Three-Martini Lunch (31 page)

50

I
was fed up with writing, for a little while, at least. My big plan had been to casually drop a copy of
The Tuning Fork
on My Old Man and then, when he read my story and liked it, naturally he would ask me did I have anything else and I would surprise him with the novel manuscript I was working on. But when things didn't happen like that it took the wind out of my sails and I found myself stalled again.

Being a writer was fine and dandy, but punching a typewriter was not much for exercise and it occurred to me one day that between writing all day and drinking all night I was getting soft, so I started doing some boxing over at the Y. All the other guys who boxed at the Y each had about ten years and fifty pounds on me. They were big oafy guys who shared a thirst for contact sports and hadn't seen enough action in the war. Some of them were clean-cut and some of them were tattooed all over with pin-ups and anchors but clean-cut or not, they were all really the same guy and I was the only truly different one.

I was aware of the differences that made me stand apart and especially
of the fact I'd read books they had not. They were not intellectuals and they did not care that Hemingway had boxed and that he had claimed that understanding the rhythms of the boxing ring had helped him write better dialogue and better scenes. They did not care about reading or about Hemingway or about writing, full stop. They only cared about throwing the next punch, and how. I liked them for this. There was something simple and clean and pure about their limited minds that made them almost noble in a way.

Of course the feeling was not mutual at first and I had to earn their respect. I did this by throwing a mean right hook while managing not to blow out my shoulder. Plenty of guys could throw a good right hook, and if a guy was especially big he could put his weight into it and really lay someone out. But most of the guys who had a strong hook eventually threw out their shoulders and then they had to go to the doctor and occasionally even the surgeon and after that they were out of commission for a good long while and sometimes they never recovered well enough to properly box again. This was due to bad technique. If you threw a good right hook using the proper technique there was no risk of injury, but most guys had not been taught proper technique, only that they ought to throw as hard as they could.

Luckily for me, I had a buddy at Columbia who had boxed for Oxford and he had taught me the secret to a proper hook. The guy who taught me was a graduate student called Richard—always Richard, never Dick or Ricky or any of that business. I met him at a bar up near Morningside Heights and quickly discovered one of his favorite pastimes was to drink beer and talk a lot about Schopenhauer until he was good and buzzed and then he always wanted to go out to an alley and explain how Schopenhauer and boxing were related. He'd land a lot of blows and they hurt plenty, but he was also very gracious about showing you how he'd landed each one and so the experience of it ended up being kind of a cross between a sparring match and a professor's lecture.

In any case, I showed a few of the guys at the Y the trick of throwing a right hook while still preserving your shoulder, and when they could see it worked and
feel
it worked, the rest of them all wanted to be taught how.

Among themselves, they held local matches and worked out a scheme for everyone to bet and for the winner to walk away with a little bit of prize money. They didn't really bet as a means of making an income so much as a means of funding the prize and taking turns winning it. The more of a long shot you were, the larger percentage of the overall pot you got to take home, so there was a great excitement to an underdog winning one of these matches. As the smallest guy at the Y, I was the biggest of the underdogs. When I pressed them to give me the odds and tell me what my take of the prize money would be, it was quite a decent sum and too difficult to resist. I thought of everything the money could do for Eden and myself, and about how it would be nice to be the breadwinner for a change. I could really make things up to her.

I imagined myself winning and taking Eden to a fancy French dinner and buying her a swell hat. She was dotty for hats; don't ask me why, because in those days hats had fallen out of favor with the hip crowd and none of the chicks down in the Village wore hats unless of course you counted berets, which were all over the place below Fourteenth Street. Formal hats were strictly for squares. But Eden still salivated and stared in the windows every time we passed a milliner. It was one of her conservative tastes left over from Indiana, where I pictured her mother hosting the weekly bridge club and her father strolling the golf links in argyle socks pulled to his knees, and whatever else people in the great Midwestern suburbs do when they are trying to imitate the things they see in magazines and on television. Eden liked hats but she never bought them for herself because she said they were too expensive and anyway she didn't have anyplace to wear them. I agreed but I still wanted her to have a nice hat all the same, and I wanted to be the one to provide it.

In any case, I signed up for a fight and the guys set a date. They all
assumed I would fight this Spanish kid Carlos, because he was the closest to my size but I surprised them all by insisting on fighting a big Polish guy named Jozef. I had watched both of them fight and Carlos was small and quick while Jozef was large and slow. I decided slow was better even though Jozef was a heavyweight while I was a welterweight at most and—if I am being brutally honest—probably more of a lightweight when I really trained and trimmed all the beer and whiskey off my gut. Of course we were nuts to be mixing weight classes like this; I was confident I was the better boxer pound for pound, but nonetheless there were still an awful lot of pounds separating me from Jozef. I was expecting to lose but was excited all the same.

The week leading up to the fight I was very disciplined about not going out so much and doing as much extra training as I could stand. Eden noticed the difference in me and I couldn't hide some of the bruises. When I explained I'd been boxing I could tell she disapproved. I told her I was doing the boxing because it helped me get my writing juices flowing again but I could see she still didn't like it. She probably would've rather had a husband who knitted in order to get a second writing wind but this was foolish of her because that was not at all who she had married. I figured she would take back her disapproving frown once I'd won the prizefight money and taken her to dinner and bought her that hat.

•   •   •

O
n the day of the fight I arrived feeling calm and ready to give it my all. Perhaps it's simply a question of feeling you have nothing to lose. I looked around the gym that afternoon and saw that nobody in the room was expecting me to win and suddenly this made me feel very free. To them, I was the kid who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and gone to fancy prep schools and I was supposed to get the stuffing knocked out of me. In the worst-case scenario I could lose and this would gratify the expectations of every man in the room and there would be
nothing terrible in simply giving these men the satisfaction of their expectations being fulfilled. I could see they had already put me through the humiliation of a knockout in their heads, so the most unpleasant part of it was over.

Jozef was already there and was dancing on his toes, doing warm-ups when I arrived, only he didn't ever really step very lightly so it was less like dancing and more like shuffling around flat-footed in that slow, stupid, thumping way he had while a couple of other guys wrapped his fists and laced his gloves. As I looked at him I began to feel slightly guilty for having picked him to fight. I didn't know him that well but some of the guys at the Y had commented that Jozef might even be a bona fide simpleton, and they argued that if this was true then it might not be fair to fight him the same way you would fight a guy who was not a simpleton. They had a point but the fact remained Jozef was enormous and no one had officially declared him a simpleton and so I had no reason not to give it my all.

I peered across the gym and watched him work up a sweat. Between calisthenic maneuvers, a couple of guys came over to him with a bucket to sop his face with a wet cloth. The fight was on and it was clear, even with Jozef being as dull-witted as he was, everyone was expecting me to lose. Jozef was huge and when it came down to it, you kinda had to put your money on any guy who was that huge. The fellas attending to him were snickering and I realized they were eager to watch Jozef and his heavy fists show me just how little a proper prep school education mattered in the boxing ring.

They draped a towel around his neck and rubbed his shoulders with their callused fingers and as I gazed across the room I regretted not telling Swish and Pal and even Bobby about the prizefight, because they would've been perfect guys to have along to do these things, and they would have cheered me on and made plenty of wisecracks to keep me entertained along the way. But I had to settle for two of the guys from the Y who had been nice enough to step forward when Tony, the makeshift
referee, asked for volunteers. Robert and Arturo were decent guys and equal to the task but there was a dull, obligatory air about their service. They didn't believe I stood a chance against Jozef and tended to me while at the same time making it plain they wished I would just save everyone the trouble and have the common sense not to get into the ring in the first place.

I got good and ready and before I knew it, the bell rang for round one. Right away Jozef came at me like a bulldozer and pinned me in the corner. I felt two terrible body shots hit their marks and shortly afterwards he had me bulled on the ropes. From some far-off place, I heard Tony blow his whistle and warn Jozef to keep his punches up. By the second round I got wise and started feinting and this really seemed to take Jozef off the offensive, for a little while at least. A good boxer knows you should spend the first part of a fight studying your opponent and once you have done that only
then
really lay in your best blows, and I was buying time so I could study him. We danced around each other trading jabs and in this way I got to know where and how he was at his slowest. This went on for a while, with me buzzing around Jozef like a mosquito and darting in to land the occasional jab.

Jozef, meanwhile, was getting impatient and started heckling me to fight his way and try to land some big wallops. I largely resisted his taunting invitation but it was difficult; I looked at his stupid, thick-cheeked face and the bubbles of saliva running down his chin and I sorely wanted to land one square on the broken bridge of his nose. I knew better than to give in to this impulse and instead just kept jabbing away at the sides of Jozef's head, hoping to get him off balance more gradually. By round six his patience had finally expired altogether and he began throwing huge, wild punches. And this is when I knew I had him. I'd always been good at bobbing and weaving and all I had to do was steer clear and let him tire himself out. Over and over again, I ducked as he swung and missed.

At that point the boys who'd been politely cheering us on grew notably more rowdy. They had been fairly sedate up until then. I don't think anyone had expected me to last longer than a couple of rounds but I had turned everything topsy-turvy with my ability to dodge Jozef's punches and get in all those jabs. I was aware of side bets being made between several of the fellas as they hooted and hollered at each other and I became increasingly conscious of the fact that my surprise performance was shaping up to be the stuff from which legends are born.

There were mirrors on two of the walls in the boxing room at the Y and at one point I caught sight of the spectacle we made. It was like something out of the Bible: Jozef, the big Goliath, staggering around the ring with all the precision of a drunken sailor, and me, the spry David, zipping here and there with my lightning-fast jabs in lieu of a slingshot. I shouldn't have been so taken with the picture this made, though, because the distraction of it meant I was glancing at the mirror during a crucial moment. Jozef was finally able to land one of his blows and he got me right on the left side of my head. The sheer force of it had me seeing stars and I realized if I let him land one more blow like that one, I'd be knocked out cold. I could lose the whole match in a matter of seconds if I allowed my vanity to get the better of me.

I gathered my wits and focused once again on ducking and jabbing, and won the next round. Each time they rang the bell and called the round, Jozef's face got redder and redder until at last he looked less like a person and more like a stop sign. I decided to see if I couldn't make the most of this. Every time I landed a jab on Jozef, I grinned at him as I danced away, and his anger mounted. Little by little, he began to go bonkers, bulling me on the ropes and swinging away. But he couldn't land anything properly. He was desperate and his punches went flying all over the place, glancing my sides.

“Say, what're you trying to do, buddy—give me a rubdown?” I taunted
him. He roared and lunged at me like a crazed animal. Tony had to blow his whistle several times over, and eventually scolded Jozef for using his head.

“Using his head?” I scoffed, unable to resist. “Well, I suppose there's a first time for everything.” It took Jozef a full minute to comprehend the insult but when he did, he went ape-shit. I knew we were reaching a crucial point in the fight. Until that point, the match was solely about stepping out of the way, not unlike the way a matador flares his cape and moves, catlike, off to the side. Some of the fellas began booing—at me, I suppose—for avoiding so many punches, but I wasn't a bit sorry. I wasn't there to prove I was sturdy enough to be Jozef's punching bag, I was there to win, and boxing is one part brawn and two parts brain, that's what I always say. Now as Jozef rushed at me I stepped to one side and allowed him to reel past, then I spun around and drove my fist directly into his kidney. I heard him groan as I made contact and I knew—just as David had reached that sweet moment of realization before me—that Goliath was destined to fall. I got in several more shots like that one, with some variations, and after the twelfth round it was an undeniable victory. Tony raised my glove in the air and called it, albeit with some reluctance. The room erupted into cacophony of sound, some guys cheering, some guys booing. Everybody, it seemed, had an opinion.