In the back were full-size stainless steel sinks for pots and pans and that’s where Sam spent most of his time in an apron scrubbing bits of fish and potatoes, pasta, grease, and meat off of the bottoms and sides of massive containers. My job was to either load the machine or unload it, and I liked how hard it was to do well, how fast and efficiently you had to move, how quickly I broke out in a sweat and how much like a workout it became. That summer, the man who sprayed down the dishes and worked the machine was a drifter named Charlie Pierce.
Tall and scrawny, his arms scarred with blue tattoos, he was deep into his fifties and had thin gray hair and a coarse voice, though we never heard it much because he rarely smiled or spoke to anyone. Whenever there was a lull in the shift, he’d take a cigarette break out on the back stoop. He’d pull off his white apron and drape it over the railing, then light up a Raleigh and squint out at the river, exhaling smoke through his nose, taking his time.
One night very late, the cooks gone, the last of the waitresses too, it was just me and Sam and Charlie Pierce. Sam and I were wiping down the steel counters, and Charlie was mopping the floor. The transistor radio near the sink was playing, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
We kept working and the singer kept singing over and over how she’s leaving on a jet plane and Charlie straightened up from his mopping and shouted, “So fuckin’ leave then!!”
Sam and I started to laugh, but Charlie was staring at us wide-eyed, like he’d just been insulted and couldn’t we see that? He shook his head and went back to his mopping, swearing under his breath, mumbling to himself.
IT WAS a Saturday night in July, the place filled to capacity, and the kitchen was a loud, steaming machine of cooks calling out orders, the sizzling of hot oil, the swinging of the kitchen doors, Charlie spraying down the dishes before they went into the washer. There was the hollow clank of pots Sam was scrubbing out back, the chatter of the waitresses as they loaded their trays, some of them balancing three full platters of food up one arm, and the busboys were wheeling in carts of dirty dishes and were so backed up I had to move from the rear of the machine where I was unloading it to the front. The busboy had already run to his station to go set up recently cleared tables, and there were two full carts of food-streaked dishes, glasses, cups, and silverware, and I grabbed plates and bowls and began scraping them clean, sliding them into plastic trays and pushing them onto the belt for Charlie to spray.
“Slow down, kid.” His voice came from behind the rack of plastic trays, and I could only see his waist and hands as he sprayed down the dishes I’d just pushed to him.
“I can’t, we’re backed up.” I dropped a salad bowl into the loaded tray, then shoved it under the rack onto the belt and a hot sting shot across my arms and chest, water dripping from my elbows, the scalding water Charlie Pierce had just sprayed at me, and I was rushing around the corner to get him, the head cook dropping a sautée pan and jumping between us, another cook there too, then an older waitress with gray hair in a bun, Charlie saying, “I’ll kill him. So help me, I will take that kid’s life. I will take his life.”
The head cook sent him outside to cool off. He put Sam in his place at the machine, then he turned to me and said, “And you, hothead, calm the fuck down.” In seconds the kitchen was back to normal and I was pushing loaded trays to Sam, my heart still going, and even though Charlie’s words were in my head, I wasn’t afraid.
After smoking two or three slow cigarettes out on the stoop, Charlie came back in and relieved Sam, and we worked the rest of the shift without a word to him or from him.
Five years later, standing in my father’s small campus house he shared with his third wife, I saw a photograph of Charlie Pierce in The Boston Globe. It was a mug shot, and he was looking into the camera with the same expression I’d seen before, as if he’d been deeply insulted and couldn’t we all see that? I read the article below him, learned that he lay dying of cancer in prison and was confessing to over thirty years of murdering children. He was telling the police where he’d buried two bodies in Lawrence, one of a ten-year-old boy he said he’d raped and killed the summer of 1976, the summer he worked with us at Captain Chris’s Restaurant down on Water Street overlooking the brown and swirling Merrimack River.
IN THE seventies, the only gyms were the ones we read about in Muscle Builder magazine, iron gyms in Southern California where the professional bodybuilders trained. There was the Y down near GAR Park, but the dues were expensive, and besides, from the outside it was a cinderblock box with few windows and looked like a prison, the only other place where I’d heard men regularly lifted weights.
Connolly’s Gym was down near Railroad Square, a few blocks north of the river on Grant Street. It was on the first floor of an old shoe factory that must’ve been turned into a store at one time because there was no front wall, just floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto Grant and an empty lot surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. On the other side, weeds had grown up between cracks in the asphalt, and there were a few empty oil drums, a stack of mattresses, an upside-down shopping cart.
Sam and I went down there hoping to see a weight-training gym like the kind we’d only read about, but when we walked into the hot open space, the carpet blue and commercial-thin, the walls whitewashed and still smelling like paint, we saw just two weight benches not much better than what I had in my basement. I almost turned to walk out when I saw the barbells; they were the seven-foot-long Olympics the pros used. They weighed 45 pounds and held big black iron plates. Around the corner a kid was working on a heavy bag, and he wore red Everlast hitting gloves, his wrists wrapped with tape. He looked pretty good, throwing fast punches, bobbing and weaving away from the swaying bag.
“Don’t shlap it, Shtevie, punch it! Punch it!” Bill Connolly stood a few feet away. He was over forty and an inch shorter than I was, but he had a deep chest and thick upper arms, and we found out later that when he was younger he’d been a professional fighter up and down the East Coast. He was clean-shaven, and whenever he spoke he blinked a lot and all his s’s sounded like sh’s.
He shook our hands and showed us around. There were more weights and another bench, a couple of incline sit-up boards. He looked us up and down. “A middleweight and a welterweight. You boys gonna shign up?”
I had no desire to be a boxer. I was more interested in lifting the black iron weights I saw there, the same kind all the bodybuilders used in California. It was hard to get big if you were boxing, too. Sam may have been more interested than I was. His coach still had him off the weights, but he liked the idea of doing his push-ups and isometrics where other people were working out too.
“Yeah,” he said. “We are.”
The dues were cheap, and when we handed our dishwashing money over to Bill Connolly, he smiled and thanked us and took a pen and carefully wrote our names in a notebook. He blinked a lot and asked us twice about the spelling. I began to think this came from taking shots to the head, from getting punched over and over again in the brain.
WE STARTED working out there right away. Sam did his 666 push-ups, isometric curls and press-downs, pushing and pulling one hand slowly against the other, flexing his big biceps and horseshoe-shaped triceps. And I borrowed money from my mother she didn’t have and sent away to southern California for an advanced bodybuilding course from Franco Columbu, a Mr. Olympia who was also a powerlifting champion and at 185 pounds could bench-press over 500.
Columbu’s pamphlets were full of warnings that these were advanced routines for competitive bodybuilders, but I ignored those. Now, instead of one or two exercises for each body part, I was doing five, four or five sets each, and I moved my workouts from three times a week to six, and they were no longer one hour each but two and a half to three hours. Many times Bill Connolly would walk over and say, “Andre, you’re doing too much. You want power, come hit the heavy bag.”
But I didn’t want to hit the heavy bag. I wanted to be as big as Franco Columbu. I wanted his flaring back, h
is huge bulbous shoulders, his pecs he could crush a pencil between. For weeks I ignored how tired I was getting, how I was always sore and avoided looking in the mirror because there was never much to see, even less than a few months earlier.
One afternoon, Bobby Schwartz walked into the gym. He was over 200 pounds and six feet tall and wanted to lose some fat around his waist. He worked for his father, Saul, who owned a police supply business up on Washington Street, his shop across from Saldana’s bakery that’d been closed down because the owner hired only Puerto Ricans and Dominicans straight from their homelands and was accused of never paying them. Bobby was outgoing and good-looking, and he liked how long I worked out, how skinny I was. He asked if he could be my training partner and I said sure.
One Thursday, after a three-hour workout, we drove up to Bobby’s father’s store for Bobby’s weekly pay. It was a small, musty shop, blue uniform pants and shirts hanging from racks. Under a glass case were silver handcuffs and black regulation billy clubs. Bobby’s father was in the back office sitting at a desk cluttered with catalogues, a telephone, and Rolodex under a flickering fluorescent lamp.
Saul was talking on the phone when we walked in. He nodded at his son, his eyes passing over me, then he squeezed the receiver between his neck and shoulder and leaned back and reached into his front pocket and pulled out more cash than I’d ever seen before, fifties, twenties, tens, all in a wad three inches thick. Clipped to his belt was a semiautomatic pistol in a leather holster.
“Yeah?” he said into the phone. “Well fuck him, too.” And he fingered some bills away from the fold and handed them to Bobby. He winked at him, then nodded at me as if we’d known each other a long time. He pushed the money back into his pocket. On the way out of his office, we passed another glass case, this one lined with brass knuckles and weighted black saps and boot knives.
Bobby saw me looking. “You didn’t see those.” He smiled. “Cops carry ’em, but they’re not ’sposed to.”
LATELY, EVEN though the weather was warm, I’d been wearing my leather jacket more. All I ever seemed to do was work out, but whatever muscles I’d begun to build in the last year were getting smaller. I was tired all the time and never felt like walking the two miles down to the gym or even having Bobby pull up to my house in his pickup. Still, I’d go.
One September afternoon, I had gotten to Connolly’s ahead of Bobby and lay down on the incline sit up board, waiting for him. Outside there was a soft rain ticking against the glass. I could hear the transistor radio Bill sometimes played out back where he slept—talk radio, men speaking heatedly about some kind of game. Around the corner where the heavy bag hung, somebody was punching it, the shots coming hard but far apart.
“That’s good,” Bill’s voice said. “That’s good, Tommy.”
My eyes were closed and I began to drift off, all the sounds becoming one sound I was floating away on.
“Hey.”
I sat up. Bill was standing a few feet away looking at me, a pair of red Everlast hitting gloves in his hand. He smiled and held them up. “Get over here.”
Then I was around the corner, this part of the gym unfinished, the walls naked brick, the floor concrete. It was cool and damp and smelled like sweat and rust.
“I know you want to be a muscle man, but let me show you a couple things, all right?” Bill was wrapping my wrists with two-inch-wide strips of what felt like Ace bandage. “This is sho you don’t hurt yourshelf. Watch me.” Bill pulled on the hitting gloves. They were made only for punching the bag, not for sparring, and they fit the hand close to the skin. Sewed inside the palm was a small iron bar. He raised his hand and shot his left fist into the bag. “That’s a jab to throw ’em off balance.” He threw two more, the bag jerking on its chain, then he threw a punch from his right shoulder, his back foot pivoting on his toes. There was a loud whop and the bag swung back three feet and Bill followed it, both hands up at his ears, and he dropped his left shoulder and got off two more quick lefts that jerked the bag to the right. He weaved to the left and shot another right, the bag jolting to a stop.
He was breathing hard, sweat breaking out just above his thick eyebrows. “Shee what I’m doin’? The jab shets you up for your combinations. I just threw three jabs, then a right crosh, a double left hook, then a shtraight right. Here, put these on.”
I did. I liked the feel of the iron bar in my fists. Bill told me to raise my hands up and to turn more to the side, to put my weight on my back foot. “Now bring your elbows into your midsection and throw a jab.”
I punched the bag. It was heavier than it looked. It barely moved.
“Rotate your fist as you throw it. That’ll cut your opponent up good. Now jab three times, then throw a right.”
I punched the bag three times, then threw the right as hard as I could, an ache jolting up my arm into my shoulder, the bag swaying away from me.
“Good power, but do it with your legs, too, Andre. Just like shwingin’ a bat in baseball. You squash the bug with your back foot.” I nodded like I knew what he meant. He raised his fists up. “Look at my feet.” He threw a slow-motion right, his weight on his back foot, his toes corkscrewing with the punch. “A knockout comes from the legs, Andre. You try it.”
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 w
e 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 dance. Because we were close to the same weight, and because Bill wanted to see how each of us would do, he matched us up on a gray Friday afternoon in October.
He wrapped our wrists and hands, helped us lace our gloves, made sure we had mouthguards, then ducked out of the ring. He studied his wristwatch and called, “Time!”
I expected to get beaten up, my heart pulsing hard in my temples as Brent and I raised our gloves and moved to the center of the ring. Bill had taught me to keep the right up to block any head shots, to jab, then move constantly to avoid being a target, to wait for my opening. Brent jabbed first and I blocked it with my left, then jabbed back and popped him in the forehead. His eyes blinked and I blinked too, a ripple of heat passing through my cheeks at what I’d just done. He jabbed again and as I blocked it, a right slammed into my right glove and smashed me in the eyebrow. I moved to the left and jabbed him two more times in the forehead, his eyes tearing up. His mouth looked swollen from the mouthguard and I knew mine did too and it was harder to breathe with it. Brent stepped in and threw a straight right I weaved away from, then got off a left hook into his ribs, bright green flashing through my brain. I brought my left back up from where I’d dropped it, from where Brent had seen his opening and connected with a right.