Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [108]
“Who are you?”
“Andre.”
“French?”
“Yep.”
“You wanna fight?”
“Yeah, I do.”
He offered his hand, his knuckles twice the size of mine. “Tony Pavone.” He waved his arm at the room. “I train all these kids. We got the Gloves coming up down to Lowell. What’re you, a middleweight?”
I smiled and shrugged.
“Yeah, we need a middleweight. You want to start right now?”
I was still in my construction clothes and work boots, but I told him I’d be back the next night, and I was.
TONY PAVONE had been the New England Champion in his weight class back in the thirties, and he trained everyone the same way. The workout started with three rounds of shadowboxing in the ring. At first no one was in there but me, throwing combinations at the air under the lights, bobbing under imaginary counterpunches, weaving into some hopefully evasive footwork before going back in and throwing more punches. I’d never done it before, and I felt silly till I saw four or five others doing the same thing. One climbed into the ring and worked alongside me. The others shadowboxed in the center of the concrete floor. A few times Tony would shout from the darkness beyond the ropes, “Keep your right up. Throw more jabs.”
After only three rounds I was breathing hard and my sweatshirt was sticking to my back. Now it was time for two rounds on the small heavy bag, then two on the medium, then two more on the heaviest. Earlier I’d wrapped my hands and it felt good to have those hitting gloves back on, that leather-sewn iron bar against my palms. Pavone walked around the gym in his wool sweater and worn gray dress pants and scuffed black shoes. He studied each fighter for a half minute or so. Whether they were in the ring or shadowboxing or working one of the bags, he’d offer a tip or he’d stay quiet. With me he was quiet till I got to the heavy bag, my eyes burning from the sweat, my shoulders sore from holding up my hands. I’d been trying to remember some of the combinations I’d learned from Bill Connolly, and I threw a jab, then a double left hook, weaved away from the bag, set my feet, and threw a right cross that sent an ache up my arm into my shoulder.
“That’s good power. That’s good.”
He walked away, and that’s all I needed to hear, though it was a surprise to me that I did; I already knew I had something good with my right cross, that it might be a knockout punch in the ring too, but it was just having a man older than my father take me in and say something about what he saw that felt like cool water on a dry tongue, one I hadn’t known was so dry.
Sam often talked about his own growing up, how his father had driven him to hundreds of practices and games, the coaches or ex-teachers or uncles he would sometimes go to for advice. But I’d had no coaches and until college had done my best to be invisible in the classroom. Whatever uncles I had were in Louisiana and they were uncles by a marriage that had ended years ago anyway. Somewhere, sometime I’d stopped expecting my father to father; maybe if he’d stayed with us, it would have been different, but even then there was the feeling that writing and running and teaching is where he seemed to put the truest part of himself. After those things, there seemed to be little extra energy or time for anything else. When I saw him now, it was usually at Ronnie D’s on the weekends and when I walked in his eyes would light up and he’d call me over to the bar and buy me a beer, put his arm around me as if we both knew more about the other than we did.
I finished my rounds on the heavy bag, then followed old and slightly hunched Tony Pavone to the ring.
11
LIZ WAS IN one of my father’s fiction writing classes. She was from Maine and had brown hair and bright hazel eyes and whenever she blinked a tiny indentation appeared above her nostrils. Pop told me she was a good writer, one of his most talented, and one night at Ronnie D’s I sat across from her in one of the booths. Under the bar noise we talked and sipped beer, then went