by Tom Sheridan
“How is the little tyke?”
“Good. Busy.”
“Haven’t seen him since he’d come over to ride his bike. Real nice at the park by my place. Before they paved it over with apartments.”
“Right. Yeah. He’s got homework.” Franco motioned for The Frog to head on into the kitchen. “I’ll make ya a drink.”
The Frog glanced the TV as his Ferragamos click-clacked along the linoleum. Made their way into the kitchen. The Frog took a seat at the booth table against the back wall. Stretched his arms about.
Franco brought him a whiskey neat. Jameson. Had to be Jameson. The Catholic whiskey. Bushmills was proper for Protestants. Franco learned that a long time ago, serving The Frog in the basement casino over at Tiffy’s. Franco cut himself a club soda rocks. Gave the illusion of a cocktail with his capo.
Franco sat under the lone light in the room. A 60-watt beneath a beige shade. The asymmetrical alignment of the booth table that Young Franco had banged in now caused him to sit illuminated while The Frog sat in the shadows.
The Frog began the interrogation. “You own this place, right?”
“For the time being.”
“Paying your fight team?”
“Same.”
“Last fight of your contract? They say this kid’s unbeatable.”
“Yeah, somethin like that.” Franco sipped his carbonated cocktail.
“Gotta get back on the docks.”
“That’d be nice.”
“Ain’t gonna just happen.”
Franco shrugged.
The Frog squeezed his folded hands. “Gotta make it happen.”
“How’s that?” said Franco as he sipped.
“Gotta get a hold of the honcho importing the illegals.”
Soda gas rose in Franco’s throat.
The Frog leaned forward into the lamp light. His head illuminated as he spoke of another’s. “Twenty large for his fuckin head.”
Franco’s rocks glass rattled to rest on the table. He had been dodging the heavy-hitter shit ever since he got going with The Frog. Kept his distance by docking himself at the docks. By dropping off gangsta rolls then rolling to the mats. By cutting The Frog in on his fight earnings to get him invested in Franco the Fighter. All in all, it left Franco with a line of work he could live with. Makin a buck off gambling? Wasn’t anything the state governments with their tracks and their lottos, the corporate casinos all across the country, and companies all over the World Wide Web weren’t doing. They can all rake it in by the billions, sure. But the little guy himself can’t make a few bucks off a few bets? Dafuckouttahere.
But now? Here The Frog was. Once again asking the temp to do the dirty work. Rake up rat shit? Fine. Mince through maggots? No problem. Drop into a junkyard and collect five yards? Okay. But offing someone? Franco considered saying he had a big fight. But he’d been telling The Frog that for ten years now. “I ain’t a killer.”
The Frog leaned his head in even farther. His deep-set eyes now illuminated. Hazel. “Nobody’s a killer until they have to.”
Nobody’s a killer until they have to. The haunting phrase made itself a nice little home in Franco’s head.
“You wanna pay your mortgage? Or bounce back across Bunns Lane?”
“I say no. Someone gonna take care of El Jefe anyway?”
“No. I’m just gonna let him take my turf.” The Frog leaned back in the shadows. Sipped the Jameson as rich as his sarcasm.
“What’s his story? This jefe,” Franco said, flying through whatever the fuck the five stages of grief were.
“Name’s Arturo. He’s a fuckin crook. Rounds up a bunch of illegals. Puts together fake IDs for them. Contracts them out.”
Franco sipped his soda. “He’s got juice?”
“We got juice.” The Frog reached in his trench coat pocket. Laid the Glock under the lamplight.
Franco glanced down the hall. T could pop in—
The Frog leaned in. Slid the .45 to Franco like he was at the Little League mound giving him the game ball. Franco, taken by its weight, fumbled it to the floor.
The Frog hopped back. “Jesus Christ.”
Franco picked the piece up. Handled it like a hot potato. For the hundred street fights Franco had in his life, he brought a gun to not one. “There a safety on this thing?”
The Frog grabbed the Glock from his goon. “Look. Right here. Safe as can be.” The Frog slid it back over. Franco tucked it in his waist with the confidence of a turtle tucking his head in his shell.
“A middle man moseying the Mexicans in is into us for twenty large. Runs a trucking fleet outside AC. You pay him a visit. Find out how to get a hold of the honcho.”
Franco sucked his soda down to the rocks. The fight game was growing by the minute. A win in a couple weeks and he’d easily have his biggest contract yet. Could walk away from this shit once and for all. Like he was supposed to seven years ago. Until those final ticks. When his ankle split. Then again. A loss in a couple weeks and shit was bleak. Locked out at the docks. Locked out of the fight game forever. What the fuck was The Frog always poppin off about after watching Mad Money with Jim Cramer? Diversity? Nah. Definitely not that. Diversification. That’s it. Franco had been wishing lately, at 33, that he stepped up his responsibility. Not to mention that this Arturo was a gangster. A gangster that put Franco’s fellow longshoremen out of work. A gangster that lives by the gun. So it’s only fair if he dies by the gun. But. Could Franco really bring himself to pull the trigger?
He told The Frog he would.
TRACK 6. BUNNS PAIN
TJ WOKE UP in his old bedroom as he did five years before. Only now, when he sat up, he hit his head on the slanted ceiling. His Jeter poster behind him. His 1998 Dell set upon a flimsy formica desk. He looked out his wood-framed window. A sunny Sunday. One of those March days that made him think the good weather was finally there. Until he opened the window. Got whipped by the wind.
TJ spotted Dragon walking along in work boots. A brown-bagged lunch to boot. “Yo. Pickin up work at H——? Long walk,” hollered T.
“More time to write my raps,” said Dragon as he knocked on his noggin.
“More time to see what’s goin on in the streets.”
“Exact,” said Dragon. Dragon, who rapped the first day of their freshman year,
I see all this pain
This heartache desire
Breathe it in
Spit it out like fire
Dragon here
The situation is dire
The two threw each other peace signs as Dragon dragged on.
TJ’s eyes transferred to Franco—wrapping his run with a sprint down Bunns. “Eight am and you already got a run in?” TJ shouted.
Franco doubled over for a beat. Huffed and puffed by his barren garden. “And Muay Thai after I take you to school.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“I know,” said Franco as he harvested a dirt-bombed basketball.
Father and son shared smiles.
They made their way up the block. Past all the two-story cookie-cut brick projects with pitched roofs. Life-sized versions of the Monopoly hotels. Laid out in pairs in alternating east-west, north-south patterns to create quads in between. Quads of clotheslines. Coal grills. An H-head sneaking pills. As they walked the projects that projected people of all pigment, Franco said hey to McKay. Yo to Cho. Hola to Lola—aka Naval Officer Cruz. Visiting Mom after a one-year cruise.
The ball court was on the elevated end of the street. Flanked by a beige sound barrier that muffled Mack trucks tearing up the Turnpike. The Brown Monster. An expansive canvas for local artists. MENACE. DRAY. SCREWS.
And Franco’s favorite. CROCK. With green block letters angled into points. The bottoms of the letters submerged in a pool of brown. “How about my man Crock?” said Frahnc as he tossed the rock. “Crocodile. From the swamps of Jersey.”
TJ squared up to the netless rim
backed by a rust-patched backboard. The court was riddled with puddles from the wintry mix that made its way through the day before. Puddles that made it TJ’s favorite time to play. When the court was clear, there’d be ten running full and another ten waiting, leaving little T left out. “If it meant Crocodile, it’d be spelled C-R-O-C,” T noted as he bricked his first shot. “It means crock as in crock of shit.” TJ rarely cursed around his parents. But he had to make the point. “He’s melting away in a crock of shit.” TJ drove and laid one up to get going.
Franco caught the ball under the basket. Recalled the time The Frog asked him what he thought Gremlins was about. Like really fuckin about as The Frog put it. Franco was holding Baby T at the time. Just like he was holding the ball right then. Young Franco said he figured it was about a guy who wasn’t ready to be a parent. The Frog, meanwhile, focused on another aspect of the movie altogether: the Gremlins destroying the town. And came up with a far different answer. “Yeah, I dunno. Maybe art says more about the observer than anything.” Franco fired the ball to T.
Father and son had one side to themselves. Two teen brothers had the other. Freddy with the fresh fade and fleet of foot. His older brother Lenny with more lank and less hair. TJ knew them from the block and the ball team. A soph and a senior. Both on varsity.
Franco warmed up with some Js.
Meanwhile, TJ watched Freddy fake the fadeaway, then run it to the rack for a flush. “Damn. I can’t even get net.”
“He’s older,” Franco fired as he fired a pass.
“One year,” retorted T as he heaved another brick.
Franco chased down the rebound. “I never had those hops either.” He fed TJ again.
TJ considered pointing out that Franco was a freshman way back in ’89-’90. Before the AAU explosion. Before everyone wanted to be Like Mike. Before the internet intensified everything: nutrition plans, workout programs, year-round leagues. Ballin outta control. Back in 1990 Woodbridge, TJ imagined, you could wake up hungover, eat a bag of potato chips, pick up a basketball for the first time in nine months, and make the team. But TJ kept that all to himself. Had a hard time contradicting Dad. TJ instead doubled down and flung one with full focus. It rattled out of the unforgiving rim.
“Woulda went in indoors,” Franco reassured T. “Besides. School’s more important. You gotta do better in school,” Franco said as he slid into territory Julie had asked him to cover. Or more accurately per the wording of her text, told him to cover.
Gotta do better in school. TJ laughed to himself over the ironic imperative from Dad. Have to do better in school would’ve been much more apropos.
Franco launched a fadeaway that nicked the far side of the rim and faded away. It was hard for him to tell TJ to do good in school, walk the line, go make somethin of himself. After all, Franco hadn’t done any of those things. He didn’t even have his own shit in order and he was gonna tell his kid how to go about it? Fuck, Franco’s life was never in order. From the orphanage. To the foster family. To the teen pregnancy. To the up-and-down docks. To the street hustle. To the fits-and-starts fight career. To the failed marriage. In his 20s, he was sure his whole life would be sorted by now. Twenty-three and he was hoisting little T on his shoulders, hopping around on two good ankles, Franklins fallin out of his track pant pockets. Professional fighter knockin fools out in AC. And Young Julie. Ooh wee. Franco had the whole block clicking. The whole town. When the college grads from his high school soccer team were moving back to their basements, Franco was buying them beers. Throwing bangers in his basement. In the house that he bought.
But while Franco floundered, the grads left their basements one step at a time. Whack-ass internship. Step one. Emasculating assistant gig. Step two. Middling middle manager. Step three. Overworked worker bee. Step four. Worker bees that built new nests in bucolic Bridgewater. Breezy Bay Head. Cozy Cranford. Steps five, six, and seven. Off to suburban heaven. Anywhere but there. Outtie in their Audis. In their $50K cars bumping 50. With their Bose and their nose turned up. Damn homie. What the fuck happened to Franco? Nothing. Nathan. He was still in-town. Still on Bunns Lane. All in. His stacks pushed to the middle of the table. Trying to gut out a gut shot with only the river to come. The Return. To a top-ten fight.
As TJ ran after the failed fadeaway, it hit Franco as hard as the whipping wind. Ten years since he last bumped “Sky’s the Limit” in his basement. He’d thought he’d made it back then. From ashy to classy like his boy Biggie. Back in his Michael Jordan year. But now in his Larry Bird year and still broke? Franco had love for everyone he’d kicked it with. From the projects to the penthouse. But what about him? While The Prince became a Playboy, he was a Penthouse. Dirty dirty. In the slums of Jersey Jersey. Despite working harder than anyone he knew. Organized his entire “post-college” career years around the fight game. Docked the dock hours. Intensified the training. Ditched drinking. Started studying. Taught himself how to use TJ’s computer. Broke down video on every fighter he could find. Even started reading. Every MMA article he could get his hands on. Not only that. Academic journals. On everything from nutritional science to the sweet science. Studying video and reading into the wee hours. Miss Lane woulda lost her mind. There Franco was, studying studies from Princeton. Shit, he almost bought glasses and a pipe! Like he was Francis Freeman. Workin on bein a free man. Not owing nobody nathan. Like his old soccer teammate, Nathan. Workin at JP Nathan. Sellin mortgage-backed somethins worth nathan. Buyin up foreclosed houses like nathan. Gobblin up green like Joey Chestnut at Nathan’s. College paid for his baby boy. Nathan.
All while Franco pushed his pony from Santa Fe to Portland, Maine. Fighting his way from a Brooklyn dungeon to an arena in London. Shit, even bein a father made him a better fighter. And vice versa. Focused. Motivated. Responsible. Sober. Where would Franco be without TJ and MMA? His whole adult life woulda been DOA. He woulda been fifty-fifty partners with The Frog by now. Forget The Bunns Lane Brawler. He’d be The Lizard. Even his side gigs with The Frog were all about allowing him to focus on Franco the Fighter. A decade-long 24-7 focus for the old teammate of Nathan. A focus that left him with exactly nathan.
And not only did Franco work harder than anyone he knew, he was pursuing his dreams. Wasn’t that exactly what all the music, movies, and TV told him to do? Motherfucker. That’s exactly what the inspiring words of “Sky’s the Limit” ran out on. Motherfucker. It sure was, Biggie. The motherfucker for Franco being that one slip in the octagon. Which led to that one slip with The Frog. To that one slip with his family. Motherfu—
Franco had to come correct in his upcoming fight.
But right then, he had to come correct as a father. He passed a rebound to his son who had already passed him. Better grades than Franco ever got. Higher IQ. Only half of Franco’s crazy motherfucking DNA. The way it was before Julie dropped T off made a lot more sense all the sudden. Franco could just keep his fuckin mouth shut and let her do all the talking. So he followed her lead. While Franco delivered passes, he shot stock messages from Mom. All your grades count now. Miss Lane says you ain’t tryin. You need an activity—gotta keep up with basketball.
TJ sunk his shoulders despite sinking shots. It was all things he’d heard already. Only with worse grammar. TJ thought about explaining to Franco that he was too small to ball. That it wasn’t rec league anymore back when the rim was so much higher relative to the pre-pubescent kids that all Franco had to do was teach little T to heave it better than the next boy. TJ thought about explaining that all they do in Lane’s class is read books about kids in private school in the 1900s. Early 1900s. Yeah, TJ liked to read. But Will Hunting wasn’t the only one with the wrong fuckin books. What did TJ’s have anything to do with what was poppin in The Wood? Hanging with Franco was what would really get TJ ready for the real world. But TJ didn’t explain any of that. He just gave Franco the yeah yeah so they could move on to more important things. Like is Dad mafia? Like why won’t Mom let TJ wrestle? And most importantly
, how the fuck does one fight?
The two got in a groove as T showed the right attitude toward the platitudes. T even started sharp-shooting from three. Worked his way around the world.
“Ho. Larry Bird.”
“Ray Allen,” said TJ low enough such that Freddy and Lenny couldn’t hear. Them looking like Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. TJ looking like the Celts towel boy.
Franco came forward and challenged T. T crossed Franco up. But Franco caught up. Swatted T’s shot. Sent the ball bouncing down Bunns Lane. “Come on. I gotta make it to Muay Thai anyway.”
TJ ran down the ball. The work of CROCK caught his eye. Lenny meanwhile ohhh’d over Freddy flushing another one. TJ then looked down at his own ball. The graffiti wasn’t the only writing on the wall.
Franco and TJ were walking the project side of the street when the lowrider rolled by. On the vinyl side of Bunns Lane. Chromed out from the 5-spoke spinners to the 26-inch twisted handlebars. Franco didn’t even have to look up to the baby face above the North Face. Eddo. Fuck.
Eddo owed two Gs to The Frog. Two Gs The Frog pulled from the pay of the guy who vouched for Eddo. Franco.
“Motherfucker owes me two Gs,” fired Franco, forgetting fatherly duties. “Ay! Eddo!”
The shout shook Eddo. Almost fell off his lowrider. “Yo Franco! What’s good? Got your dinero next week no doubt!”
The answer to all Franco’s problems pedaled away. The two Gs would be enough to float Franco until his fight night money came through. He could put icing Arturo on ice until after. And with a win? Put it on ice forever. “Hold the fuck up!”
Eddo fuckin stood and pedaled. His knit Raiders hat flapped in the wind. The West Coast wannabe ready to pump his way to the Pacific.
The Bunns Lane Brawler grabbed the ball from T. He gained ground with his first burst but lost ground as Eddo picked up a head of steam. Franco cocked the basketball back. Let it rip like Eli in the Super Bowl. Eddo played the receiving role of Tyree. Only he didn’t catch the bomb that blew up his head. He flew off his bike like a character on Jackass as Franco ran up to jack his ass.