it got on my nerves. I sat down on the good side of my couch, took a hit of the Schlitz, and hit the button on my message machine. There were a few messages for me.
The first was from Smitty, who ran the gym inside the old Crawford YMCA. Anyone could use the boxing gym in the Y, but there was sort of a Darwinian law at work that kept the place from getting too crowded. Fighters are generally suspicious people, and it takes awhile to warm up to them. Most people who think it would be neat fun to learn how to box usually rethink it after someone punches them in the head. People come and people go and there’s no point in making friends with guys until they earn their stripes.
Smitty acted as my default manager. A promoter from Kentucky had a fight offer for me as a main event on a card he was having in Lexington. Kentucky is famous for lousy boxing and lousy pay, and though it would be cool to be in a main event and actually have a chance to win, I didn’t feel like driving all that way for what would probably amount to seven hundred bucks in my pocket. With gas, tolls, motels along the way, and all the little expenses that get taken up with travel, the two-thousand-dollar purse would be gone in no time. It’s the sort of stuff that Oscar de la Hoya doesn’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about. I wanted to think about it before I made any decisions.
The second call was from Lisa, the woman I had been dating. We’d been seeing each other for about seven months, and for about the last three weeks she’d been acting weird. There were nights when she seemed pretty normal, happy to be with me, and, frankly, interested in the things that people who date are interested in, namely sex. Then there’d be times when she was distant and seemed to take everything I said as an offense. Though I would never say it out loud in front of her or, for that matter, anyone else carrying two X chromosomes, I might think it was PMS. Actually, if it wasn’t PMS, it could be “the time right before” or “right after” or any of a number of those coded expressions women use to explain why they’re being weird. The way I had it figured, women could excuse their mood and behavior about twenty-seven out of every thirty days in the month if they tried hard enough.
This seemed more than that. I’ve stayed unmarried but have had enough relationships of varying lengths to recognize the signs. It hasn’t been a particularly pretty love history for me-my relationships usually follow the same arc. First, the woman gets charmed with the fact that she’s met an adult male who is physically fit and able to speak using words with more than one syllable. During this phase, sex occurs freely and often and googly eyes are made during tender moments in which the woman usually voices her joy of just spending time with me.
That phase, which can last from several hours to almost a month, but seldom more than that, is replaced with the second phase. In the second phase, the object of my affection begins to exhibit tendencies that make me believe that she may not be quite as enamored as I thought she might be. This stage manifests itself in symptomatology such as a tendency to find fault in my hobbies, especially my devotion to boxing, a dislike for my choice of restaurants, and then, most telling, the postponement of any coital activity.
My reaction, which has been tested over more trials than I care to admit, is to deny that such symptomatology exists. Then I try to convince myself that the said object of my affection is just going through a phase.
The third and usually final phase is when my partner returns to the psychotic diagnosis that she somehow had been able to mask during our brief love affair. The psychosis can manifest itself in schizophrenic thinking, rage disorders, or complex paranoia. During this time all sexual activity ceases and the relationship ultimately implodes, followed by the request of the now psychotic partner that the two of us remain friends.
Lisa had begun to enter the second phase or was indeed battling an extended period of pre-, active-, or post-menstrual difficulty. On one of our evenings out having drinks after attending the movies, I made the mistake of asking her if she was “puffy,” my special code for menstrual-cycle-induced dysphoria. That may have been my first mistake, but it certainly wasn’t going to be my last.
“Duffy,” Lisa had addressed me with the tone you might reserve for someone who farted at a tea party, “I’m not sure you’re ready for intimacy at all.”
“I thought I was pretty ready last Saturday night, if I do say so myself,” I said with an exaggerated wink and a loving punch to her upper arm.
“Uh… that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Lisa rolled her eyes, hunched her shoulders, and sipped her Chardonnay while turning away from me.
It was one of those unanswerable digs that a woman throws out when she wants to righteously make a statement. The fact that the statement makes no sense is beside the point. The point is, I’m an asshole, unfit for the righteous pursuit of intimacy, who has the nerve to want to have fun and enjoy sex once in a while.
She hasn’t returned my phone calls since that date and I’m not sure what happened. I’d like to say that it doesn’t bother me and try to pull off the flip “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” deal, but I can’t. I like Lisa, I respect her, and I think we could go someplace. I don’t get what I did wrong or what I need to do to make it better. The way she’s been acting, it could be something she just snaps out of, but something inside made me doubt it.
Anyway, her message was a simple “Duffy, please call me.” It had a weird feeling to it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I have always talked to Trina at work about my various relationships, and right from the start she didn’t approve of Lisa. Trina made it clear that I put up with way too much goofy shit with Lisa. In fact, Trina almost always thought that the women I got involved with were way too needy and that I should choose more carefully. That always sounded good, but when it came to dating women, it’s not like they do a full disclosure when you first meet them. When I first meet them they’re always attractive, interesting, and engaging, and it usually takes time before the psychotic behavior starts. Then I’m left with trying to figure out if their wackiness is an aberration or if they really are funny-farm certifiable. Inevitably they should be getting their mail delivered to One Funny Farm Circle, Wack-job, USA.
The third call was from Walanda. She was using one of her two weekly calls to contact me from jail. She was not doing well.
“Duffy, get me out of here, they’re goin’ kill me. He has people in here… they’re goin’ kill me. Duffy, you gotta get me out of here!”
She was holding back tears and half shouting in that weird way that people sometimes do on the phone when they’re trying to control the volume of their yells.
Al whimpered when he heard Walanda’s voice.
Before she hung up, she paused and, as an afterthought, said, “Remember, don’t give Allah-King no pork.”
No doubt Walanda felt she was in trouble-the difficult thing was trying to get a handle on whether it was real or brought on by withdrawal from the lack of psychotropics, both legal and illicit, in her system. Whether or not the danger was real or imagined, her anxiety certainly was authentic. One thing I’ve learned over the years of working with people like Walanda is that reality has very little to do with emotion. Right or wrong, true or false-Walanda was hurting and hurting bad.
Her short-legged, overgrown sausage continued to whimper for a few minutes after the phone call. After a minute or two the whimpering must’ve exhausted him, because he laid down on his back with all four paws pointing straight up and went to sleep.
Even though Walanda was nuts, it didn’t necessarily mean she was imagining the danger. Still, she was coming off crack and who knows what else and probably wasn’t taking her antipsychotic medication. It would be a few days before the jail doctor would see her and prescribe her Haldol, and then a few days after that the medication would work again. The stress of being taken out of her environment, losing Al, the situation with her stepdaughter-real or imagined-and being in jail were all sufficient to put her over the edge.
Just the same, I called Kelley to see if he could help. He wasn’t in, but I knew where I could find him. I put Al’s new leash on him and we headed for AJ’s. AJ’s is a grill on the West Side, in the middle of the city’s industrial section. It was a speakeasy during prohibition, and I think that was the last time that any of the AJs had put a dime into the place. The bar has been passed down three generations to its current proprietor, the one and only Andrew Jursczak III. The place reeked of stale beer, cigar smoke, and the poor hygiene of the people who frequented the place. Kelley hung out there a lot when he was off duty.
AJ’s is a dive, which is why I like it. I parked right in front of the entrance, told Al I’d be back, and headed in. As I closed my door and walked around the car, I could hear Al’s protest. I did my best to ignore him, that is, if you can ignore the baritone woofing of a hound fixated on getting your attention.
The place is long and thin with a bar capable of holding maybe eighteen patrons, and there are a half-dozen
