Jog On Fat Barry (3 page)

Danny said the angels spoke to him: told him stuff. Crazy shit most of the time, but one time they gave him the name of a horse that was going to win at Flushing Meadows the next day. Danny got out this old shoebox where he kept his money and counted up. There was $35.71 in it, which was a shit-load of money for an eleven-year-old who wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer to have saved. Danny gave me the thirty-five and change, and I gave it to Uncle Frank, and Uncle Frank placed it on the horse that the angels had tipped because Danny and me were too young to do it ourselves. Then we crowded around the little transistor radio the black kid up on the third floor had and listened to that race at Flushing Meadows. And we practically shit our pants when the horse came home to win at 12-1. I fucking kid you not…12-1! Those angels were right on the money; Danny was $500 richer, and we were like three jumping fools. We hopped around like crazy, waiting for Frank to show with the money. We were these three big shots, ready to turn the world on its head. No more macaroni and cheese out of a box for us. Fuck no. We had five hundred bucks. The sky was the limit and we were bouncing off it. There were a million things we wanted to do: I’d set my heart on Coney Island and The Cyclone; Danny wanted to walk to the top of the Empire State building, and set a Lincoln Continental on fire, and the black kid said The Jackson 5 would be appearing at The Apollo but the tickets were $100.

“We’ll do it all when Uncle Frank shows,” I told them, “because we’re fuckin’ rich, man! We’re fuckin’ rich!”

Danny and me and the black kid waited all day for Uncle Frank to show. We counted away the minutes, and then the hours on the black kid’s watch waiting for Frank to show with the $500. But Frank never did show, because he ran into Aileen on his way back, and gave her the money. And Aileen did the same thing she always did with money: drank it all up with whichever uncle Frank happened to be screwing her at the time.

When we found out what they’d done with the money Danny had won, I wanted to kill them, but Danny was more philosophical.

“We still got the wallpaper,” he said.

His idea was that we could bankroll ourselves again: save up all our nickels and dimes, pool our resources, if you like, and then, when the time was right, and we had another big chunk of change, Danny could sing to the angels again. He’d get the name of a new horse and we’d be rich all over again. So all that summer Danny and me washed cars, and took out people’s trash, and dropped nickels, dimes and quarters into the glass jar Danny kept under his bed, and watched our chunk of change grow. Then summer ended and I went back to school. But Danny had no school to go to. Aileen said it was pointless for fools like him to go to school because he couldn’t keep anything in his head anyway, so Danny kept washing cars, and kept dropping coins into that big old glass jar.

Pretty soon the glass jar was almost full. Danny said a few more coins would fill it to the top, and then he was going to sing to the angels. On Monday he took out the trash for the Italian lady on the fifth floor and she gave him a quarter. On Tuesday someone broke a bottle outside the grocery store on the corner, and Danny cleaned it up for fifty cents. On Wednesday he didn’t make zip, but Thursday the black kid swiped a pack of smokes from his mom and sold them for forty cents. He kept the dime and nickel but gave Danny the quarter. The jar was full. Danny said he’d sing that Friday and I raced home from school because I didn’t want to miss it. But when I got home, Danny was in the kitchen, sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth, and hugging himself the way he did when something had upset him. He was growling and dribbling and wouldn’t say what was wrong. I heard noises down the hall. It sounded something like a dog scratching at a door. It was coming from our room. I ran down the hall and threw open the door. Aileen and Uncle Frank were standing in the middle of the room. They were drunk. Frank had a scraper in his hands; Aileen had a chisel in hers. The beds and the floor and everything else were covered with shredded pieces of furry paper. The walls had been stripped bare. I dropped my schoolbag and stepped into the room. Aileen had this huge grin on her face. She was beaming. I don’t think I’d ever seen her looking so happy. She started to stomp around the room and kick pieces of shredded wallpaper up into the air.

“Danny and his fucking wallpaper!” she cried.

She slipped on something; took a tumble. I saw the glass jar. It was on the floor beside her feet. The lid was off; the jar was empty. Aileen tried to stand but fell over again. I got down beside her. Her face was all ugly and bent out of shape.

“Where’s our money?” I asked.

“Danny and his fucking wallpaper,” she hissed as globules of spit went flying out of her mouth.

I glanced at the chisel in her hand. I felt my fingers tighten around its wooden handle. My face began to mirror hers. I could feel it contorting with rage. I grabbed her by the hair. Everything went quiet as I plunged the chisel into her heart. I don’t know how many times I did it, but I could hear bones crack and splinter every time the chisel smashed through her ribcage. When I finally stopped she was bug-eyed and jerking. Her head slumped down onto her chest and her eyes closed. Uncle Frank had been standing there with his mouth open, but he yelped like a puppy when I pushed the chisel into his gut. The sound made me hesitate, and I only got to stick him another three or four times before the cops arrived to stop me. One of the cops took me into the kitchen and gave me a glass of water. His name was Francis Michael Stations. He was fat and didn’t speak much. I wondered if he was the cop who drove Aileen back to Brooklyn General the day I was born, and was going to ask him. I wanted to say that Aileen had named me after him. But why would Stations remember me even if he had been that cop? And supposing he was, and he did, it wasn’t like Stations would give a shit about it anyway.

“Who’s dead?”

Out in the hall one homicide detective was talking to another.

“The kid’s mom.”

“Kid the doer?”

“Looks that way.”

“Where is he?”

The detective nodded into the kitchen.

“In the kitchen with Stations.”

The other detective glanced through the doorway. He looked at me for a moment and then noticed Danny.

“Who’s the other kid?”

“The doer’s brother.”

“How come he’s growling?”

“I think he’s retarded.”

The Agency put Danny and me in the system. Danny went some place upstate and I went to juvie. Neither of us went to Aileen’s funeral. I don’t even know if she had one. I’d ask after Danny whenever I could, but no one knew or seemed to care where he was, and, after a few years, I stopped asking. I even forgot I had a brother for a while. I guess it was easier to shut him out. But then, when I was fourteen or thereabouts, I ran into a kid who said he’d been upstate with him. He said the place they were at was a minimum-security detention centre. There was an old man on the gate at night, and if you wanted gum, or a pack of smokes or something, you could skip over the wall, run into town, and no one would be the wiser. The kid said they had a heat wave the summer Danny arrived.

“It was so hot I lost ten pounds,” the kid said. “Melted away like a fucking ice cube.”

He said a few nights after Danny had got there, a bunch of them jumped the wall and then hiked over to this little river to cool down in. He said Danny had tagged along and stood on the riverbank, watching them all goofing off in the water. Sometime later, Danny pulled himself up onto the overhanging branch of this big old tree beside the riverbank, and started to climb up it.

“I never saw anything like it,” the kid said. “Your brother went up that old tree like a monkey up a fucking rope.”

The kid said when Danny reached the top he looked down at all the other kids floating around in the water and he smiled, but only for a second, because then he straightened up and dove off.

“The sucker couldn’t tie his own shoelaces,” the kid said. “But he could fly. And it was a beautiful thing, watching him knife into the water with no splash or nothing the way he did… it was a beautiful thing.”

The kid said a counsellor in the place they were at told them that what had happened to Danny that night was an accident. She said Danny went too high; dove too deep; got tangled up in roots on the river bottom, and drowned. But she was wrong: dead wrong. Danny didn’t know how to swim: he’d never been to a pool in his life; never jumped off any diving board, and if he did knife into the water with no splash like the kid said, it was luck and nothing else.

“Tangled-up roots on the bed of a river had nothing to do with my brother not coming up again,” I said. “Danny monkeyed up that tree, dove off, and didn’t come up again because the furry wallpaper in our bedroom was the only thing that ever meant anything to him. It was the only thing.”

And I never got the chance to kill Uncle Frank either, although I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going to do it once I did catch up with him. But as things panned out I’d been wasting my time, because before I got a chance to do anything, the dumb fuck stepped out in front of a bus on 92nd and Amsterdam, and killed his own damn-fool self.

On a hot summer night in Atlantic City in 1989, I shook up the world. I climbed into the ring to dance the dance and climbed down four rounds later worth my weight in gold: the undisputed Middleweight Champion of the World. Don’t see any point running through my adolescence or teenage years. That shit all reads the same anyway: two degrees of fornication. I got fucked, and fucked everyone else. I made it. That’s all that matters. That, and the fact that somewhere along the way, I found out I could fight. I was a rare commodity: the Great White Hope. I was gifted, white, and everyone wanted me. For nothing in the boxing world is more profitable than a white boy who can kick seven colours of shit out of every black fighter he comes up against, because there’s nothing white fans like more than to see one of their own beat some poor black fool senseless.

Kicking the shit out of black men is an American heritage. It’s the inalienable birthright of all white men living in this Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. America has been kicking the shit out of black men for three hundred years. The country excelled at it; built the greatest nation in the world by doing so. Kicking shit out of black men was, and is, national policy. It’s in the Constitution, not that you’ll ever find it. But no great American ever became great without playing his part in it. Our Founding Fathers, for the most part, were slave-owners one and all. And still today, this great nation rewards its highest elected shit-kicker with a magnificent palace named the White House, where he and all the other great Americans can invent new ways to keep on kicking the shit out of black men. But the emancipation of African-Americans is another story. This one is about me. If you want to read up on blacks getting the shit kicked out of them, ask for a refund, and stay the fuck away from bestsellers.

I shook up the world: me, Chilly Doyle: the Great White Hope. Tale of the tape leaves no doubt about it: undefeated in both amateur and professional careers. Would’ve followed other middleweight legends like Floyd and won gold too, but a month before I was set to join the Olympic team in Los Angeles, two subway cops started fucking with me and my girl and I got into this thing, which led to another thing. Punches were thrown; one fell down; cracked his head. More cops arrived; nightsticks got swung; cocksuckers broke my arms, and a boxer with broken arms can’t win shit. The zenith of my unblemished amateur career was crowned with plaster casts. No coronets encrusted with precious gems for this Prince of the Ring. Virgil “Quicksilver” Hill went to Los Angeles; I went to Attica.

I got four years, and when the judge passed sentence, a grinning assistant district attorney told me, “Luck may be the residue of design, but timing is everything, sucker.” I didn’t get what he meant at first, but that first week in, while I was cracking jaws convincing any doubters I already had one asshole in my pants and didn’t need another one, and the world watched Virgil mix-it-up on his way to the Olympic middleweight final, I understood what that DA was saying: my amateur career was over. I had blown it. No gold for Doyle. And that made me mean, real mean, real quick. Not that I was any kind of pussy to begin with. I kicked ass when it needed kicking. But in jail, nastiness flourished like weeds in a neglected garden. I tapped into levels of nasty shit I never even knew existed. Prison revealed the barbaric nature of the world to me. It taught me how to suck up all that hate. Taught me how to train it: taught me to let it run free every now and then, so it could do unto others before any motherfucker got the chance to do unto me.

Virgil Hill got gold beat out of him by Shin Joon-Sup and had to settle for silver. But Virgil was lucky just being there in the first place. I kicked his butt once in ‘82, and again in ‘83. Could kick it from asshole to breakfast time still if I didn’t have this thing with my head: these lesions. The doctors have a name for what I’ve got, but basically I just fall down a lot. I roll around and foam at the mouth. Doesn’t really matter what it’s called. Virgil got silver, and Shin Joon-Sup got gold: my gold. The South Korean flew back to Seoul a hero, and I moped around Attica hating his ass for it. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw him strutting around the Korean countryside. Could see the people reaching out to him, trying to touch that gold medal dangling around his neck: my medal. Every chink in Attica was Shin Joon-Sup as far as I was concerned. And not one of those kung-fu motherfuckers was left standing after I was through with them. I won that gold time and again before the Asian inmates wised up and learnt to keep the fuck away from me. And every time I won, the
Star Spangled Banner
played, and Chilly Doyle took his rightful place in the International Boxing Hall of Fame.