Pound for Pound (34 page)

Because he was an eager, clean-cut kid who spoke good English, he found a busboy job his second day out. He’d be working the night shift in the coffee shop at the Bicycle Club casino in nearby Bell Gardens. He was paid minimum wage, but got good tips nightly from the waitresses because he cleared and set tables and bussed dirty dishes as if he was getting twenty dollars an hour. He ate one hot meal during his shift, and while the manager purposely looked the other way, the thick-ankled old gals he worked for tipped the cooks into slipping him another hot meal
to go when he punched out at eight
a.m.
In a few days, he gained his weight back, but he still felt weak. He wasn’t sleeping properly because of his shame. He needed to get back to the gym, but where should he go? Certainly not the Indio. And at what time of day, now that he was working nights? Being dumped as a loser by Velasco still hurt. He couldn’t stop thinking about Vegas, or Watsonville, nor could he stop thinking about his lost passbook in San Anto. He needed sleep like a sumbitch.

He worked three weeks at the casino. He saved everything he made, except for gas money and a few dollars for
pan dulce
and
café con leche,
the hot and the sweet waking him up after fitful sleep. He paid another month’s rent, had money left over, and realized that if he kept saving, he could add to Eloy’s money and buy the kind of Stetson that would make his grandpa proud. The job also paid enough that he could pull up stakes anytime he wanted and haul ass for home, not that he’d have that much left over after gas and such on the road. But that wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was what he’d always wanted, to be Champion of the World, the best champion there’d ever been.

He also wanted some pussy, damn. A thirty-something chip girl from the casino, known to all and sundry as Blond Darleen, took care of that. She fed him Sara Lee pies, and gave him bubble baths, and rubbed Kama Sutra oil into him. She bought him a wide, tooled belt with a heavy silver belt buckle that depicted a longhorn steer. She peroxided his dark hair to a yellow blond. She taught him to eat pussy, and gave him blue-ribbon head. She had him do her with a vibrator. She put strawberries in her pussy. She made him forget boxing.

“You’re so beautiful,” she’d whisper on her water bed, dragging her decorated nails across his twitching back. “Look at you, you’re so beautiful, oh, ah, God, I’m coming on your cock!”

Pussy, and sleeping again, and eating, and not going to the gym … Chicky went up to 151 pounds, 4 pounds over his fighting weight, the most he’d ever weighed. The weight went into his neck, and shoulders, and back and didn’t show, but Chicky didn’t like the idea of being overweight.

He paid another month’s rent. In the Sunday newspaper, he saw an ad for a yearly sale at the Hat & Boot Bonanza in Hawthorne, which was almost on a straight line west, across South Central, from Bell. He took care of business with Blond Darleen the next day in Downey, put his Resistol straw back on, and then took the 710 and the 105 and got off at the Hawthorne Boulevard exit near Imperial Highway. He added some of his casino money to what he still had from his granddaddy’s money, and shelled out
$487.17
for his El Patron
30X
beaver, light tan in color, known as a “Silver Belly,” the light off it like the first silver streaks of a Texas dawn. He’d hoped to buy such a Stetson with his granddaddy at Paris Hatters in San Anto, but the Hat & Boot Bonanza would have to do.

He wore the 30 X beaver out of the Bonanza. At least he’d done one big thing in California. He just wished his granddaddy had been there to see it and touch it and try it on. Even so, Chicky dwelled on what ate at him most—was he a loser?

“Please God, no.”

Chicky liked the hot tricks Blond Darleen was teaching him, but he missed the action of the gym, missed the kind of work that daily made him a better man. He’d gained another two pounds. That scared him, so he began dipping more so he’d start spitting more, and lose water weight. He didn’t.

On the way back to Bell, he remembered that the Broadway Gym was not far off his route. Mr. Purdy at the Broadway had been courteous and helpful when he’d been there asking for Dan Cooley. Courtesy was not all that common in Califa.

Chicky drove in a leisurely fashion through moderate, black middle-class traffic for several miles. Once he crossed Western Avenue, things began to change, took on a desolate cast. Used tire stores. Failed cafés. Stacked barbecue ovens, all rusted, made from welded oil drums.

Chicky signed up for $20 a month at Broadway that same day. He began
training the next. He’d sleep after work, sleep again after training, and then run a mile or so before going back to work the same night.

Wardell Purdy had remembered him. “You never found Dan Cooley?”

Chicky said, “Looks like he passed.”

“I’da gone to Dan’s funeral if I’da known, and I don’t usually go to funerals.”

Chicky worked out a week at Broadway and lost two pounds. Darleen pursed her lips when he turned down her frozen pumpkin pie, and was clearly pissed when he began to sleep some at his place instead of mostly at hers.

Wardell had liked Chicky’s polite ways the first day he’d come in. He admired Chicky’s raw talent, too, and appreciated how hard the boy worked. Watching Chicky in the full power of his youth made Wardell remember all the times he’d brought kids like Chicky along. Black and brown and white. But the whites weren’t hungry anymore. Not so many blacks were, either. The truth was that the fights had gone mostly Latino, of one kind or another. Now it was the Latinos who outnumbered the rest of the ticket buyers at the gate. Promoters saw where the money was, and the result was more Latinos in the ring.

The Russians and the Armenians were tough fuckers these days, so were the Japanese. The same in South Africa, Australia, and in the British Isles, particularly now that the Brits had a heavyweight champion. Boxing was big again in Germany, as well. So there was indeed white blood, aside from the marines and such, who would still fight. And some of those boys were big, too. Wardell had always wanted a white heavyweight, didn’t care if the muhfuh came from outer space. White + heavyweight = $.

“Wardell, you wanna train me? I’d pay,” Chicky said after a couple of days.

“Naw, son,” said Wardell. “Too old. Catchin all those punches cripples
up my back and bad leg so bad I walk around like I got a stake up my ass.”

Chicky said, “Any of these other trainers any good? I could use some slick.”

“Some’r good. But they’ll want to know how long you’ll be around, so their time ain’t wasted.”

“I’d be lyin if I said I knew,” said Chicky.

“You decide to hang around, let me know.”

“How much’ll they charge?”

“You’re good enough, they won’t charge but their righteous ten off the top, not long’s you stay good enough.”

Hawaiian-Japanese trainer and first-class cut man Mack Takahashi was in L.A. preparing his Japanese junior-welter for an upcoming ten-round HBO fight in Vegas. Mack stood five-foot-four and weighed 141, up 30 from his 111 -pound fighting weight back when. He had a full head of dyed black hair he wore in a ducktail, and sported stringy gray chin whiskers. He had bad eyes and wore thick specs with oversize black frames. Mack always showed respect, but should someone try to stiff him, he’d cuss their mamas as if he stood six-foot-five, and dare their ass to move on him.

“I got somethin for you, bastahd fuckkah!”

Mack got up at three-forty-five
a.m.
every morning but Sundays to run his fighters. He had followed this schedule as a fighter, and had never dumped it, no matter how much hot sake and cold beer he’d had the night before.

Mack had started out with two sparring partners at Broadway, but one boy couldn’t take the pounding, and he quit. Needing another, Mack watched Chicky work. From Wardell, he learned that Chicky had just turned pro. Mack didn’t think he could get much out of Chicky except a
moving warm body, and wasn’t sure if Chicky would even take the deal, but he offered him ten dollars a round to spar two rounds a day for ten days.

Chicky took it, more to learn than for the money. Wardell coached him from the floor because he couldn’t climb the ring steps. Chicky got popped good the first day by Mack’s Japanese fighter. He was out of gas after the first round and a half, but the second day he was better. Being a southpaw helped. By the third day, his wind carried him the two rounds, and from then on he stayed with the Japanese boy bell to bell.

Mack liked that. “Hey, brudduh, you pretty good.”

He offered Chicky four rounds a day,
$40.00,
no taxes. Chicky took it, got into shape inside the ropes, bruises and lumps meaningless to him at this point.

Mack upped it again two days later, fifteen dollars a round. “You a tough fukkah. We go Japan, blondie, you make mothafukkah big money.”

Getting paid for learning was the sweetest money Chicky had ever made. This was the kind of training he’d needed before his first two fights.

Chicky made the daily trip in from Bell after only three hours of sleep, but he wasn’t tired until the drive home. Darleen wanted him to spend more time with her.

“I would,” Chicky said, “but I’d be all jiggle-kneed and get hit too much.”

“You could quit boxing and move in here.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Getting hit in the face doesn’t make much sense to me.”

“Like my granddaddy says, ‘It’s more fun to play with girls than fight with boys, but you don’t get paid playin with girls.’ “

“No?” Darleen said, and gave him a sly smile. “Move in here rent free, and you do. Think about it, hon.”

A call came to Wardell from a small-time promoter. He’d put together an all-Latino card across town at the Santa Cruz Sports Arena in Pico Rivera, but a prelim boy had pulled out because of a bad hand. The fight was to honor César Chávez, and the promoter found several black fill-in forty-seven-pounders, but not a Chicano, and was calling every gym in town because he couldn’t afford to fly someone in. Wardell motioned Chicky into his office. He covered the phone with his hand. He explained the promoter’s problem, and laid out the deal in simple terms while the promoter hung on the line.

“Your guy’s from East L.A. He’s four, three, and one draw, with no KOs—seven fights. His trainer’s a dummy. You want it? I said five hundred, since it’s a last-minute pop. Promoter’s goin for it on my word you can fight.”

“Five hundred? Damn,” Chicky said. “But I’m zero and two. Will the Commission go for it?”

Wardell said, “I’ll call my man Jolly Joe and tell him you been sparing with Mack’s Jap.”

Chicky said, “You think I can take this
cholo?
”

“Take him like you take a shit.”

The fight was made and would go off three days before Chicky’s rent was due.

Chicky said, “You’ll be workin my corner, right, Wardell?”

“I don’t hardly work ‘em no more. Rushin up wobbly ring stairs knots up my old hip.”

“You hurt it fightin?”

“Korea.”

Chicky said, “Can you get me somebody good as you?”

“Yeah, for half a yard. He’ll be your chief second, and I’ll work the bucket and the stool from the floor.”

“What if I get cut?”

“It’ll take a while, but I’ll come up.”

“I’ll pay you what you want.”

“Just pay my gas.”

Chicky hadn’t moved in with Blond Darleen, but he’d been tempted, especially with his rent coming up. Sleeping alone had been tough. But getting to sleep while thinking about games with candles and hot wax, or flipping a coin to see who’d be on top and such, that had been tough, too. Seeing her at work had been awkward. She’d smile as always, but lately she didn’t stop to chat the way she had before. After he had taken the Sports Arena fight, he made a point of stopping her in the lobby so she couldn’t get by.

“You’re gonna come to the fight, ain’t you? It’ll be over before your shift. Afterward, we can be together like before.”

“That’s so good to hear.”

“So you’ll come, right?” Chicky asked.

“I didn’t exactly say.”

“But you didn’t say no, so I’ll get you a ringside ticket, okay?”

Chicky continued to sleep alone. No pie, no poon. It was lonely in bed, but that was better than being lonely in the middle of the ring. He stayed at
147¼
. The day before the weigh-in, he drank no liquids from noon on.

At the weigh-in he came in at 146, even, a pound under.

“Eat,” Wardell ordered him.

On the morning of the fight, Chicky had the jits. He felt that he hadn’t had enough time to be in top shape, and was preoccupied with losing.

Wardell had warned him to be on time. “We’ll most likely fight first. Don’t be late.”

“No way.”

Chicky tried to eat breakfast. Bacon and eggs and hotcakes with butter and syrup. Couldn’t get it down. He called Darleen from his room. He called her three more times between one o’clock and two, but no answer. He left messages and hoped she was all right and could make it
to the fight. He had something for her afterward, but as much as he’d missed all that trim, he knew he was right to stay away. Once the fight was over, Blond Darleen would have to pull him out of her with a team of Clydesdales.

Now that he’d made weight, there was no rule against half a pie and a quart of milk, and maybe gaining a few pounds before the fight. Besides, a nice rest on the water bed would calm him some if he could get some shut-eye, a nap taking his mind off of losing again—sprawled on the twisted sheets of his own bed, losing was all he could think of.

He called Darleen again. Still no answer. Since her condo was on the way to the arena, and since he had to get her ticket to her, he decided to pack his fight gear and drop by her place. If he missed her, he’d stick the ticket in her door and call later. Surely she’d understand about his staying out of her knickers once she saw the kind of shape he had to be in to be a boxer. Maybe she’d pick up some more Reddi Wip and have him shave her pussy again.

He parked at an angle across from Darleen’s condo. Her car wasn’t in her carport. He hoped there was nothing wrong. Maybe she’d just gone to the market, or had to pull a double shift. Or something. He was setting his emergency brake when Darleen’s door opened. She was wearing a kimono that hung open down the front. Her white hooters glowed in the shadow of the doorway. Standing with Darleen was one of the other busboys from the casino, an illegal from Zacatecas. He tried to pull the kimono closed, but she pulled it open again. They laughed and kissed, and played some grab-ass, and then the busboy rode off on a bicycle. He waved and she waved back, and she closed her door without noticing Chicky.