decision, his first unjustifiable loss. (Just how unjustifiable became clear a year later when Hagler stopped Hamsho in the third in a rematch granted to Hamsho primarily on the strength of his victory over Benitez. That was what all-time greats did to people like Hamsho.) Now Wilfred’s career needed repairing but Duran had shown that you could suffer a bad loss and still come back to later post big wins for big money. After all, Benitez reasoned, Hamsho was better than fucking Kirkland Laing. So after posting a decision victory against a nondescript opponent in February of 1984, Benitez signed to fight Davey Moore, the same opponent Duran had used to rocket himself back to stardom.

  Only now the reasons for the Hamsho loss started to maybe slowly reveal themselves. In the gym, training for Moore, he noticed that palookas who’d always managed to come down with mysterious ailments whenever he was looking for sparring partners were suddenly rearranging their schedules to be available. They wanted something to brag about, wanted to say they once held their own against the great Benitez. People were saying things too, louder and louder. That he seemed off in the way he acted towards people, well, more off than before anyway. When the Moore fight occurred, the latent, the whispered, became apparent and undeniable as Wilfred was knocked out by a right hand in the second round from the same fighter who could do nothing against a thirty-two-year-old Duran. Something was definitely wrong.

  Wilfred had broken his ankle in three places while crumbling to the canvas so, with the necessarily-idle recovery time, he didn’t fight again for almost a year. This, of course, would have been a good time to retire, even at twenty-four, but that kind of thing never happens so we’ll move on. The truth was he needed the money. Tax problems, bad investments, all those things people always say when they’ve somehow managed to squander absurd sums of money. If he retired he would have no hope of getting back what he had lost. So instead he did what he’d done since he was seven. He fought.

  He fought the decent Mauricio Bravo in Aruba on March 30, 1985, and knocked him out in the second round. Maybe the layoff had been the best thing for him he thought and this notion gained credence when he followed that victory with a seventh-round knockout of Danny Chapman in July. Now he could step it up again, the thinking went, and his next fight would be against the undefeated (22-0 19 KOs) Kevin Moley in Madison Square Garden.

  Moley was a pretty good fighter who had been carefully nursed by his management team to an undefeated record. What happens in Boxing though is that eventually the protected kid with the stellar record has to fight someone legitimate. When that point is first reached, as it had been with Moley, what customarily happens is the fighter will fight someone who still has a recognizable and respected name but who is far enough along on his decline as to pose no real threat. Moley’s team identified Wilfred as that individual. They reasoned that he was nothing more than the shell of a once-great fighter and as such would represent an easy yet superficially impressive victory for their fighter. They were both right and wrong. They were right that he was a shell. What they failed to realize is that even the shell of a great fighter can often beat a merely good one. They got what they deserved those fucks. After being dropped by a right fifteen seconds into the fight, Benitez got up, made the sign of the cross, and proceeded to give Moley a thorough ten-round pasting. There were actual flashes of the old Benitez as he lay against the ropes impervious to his opponent’s attack, doubled and tripled up on his jab, and repeatedly bounced short straight punches off Moley’s melon. Maybe he was back all the way Benitez thought. Those other incidents weren’t signs after all, just a temporary lull. Damn he was still only twenty-six.

  In the ring, after the fight, Benitez was excited. He grabbed the microphone that had been used to announce his victory and addressed what had been a supportive Garden crowd in broken, halting English. At times he seemed to have trouble speaking, it was one of those uncomfortable situations. But he managed to thank the crowd for coming to watch him fight at the stadium of Madison of Madison Square Garden. He told them he was born in New York but added that he was raised in Puerto Rico. He said he liked fighting in New York. He finished by yelling God bless you all because God has made me winner again! God bless you! to loud cheers. Off that he would not be retiring.

  Coming off the Moley victory, Benitez signed for a similar fight against Matthew Hilton. Hilton was a highly marketable, white($$), Canadian, twenty-year-old with a serious left hook who was being groomed as one of Boxing’s next big stars. He was undefeated (18-0 13 KOs) and coming off one of those impressive-in-name-only victories against former middleweight champion Vito Antuofermo. Benitez actually trained properly for this fight and came into the ring in shape knowing that a victory over the high-profile Hilton in a nationally televised fight would likely gain him the Hagler title shot and big payday he had blown with his loss to Hamsho. He would be back in the Greatness conversation, still with a chance to make more history.

  Early on it was one of those good news/bad news deals for Benitez. The bad news was that Hilton had really heavy hands, or I should say hand—the left one. He showed this by dropping Benitez in the first with a good body shot. The good news was that he was slow as an hourglass and somewhat amateurish in the way he set up to throw punches, telegraphing everything that was coming. He was the kind of guy a prime Benitez ate for lunch, frustrating to no end with his defense before winning a decision. This was where the further bad news came in, however, because Benitez looked awful. Every punch that landed solidly, and there were more of these than ever before, seemed to at least stagger Benitez. He took a beating from this chump who in a just universe would have been honored to hold Wilfred’s spit bucket. He got hit clean, hard, and often while the Montreal crowd chanted for Matthew, Matthew. In the sixth he got caught with a severe left hook to the head, the kind of punch he never got hit with before. He must have wondered what was going on. He must have wondered this as he stumbled back against the ropes and the twenty-year-old came in firing more punches he couldn’t get out of the way of. It should have ended there but it didn’t. On the basis of some now-remembered, long-ago-installed instinct Benitez moved his head just enough and Hilton got tired just enough that soon Wilfred was firing back and, whenever the ref intervened, shaking his legs in the hopes they would return.

  If Benitez was in a ring he was trying to win. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t or even that he knew he couldn’t. If he fell and shattered his ankle he tried to stand on it and continue. If a twenty-year-old was hitting him with punches he had easily avoided in the past there was nothing you could do about it. You certainly couldn’t stop fighting, you couldn’t quit. No, you took the punches best you could and fired your own back in the general direction they were coming from. You made movements that had been ingrained in you since before puberty and for some reason you hoped the ref wouldn’t stop the fight. And in the eighth Benitez got hit with so many consecutive solid punches that the referee came very close to the fighters and appeared to be on the verge of stopping the fight. Except that when he looked closely at Wilfred’s eyes to see what was there he saw him shaking his head no and grinning in the universal boxing sign for this guy can’t hurt me. But he could. The ref didn’t stop the fight then but in the ninth it didn’t matter. Against the ropes as Hilton threw everything he had, Benitez was only barely surviving when he got hit with a particularly savage left hook. The punch shot Wilfred’s chin to the left and the top of his head in the opposite direction. He slumped to the canvas, his left arm becoming entangled in the ropes so that he fell on his chest, his left shoulder suspended by those ropes and the left side of his face at the referee’s feet. He raised his head and looked up at the ref. He slowly shook his head a
nd blinked his watery eyes. He wanted to stand up and keep fighting. He wanted to clear his head and last the round. Then he could recuperate between rounds and even though he had lost every round to that point, had been down twice, he would come back and win the fight, give Hilton the type of beating that would make his people regret they ever considered putting their guy in the ring with him. He would win because he was WILFRED BENITEZ and that was reason enough. So he tried to stand and put himself in a position where Hilton could legally throw more punches at his head. Where you would have covered up and cried, he tried to stand. He couldn’t, didn’t come close, and when the count was over the ring doctor rushed into the ring as the announcers openly feared for his safety.

  It was over. All of it. Everyone could see it except the eyes that mattered. What Wilfred saw in the ring with those eyes was the same thing he had always seen. He saw openings and opponent mistakes; opportunities to hit and moving gloves to avoid being hit with. The difference was that by the time his damaged brain would send the signal to his body it would be too late. Too late to expose the opening and, what was worse, too late to avoid the incoming punches the way he had done so easily for so long. And when those punches would land the same brain that since age seven had absorbed the shock of incoming skull had had enough and that brain would rebel by starting to partially shut down.

  Everyone saw this and Wilfred felt it. It hurt him more than just physically but he kept fighting because ultimately it was what he was, the one thing he had made himself into, and everyone who’s like Wilfred wants to be something whatever the cost. He fought three more times in 1986. He fought even though he didn’t feel great, didn’t sound great, and was acting more erratic and childlike every day. He fought and posted two decision victories, even including a win over the decent Paul Whittaker who was undefeated at the time.

  But then the first end came and it was a vicious one.

  Fighting Carlos Herrera on November 28, 1996, in an unnoticed fight held in Salta, Argentina, Wilfred Benitez was knocked out in the seventh round. Forget Hearns and Leonard, this guy couldn’t be said to be on the same level as Hamsho or Moore or even a rising Hilton as was evident in Herrera’s next and last fight when he was knocked out by fellow-Argentinean Juan Roldan in the second. The brutal, ignominious loss to a guy like Herrera was finally a hint even Wilfred could take. He retired and hoped he would start feeling better.

  I had banged the payphone receiver into its holder out of the frustration I felt when no one answered and now I held the phone’s exposed innards in my hands and tried again. When it somehow worked and Dane answered he wanted to know whether I was crazy and what I was talking about confession.

  “Are you crazy?” he said. “And what are you talking about confession?”

  “I confessed.”

  “To who? That detective?”

  “No not that kind of confession, the sacrament.”

  “The what?”

  “The sacrament of confession. I participated in it, sort of.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, a couple of weeks ago maybe.”

  “Okay so what’s the problem?”

  “Well, what Assado said for one.”

  “But if it was a couple of weeks ago.”

  “It’s hard to explain but—”

  “Just come over, come over and we’ll talk about all this.”

  Which I did. And this happened at an obscenely opulent suite at The Plaza.

  “The hell you doing here?”

  “Where else should a man of my means live?”

  “You live here now?”

  “Sure, for now. Like it?”

  What wasn’t to like in a suite the size of an auditorium with carpet so thick we grew six inches, multiple silver trays of food rolling about and square vents blowing perfect temperature in? And Dane walked around in a slow semicircle occasionally dragging from a fat cigar from you know where and also sipping from a foot long champagne flute while wearing a ridiculously shiny, almost mirrorly-reflective, black robe.

  “Have some Cristal, relax. You look a mess,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Fine have some Maine lobster tails, right there. Pulled up this very morning and still warm. I haven’t laid a fork on them either.”

  “No thanks.”

  “What then? You want to go get your money now don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just have more pressing things right now.”

  He inhaled deeply, flaring up the end of the brown log pointing out from his mouth. “So what’s the big problem?” he said. “Because as I see it it’s that you’ve let this flatfoot tie you all up inside and for what? You haven’t enjoyed minute one of this victory and for no good reason.”

  “This fucker knows man, you know he knows.”

  “So what he knows? You sound like a fucking client. Who cares what he knows? What can he prove? I’ll tell you what. Nothing! So he’s fucking with you. I told you, fuck him up right back. It’s not like you don’t have the materials or the tools to do that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Unbelievable. It’s as if, having established that you’re the kind of person capable of doing what you did, you now suddenly want to regress into being the kind of person who worries about things like cops.”

  “I never stopped being that person. I told you from the outset what my principal concern was. And as it turns out it appears I was wholly justified because whatever happened back there we seem to have screwed up in such a fundamental manner that the unthinkable, law enforcement involvement, is currently all I can think about.”

  “Not true, that’s not the way it happened, you’re wrong about that. But before I even get to that there’s a more basic issue to consider here. As I’ve said, I find the whole avoiding-apprehension-after-the-fact deal supremely boring but since you obviously don’t then it would seem you need to do something about the situation. Something decisive even extreme if necessary but something that will finally put this all to bed for good so you can fill your pockets with treasure in peace. Now what’s this about a confession?”

  “What did you mean when you said I could fuck with him back? How?”

  “See that’s where you surprise me because it seems that the stress or whatever of this situation has messed with your brain in a way that is completely unacceptable.”

  “What?”

  “Well the way you apparently hear this fucker’s declarations and are either unable or unwilling to look past the limited question of how they potentially imperil or otherwise affect you to what they say about their speaker.”

  “I see.”

  “Not yet but you will.”

  And we talked about Detective Assado and what Dane thought about it but I didn’t tell him about Clerical Confessions and truth is when I walked out of there, having reconsidered and imbibed a substantial amount of the champagne, having ordered and received a therapeutic massage, having likewise ordered a ton of room service and sampled one of the Cubans, I did feel a whole lot better. Better that is until I stepped out into the artificial brightness of the circular area where rich people give strangers their car keys and heard that infernal voice again.

  “The Plaza wow. Not bad for a public defender,” Assado said. “I’m serious, where you getting that kind of scratch exactly?”

  “They don’t charge you to visit their guests.”

  “Oh who are you visiting? Are you at liberty to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Funny I chose that phrase huh? I mean who knows how much longer you’ll be at liberty right?”

  “Can I help you with something? In other words, is there a reason you’re following me?”

  “Just a couple of things I want to discuss with you. Maybe we could grab something to eat.”

  “I just ate.”

  “Really? Here? That’s like a fortune. What’d you have?”

  “I forget.”
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  “And I suppose you forget who you just met with as well?”

  “That’s right, I do.”

  “Okay so you’re full. Let’s go get a drink instead then. I’m told there’s a couple of good bars around here.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “You don’t? Because you look like you’ve had a couple tonight.”

  “I did.”

  “So what did you mean?”

  “I didn’t say I’ve never had a drink. I said I don’t drink and I don’t. But I used to drink.”

  “A couple hours ago.”

  “Right.”

  “Well come watch me drink then. That can be entertaining in its own right.”

  “Thanks for the offer but no.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “What do I want to do? I want to go home.”

  “What about me?”

  “What about you?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Since you ask, I want you to crawl back under whatever rock you crawled out from under a few days ago and never show me your face again.”

  “We both know that’s not going to happen though don’t we? I’m nothing if not persistent. Persistent Peter my friends used to call me in high school.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what they called me.”

  “No I mean you had friends?”

  “Well I was using the term loosely to describe the people who attended my high school at the same time I did.”

  “Oh, and your name was Peter back then?”

  “No, it’s always been Mondongo.”

  “I guess in those instances alliteration tends to be viewed as more important than accuracy.”

  “So you’ll come? It won’t take long.”