There’re less white heavies than black, and the whites can be even goofier than blacks about quick money. Some whites spout off that ’cause they’re white, as in White Hope, that they should be getting easy fights up to and including the one for the title. If you’re that kind—and there’s black ones same as white—you learn right quick that he don’t have the tit or the brains to be a winner under them bright lights.
Though heavies may have the same look, they’re as different from each other as zebras when it comes to mental desire, chin, heart, and huevos—huevos is eggs, but in Messkin it means balls. Getting heavies into shape is another problem, keeping them in shape is a even bigger one, ’cause they got these bottomless pits for stomachs. So you work to keep them in at least decent shape all the time—but not in punishing top shape, the kind that peaks just before a fight. Fighter’d go wild-pig crazy if he had to live at top shape longer than a few days, his nerves all crawly and hunger eating him alive. And then there’s that blood-clotting wait to the first bell. See, the job of molding flesh and bone into a fighting machine that meets danger instead of high-tailing from it is as tricky as the needlework what goes into one of them black, lacy deals what Spanish ladies wear on their heads. Fighting’s easy, cowboy, it’s training what’s hard.
But once a trainer takes a heavy on, there’s all that thump. First of all, when the heavy moves, you got to move with him—up in the ring, on the hardwood, around the big bag. You’re there to guide him like a mama bear, and to stay on his ass so’s he don’t dog it. All fighters’ll dog it after they been in the game a while, but the heavies can be the worst. They got all that weight to transport, and being human, they’ll look for a place to hide. A good piece of change’ll usually goad them. But always there is more training than fighting, and the faith and the fever it takes to be a champ will drop below ninety-eight-point-six real quick unless your boy eats and sleeps fight. ’Course, no fighter can do that one hundred percent. Besides, there’s the pussy factor. Which is part of where the punch mitts come in. They’ll make him sharp with his punches, but they’re also there to help tire him into submission come bedtime.
The big bag they can fake if you don’t stay on them, but a trainer with mitts, calling for combination after combination, see that’s for the fighter like he’s wearing a wire jock. But for the trainer, the mitts mean you’re catching punches thrown by a six-foot-five longhorn, and the punches carry force enough to drop a horse. And the trainer takes this punishment round after round, day after day, the thump pounding through him like batting practice and he’s the ball. I can’t much work the mitts like I once did, only when I’m working on moves, or getting ready for a set date. But even bantamweights can make your eyes pop.
Part of the payoff for all this is sweeter’n whipped cream on top of strawberry pie. It’s when your fighter comes to see himself from the outside instead of just from the in. It’s when all of a sudden he can see how to use his feet to control that other guy in the short pants. It’s how a fighter’ll smile like a shy little boy when he understands that all his moves’re now offense and defense, and that he suddenly has the know-how to beat the other guy with his mind, that he no longer has to be just some bull at the watering hole looking to gore. And that’s when, Lordy, that you just maybe got yourself a piece of somebody what can change sweat and hurt into gold and glory.
Getting a boy ready for a fight is the toughest time of all for trainers. After a session with the mitts, your fingers’ll curl into the palms of your hands for a hour or so, and driving home in your Jimmy pickup means your hands’ll be claws on the steering wheel. The muscles in the middle of your back squeeze your shoulders up around your ears. Where your chest hooks into your shoulders, you go home feeling there’s something tore down in there. Elbows get sprung, and groin pulls hobble you. In my case, I’ve got piano wire holding my chest and ribs together, so when I leave the gym shock keeps on twanging through me. By the time I’m heading home, I’m thinking hard on a longneck bottle of Lone Star. The only other thing I’m thinking on is time in the prone position underneath Granny’s quilt.
See, what we’re talking about here is signing on to be a cripple, ’cause when you get down to it, trainers in their way get hit more than fighters, only we do it for nickels and dimes, compared. So what’s the rest of the deal for the trainer? Well, sir, after getting through all the training and hurting, you live with the threat that you could work years with a heavy only to have him quit on you for somebody who’s dangling money at him now that you’ve done the job that changed a lump of fear and doubt into a fighter. But like I say, a good heavy these days only has to win a few fights for a shot at the title. If he wins that, he’s suddenly drinking from solid gold teacups. As the champ, he will defend his title as little as once. But the payoff can be mucho if he can defend a few times. So when the champ gets a ten-million-dollar payday, the trainer gets ten percent off the top—that’s a one-million-dollar bill. That can make you forget crippled backs and hands.
’Course the downside can be there, too. That’s when your heart goes out to your fighter as you watch helpless sometimes as he takes punches to the head that can hack into his memory forever. And your gut will turn against you when one day you see your boy’s eyes wander all glassy when he tries to find a word that he don’t have in his mouth no more. You feel rotten deep down, but you also love your fighter for having the heart to roll the dice of his life on a dream. And above all, you see clear that no matter how rotten you feel, that your boy never had nothing else but his life to roll, and that you was the lone one who ever cared enough to give him the only shot he would ever have.
Yet the real lure, when you love the fights with everything that’s left of your patched-up old heart, is to be part of the great game—a game where the dues are so high that once paid they take you to the Mount Everest of the Squared Circle, to that highest of places, where fire and ice are one and where only the biggest and best can play, yip!
Trainers know going in that the odds against you are a ton to one. So why do I risk the years, why do I take shots that stun my heart? Why am I part of the spilt blood? Why do I take trips to Leipzig or Johannesburg that take me two weeks to recover from? B.B. King sings my answer for me, backs it up with that big old guitar. “I got a bad case of love. ”
Anyway, all I was able to get Billy was what was out there, mostly Messkins, little guys wringing wet at a hundred twenty-four and three-quarters, what with us being in San Antonia. But there was some black fighters, too, a welter or a middleweight, now and then. Billy treated all his fighters like they was champs, no matter that they was prelim boys hanging between hope and fear, and praying hard the tornado don’t touch down. If they was to show promise, he’d outright sponsor them good, give them a deuce a week minimum, no paybacks, a free room someplace decent, and eats in one of his pubs, whatever they wanted as long as they kept their weight right. If a boy wasn’t so good, Billy’d give ’em work, that way if the kid didn’t catch in boxing, leastways he always had a job. People loved Billy Clancy.
See, he’d start boys as a dishwasher, but then he’d move ’em up, make waiters and bartenders of them. He had Messkin managers what started as busboys. He was godfather to close to two dozen Messkin babies, and he never forgot a birthday or Christmas. His help would invite him to their weddings, sometimes deep into Mexico, and damned if he wouldn’t go. Eyes down there would bug out when this big gringo'& come driving through a dusty pueblo in one of his big old silver Lincoln Town Cars what he ordered made special. Billy’d join right in, yip!, got to where he could talk the lingo passable, good enough to where he could tell jokes and make folks laugh in their own tongue.
Billy Clancy’d be in the middle of it, but he never crossed the line, never messed with any of the gals, though he could have had any or all of ’em. The priests would always take a shine to him, too, want to talk baseball. He never turned one down who come to him about somebody’s grandma what needed a decent burial, instead o
f being dropped down a hole in a bag.
One time 1 asked Billy why he didn’t try on one of them Indian-eyed honeys down there. Respect, is what he said, for the older folks, and ’specially for the young men, you don’t want to take a man’s pride.
“When you’re invited to a party,” said Billy, “act like you care to be invited back.”
That was Billy Clancy, you don’t shit where you eat.
My deal with Billy was working in the gym with his fighters for ten percent of the purse off the top. No fights, no money. I didn’t see him for days unless it was getting up around fight time. But he’d stop by, not to check up on me, but just to let his boys know he cared about them. Most times he was smoother than gravy on a biscuit, but I could always tell when something was pestering him. ’Course he wouldn’t talk about it much. Billy didn’t feel the need to talk, or he saw fit not to.
I know there was this one time when the head manager of all Billy’s joints in San Antonia took off with Billy’s cash. Billy come into his private office one Monday expecting to see deposit slips for the money what come in over a big weekend. Well, sir, there was no money, and no keys, and no manager, but that same manager had held a gun on Billy’s little Messkin office gal so’s she’d open the safe. The manager had whipped on the little gal, taped her to a chair with duct tape to where she’d peed herself, and she was near hysteric.
Billy had some of his help make a few phone calls, and damned if the boy what did Billy didn’t head for his hometown on the island of Isla Mujeres way down at the tip of Mexico, where he thought he’d be safe. Billy waited a week, then took a plane to Merida in the Yucatan. He rented him a big car with a good AC and drove on over to the dried-out, palmy little town of Puerto Juarez on the coast that’s just lick across the water from what’s called Women’s Island.
He hung out a day or so in Puerto Juarez, until he got a feel for the place, and so the local police could get a good look at him. Then he just pulled up in front of their peach-colored shack, half its palm-leaf roof hanging loose. He took his time getting out of his rental car, and walked slow inside. Stood a foot taller than most. He talked Spanish and told the captain of the local federales his deal, made it simple. All he wanted was his keys back, and he wanted both the manager’s balls. The captain was to keep what was left of the money.
That night late, the captain brought forty-six keys on three key rings to Billy’s blistered motel. He showed Polaroids of the manager’s corpse what was dumped to cook in the hot water off the island, and he also brought in the manager’s two huevos—his two eggs, each wrapped in a corn tortilla. Billy Clancy fed them to the wild dogs on the other side of the adobe back fence.
Billy checked out some of the Mayan ruins down around those parts, giving local folks time to call the news back to San Antonia. Billy got back, nobody said nothing. Didn’t have no more problems with the help stealing now he’d made clear what was his was his.
There was only one other deal about Billy I ever knew about, this time with one of his ex-fighters, a failed middleweight, a colored boy Billy’d made a cook in one of his places. Nice boy, worked hard, short hair, all the good stuff. First off, he worked as a bar-back. But then the bartenders found out the kid was sneaking their tips. They cornered him in a storeroom. They had him turned upside down, was ready to break his hands for him, but then he started squealing they was only doing it ’cause he’s black. Billy heard it from upstairs and called off his bartenders, piecing them off with a couple of c-notes each. He listened to the boy’s story, and ’cause he couldn’t prove the boy was dirty, he moved him to a different joint, and that’s where he made a fry cook out of him. The kid was good at cooking, worked overtime anytime the head cook wanted. But then word come down the kid was dealing drugs outta the kitchen. Billy knew dead bang this time and he had one of his cop friends make a buy on the sly.
See, Billy always tried to take care of his own business, unless when it was something like down in Mexico. Billy said when he took care of things himself, there was nobody could tell a story different from the one he told. So he waited for the boy outside the boy’s mama’s house one night late, slashed two of his tires. Boy comes out and goes shitting mad when he sees his tires cut, starts waving his arms like a crawdad.
Billy comes up with a baseball bat alongside his leg, said, “Boy, 1 come to buy some of that shit you sell.”
Boy pissed the boy off something awful, but he knew better than to challenge Billy on it. So the boy tried to run. He showed up dead, is what happened, his legs broke, his balls in his mouth. No cop ever knocked on Billy Clancy’s door, but drugs didn’t happen in any of Billy’s places after that neither.
It was a couple years after that when Dee-Cee Swans collared me about this heavyweight he’d been working with over at the Brown Bomber Gym in Houston. I said I wasn’t going to no Houston—even if it was to look at the real Brown Bomber himself. Dee-Cee said there wasn’t no need.
Henrilee “Dark Chocolate” Swans was from Louisiana, his family going back to Spanish slave times, the original name was Cisneros. Family’d brought him as a boy to Houston during World War Two, where they’d come to better themself. Henrilee’s fighting days started on the streets of the Fifth Ward. He said things was so tough in his part of town that when a wino died, his dog ate him. Dee-Cee was a pretty good lightweight in his time, now a’course he weighs more. Fight guys got to calling him Dee-Cee instead of Dark Chocolate, to make things short. Dee-Cee said call him anything you want, long as you called him to dinner.
He wore a cap ’cause he was bald-headed except for the white fringe around his ears and neck. He wore glasses, but one lens had a crack in it. He had a bad back and a slight limp, so he walked with a polished, homemade old mesquite walking stick. It was thick as your wrist and was more like a knobby club than a cane. But old Dee-Cee still had the moves. The time, between now and back when he was still Dark Chocolate, disappeared when Dee-Cee had need to move. Said he never had no trouble on no bus in no part of town, not with that stick between his legs. Dee-Cee had them greeny-blue eyes what some coloreds gets, and when he looked at you square, you was looked at.
Way me and him hooked up was chancy, like everything else in fights. ’Course we knew each other going way back. Both of us liked stand-up style of fighters, so we always had a lot to talk about, things like moves, slips and counters. Like me, he knew that a fighter’s feet are his brains—that they’re what tell you what punches to throw and when to do it. Since there was more colored fighters in Dallas and Houston, that’s where Dee-Cee operated out of most. But he had folks in San Antonia, too. He showed up again, him and a white heavyweight, big kid, a Irish boy calling himself “KO” Kenny Coyle. What wasn’t chancy was that Dee-Cee knew I was connected with Billy Clancy.
Dee-Cee got together with Coyle, trained him a while in Houston after working the boy’s corner twice as a pickup cutman in a Alabama casino. The way the boy was matched, he was supposed to lose. See, he hadn’t fought in a while. But he won both fights by early KOs, and his record got to be seventeen and one, with fifteen knockouts. Coyle could punch with both hands at six-foot-five, two hundred forty-five pounds, size sixteen shoe. His only loss came a few years back from a bad cut to his left eyelid up Vancouver, Canada.
The boy’d also worked as sparring partner for big-time heavyweights, going to camp sometimes for weeks at a time. That’s a lot of high-level experience, but it’s a lot of punishment, even when you’re bone strong, and sometimes you could tell that Coyle’d lose a word. Except for the bad scar on his eyelid, and his nose being a little flat, he didn’t look much busted up, so that made you think he maybe had some smarts. He was in shape, too. That made you like him right off.
Dee-Cee was slick. He always put one hand up to his mouth when he talked, said he didn’t want spies to read his lips, said some had telescopes. He was known to be a bad man, Dee-Cee, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a sense of right and wrong. Back before he had to use a cane, we
got to drinking over Houston after a afternoon fight—it was at a fair where we both lost. Half drunk, we went to a fish shack in dark town for some catfish. Place was jam-packed. The lard-ass owner had one of them muslim-style gold teeth—the slip-on kind with a star cutout that shows white from the white enamel underneath? Wouldn’t you know it, he took one look at my color and flat said they didn’t serve no food. Dee-Cee was fit to be tied—talked nigga, talked common, said Allah was going to send his black ass to the pit along with his four handkerchief-head ho’s. Old muslim slid off the tooth quick as a quail when Dee-Cee tapped his pocket and said he was going to cut that tooth out or break it off.
We headed for a liquor store, bought some jerky and ended up out at one of them baseball-pitching park deals drinking rock and rye and falling down in the dirt from swinging and missing pitches. People got to laughing like we was Richard Pryor. Special loud was the hustler running a three-card monte game next to the stands, a little round dude with fuzzy-wuzzy hair. He worked off a old lettuce crate and cheated people for nickels and dimes. Not one of them ever broke the code, but old Dee-Cee had broke it from the git. He watched sly from the fence as the monte-guy took even pennies from the raggedy kids what made a few cents chasing down the balls in the outfield.
Otto Penzler (ed) - Murder 06 - Murder on the Ropes raw Page 36