Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [54]
I stood in front of the bag, my hands up, my body turned sideways to it.
“Put your weight on your back foot.”
I did and could feel the concrete under the ball of my foot, my heel up. I threw a right, my back foot like a spring, the bag swinging away nearly as far as when Bill had punched it. It swung back and hit me in the knee. Bill steadied the bag and looked at me. He took in my chest and shoulders, my small arms. “Andre, you are deshieving. You are a lot shtronger than you look. You hit shomebody in the shtreet like that, they’re going down.”
I nodded and smiled. It’d felt good to hit the bag. I wanted to do it again. I wanted to find other ways to do it.
Bill said, “Give me them gloves.”
For the next thirty minutes, he showed me how to throw a left hook, a right hook, the uppercut and straight right. He showed me how to weave away from the bag, then counterpunch. He showed me how to combine different shots, how to set my opponent up with pesky jabs, all while putting myself at the perfect distance to set my feet, then let go with a fight-ending right cross.
I was sweating and breathing hard, and when Bobby came in wanting to get to our chest workout, I was slow to unwrap my hands and wrists. I wanted to learn more, to keep punching that bag that began to look like Tommy J. and Cody Perkins, Clay Whelan, and Dennis Murphy and all the rest, the worn Everlast label on the canvas not letters, but eyes and a nose and a mouthful of teeth.
BOBBY GOT himself a new girlfriend. She had brown eyes and long shiny brown hair and she worked at a restaurant down the river in Newburyport. He started missing a lot of workouts, and I went back to my old routine of three days a week. Right away my energy came back. In a month my shirts were getting tight in the shoulders and upper back again, and before and after every weight workout I did three to four rounds on the heavy bag.
I was looking forward to going to the gym now. I was getting faster and trying new combinations, though I really liked going from the jab, then weaving to the left where I’d throw two left hooks to the body, then a right uppercut, a left hook to the head, then I’d find my range, set my weight down onto the ball of my foot, and throw a right cross that would shoot the bag backwards, Bill usually standing there shaking his head.
“You are desheivin’. A real shleeper.”
This was brand new, a grown man taking note of me. It felt good, and I wanted more of it.
BY MID-FALL, Connolly had paid a carpenter to come and build a ring. It was just a plywood platform on two-by-fours on concrete, but he had the carpenter put in four posts and he padded them and ran regulation boxing rope from one to the other. In the corner was a crate of old leather boxing gloves, most of them the smaller eight ounces used in fights, but no headgear, and he told us that unless we wanted to lose some teeth we should go buy our own mouthguards.
Word got out Connolly had built a ring, and now boxers from the Y or other towns were stopping in to look at it. I was usually lifting out on the floor when they came in, their noses flattened, their eyes narrowed under punch-thickened eyebrows. One was Ray Duffy. Everybody said the Duffys were crazy as the Murphy brothers but tougher. There was the story of Ray down in a bar on Washington Street. Two men slighted him somehow and he stood there listening, then knocked them both out, one punch each.
Now Ray was coming in a few days a week. He rarely hit the heavy bag or lifted weights. Instead he’d step into the ring in his street clothes and shadowbox, his punches clean and efficient.
THE FIRST one I boxed in the ring was Bill Connolly’s nephew Brent. Brent was ten or twelve pounds heavier than I was, and he had straight black hair and olive skin, acne scars on his cheeks. Except for Bill, he hit the bag better than anyone, his punches hard and crisp, his combinations fluid, his footwork and bobbing and weaving like some masculine