Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [113]
Doug was on his third bolt while I was still on my first. He looked over at me. He stood and walked across the roof. “The fuck you doin’? That’s a ratchet wrench.” He squatted and cranked the ratchet back and forth, the lag bolt sinking all the way into the wood without his once having to pull it away and reset it on the head of the lag. “See, numb-nuts. It fuckin’ ratchets.” He straightened up and laughed. “That’s it, man. When we come to one of your fights, I’m calling you ‘the Ratchet Kid.’” He laughed again and shook his head. “See what college did to you? Unfuckin’ believable, the Ratchet Kid.”
Jeb had told them I was boxing. The five of us were standing around the vending truck, sipping hot coffee, warming our hands on the Styrofoam cups. Jeb nodded in my direction and said, “Andre’s a boxer.” I could see the pride in my younger brother’s eyes, and it surprised me; what seemed to move and impress him most were artistic pursuits—a perfectly executed painting, a flawlessly played fugue, anything that came from the rosewood guitar of Andrés Segovia.
“Yeah,” Trevor said, “but can you build a box?”
The conversation turned to furniture-building, fine-finish work, but when coffee break was over, Doug tossed his cup into the dumpster and said, “We should all get shit-faced and go watch Andre fight.”
We went back to the job, but it was like hearing they wanted to come watch me read political theory at night, this private thing I was doing to weigh who I was and where I should be going. And my first official fight wouldn’t come until late winter anyway, the Golden Gloves down in Lowell, another milltown on the Merrimack River, the one Jack Kerouac had made famous. I’d been doing well enough in the ring that Tony Pavone handed me an application form, and a few days later I got my AAU number in the mail. At the Gloves you had to have it pinned to your shirt or trunks for each bout, and each one was single-elimination, a term I’d never heard before. Pavone was standing in the fluorescent light of his office doorway when he said it. Behind me the gym was crowded with fighters working out, the place smelling like sweat and mildew.
“What’s that mean, Tony?”
“You know, like in playoffs. It means you can’t lose. You do, and you’re out.”
Playoffs. Another word I barely knew. But I learned a Golden Gloves champion sometimes fought as many as ten fights in two days. And he had to win them all.
In the ring, even after an hour of shadowboxing and working on the heavy bags and now the speed bag I’d finally learned how to control, I kept coming out ahead. Not in a big way; I never knocked anyone down or out, and I was often too afraid of dropping my guard to plant my feet and throw combinations, so I jabbed and jabbed and jabbed. I never stopped jabbing. These years of consistent workouts hadn’t put much muscle on me, but I had stamina. It’s what seemed to come more naturally to me than power, and I felt as if I could throw jabs for hours, my opponent’s eyes tearing up as I popped him in the forehead, the upper cheek, his nose and mouth.
Every few jabs I’d let go with a straight right or a cross, and I’d feel the itch to weave and step in close with an uppercut I could follow with a left hook to the ribs or ear, but I was worried about the rain of counterpunches from these fighters, some black, some white or Latino. Most of them were only eighteen or nineteen but had over a hundred fights behind them already. One black kid, an eighteen-year-old welterweight I’d sparred for three rounds, told me he’d been training with Tony Pavone since he was six.
Tony had big plans for him, said openly, “This kid’s gonna be the welterweight champ at the Gloves. You watch.”
Tony would sometimes match up fighters from different weight classes. Bigger boxers could learn speed from the smaller ones. Small boxers learned how to evade. The night Tony put me in the ring