Rope Burns - [SSC]

by F. X. Toole

  Despite being in great shape and the cut man thinking of him as his kid, Mookie wasn’t a kid anymore. He was thirty-two, and God only knew what would happen to him and his sisters and his mama’s house if he didn’t beat the African. But he was a young thirty-two, and he had a young body and young eyes because he didn’t drink or use drugs. How he escaped those habits, especially after his title losses, the cut man didn’t know. Many didn’t. Well, Mookie did have one habit, pussy, but that didn’t make him a bad guy.

  And now they were fighting a six-foot-two African monster from Uganda, one with a big head and no nose and skinny long arms and legs, arms as long as a heavyweight’s. And he had that big back and rocks for shoulders, and he could crack—twenty-six wins, nineteen by knockout, and no losses. Con loved the Africans, loved their heart, their discipline; and he loved them because they weren’t afraid to love their dream. He loved their courtesy as well, and how in their modesty they cupped their private parts with their hands when coming out of a shower. And he loved how they could fight, and would fight, how they put everything on the line.

  Mookie had two managers, one white and one black, both good guys who’d had him for ten years except for the foolish time he managed himself, foolish because you can’t be the horse and the jockey and win. They’d brought Mookie along, picking the right fights, and though he’d been knocked out, he’d never been beat up, and getting Mookie his title shots was some kind of slick because most managers of champions avoid southpaws like they’ve got AIDS. But the African’s faction wanted to see the African against a name fighter, a boxer who would test him but who was getting old, someone they thought they could knock out with the African’s big right-hand. The African wanted to fight Mookie because Mookie was ranked number five; he was ranked number seven, and by beating Mookie he would move closer to his own shot at a title. The African wanted to win, but so did Mookie, and Mookie was so slick and quick and pretty that people in the gym watching him train would hold their breath or whine or say, “Dayamn.”

  But when Mookie got to Philly, he could hardly walk. Con was unaware of it, but that morning, Saturday, Mookie’s last day of running before the fight, while wrapping up his workout with wind sprints, ten strides into the seventh and last set he felt something go in his left leg, the leg he pushed off on when he jabbed, the leg that generated speed and power. Since Con had arrived in Philly first, he took his walk along the parkway and then returned to his room. He was watching the news when Odell called him from their room down the hall.

  “You better come down, old man. Room 645.”

  From Odell’s voice Con knew something was wrong. When he got to 645, Mookie had his face in his hands. It was like a wake in the room. “What’s up?” Con asked.

  Mookie told him about the leg, how it was killing him, and he showed how he could hardly walk, dragging the left leg like a cannonball was chained to it. Con had Mookie describe in detail what had happened. Mookie added that he’d thought of pulling out of the fight, but that he had come on anyway, hoping Con could fix him.

  Con started with the big question first. “When it went, did you feel it go pop?”

  “No, it just felt like it kind of came apart, or pulled or something behind my knee, and it hurt like a bitch right away.”

  “Well, we’ve got four days. Three, really.”

  “I feel it, but I can’t believe it,” Mookie said, his face long as a casket. “I worked so hard, two months, man. I’m in the best shape of my life. Better than for my title fights. They got me a nutritioniss this time. I came down from one-eighty, but what I lost was fat and water and not muscle. Look at my eight-pack,” he said, lifting his T-shirt so Con could see his abdominals.

  “You got no ass, either,” said Con, referring to how Mookie always put on weight in his high behind. It made Mookie smile, and some of the tension left the room.

  Mookie, as if to validate himself, began pulling bottles from his suitcase. “Look, look,” he said, lining up a display of pills and powders and liquids, explaining the function of each and how he’d maintained muscle mass as he’d taken off fat. “I been runnin my drawers off, Con, this ain’t right, I can’t believe my leg was what went, not my leg, my legs is stronger than anything on me, you understan what I’m sayin?, this ain’t right.”

  Con had him strip to his underwear, the little Frenchie kind. Mookie had the body of a twenty-two-year- old, with jackrabbit legs and a series of deep indentations from his solar plexus down to below his belly button. But his face was so sad that Con touched it, patted it like the face of a hurt child, and not knowing whether he was lying or not, said, “Don’t worry. I can fix it.”

  “You really can?”

  “Damn straight,” he said, but this time he knew he lied. “Now, tell me. You sure it didn’t go pop?”

  “If it did, I didn’t hear it or feel it.”

  “Did it make you flip?”

  “No, man, it made me sad.”

  “I mean did it knock your dick in the dirt.”

  “No, I just grabbed my leg and limped down to still. It ain’t my handspring, is it?”

  “If it was your hamstring, your dick is already in the dirt. Have you told anyone?”

  “Just you and Odell.”

  “Good. Did anyone see you limping into the hotel?”

  “No,” said Odell. “I told him to walk right.”

  Con had the kid lie on the low bed and asked more questions, lightly touching the leg and watching Mookie wince. What he liked was that there were no bunched-up knots in the muscle or the tendon. He went to his room for the medical kit that was his private emergency room. It had everything from cough drops to diaper pins, from adrenaline chloride solution 1:1000 for cuts to Nupercainal ointment, ass medicine that he used to soothe scraped faces and rope burns after a fight.

  “I’m going to give you codeine,” Con said, returning to room 645. “It won’t show up in your piss test this far from the fight, so don’t worry. I want your leg to stop hurting so I can get down into it, okay?, like a dentist into a tooth.”

  “You the doctor.”

  Odell watched it all, his face and good eye expressing nothing.

  Con got his alcohol-based lineament and the extra-virgin olive oil he used to lay down a slippery base. It made the skin supple when he gave a massage, and it made the black kids glow and feel happy with their pretty selves. Now he’d use the olive oil only from below Mookie’s ass to his Achilles tendon. Trainers were usually careful not to massage a fighter too close to a fight because they wanted him hard, physically and mentally, didn’t want to cut off the flow of adrenaline to the mind and tissue, didn’t want to siphon off the warrior’s edge. But Con had to go after Mookie’s leg, had to soften it up, or there wouldn’t be a fight.

  “Ice?” asked Odell, not waiting for an answer, going out the door to the ice machine with one of Con’s 11-by-12½-inch lock-top plastic bags.

  By then Mookie had given himself over to Con in the complete trust fighters will give to their handlers. It always touched Con, whether something went wrong with their hands in the gym or when he was in the corner working to stop the flow of blood in less than the one minute he had between rounds. It made him love his fighters close to the way he loved his own children. He worked very slowly on Mookie, reaching into the wounded tissue an eighth of an inch at a time until the back of his kid’s leg was like pudding and Mookie could walk around the room free from pain.

  “You fixed the muhfuh!” shouted Mookie. “You the king!”

  “Maybe it’ll tighten up,” said Con, “but we’ll go back at it. I think we got a shot.”

  “But you said you could fix it,” said Mookie, doubt in his voice.

  “I did fix it. Now let’s see if I can keep on fixing it.”

  “What about my weight? I got to sweat.”

  “We’ll be okay if we eat right and go light on liquids. Then we go to the gym two days before the fight, stretch like I show you, shadowbox, punch the mitts, and s
ee what happens.”

  “It feels fixed now,” Mookie protested.

  “Let’s hit it with more ice and some more hurt juice and walk it.”

  “It fixed, man.”

  “Wait. Wait and see.”

  They napped, Odell and Mookie keeping their room so hot Con could hardly breathe, especially with the fumes he was eating. Con kept the window open in his room.

  “You bloods got no blood,” Con would always say.

  “We cold, you crazy,” Mookie or Odell would always answer.

  Much of the pain had been relieved and Mookie was able to nap, but the leg did tighten up some while he was sleeping. Con worked on it until it was loose again, inhaling alcohol and winter-green fumes because he had to bend down so low to work on the leg. After two days he was half sick from the fumes, but the leg appeared to be a hundred percent and each hour Mookie was more sure of himself.

  “You a witch doctor, old man, a voodoo-hoodoo man.”

  “Old but pretty.”

  “Prettiest white man I seen.”

  So that’s the way it went, and when it was time they went to the gym in good spirits. The gym was in West Philly, at the very bottom of the ‘hood, and after stretching like Con showed him, and after a complete workout, including eight hard rounds on the punch mitts, Mookie was wringing wet. He weighed out at 157, still three pounds under the 160 limit. The leg held.

  “You did it, old man,” said Mookie.

  “Wait.”

  The leg was fixed. Con knew it would be when it didn’t tighten up after the gym work. They didn’t have to pull out of the fight, and Mookie would get his shot. Except for the managers, with whom Odell and Con were always square, the leg injury never happened as far as the promoter, the Boxing Commission, and the African ever knew.

  Mookie was in the shower. Odell smiled his shy smile and looked down the way he always did when he had something to say from his heart. “You didn’t believe,” Odell said to Con. “I believe, but not you.”

  “Yeah, I believed.”

  “No good.”

  “I believed, but I didn’t know until now,” said Con.

  “Once I see you wif him, you talkin wif him the way you talk an’ all, and once you start workin on the boy, I knew.”

  “I’m glad you did.” Con nodded to the shower. “Anyway, Mookie’s in shape, and that helped a ton, and we were lucky.”

  “Yeah, he in shape, but you the man.”

  Odell had stuttered a little, and Con knew how hard it was for him to say what he felt. Con was always surprised at how many ways he’d found to love Odell, so different in color and features and in so many other ways, and yet so much the same.

  “You think about it,” Odell had once told him. “We got the same daddy. He love us bof.”

  Factions travel around the world sometimes, and people often say that they wish they could see the places fight guys get to see. But fight guys get to see airports, fly in tight seats, and mostly stay in second-class hotels, eat in second-class joints. Time zones turn them upside down, and sometimes the seasons are in reverse. When the fighter works, the fight guys work with him; when he rests, so do they. In Paris or Tokyo or Philly they will take walks after eating, but then they go back to their dark rooms and watch bimbo TV shows to keep their minds off the fight, even when the language is one they don’t understand.

  It wasn’t exactly the same with Con—he liked his mind to be working, not numb. On Sunday he was able to go to mass in the Chapel of Saint Peter and Saint Paul’s domed cathedral at Eighteenth and Parkway. Walking back to the hotel, he saw the Free Library. He had read all his life, educated himself that way, and hoped he’d be able to go back on Monday. Being in the library would fill him with peace. But on Monday Mookie’s managers flew in, and what with Mookie’s TV interview, there was no time to go back to the library.

  He and Odell got to take a walk downtown for breakfast because Mookie didn’t eat and stayed in his room—it would have been too painful to tag along and have to look at food he couldn’t eat. But he was so happy about his leg he didn’t mind being alone. When asked by other blacks why he had a white man in his corner instead of a brother, Mookie would repeat what Odell always said about Con. “He a hell of a man.”

  The next day, Tuesday, the day of the fight, the weigh-in was at 9:oo A.M. Between the weigh-in and their eleven o’clock meeting with the boxing commissioner, Odell, Con, and Mookie’s managers took Mookie in a cab downtown, where they fed him Irish oatmeal and a stack of pancakes. Before his breakfast, though Mookie hated it, he drank a big glass of grapefruit juice for the potassium in it and to help regain fluids in his system. Walking back to the hotel with the others, Con noticed a poster advertising an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one featuring Michelangelo and Rodin together. Short of going to the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, or maybe to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on an if-come trip to New York, Con had come to believe that at his age he would never stand before a Michelangelo. But here he was, just half a mile away. He hoped he could get there, but on the day of the fight, time would be tight.

  Mookie returned to his room, but his faction met with the commissioner and the African’s faction in a meeting room at their hotel. All manner of fouls were discussed, including head butts, low blows, and knockdowns, but low blows were stressed. In the list of rules that were handed out, it was written that after two low-blow warnings, a point would automatically be deducted for the third infraction. The commissioner was a little guy, handsome, and Con saw him for either Italian or maybe Jewish. The guy was proud of his job and crazy for boxing, particularly the fights in Philly, and let everyone know that a first-class fight was expected, adding that he didn’t care whether it was a four-rounder or a twelve-round title-fight main event. Everyone understood.

  Back in his room Con tried to nap, but he couldn’t, even though he had slept fitfully the night before. He got nervous lying there, and hungry for something sweet. He went down to the busy convenience store across from the hotel for a small container of skim milk, an apple and a coconut Tastykake. Part of one ear had been bitten off in a street fight when he caught someone trying to break into his car, and he didn’t hear well on that side. So as he stood in line to pay, he didn’t hear the up-tempo soul music that was piped into the store—Patti LaBelle high and jamming above the bass and drums, improvising lyrics and playing hide-and-seek with the melody. Con noticed the music when someone standing somewhere behind him began singing along, matching Patti’s black sound word for word and inflection for inflection. Con looked back expecting to see a black teenaged boy but instead saw what looked like a Jewish college boy, his yarmulke pinned to his curly brown hair with bobby pins. He was accompanied by three gum-chewing coeds, their arms full of books, and as he hit the high notes, snapping his fingers and matching the singer’s style exactly, Con decided he was showing off in hopes of getting laid. The way the girls eyed each other, Con thought the guy might nail at least one of them if he kept working at it. Con’s mind went back to his kid resting in his hot, dark room, to his baby boy, to his fighting man.

  “Excuse me, sir. Sir? What is that?” Con only half heard the question, his mind now on his Tastykake. “Sir, excuse me? You with the tattoo?”

  Con turned and saw the yarmulke guy, noticed that the girls had vacant eyes. “That’s a tattoo on your wrist, isn’t it?” the guy asked rhetorically.

  Con looked down. As usual, his heavy Timex wristwatch had slipped down to reveal a blurred tattoo that resembled jailhouse art. Close to fifty years before, in the throes of his second steady piece of tail, and just before signing himself into the navy during the Korean War, it had been legible. It wasn’t anymore.

  “You did it yourself, right?” the singing guy asked excitedly.

  There was wonder rather than disrespect in his voice, so Con answered him. “No, I had it done.”

  “Where?”

  “On Skid Row in L.A., if it matters.”

  The boy look
ed disappointed; Con could see that he’d hoped to hear the tattoo was from Sing Sing or Alcatraz, or maybe Devil’s Island. “What, were a bunch of you out drunk or something?”

  “It was two in the afternoon,” said Con, but what came to mind, as they often did, were lines from Garcia Lorca:

  At five in the afternoon.

  It was exactly five in the afternoon.

  ‘You got it so early, the tattoo? Really?”

  “I was sober, alone, and it cost me my last two dollars.”

  “What does it say, the tattoo?” the guy asked, and one of the girls giggled. The guy squeezed her shoulders, and she leaned back into him.

  “Well,” said Con. He waited a moment and wondered if he should go ahead and tell. “It says, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.”

  “Says what?” the singing guy asked, thinking he was familiar with the sound of Rubáiyát, but he wasn’t sure. “You mean the, what?, is it a book or something?”