Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  “You know, Dewey, it’s not about you no more,” Trena said more than once.

  Now and then her patience wore thin, especially when there was some ordinary problem with a reservation, or tickets, or what have you, and I reverted to my “avoid confrontation” mode and made Trena deal with it alone. Shutting out everything and everyone around me used to keep me untouchable; now it made me unreachable to those who cared about me most. Trena kept pushing for me to get counseling, first for myself, and later, as a couple, but I have zero interest in sitting around talking to some stranger who can never understand where I’m coming from. I’ve lost too much time to waste more. I am who I am, the way I am.

  I came to recognize that certain things never failed to agitate me, and I would have to make a conscious effort to work on my attitude. For starters, I couldn’t stand people telling me what to do. I read too much into harmless requests that sounded, through ears accustomed to little else, like orders. You better do this or You have to are casual words that a loving wife says, but the ex-inmate hears, and taking out the trash suddenly isn’t about a household chore anymore. I ain’t doing nothin’ period. I had to learn how not to let my ego, my pride, get in the way. I made myself come back to apologize, because I was wrong. But Trena and I sometimes felt locked in position, caught out time and again in these small storms that rolled through our marriage.

  TENSIONS IN OUR SMALL FAMILY RELAXED once we were able to afford a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in the same complex. Diamond got her own room and her own TV, and one day brought home a Yorkshire terrier pup whose antics could instantly take the edge off any bad day. The bigger issues still shadowed us, though, and Trena started seeing a marriage counselor without me. I wasn’t going to be bullied into going. Some differences, I reasoned, were just the way we are, and we needed to let them be and move on. Charity was one of those ongoing debates.

  If I see a need and I can do something about it, I’ll act impulsively. At the gas station, there was a guy with a sign in his hand one day. I didn’t know if he wanted the money for drugs, but I didn’t care. My thing is, I follow my heart. I watched him take the cash I gave him and go inside and buy some soup. Another time, I was standing in line at the dollar store behind a lady and her little girl as they unloaded their cart full of clothes and cheap toys. The woman went to pay, and the clerk said her credit card had been declined. The little girl and her mother started putting everything back in the cart, and I could see the girl’s face, the hurt she was trying not to show.

  “Nah, put it back up there,” I told them. The mother looked up at me. “Don’t worry about it. It’s from me to you. You and your daughter.” I gave the cashier ninety dollars in cash. “What’d you do that for?” the clerk asked me as the grateful mother and daughter carried their bags out the door. I just shrugged. “Because I could.”

  Trena has deep compassion, but she is ruled more by reason than emotion. The crack addicts at church showed us how differently we regard an outstretched hand.

  We were sitting there before services one Sunday when a young woman came up to us and grabbed hold of Trena’s arm. They’d exchanged pleasantries on previous occasions, and now the woman told her, “I don’t have any money and I need some shoes. Can you help me with some shoes?” Trena handed her some bills with a gentle warning: “If I see you come into church and you don’t have on the shoes I bought you, we have trouble.”

  Another girl approached me directly, in her tight torn jeans and skimpy top. “Mmmm, you fine,” she crooned. “Can you help me with a dollar, or two dollars?” Trena came up, blood in her eye. The hooker tried to win her over. “Ma’am, I’m so sorry I disrespected you.” I was digging out my wallet. Trena shot me a look.

  “Don’t give it to her,” she said. “Wake up.”

  I gave the girl some money.

  The next time we saw her, she was marching through the aisles of the church with a crack pipe in her mouth, sucking on it, slurring, “Anybody help me with this pipe? I need some crack. I want some crack.” Trena turned on me.

  “Now do you understand? When you’re giving this young lady money, you understand that your blood is on her body? If she overdoses or gets killed by some dealer, you helped that happen.” If she had said she was hungry, Trena added for good measure, she would have told the girl to hop in the car and taken her to get something to eat.

  I did see Trena’s point, but I still disagreed.

  “What she does with the money is between her and God,” I said. “I’m not going to disrespect her or God.” Maybe I had paid for her drugs that day. But maybe that kept her from selling her body for the money. Maybe that prevented someone from getting HIV. I didn’t know. I never would. My role, as I saw it, was to give. Not to judge. I’d been judged.

  Maybe I saw the ghost of myself in all of them—the baby whose cries deserve to be heard, the little girl at the cash register resigned to having what she wants snatched away, the young parolees who piss away their own futures, the crack whores hustling in the aisles of church. Something pushes me to step into instead of away from their pain and anger. I’m not fool enough to think I’m there to save them. I just know I can’t do that one thing that caused more hurt and damage in my life than poverty, crime, or substance abuse combined: I won’t just turn my back and abandon them.

  WHEN TRENA AND I HEARD THAT BABYFACE WAS GOING TO BE PLAYING IN CONCERT at the Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, we bought front-row seats to see him. He’d always been “our” singer since I pressed that CD on Trena after we first met and urged her to listen, because his lyrics were my love letter to her. We had dinner at home, then got dressed up and headed out for our big night. Once we were inside the Civic Center, Trena headed off to the ladies’ room before we got seated. As I stood there waiting for her, idly watching the crowd heading into the concert hall, a face I instantly recognized emerged. The man walked up to me to say hello and introduce me to his girlfriend just as Trena reappeared. I could tell she couldn’t place the couple.

  “Trena, you remember, this is Anthony,” I said. I could feel her body tense next to mine, and her voice was cordial but her eyes cold as she politely said hello and how are you. “Enjoy the show, man,” I said as Anthony Wise excused himself and went to find his seat. I had heard he was out of prison; his sentence for killing Mary King was over while I was still serving time for the murder I’ll always believe he and his brother got away with.

  “Let’s go,” Trena said. She was rattled. “Why did you have to bring that guy in front of me?” she demanded. But seeing Anthony Wise didn’t mean a thing to me, and I wasn’t about to sacrifice front-row seats to Babyface because he was somewhere in the concert hall enjoying the same music. Trena didn’t understand that we had to acknowledge each other, play it straight, keep it moving. Prison code. If I ignored him, I became a threat, an enemy who was waiting for the chance to jump him. Our charade of civility is what kept it neutral, what let us both just continue on with our own lives.

  COMING UP ON THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF MY RELEASE, I got astonishing news: I was a finalist for ESPN’s prestigious Arthur Ashe Award for Courage. Named for the inspirational tennis champ, the award honors recipients for “possessing strength in the face of adversity, courage in the face of peril and the willingness to stand up for their beliefs no matter what the cost.” Past winners included Nelson Mandela, Pat Tillman, and Muhammad Ali. I had gotten on ESPN’s radar when filmmaker Jose Morales began filming a documentary on my case for the network after hearing about me from the Innocence Project. When the call came telling me I was the 2011 Arthur Ashe winner, it was like a gift from God, the one thing my prosecutors and persecutors had withheld from me even in the shameful face of their defeat the day I was freed: vindication. Standing at the awards ceremony in my suit and tie, hearing the crowd applaud and cheer for me, was both my proudest moment and my most humbling.

  It had rankled me, the D.A.’s refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing—or my innocence—even after all the ev
idence Ross uncovered made my conviction collapse like a house of cards. Who was accountable for twenty-six years stolen from a man’s life? Ross prepared a civil suit against the Dutchess County district attorney’s office and the Poughkeepsie Police Department, demanding $26 million in damages for what he described as the “gross violation” of my constitutional rights that led to my false arrest and conviction. WilmerHale once again took on my fight entirely pro bono, and Ross and his team dug in for another long haul. It could be years, he warned me. And, just as it had been in my two murder trials, my character would be attacked. What was my life worth? That’s what it seemed to come down to. Ross tracked down trainers and boxers who had seen me fight on Sing Sing’s boxing team to get expert analysis of my skills and what my potential had been. If I had been free to pursue the boxing career I was just beginning when I got locked up, what could my winnings have added up to over a lifetime? Would I have become a champ? Would I have had endorsements? Would I have left the ring to become a successful manager or promoter? Would I have opened my own gym, or a chain of them? My lawyers had their own complicated calculus for setting damages. I had my own.

  No one can ever repay you for a stolen life.

  14

  “FAILURE IS A CHAIN REACTION. So is success.” When I repeat those words to a classroom full of at-risk kids, or to a ballroom full of corporate executives, I want them to know that it’s not just some generic motivational quote. It’s a truth that I know in my heart and have experienced intensely all my life. Even so, winning the Arthur Ashe Award set off a chain of events that I could never have predicted. Here I was, a man past fifty, fully realizing my dreams for the first time.

  The Ashe Award generated interest in me as a motivational speaker, and Ross and Shauna set me up with an agency that began booking me for all-expense-paid business trips across the country, and even internationally. Trena and I started a magnet collection on our refrigerator door: Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Kalamazoo, Australia, even London. I had never flown before and was as excited as a kid to even be in an airport. I didn’t have a fear of flying, but going through security gave me flashbacks. If something beeped, I would start shaking.

  “I don’t know what else I got,” I said the first time it happened, turning to Trena for help.

  “Babe, take off your belt,” she calmly told me.

  At the Ashe awards ceremony, ESPN had broadcast a short video chronicling my journey, narrated by actor Matthew McConaughey. The big auditorium fell still at the conclusion, when McConaughey told viewers that I still prayed “to get back one small one piece” of the life taken from me: “He wants just one fight as a free man.” One of the people touched by my story turned out to be Dan Beckerman, a senior executive with Anschutz Entertainment Group, the largest owner of sports teams and sports events in the world. Beckerman immediately fired off an e-mail to boxer Oscar De La Hoya, and within days, the two had arranged for my biggest dream of all to come true: I was going to step into the ring as a pro boxer. De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions was offering me a spot on the undercard of a light-heavyweight championship match at the Staples Arena in Los Angeles. I had barely three months to get my boxing license and train for the October 15, 2011, match against Larry Hopkins. I had already been helping train aspiring young boxers at my friend Ray’s gym, and now it was time to focus intensely on myself. I was proud that with self-discipline and demanding workouts, I had managed to keep my fighter’s physique over the years, but a lifetime spent on concrete floors and prison bunks had taken a toll on my back and hips. Watching me do squats or jump rope at the gym, nobody would guess I was in pain. But at home, just getting up from the kitchen table or walking stiffly around the apartment was difficult. It worried Trena, who badgered me about seeing an orthopedist.

  “I can deal with it on my own,” I told her.

  No one over the age of fifty had ever earned their pro boxing license in California, and I would have to pass a whole raft of mandatory medical exams before the state Athletic Commission would decide if I was fit to fight. I was excited to get things moving. Trena and I were up well before dawn to catch our five-hour flight to Los Angeles. “Rock ’n’ roll,” I told her as we headed from the airport straight to a day full of doctor’s appointments without even stopping to unpack at our hotel. I would have to undergo a neurological exam, an MRI brain scan to make sure I hadn’t suffered any previous cerebral hemorrhaging, an eye test, a basic physical, blood tests to rule out HIV and hepatitis, and an EKG.

  “How many fights do you think you’ve had altogether?” the neurologist asked, shining a tiny flashlight into my eyes and tracking their movement.

  “Ten,” I said.

  “Ten fights in prison,” he repeated.

  I nodded. My last one had been maybe fifteen years ago. Was I being a fool to think I could go pro now, even for a single night? Lying on the cold EKG table with electrodes attached to my chest, I remembered the closing line Matthew McConaughey had narrated in my minibiography at the Ashe ceremony: “It’ll be easy to train for, considering he’s already won the most difficult fight he’ll ever face.”

  Electrocardigram over, I sat up and gave the cardiologist a smile.

  “That’s a good heart, right?” I prodded.

  “Yeah, very good,” she agreed.

  Next, I met up with Sid Segovia from the California Athletic Commission at a fighters’ gym in downtown L.A., where I would be put through the paces. Dressed in a neatly tucked red polo shirt with a state emblem on the pocket, Segovia was every inch the bureaucrat as he consulted the clipboard in his hands.

  “Okay, so you’re going to do five minutes on the jump rope, five minutes on the heavy bag, five minutes on the speed bag, then five minutes on the mitt.”

  Segovia handed me a jump rope and hit his stopwatch. Twenty minutes later, a sheen of sweat covering my torso, I sat down on the edge of the ring, glad it was over. I couldn’t wait to get to the hotel. Between traveling, medical tests, and now this, it had been a grueling twelve hours without rest or a proper meal. I just wanted to shower and crash for a while, then maybe go out for a nice dinner with Trena.

  “Okay, now you’re going to do three three-minute rounds of sparring with Mr. Carthron,” Segovia instructed, gesturing toward a young pro-heavyweight named Andrae Carthron who was gloved up and waiting for me. I was dumbfounded.

  “I do all that work and you want me to go out there and spar with that man for ten minutes?” I objected. “I’ve been up since three this morning!”

  “Correct,” Segovia said in his pleasant robot-official voice. “Again, we’re just doing what we were told to do, which is to come here and do an evaluation. We’re following the same protocol we do with every athlete in California.”

  I had my doubts that every athlete flew across the country, underwent hours of medical exams, and then was rushed right into the evaluation of skills all on the same day—while jet-lagged and operating on just a few hours’ sleep. I took a long drink of water and breathed deeply to clear my head. It is what it is, I told myself. The same mantra had pulled me through far worse challenges than this.

  “Okay,” I told the evaluator. “Let’s go.”

  “Try not to hurt each other, but we gotta see some skills,” Segovia advised us before we began. The bell rang and we went at it. I didn’t notice Trena scowling behind her sunglasses on the sidelines, or see her walk out with the kind of ladylike, contained fury that spells serious trouble for whoever set her off. She would later tell me she couldn’t bear to watch because it seemed so unfair to her.

  The three rounds passed in a blur. I looked at Segovia expectantly. He consulted his clipboard.

  “Cardio looked good, technique looked good,” he offered. “In terms of how you rated from 1 to 10, that will be determined by our office in Sacramento.”

  I was dog-tired but optimistic as Trena and I headed to the hotel.

  “I believe 99.9 percent that I proved myself,” I told her. “I’m this close
, this close to getting my fight.”

  BACK HOME IN BEACON TWO DAYS LATER, THE PHONE RANG. Che Guevara, the California athletic inspector, introduced himself on the other end. He said he wanted to read a letter to me. I was ready to jump out of my skin from nerves. Trena and I put the phone on speaker and listened expectantly.

  “Dear Mr. Bozella,” Guevara read out loud, “this letter serves as notice that your professional boxing application is currently denied . . .”

  I was stunned. My heart fell a thousand feet and broke. I could barely hear Mr. Guevara reading the rest of the letter over the sound of blood roaring through my ears. Trena sat forward in her chair, listening intently while I shook my head in disbelief.

  “. . . based on your performance and evaluation process at Strong Sports Gym in Los Angeles. Despite receiving high cardiological reviews, it was the actual sparring session of the eval that raised concerns, Dewey. It was reported that you had difficulty with lateral movement in the ring and it was noted that you showed questionable reflexes and lacked adequate defensive footwork.

  “This isn’t the be all and end all,” Guevara went on, unaware that I had walked out of the apartment, desperate for some fresh air. Trena stayed behind to hear him finish. “You have the opportunity in the next month to hone your craft more, work on some of the things we just listed off, and possibly come back another time to try to make it for your scheduled bout October fifteenth, if that’s something you’d like to do.”

  Guevara waited for me to answer, and Trena improvised.

  “Uh, Dewey just went to the men’s room,” she said. “This is his wife, Trena Bozella.”

  “Is he okay?” Guevara asked.

  “I hope so,” Trena said. She had no idea whether I’d gotten into my Honda and driven off in anger or what. In truth, I was sitting on the stoop growing more bitter by the second.