On the Ropes addm-1

by Tom Schreck

  After Clogger came Larry Kingston, who was chronically depressed and incredibly boring to talk to. During Larry’s sessions I usually pretended to jot notes down on what he said and instead wrote out what I needed at the grocery store.

  The very last session of the day was with Emmanuel “Froggy” Bramble. Froggy was another gay guy who hung out in the park and lived pretty much the same life as Mikey. Froggy didn’t have any desire to go the transgendered route, but he was flamboyantly feminine. He accentuated a lisp as if playing to the stereotype and he often said he had no desire to change his lifestyle.

  His numerous arrests for park activity and low-level drug possessions forced him into treatment. Like Mikey, he was fun to talk to but he did very little therapeutic “work” in our sessions-whatever that is. Froggy was originally from Jamaica and he had very dark skin and wore his hair in neat cornrows. At six-two and a well-muscled 215 pounds, he didn’t really fit the body type of your basic, central-casting flamer.

  He was about ten minutes late, which is actually early by our clinic’s standards. Froggy was wearing knee-length black spandex pants and a white mesh shirt. He kept his wraparound mirrored sunglasses on.

  “Hello Mr. Duffy,” Froggy said.

  “Hey Froggy,” I said. “Tell me what’s been going on.”

  “Oh, you know, just doing my thing.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. You’re talking about your nocturnal park rendezvous?”

  “You say it so nice,” Froggy said, exaggerating his lisp.

  “C’mon, Frog, you know it’s not safe.”

  “That doesn’t seem to bother the steady stream of upstanding businessmen who come visit us,” he said. “’Course when I get through with them, they’re all upstanding.”

  “Yeah, but-”

  “This week we had a Crawford city council member, a prominent tax attorney, and my new favorite-that TV doctor,” Froggy rolled his eyes like someone who just finished a superb flaming baked Alaska for dessert. “That man gives as good as he gets-just like he says, ‘body and spirit,’” Froggy said.

  “Look, Frog, let’s talk about drugs…”

  “He’s so cute in his white coat and to think, a TV celebrity, doing me the favors.”

  “Frog-the drugs?” I said.

  And so it went. Froggy wanted to get off bragging about his sex life and I wanted to talk about anything else. Part of it was because it was a little gross, but mostly because it didn’t help Froggy focus on doing anything to better himself. It was an uphill battle, but toward the end of the hour Froggy halfheartedly agreed to at least look at his addictive tendency.

  Such is a day in the business of saving lives. It was a full day and I had had enough. I needed to do something physical and get my heart racing, so I headed to the gym to hopefully get some sparring in. My own rule is to get a sparring session in at least every two weeks if I have no fight scheduled. If I’m training for a specific bout, then I spar three times a week. As a professional opponent, it behooves me to stay in shape in case a decent payday, short-notice fight comes up. There was the possibility of that fight in Kentucky, but I didn’t think I wanted to take it. After that, you just never know when the phone is going to ring.

  Smitty was watching a couple of teenage featherweights in the ring. The cool thing about Smitty was he gave everyone the same attention regardless of ability or potential. The determining factor about whether Smitty took time to coach you was whether you sparred with heart. If you avoided fighting, if you got in the ring and pussied it, or if you made a ton of excuses about sparring, then Smitty had little use for you. He wouldn’t be mean; he just wouldn’t take you seriously.

  Fighting was a spiritual thing to him. He believed it was an important thing in life to face what you’re scared of and keep on keeping on despite your fears. We met when I was a teenager and I was doing karate. The Y has a karate class and some of the guys from the class come in during the boxing sessions to work out or to add boxing to their skills. I thought I was a badass as a kid because I had a black belt until I decided to box with another kid who had a few amateur fights. The kid punched me in the stomach and I threw up. The next day I asked Smitty if he would train me and I never went back to karate. Real fighting, I’ve learned, involves being hit and dealing with it and in karate classes there just isn’t enough real hitting.

  If you looked at Smitty, you’d think he was the quintessential, old-time, gym-rat boxing trainer. He was in his sixties, black, and still all wiry muscle with a close-cropped head of gray hair. He favored Dickies, flannel shirts, and work boots as his fashion statement. Smitty devoted his life to boxing, which made his central casting role authentic, but it was far from all he was. Smitty got out of Korea and with the GI Bill went to Dartmouth where he got a degree in American literature. He reads voraciously and continues to teach literacy courses in the state prison sixty miles away three times a week for nothing. Smitty is independently wealthy, though you’d never guess it from looking at him. He never said how he happened to make his fortune and he never flaunted it, living in one of the city’s old brownstones and driving an Olds Ninety-Eight from the late eighties.

  I loosened up and Smitty came over to work me through the mitts. In mitt work, the trainer calls out punch combinations and you have to respond with the right punches. It drills proper technique and reaction time. The way Smitty did it, it worked your defense too, because if he saw you drop your guard, he’d crack you in the face with a mitt.

  “Turn the hip over on your hook,” Smitty said. “That’s where your power comes from.”

  I threw four or five more hooks in a row, none of which pleased Smitty.

  “Do you want to hit like a bitch your whole life?” he growled. “Throw the hip into the hook!” he said.

  This has been going on since I was a teenager. I didn’t have much power in my punches and I knew it. Power in boxing comes less from muscle strength and more from the subtle shifting of body weight. Some fighters naturally have the knack of shifting their body weight just right so they maximize their power. If you don’t have it, you can have success by being crafty in the ring and by hitting the other guy more than he hits you. Without the shifting of body weight, it’s tough to get one-punch knockout power.

  “Smitty-I’m trying,” I said. “I’ve been fuckin’ trying since I was fourteen.”

  “Let it happen, Duff. Let your hip out, then snap it in at the right moment. It’s just like givin’ it to a chick,” Smitty said.

  He’s used that analogy every day I’ve been in the gym since I was fourteen. Maybe if Lisa let me throw it to her once in a while it would mean something to me. Smitty finally changed up from the hooks and had me working some other combinations and moving. Moving and being crafty was my game, and it’s what keeps me in boxing. I get knocked out, but I rarely take beatings, because I know how to move. That’s why I can beat the local guys and the nobodies and can’t beat guys with one-punch power.

  “You’re good for today, Duff,” Smitty said. “I ain’t got nobody for you to spar.”

  “I was hoping to get some work in the ring. Ain’t nobody around?” I said.

  “Nobody for you, Duff. If you really want to, do some bag work,” Smitty said. “You got to let me know about the deal in Kentucky.”

  “I don’t want to go down there unless they come up with more money.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Smitty said. He was no Don King, but he knew how to work small-time promoters and squeeze the most money out of them.

  I did a few rounds on the bag, once again pursuing the elusive right hook. As a lefty, I hooked off my right hand, and no matter how I broke it down, I couldn’t get the snap Smitty was looking for. I guess I was destined to hit like a bitch.

  I finished up and was undoing the wraps on my hands and absentmindedly watching a couple of teenagers in the ring when I saw Kelley come in the front door. He occasionally dropped by the gym to hit the bags. He didn’t have any gear with him and
he was still in uniform.

  “Hey Kel,” I said. “Dropping by to watch the next heavyweight champ do some work? Hate to bum you out, but I’m finished for the day.”

  “Duff, I got some bad news.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Walanda was murdered this afternoon.”

  6

  I showered and headed home, staring at the lines in the road, the sky, the street signs-anything that kept me from thinking. I felt guilty; I felt negligent and incredibly sad because I liked Walanda. She asked me for help and she asked me to protect her and now she was dead. I dismissed her fear and shrugged it off as the rantings of a crazy crackhead, which was the exact type of disrespect that Walanda hated so much. I felt like shit.

  Walanda was a fuck-up, there’s no doubt about that, but she tried. It wasn’t long ago that she told me about her plans to go get training to become a certified nurse’s aid. That may not sound like a whole lot, but in Walanda’s world of multigenerational welfare and crime, it was huge. Sure, she was an addict, she was a prostitute, but she also cared about her kids, including this stepkid I never even heard of. For all her faults, Walanda never quit trying and though it wasn’t obvious to many people, I knew she was doing what she could to be better. When you come down to it, that’s about all you could ever ask of anyone.

  I got to the Moody Blue and prepped myself for Al’s assault. Sure enough, as soon as I put the key in the lock I heard his paws hit the floor, move across the carpet, scratch across the tile, and then bounce off the inside of the door. I opened the door and he sprung up, again hitting me in the nuts, but at least this time I was prepared. Besides, Al, low-riding pain in the ass that he was, deserved a little slack today. I don’t know shit about animal psychology and my Muslim brother didn’t seem to be all that emotionally complex, but the guy did just lose his mom.

  I cracked open a Schlitz and sat down on the good side of the sofa. Apparently, Al had a busy and productive day, because the remainder of the foam rubber that he started on yesterday was chewed up and spit out on the floor in front of the couch. I didn’t have the energy to get furious right now. I slumped into the couch, threw on the TV, and took another pull off the Schlitz. The local news was on, but they wouldn’t be reporting on a jail incident because the jail was pretty good at keeping stuff like that out of the media and even if it did get out, the press had a tendency not to care when people like Walanda got killed. Just another dead crack ho.

  The thought of not taking Walanda’s phone call ate at me. When the fourth Schlitz gave way to the fifth, sixth, seventh, and, I think, eighth, it didn’t get any better. I was drunk, but the beer didn’t touch the feeling in my gut. I knew it wouldn’t, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  Kelley told me it looked like it was just a battle over jailhouse dominance. Someone, or a couple of someones, caved in the side of her head with a mop wringer. She was found outside the chapel by one of the corrections officers and, to no one’s surprise, no inmate saw anything or knew anything. Kelley said that one of the COs told him that it might’ve been over cigarettes-either Walanda stole somebody’s or somebody stole hers. It’s the sort of thing that happens inside jails and prisons and I believe it happens so much because wherever people are, they have to struggle over power. More cigarettes means more power, just like more money means more power, or more stock shares means more power.

  Just the same, the fact that she had called me, scared for her life, didn’t sit right with me. Still, it wouldn’t be much of a reach to figure the two events were mutually exclusive. After all, it’s not uncommon to feel in danger in jail, especially when you’re schizophrenic and addicted to crack. It’s also not terribly unusual to be assaulted in jail. The two could’ve just happened. All her yelling and carrying on about “Webster” made no sense.

  There wouldn’t be much of an investigation. Walanda had no family around, she was a crack ho who didn’t vote, and she was a criminal. The DA wouldn’t exactly be overwhelmed with pressure to solve this one. That wasn’t right and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Right now, I was getting bombed, so there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about anything. Going to bed made the most sense to me.

  The next morning came a whole lot sooner than I expected. Having gotten Schlitzed the night before, I didn’t anticipate rising and shining. I also didn’t anticipate my Muslim brother, Allah-King, barking incessantly at the foot of my bed at 5:04 a.m. For reasons probably only revealed to Muhammad, the short-legged pain in the ass wouldn’t shut up. I yelled at him, I threw pillows at him, I tried to throw the contents of the half-empty Schlitz on the nightstand at him-none of it mattered. He was a barking machine.

  I sat up in bed and got one of those waves of wishy-washiness that comes with an overindulgence in that product that made Milwaukee famous. Trying to think of anything to stop the racket, I stepped out of bed to get the long-eared beast some food so he’d shut up. I was slightly dizzy when I got out of bed and when I stepped toward Al, my bare foot splatted into something slippery, sending my vastly hungover body to the hard tile. I had a good idea of what it was without looking, but, like a bad car wreck, I couldn’t not look. Sure as shit, it was between my toes and because of the fall, all over my foot.

  All through this, Al never stopped with the racket, though I swear to God, I thought I heard him laughing through the barking. I hopped to the bathroom to stick my shit-foot under the showerhead, and for some reason the sight of me hopping threatened Al. He growled and jumped at me, again striking me in the nuts and sending me sprawling, shit-foot and all, into the bathroom wall. I now had a streak of dog shit throughout my house, poo between the toes, and a bump on my hungover head from the second of two falls in the last forty-five seconds. This is not what I consider nursing a hangover.

  I cleaned my foot, mopped the floor, fed the beast, and took a shower. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to the office, but I had to. The Michelin Woman was gunning for me and any unexplained absences would surely do me in. Walanda’s death would be a big administrative deal not because ol’ yellow teeth cared about Walanda’s loss of life, but because she would have to oversee the filling out of forms that would have to be filed with the state. On top of that, an incident such as this would undoubtedly mean an emergency meeting of the board.

  The board was comprised of the biggest group of phonies and opportunists I’d ever met. They got on the board because it was politically correct for them. For some, it meant a tax deduction, for others, help with the Jewish vote, and for others, business connections with other board members. They’d come in their suits and ties and say a bunch of crap like they gave a shit about the people we served and then leave in their BMWs and go about their business.

  The one exception was Hymie Zuckerman. Hymie was the eighty-seven-year-old benefactor who put up the original money for the agency. He was an old Brooklyn Jew who made his fortune in the dry cleaning business. It seemed to me he cared about helping people and giving back and didn’t care about kissing ass and political opportunity. He had enough money to air condition hell and he knew it, and he also knew that was the reason these other business people joined the board. Being friends with Hymie meant instant business connections and that’s why they were sucking up to him. He didn’t care about people manipulating him if it helped the agency and therefore, in his mind, helped the greater good.

  I also liked Hymie because he liked me. He was a fight fan, knew the game inside and out, and loved to talk about it. A lot of people don’t know that Jews, along with the Irish, dominated boxing in the twenties. Throughout its history, boxing has been dominated by whatever minority was experiencing the most oppression or prejudice at the time. It probably has to do with being hungry, tough, and angry. When a minority group rises in the social order, they usually drop out of boxing dominance. It helps explain why there aren’t a hell of a lot of WASPs with fine pedigrees in the game, which is another reason I like boxing. As far as I am concerned, golf and WASPs deserve each other.


  As a fighter and a student of boxing history, I’d kibbutz with Hymie about the fighters of his era, especially the greatest Jewish fighter of all time, Benny Leonard, a lightweight who remains one of the best pound-for-pound fighters ever.

  Hymie also got a kick out of an Irish Catholic Polish guy like me mixing some Yiddish into our conversations. I’d greet him with a big “Shalom aleichem,” making sure I rolled the “ch” as much as I could. I’d also give him an “Abi gezunt,” a Yiddish expression that meant something like, “Go with good health.” Hymie loved it and would come over and pinch my cheek and say something like, “Do you hear this goy? Can you believe him? He could sell gefilte fish in Brooklyn!”

  Claudia hated the fact that Hymie liked me, partly because she hated me and partly because he had little use for her. Hymie knew about helping people and he knew about administrators. He knew Claudia was a blowhard administrator and he saw her as a necessary evil. His dislike for her probably wasn’t enough to ever save my job if it came down to it, but she sure sensed he didn’t like her.

  Despite my respect for Hymie, having the rest of the board in was a pain in the ass. Claudia had recently formed a subcommittee board group to oversee quality assurance. It was a perfect vehicle for her to point out to the board my poor paperwork and how it put the agency at regulatory risk. She was laying further groundwork to can me and this subcommittee would utilize the power of the board to justify my firing. The place would be so much better if she only put a similar amount of effort into actually doing something for the clients.