“Duffy, I am not pleased with this situation with Rheinhart,” Claudia said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“It’s bad for the clinic. It puts us in a bad light and it makes us vulnerable.”
“Bad light? Vulnerable?”
“It’s bad publicity and it overshadows the work we do. It could interfere with our ability to help clients,” Claudia said, running her hand palm-down through her Starsky-do, which was something she did when she was lying.
“Uh-huh. What does that have to do with me?” I said.
“You’re his counselor.”
“So.”
“Make sure you do everything you can to assist his apprehension.”
“What if he’s innocent and he gets hurt?”
“Duffy-be realistic.”
“I’m not always good at that,” I said, and I got up. “Claudia, I better go or you’ll be writing out verbal warnings for me.” I turned to get out of her office.
“Make sure you do what I told you,” she said.
I needed to get to the gym… for a lot of reasons.
6
With just a few days before a bout there’s not a ton you can work on, but it felt better to be in the gym doing something to get ready. I had been sparring on and off for the last month so I was reasonably sharp. Sparring too close to a fight can be dumb because you can get an injury that would make you pull out of the fight. When you’re a fighter of my caliber, that’s a big mistake because they’ll just go to the boxing registry and find another guy with your weight, height, level of competition, and won/loss record. Professional opponents really have a lot in common with the bovine futures being bought and sold at the Chicago Board of Trade. If you’re a boxing superstar like Oscar de la Hoya and everyone’s dying to fight you and you get injured, you call the fight off and the whole boxing world will wait for you. Well, the boxing world wouldn’t wait the length of a beer commercial for Duffy Dombrowski and guys like me don’t see many $15,000 paydays, so I didn’t want to take any chances.
I did want to get a feel for the Mexican gloves because I hadn’t worn them much. They’re expensive and the shows I fight on usually cut costs by using cheaper gloves. I swallowed the $250 and got a pair, figuring it was money well spent. God, they felt great, probably as good as an alligator shoe feels on someone who cares enough to buy the repulsive things. They really formed around my fists, and my hands just felt natural inside of them. I did three rounds of regular bag work and then practiced throwing the jab and just grazing the corner of the heavy bag. I saw some of the Puerto Rican fighters working this move with the Mexican gloves on the bags at Gleason’s in Brooklyn one time and they had it down to an art form. I don’t know about my artistic expression but I was getting a feel for letting the seam drag over the bag.
Smitty took me through some pad work, finishing with two full rounds drilling the recoil on my left cross. This was Smitty’s pride and joy, and he felt like if he could train a fighter to bring his hands back after a punch, then that fighter’s defense could be almost impenetrable. He was right and all his fighters did it well. If they didn’t, and didn’t practice, pretty soon they weren’t his fighters anymore. Smitty would drop them because he felt that strongly about it.
After the last round on the pads he told me to shake down a little bit and to do some stretching. He gave me the speech of what not to eat before a fight and how to get as much sleep as possible-like the nerves I went through the week of the fight would possibly allow me to concentrate on nutrition or leave me calm enough to get any sleep. The last few days before the fight I was miserable. Irritable, cranky, and generally just pissed off, and dealing with the Michelin Woman today hadn’t helped matters either.
I was undoing my wraps and heading up the stairs to the locker room when I was distracted by the yelling in the karate room. Looking through the little square window with the crosshatched lines, I saw Mitchell and Harter, the two barney-badass black belts. They were standing over the goofy kid, the one with the really bad pizza face. He was doing knuckle pushups and his arms quivered from the fatigue. The kid wasn’t blessed with a whole lot of physical strength, but it was clear that he was a karate diehard. If a karate instructor wants to work the kid’s ass off that was one thing. Corny and as politically incorrect as that sort of thing is, I do believe facing and overcoming adversity does build character in people. In fact, I’d argue that it’s the only thing that builds character. Even in a goofy karate class where the adversity was contrived, it could still breed character.
The thing with these guys was that they seemed to be enjoying making a mockery of the kid. It wasn’t about any kind of respect-it was about the opposite. I opened up the door and quietly went into the karate class and leaned against the wall.
“You are weak,” Mitchell barked at the kid. “You do not have the black belt’s heart.”
The kid looked up from his pushups and fought back the tears. The poor kid-here these guys were abusing him and he had the loyalty to be hurt by their disapproval.
“Too weak,” Harter snickered. “You can’t even finish your pushups. You will never make black belt.”
The kid started to cry, though he hid it by putting his head down in his pushup position. My neck started to twitch, and I noticed that my left hand was clenched. Today, something was going to keep me from minding my own business.
“Hey-that’s probably enough, don’t you think, fellas?” I said as I crossed my arms. I hadn’t moved otherwise and stood still, holding up the wall.
The room got quiet. The rest of the students tried not to look at me while they maintained their quasi-military forward stares.
“Sir, this is a closed class. There are no visitors,” Mitchell said. He glared at me like he thought I would melt in front of him.
“Good for you, but why don’t you leave the kid alone,” I said. I felt the vein twitch in my neck again.
“No one speaks to the sensei in this class like this. You are putting yourself in danger,” he said. His partner took an exaggerated stance with his hands on his hips. He stood up straight in a posture that was impossibly rigid.
“Yeah, well, excuse me if I don’t tremble,” I said.
I walked across the gym floor, grabbed the kid by the back of the uniform, and lifted him to his feet.
“C’mon, pal. You’re getting outta here.”
The kid tried to pull away and he tried to say something to his instructors, but nothing came out. They stood with their hands on their hips.
“You’re doing us a favor. He’s kept the rest of the class down,” Harter said.
I stopped. I put the kid down and I turned around.
The vein in my neck was doing the Twist and I had had it.
“Tell you what, tough guy, how about you come over here and make me do a pushup. Or does the fact that I’m over 140 pounds disqualify me?” I said.
“A time and a place for you, there will be,” Mitchell said.
“Hey Confucius, you want to try me? C’mon!” The neck was getting intense. “You weren’t all philosophical two minutes ago when you were abusing this kid,” I said.
“Go now, while you still can,” Harter said.
I didn’t move or say anything for a while, but I looked Mitchell right in the eye.
“C’mon, kid,” I said. The kid didn’t want to go, and I had to pull him away. I dragged him out to the stairwell. He struggled to stand up straight, he wiped his eyes, trying to make it look like he wasn’t crying, and he wouldn’t look at me.
“Why did you do that?” he said. “I am a karateka. I will be a black belt one day.”
“Hey kid-”
“Who are you? Why don’t you mind your own business?”
He looked up at me and his face was covered with zits. The very tip of his nose had a huge whitehead on it,
