Jog On Fat Barry (4 page)

Of course, I wouldn’t go along with the New York State Parole Board and ended up doing the whole nine yards. Attica institutionalized me, and I hated the fuckers for it. Being locked away for four years broke something inside me. I wouldn’t let people tell me what to do, particularly if the telling was to my advantage. I’d been KO’d by the system: was down and out for the count.

“You’re under the black cloud, man,” this Costa Rican flyweight once told me—he was a lifer and read a lot of books. “Unshackle your mind, brother. Allow the majestic clarity of knowledge to set you free, and send that black cloud on its motherfucking way.”

But I didn’t need any books to unravel the puzzle. Depravity and brutality were my bedfellows. They had given me 20/20 vision. The Prison System was the black cloud. I was the sum of its individual parts: parts that fell like drizzle for 1460 days. I shoved my head up my ass to keep it dry, but the rest of me ended up all wrinkled. I was drowning in shit. And when I walked out four years to the day that I’d walked in, that black cloud not only walked out with me, but the rain that followed it never seemed to stop.

First few months out saw me pretty much keeping to myself. I got a room downtown. A lady on the same floor liked to fuck. Sometimes I’d listen to her late at night. Sometimes I’d watch TV. I worked when there was work to be got. Restaurants mostly. I washed dishes, bussed tables, you know, whatever. I floated around fight clubs. Hit the bag. Let the tat-tat-tat of the speedball keep me sane. Fought bums in Gleason’s, and D’Angelo’s, but no one got too worked up by what they saw. I hooked up with the lady who liked to fuck. Day drifted into night drifted into day. It was the same old. Six months out of prison my head was still up my ass. I couldn’t see shit. That black cloud had got hold of me and it wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t get dry for all the rain that fell. It filled my world, and I couldn’t catch a breath. I couldn’t breathe.

Sometime around then Danny got inside my head and I couldn’t get him out. Took two days to remember the name of that place the Agency sent him to. I bought a one-way ticket upstate. Rode the bus in a daze. When I got where I was going, I spent three hours looking for Danny’s tree on the riverbank. It was dark before I found it, at a fork in the river like the kid had told me. I pulled myself up onto the overhanging branch of that big old tree and climbed to the very top. Then I looked down. Gloomy looking water swirled below me. I thought I could see those tangled-up roots on the riverbed, and tried to think of something to say before I jumped.

“If it was good enough for you, Danny,” I finally said, “I guess it’s good enough for me.”

There was no point in waiting around anyway. It was time to step off. So I jumped. The water winded me as I plunged under it. It was black as tar and freezing cold. I fishtailed around for a moment. Reached out for something to hold onto but I couldn’t find any roots. Maybe I’d monkeyed up the wrong tree. There was a chump in the river and that chump was me. I dug my fingers into the muddy bottom. The water churned all around me. I heard someone call my name.

“Doyle!”

I thought it was Danny and called out to him.

“Danny!”

But it wasn’t Danny. It was just that chicken-shit assistant district attorney who’d walked all up and down my ass four-and-a-half-years ago.

“Luck may be the residue of design,” he chuckled. “But timing is everything.”

My chest was burning. Every fiber of my body hurt. My muscles were screaming for air. My lungs felt like they were going to explode. My head was pounding. I pulled my fingers out of the mud; pressed my hands against the sides of my head. The river swooped me up. I thrashed about as the water tossed and turned me along the bottom. I couldn’t tell up from down. One of my hands broke the surface. It reached out searchingly. My fingers brushed against something on the embankment: the weeds of a neglected garden. I tried grabbing hold of them but had no strength left. The river sucked me back under. And then it was all over. It was as quick as that. I lost the urge to breathe. I stopped struggling. A kind of tranquil sensation swept over me. I felt my muscles relaxing. Could feel my arms and legs start to sway like kelp in a tide pool. And it was then that I heard Danny. He was singing something, something that made me feel happy, and I smiled for the first time in as long as I could remember.

“Where the hell you been?” I asked him. “I’ve been looking all over the place for you.”

The river spat me out sometime during the night, and, to all intents and purposes, I was dead to the world until the following morning. When I did open my eyes, I gazed up at the sky and saw the deepest blue. There were birds singing; bees and shit were buzzing all around me. I glanced around; saw that I was on the riverbank, and when I looked back up at the sky, that black cloud was nowhere to be seen.

Clinton “Handy” Smith sang quietly as he pulled boxing tape off a roll. It was an old song and kind of sad sounding. We were in a changing room at the Tropicana in Atlantic City. The undisputed middleweight champion of the world, Leroy Dancer, sat in another. It was 1989. Handy slowly started taping my hands: hands the
New York Post
had called priceless. Handy worked the tape with an effortless perfection, and, as he did, I listened as he sang. His voice was soft and delicate, like a butterfly beating its wings.

“I had a brother who used to sing.”

Handy glanced up at the ceiling. He could hear the Tropicana crowd above him: restless and jumpy.

“Motherfuckers wanna see you hurt Dancer but good.”

“Yeah, well…they ain’t gonna be disappointed then.”

Handy smiled.

“You come a long way, Pretty-Boy,” he said.

It was true. I had come a long way. And it was no cakewalk. I’d sacrificed everything to get where I was. I paired up negatives like hate and anger, and turned them into positives. Put any sucker dumb enough to fight me on the canvas and held nothing back. Inflicted as much pain as was humanely possible. Made sure every fool I crossed swords with was made to suffer, and, as a consequence, I ascended the professional rankings faster than any fighter before me. I was cold. I was hostile. The Ring called me Chilly “Pretty-Boy” Doyle. Don King said he had never seen anything like it. Told everyone I was money.

“No fucking doubt about it,” he said.

HBO knew it. And ESPN knew it. And all those other networks knew it too. Those guys were all over me like stink on shit, with each one more than willing to do whatever had to be done just so they could outdo the other.

Looking back, I guess I was a little out of line with that writer from
The Hollywood Reporter
. You know, me not telling him what it was that got me to climb up into a boxing ring in the first place. It couldn’t do no harm one way or the other. Not really. I guess when you’re famous and shit, people might even have the right to know. Movies kind of change
everything
and
nothing
at the same time. Like someone said: “That’s entertainment.” Anyhow, if you happen to see that guy, let him know, just for the record, what it was that made Chilly Doyle want to knock men down. It was because of a woman who never gave a rat’s ass for anything she couldn’t suck out of a bottle. And for a kid who used to sing to angels through furry wallpaper that smelled like a dog.

cross & missal

My mum always said she loved children, and would tell anyone willing to listen that all she had ever wanted was a big house and a big family. What she got was a council flat on the fourth floor of a tower block and me. One summer, when I was six, Mum and Dad rented a caravan in Margate, and on the third day, I woke up with these boils up under my armpits. I pulled back the sheet and saw I’d shit the bed during the night. My head was spinning. I knocked over a glass; heard it smash on the floor. Said I didn’t feel well when Dad sat up in bed: only it wasn’t Dad but someone else.

“Get out, Ronny,” Mum grumbled from under the blanket.

“But Mum, I don’t feel well.”

“Get out!”

I spent nine months in hospital. Couldn’t move my arms for six of them. It was touch and go in the beginning; my heart stopped dead on two different occasions. And it was sometime around then that Mum walked in to St. Aloysius on Eversholt Street and found religion. She stopped wearing mini-skirts and shagging strangers and said Jesus had died for my sins, not that I’d committed any. But if this bloke Jesus had gone and killed himself for the sins I hadn’t committed, I thought the very least I could do was make it up to him, and promised to do just that, as soon as I got better. Anyway, Margate was the only holiday I ever had: three overcast days at a caravan park in Kent. And it’s funny, when I think back, that what I recall most about it was, England had just won the World Cup, and “Yellow Submarine” was Top of the Pops.

There wasn’t much to me as a kid. I was an unremarkable child to say the least, and little has changed as I’ve played my part in life. I did put my hand up whenever opportunities came along, but nothing ever seemed to stick. The world of the mechanic, the electrician, or the sheet metal worker was always just outside my grasp, and the simple happiness that seemed to go hand in glove with that labour, was never mine to savour. Instead, as fate would have it, I fell in with Jackie Pepper and Harry the Syrup, and those two, as we all know, marched to the beat of a very different drum.