'I see.' I sort of did, but I liked my Chips Ahoy. 'Seems like something a whole lot worse than fat happened to you because of the government,' I said and let it hang there.
'You don't know the half of it,' Karl said and looked down at the table.
'You feel like telling me?' I said.
Karl shook his head and took a sip of coffee. It wasn't easy to sip the coffee through the helmet, but he managed by lifting up the facemask. A single tear ran down the left side of his face. He didn't wipe it away.
'All I know is they fucked with me and they're not done fucking with me just like they're fucking with a lot of people,' Karl said.
'Karl, do you know what your diagnosis is?' I felt on shaky ground here, but Karl and I had connected at least to an extent.
'Schizophrenia with paranoid symptoms, Major Depression and Substance Dependence Unspecified. According to them I'm a real smorgasbord.'
'You buy any of it?'
'Look Duffy, I know you think I'm a whack job. I got news for you-I know I'm a whack job, but there's an old saying. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.'
'I guess you got a point.' I thought for a second. 'Hey, the last time you and I talked you mentioned something about a fire. That night there was a fire in the ROTC dorm.'
'Yeah…'
'Did you know something?'
'Me? I'm just a chemically addicted, paranoid schizophrenic, depressed, nut job.'
'And then you got beat up…'
'Just a coincidence, I'm sure.' He winked at me.
'What could the two possibly have to do with each other?'
'Depends who you talk to doesn't it? I'm a semi-street person ex-vet. There are a lot of us bumbling around city streets, rambling. They like it that way.'
'I don't understand. Karl.'
'Most don't. Most don't even pay attention. Wait till the next bomb goes off in a federal building and no one will pay attention to that either. Everyone will get all up in arms and there'll be all sorts of attention paid to the cults and the cult leaders. No one will even notice the CIA connection.'
'You lost me…'
'What's his name? Koresh? The Waco dude-Ex CIA-they had to get him out. Nice production. We're due for another of those real soon. Probably in the South-everyone assumes the South is full of extremist red necks.'
'I don't know Karl, I just don't know.'
'Of course you don't, Mr. Duffy. Enjoy your chips.' He raised his cup in a mock toast and walked out. A pretty dramatic exit, except for the football helmet and rubber gloves.
6
I didn't get to any of the paperwork, so after four sessions I fell further behind. The Michelin Woman would go ballistic when, and if, she found out because she couldn't stand it when all of life's ducks weren't lined up in rows. This duck almost never got into a row, so she generally hated me. Eventually she'd get around to checking the files and I'd get in trouble, but you know, the specter of getting in trouble never really was a motivator for me. If I could avoid pain-in-the-ass trouble I would, but I didn't spend my entire existence fretting about getting in trouble. If avoiding trouble wasn't my thing, fighting definitely was. It's hard to explain to people who don't do it but I need to fight-it's my Valium. When I don't get to fight, I start to get squirrelly and tense and I don't like the feeling. When you get to fight, your body relaxes, your mind has to get away from the daily bullshit to concentrate on protecting yourself, and you get to challenge yourself with a physical chess game. It didn't have anything to with beating someone up-except for the fact I really like landing a good shot, not because I like inflicting pain, but because it's good to know my punches do what they're supposed to do. Being told to take time off from the gym pissed me off. I knew when I felt all right and I knew when I needed rest. I knew I needed stress relief more than anything right now and it was taken away from me. Well, it was taken away from me at the Crawford YMCA boxing Program. There were other places to go where I they knew me, and knew me well, where I could get some work in. Smitty wouldn't have to know and I could avoid an argument by doing what he said and stay away from the gym.
Going across town to another gym was a win-win situation. Just south of Crawford was Ravenwood. They had their own boxing club so I drove the fifteen-minute ride. I wanted to spar so much I could taste it, and with Elvis doing Trouble from '68 on the way over, I was primed and ready to go. Stan Cummings had run the gym for twenty years. As an amateur I regularly competed against his guys, so I was known and respected at Ravenwood. There had about a half dozen guys training in the gym, and from watching for a few seconds I could tell only one of the guys actually fought. If you've been in gyms most of your life you can tell almost instantly who fights competitively, who might be a sparring partner, and who just comes to hit the bags and feel like a fighter. You can tell by the way they carry themselves mostly. The guys who fight aren't posturing or strutting, their movements are natural and not contrived because they're not thinking about proving anything. The guys who spar, and particularly the guys who come in and out of the gym with long periods of not sparring, are more herkyjerky in their movements. They're not as at ease and, though they don't posture all the time, you can sometimes pick them out because they're doing their best not to look nervous, which is, of course, a dead give away.
The final group is the guys desperately trying to fit in. They study how guys talk, how they move, and what kind of slang they use. They have the right equipment, sometimes the most expensive kind, but it's broken in differently because they haven't really programmed the body to do everything in an economical boxing style. When they hit the bag they waste movement, they wind up and over hit-all things that would leave you open in the ring. After you did it once and got drilled in the ring you'd stop doing it in your shadow boxing and on the bag. People ask me if I hate the whole boxing-as-workout movement that kind of peaked and since has sort of petered out. I didn't feel strongly about it either way, but I never considered it boxing, and no one who really boxes did. Sometimes guys got good at hitting bags and doing drills and they'd want to go to the next level and actually spar. They'd get in the ring with even the kindest of real boxers, and the realization that they knew nothing about what they were about to do would hit them. A decent guy wouldn't blast a newbie like this unless maybe they needed to be taken down a peg, but probably not even then.
Even though they didn't really get hurt, the boxercise guys would all of sudden understand when someone else is in there with you it is a whole new thing. 'Boxing' without fighting is kind of like masturbation is to sex- there're some similarities and it can make you feel good, but you should never mistake it for the real thing.
Cummings finished working his one real fighter on the pads, wiped the sweat off his own scar-tissued forehead, and caught my eye.
'Duffy…what brings you around?' Stan carried about fifty pounds more than he should, but his years as a middle of the road heavyweight were still there under the layer of hard fat.
'Just looking to see if I can get some work in,' I said.
'Nobody at the Y?'
'I don't know. I just wanted to get some different work in.' The real deal was if your trainer didn't want you sparring, another trainer wouldn't let you. I didn't want to lie so I let ambiguity do it for me.
'Smitty okay with it?' Stan said.
'Uh-huh,' I said which felt damn close to a lie.
'Well, let's see, the only guy I figured on working was Stefon, the young heavy. He's got the Golden Gloves in a week and half. You wanna work with him?'
'Sure,' I said.
I loosened up a bit, got my hands wrapped, and Stan got me laced up. When the round bell rang, Stefon and I touched gloves and went to work. A big and wiry kid, maybe six foot three, and around 200 pounds who clearly had strength, but like a lot of amateurs his footwork gave away his inexperience. We exchanged some jabs with the neither of us landing. The punches slid off the 18-ounce gloves and I turned Stefon just by my positioning. Most
