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NEW YORK 1986
Pedro rang the bell and we both advanced warily, hands up, to the center of the ring. Almost simultaneously we both lunged and jabbed with our left. We circled, and jabbed again. I backed away toward the corner and when he stepped in my direction I suddenly charged him and threw a right to his head. He deflected the blow with his left glove and countered with his right, which slammed into the top of my protective helmet. I retreated, bouncing on the balls of my feet, chin against my chest, my gloves tight against my face, elbows in, guarding my midsection.
He peeked over his gloves. His face was red from exertion, distorted from the plastic mouth protector. He tried a kind of shuffling dance to distract me, but when I felt he was off-balance I charged with a right to his head, followed by a left hook to his body and another left hook to his head. He gasped. I followed up with a right to his head, which he deflected with his glove. I retreated with him following, more warily. We loped sideways together in a kind of clumsy dance toward the corner. Now we were getting into it. The stiffness was going away and we were getting used to the situation, and to each other’s style. Round after round of jabbing, chasing, deftly and not-so-deftly delivered shots to the head and body. We took turns chasing each other, going in tight and tying each other up, trying tricks to confuse and tire each other out, looking for an advantage. The room was hot and stuffy and our t-shirts and sweat pants became drenched with perspiration. Pedro, acting as both trainer and referee, kept time with us, pushing us apart when we clinched, barking instructions, admonishing against low blows, sometimes cajoling us to fight harder. “Use it!”, he would scream when he felt one or the other was not using his jab enough. We moved around the ring in a lump of three, sweating, drool dripping from our mouths, elbows flailing and laces flying. Occasionally a well-aimed shot to the face would launch a shower of sweat and sputum into the air.
We were well-matched, neither having the desire to inflict much damage on the other. After all, we were friends training together, not adversaries trying to kill each other, and the sparring session ended with a handshake.
Bogdan, Pedro and I sat in the Broadway Baby Piano Bar nursing our beers in a post-workout stupor. In some ways boxing is better than sex. Bogdan, my sparring partner, was a Yugoslav, 190 lbs., with black hair swept directly back and a neatly trimmed short beard. Bogdan was a very nasty piece of work. Like, he was a mental case. He had just gotten out of prison for assaulting a guy on the subway. While he was in jail his ex-girlfriend had died of AIDS, though he said he didn’t have it. I don’t think he had it. He didn’t fight like a guy who had AIDS.
Pedro was 160 lbs, a Puerto Rican who couldn’t speak Spanish for shit. He was short and muscular, a human pit bull. In fact, he used to train pit bulls and always carried around a book about them. Pedro was my boxing mentor. He was always developing scientific new boxing combinations to mess a man up. We used to take long runs together in Central Park. He worked for New York Social Services as a youth counselor. Once he had gone into a tenement looking for a kid and had gotten attacked by wild dogs in the hallway. They took a big chunk out of his butt. Another time, he had sat on a couch in some people’s apartment and got fleas, which made him so sick that he had to spend three weeks in the hospital. When I heard these stories I was thankful for my nice soft job hanging from scaffolding on the side of buildings.
That leaves me, Jacky O’Shea, six-feet 180 pounds of fun, girls. I grew up in a group home in Queens and I had to learn to handle myself pretty young, because when you have no parents to protect you life can be pretty mean and tough, though I didn’t have it as tough as some kids. God took some things away from me but He made me big and strong, and I’m thankful for that.
We sat around the table, gym bags and headgears hanging from the backs of the chairs. Pedro, his dark glasses flashing in the dim pink light, was waxing ecstatic over his new girlfriend, Darlene, an ebony-colored bodybuilder, into whose Brooklyn apartment he had already installed himself. He passed around snapshots of her flexing provocatively in a chocolate-brown wet-look bikini. “She’s a really fantastic person,” he enthused. “We’re gonna get some dogs and start training them. She says if it works out between us we can go live in this house her family owns in Huntingdon and we can become professional dog trainers.”
That alarmed me. “If you’re living in Long Island, how’re you gonna be able to train at the gym?”
“Don’t worry, man, I’ll still come to the gym.”
“O.K., then.”
Bogdan stared glumly at a posterior shot of Darlene, who was bent over suggestively and smiling at the camera from between her legs. “Boy,” he sighed, “I haven’t tasted pussy for a long time.”
“Well, it still tastes the same.”
Bogdan continued, “When I was in the joint, I had to pay guys to protect me.”
“Yeah?!”
“Yeah?!”
Bogdan was pretty tough, so it was hard to imagine a place so brutal that he felt compelled to buy protection.
“Yeah, it was like being in a cage with all these guys who wanted to fuck you and beat your brains out, or the other way around. And you could look out the windows and see people on the outside driving around and doing things, and you’re stuck inside with these assholes…
“Hell, I never want to go back there again.”
“So whaddaya been doing since you got out?”
“Working for my uncle. He owns an apartment building on E. 88th Street. He gave me a job as super, and I got an apartment in the building.”
See, people don’t appreciate the value of relations until they don’t have any. Even somebody as miserable and messed-up as Bogdan was able to secure some assistance, however pathetic, because he had some family ties. In my case, whatever hard luck befell me, I was strictly on my own. With Pedro it was the same. All we had was each other, and, let’s face it, we really didn’t have that either.
The subject of apartments had a lot of immediacy to me. I hated the studio I was living in, on E. 94th Street, and I was desperate to find something more desirable in the neighborhood. The way I got this apartment was, I met this girl in the gym, named Millicent Battaglia. She was an actress with a rich father. Originally, this other guy was hitting on her, but she went for me instead. I was living in Corona, but I was really living in the gym and on the trains, so it was really convenient to have a girlfriend who lived near the gym. So I moved in with her, and when she went to L.A. I got the apartment. The building was full of freaks who took drugs and practiced black magic.
I really loved living near the gym, and being in Manhattan, but I hated the apartment. Millicent wasn’t much of a housekeeper, and forget about me! I felt if I could find a new place in the neighborhood I could make a fresh start, maybe buy some new furniture or something.
Putting on the most casual air of nonchalance I could, expecting to hear an negative response, I casually asked Bogdan if there were any vacancies in his building. His response shocked me:
“Oh yeah, there are a lot of empty apartments. And you want to hear something? They’re all rent controlled. My uncle is trying to vacate the whole building. He figures that way he can get a better price for it when he puts it up for sale.”
That pissed me off good. Damn landlords! Manhattan landlords were a whole other biological species completely, some kind of freakin' maggots that had been spawned out of diseased rat sperm! Nevertheless, hope springs eternal. Smooth as I could, I implored, “Bogdan, my friend, what are the chances you could get me fixed up with one of those apartments?”
“Not a chance, Anyway, what can I do? I only work there. My uncle Walter hates me. He only loves money and Ronald Reagan. Plenty of times he told me he’s going to throw me out!"
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Posted on 2/27/2006
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