Atlas (5 page)

W
HEN
I
TOLD
C
US THAT
I
WAS GOING BACK HOME, HE
said, “You can't go. You gotta stay here. I'm responsible for you. That was the deal.”

The funny thing is that despite the fact that the terms of my parole stipulated that I stay in Catskill under Cus's supervision, my parole officer, Steve Zawada, had taken a liking to me (he'd even driven up to Catskill one time to watch me box), so he didn't bust my balls or try to stop me when I decided to leave. He understood that if I couldn't fight, I didn't want to be there.

Back home, things were pretty much the same as they'd always been. My father was wrapped up in his life and his patients, my mother was still drinking, and nobody's communication skills had improved much in the time I'd been away. My father certainly wasn't happy about my situation. I was nineteen years old and a high school dropout. It was disappointing and embarrassing for him. He tried to help me out by getting me a job as a janitor at Marine Hospital, in the Stapleton section of town. I worked there for a while, but pretty soon I was back to my old ways, hanging out with the guys down in the neighborhood, doing burglaries and getting into fights.

Cus and I maintained phone contact. We'd talk every week, and he'd
try to tempt me into coming back. He was crafty. He was a seed planter. Not too long after I left, he called me up and said, “I need a favor.”

“What is it?”

“Rooney's fighting in the Ohio State Fair. Somebody has to go with him. I can't go, but it's an important thing for him and he needs somebody he can trust and count on. I need somebody I can trust and count on.”

The Ohio State Fair was one of the toughest and most prestigious boxing tournaments in the country, on a par with the National Golden Gloves and the National AAU. Any amateur who wanted to be taken seriously had to compete there. If you wanted to fight in the Olympics, you needed to fight in the Ohio State Fair.

Cus knew how I felt about loyalty. He was basically telling me, Rooney needs you, and I need you.

I understood that he probably could have gone himself or sent someone else. But what was implied in the way he asked me was that I owed him something and I owed Rooney something, and it was true, I did. But Cus was also saying that Rooney would have a better chance to win if I was there, and even though I didn't necessarily believe that, I wanted to believe it, which Cus understood.

“Rooney's trying to make the Olympic team. You could be the difference, Teddy.”

A couple of days later, I took a train to Catskill, and then Rooney and I drove the five hundred miles to Ohio, a twelve-hour ride. The cheapest accommodations were at the university, so that's where we stayed, sharing the top and bottom of a bunk bed in one of the dorm rooms.

As Rooney's trainer, I had to register him, get his medical approval in order, find out when he was fighting, and make sure he got there on time. It might not sound like much, but it was important, because if you were late you would be disqualified. When I called Cus to tell him what was going on and how we were doing, he said, “See, I told you you'd be good at this.”

The fights took place outdoors on the fairgrounds. There were three fights going on at any one time in three different rings. They used a whistle in one, a bell in another, and a clang in the other, so the fighters would know when a round was over. There were hundreds of fighters milling around, all waiting for their bouts. Across the fairgrounds were the rides and food stalls, the smell of grilled hamburgers and hot dogs hanging in
the air. The first day, Rooney's fight didn't start until one in the morning. I'd found out from my father that it took five hours to digest food (“Except pork,” he said. “Don't eat pork, it takes longer for the body to break it down”), so I timed Rooney's meal accordingly. While we were waiting for our fight, I eavesdropped on conversations between the other trainers and fighters. There was a lot you could pick up just by listening.

About an hour before Rooney's fight, the clouds opened up and it poured. They didn't have tents over the rings, but they couldn't cancel the bouts because the schedule wouldn't allow it. The ring was slippery. The grounds had turned to mud, and the fighters' shoes were slick with mud by the time they climbed into the ring. I found plastic bags and taped them on Rooney's feet. Just before he stepped in the ring for his fight, I cut the bags off. He was the only fighter with clean, dry shoes. I told him to take small steps, bend his knees, and not move around too much. He kept his footing, won the fight, and afterward I noticed that everybody else started using plastic bags.

Following each fight, I looked at the draw, found out who Rooney had next, then dug up all I could about the guy. In the quarterfinals we fought a New York boxer I knew very well, Davey Moore, a future world champ. He had a very big rep. I called up Cus to discuss strategy. Moore liked to shoeshine—a showboat move where you drop your hands and throw a rapid flurry of punches to the midsection. Cus said, “That's good. You know what his main thing is.” I had also noticed that Moore didn't bend his knees when he did it. It left him open. So I'd instructed Rooney to fire right back to his head when he tried to shoeshine. At the very least it might take it away from him.

“Call me when it's over,” Cus said. “I'll be waiting by the phone.”

I phoned Cus right after Rooney won the fight. He started gushing. “The Young Master,” he said, “you're the Young Master.” You had to hand it to Cus. He knew exactly what to say.

In the finals we fought Bernard “Bad” Mayes from the Kronk gym. Mayes was very fast, very talented. Pure speed. Lightning hands. Cus asked me, “What are you gonna do?” I said, “We gotta go to the body, take some of that speed away, some of that eagerness. Also, time him. Timing can beat speed!” Rooney would need to be very disciplined to win.

At the end of our conversation, Cus said, “Well, he's in good hands.”

The fight started well for us. Rooney won the first round, but when he
came back to the corner, I saw the cut he'd gotten on his eyelid was bad. Rooney had thin skin. Irish skin. It was his curse. I managed to stop the bleeding, but the ref came over—in the amateurs it's safety first—and he took a look at Rooney and waved his hands. Fight over. Boom, just like that. I didn't make a big deal. I knew that was the rule. You can do things right and it can still be taken out of your hands. The other officials came over and said great job. But it wasn't much consolation.

Back in the locker room, I cleaned Rooney's cut, took some adhesive tape and made four butterfly bandages, and taped him up. The butterflies looked good, professional. I was proud of myself for that. I'd learned from watching my father. When I took Rooney to the hospital to get him stitched, the emergency room intern even complimented me on what I'd done.

Back in Catskill, Cus saw only the positives. “You did a great job, Teddy. He wouldn't have gone that far without you.”

Camille said, “See, Cus was right.”

“Why? I didn't do anything special.”

“No, Cus was right.”

I knew what they were trying to do. I guess I didn't trust them completely, that they were thinking only of what was good for me. Or maybe I just wasn't ready yet to make a commitment to being a trainer. In my mind I was still a fighter. Whatever the case, I went back to Staten Island a few days later.

For a year I'd lived a clean, disciplined life with Cus in Catskill. Now I was sliding backward, finding out how easy it was to do that. In a way I was even more dangerous than I'd been before the year in Catskill because of the fighting skills I'd developed and honed there. I was like a walking stick of dynamite. Someone looked at me wrong, or said the wrong thing, wham, I'd go off on them.

I was running with most of the same guys from down the hill that had been around before. Despite what had happened with Billy Sullivan when we'd gotten arrested, and the fact that he had signed that statement for the cops, I wound up letting him talk his way back into my good graces. Another guy, maybe I wouldn't have, but Billy had that charm; he got me to forgive him.

 

O
NE NIGHT, IN THE SUMMER OF
1977,
THE TWO OF US WERE
driving around Stapleton in my old red Chevy, drinking Heinekens. Suddenly, this Cadillac with tinted windows cut us off at a light. Billy hit the brakes, and his beer tipped over, sloshing on his pant leg.

“Son of a bitch!”

He gunned the Chevy hard, pulling even with the Caddy.

“Hey, jerkoff!”

He swerved in front of them and hit the brakes. They screeched and slammed to a halt. The driver of the Caddy opened his door and got out. He was a tall black kid, with a cigarette in his mouth. He took the cigarette and flicked it toward us. I was out the door of the Chevy like a shot. Before I got more than a few steps, the other doors of the Caddy swung open and four more guys appeared. Big guys.

I kept right on going, no hesitation, and dropped one of them with a straight right hand, and hit another one with a left hook. I was doing pretty good, but then the third guy hit me from the side with a blackjack. It stunned me. Before he could hit me again, I grabbed his hair and got him in a choke hold. Meanwhile, Billy was on the roof of the Chevy, brandishing a broken Heineken bottle to keep them away from him.

I threw the guy with the blackjack to the ground, and then saw the driver coming at me, saw the flash of a knife in his hand. It was this kind of knife called an 007, a flick blade. I remember thinking,
That's a double-oh-seven.

I knew that he'd have to come with a downward motion so I tried to close the distance, get inside before he could extend his arm. But I was too late. He stepped back and spun, like a matador, slashing the side of my face. The blade was so sharp, I barely felt it. I put my hand up and my fingers just went into my cheek; there was this thick, meaty flap of skin that moved, a warm, wet, syrupy goo oozing from the gash. I staggered and fell to the ground.

The next thing I knew, Billy was dragging me across the street. We were on Broad Street, right by the projects. There was this little bodega across the way. Billy took me in and laid me on the floor. I was losing a lot of blood; it was all over the place, streaming through my fingers and onto the linoleum floor. The old couple who ran the bodega were afraid. You could see it in their eyes. Billy was shouting at them to call an ambulance. The old woman found a towel and held it to my face. Almost
instantly, it soaked through with blood. She got more towels. The same thing happened.

The old man was frozen, looking at me, holding the phone. Billy jumped over the counter and grabbed the receiver out of his hand. He called 911. “A cop's been shot,” he yelled into the mouthpiece.

Less than five minutes later, half a dozen cop cars and an ambulance were there. I could hear a helicopter's blades beating up above. In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, one of the cops with me said, “The kid might bleed to death before we get there.” When I heard that, I was afraid to close my eyes or let go of consciousness. “My father,” I mumbled. “You gotta get my father. He's a famous doctor….”

They took me to Marine Hospital (now called Bailey Seton), the place I'd worked as a janitor. As they were wheeling me in, I kept saying, “Let my father do it.” The last thing I remember thinking about before I lost consciousness was his schedule.

It wasn't my father who sewed me up; it was an Asian physician, Dr. Lee. It took four hundred stitches. Two hundred on the outside, two hundred on the inside. My father showed up later that night. I opened my eyes and there he was.

“How is it?” I asked.

“The cut will heal, but you're going to have a scar for the rest of your life.” He looked at his hand. There were notes written on his skin. Appointments, prescriptions, phone numbers, things like that.

“I have to go,” he said.

I wanted to say something to him, or have him say something to me. But neither of us seemed to know how.

“Good night, Teddy.”

Later that night some of my buddies came to visit me in the hospital. Bruce Spicer, Mousey, and some other guys I knew from the corner. They were all worked up. They were gonna get the guys who had done this. I didn't care about that. I was fixated on something else entirely: the gold ring that I always wore around my neck on a chain was gone.

“Bruce, you have to find that ring,” I said. “The chain must have broken during the fight.”

“Teddy, it'll never be there. It's Broad Street. Forget about it.” He and the rest continued talking about finding the guys in the Caddy.

“No, the ring,” I said. “You gotta get the ring.”

They stopped talking and looked at me. My voice was so full of intensity, all they could do was kind of shrug, like, all right, we'll go look for it.

The reason the ring had such importance to me was that it had belonged to my childhood friend Sean Timpone, who had died the year before. Sean and I had always been close; we had a real comradeship. When we were young kids, he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and confined to a wheelchair. I used to go take him out and wheel him around the parks in Staten Island. He loved nature and animals, and he was always reading up on various wildlife, talking about how the animals needed to be protected or they'd become extinct. Out in the woods in these parks, we'd pretend that we were seeing all these extinct animals from the prehistoric era. He loved to fantasize about things like that.

When I had left for Catskill, Sean's condition was deteriorating. Sometime during the year I was up there, I got a call from his father that Sean was in the hospital and very sick. I took the next train back. He was in Doctor's Hospital, one of the two hospitals my father founded. Even though it was past visiting hours, all the nurses knew me, and they let me in. I found Sean in an oxygen tent. He could barely talk. One of the things he had told me, after he realized that he wasn't going to be cured, was that he didn't want to die in a hospital. I put my hand underneath the tent and took his hand and began reading him this poem that Cus always gave to all of his fighters. It was called “Don't Quit,” and the last couple of lines went, “You can never tell how close you are / It may be near when it seems afar / So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit / It's when things go wrong that you must not quit!”