Authors: F. X. Toole
Pound for Pound
for
Pound
a novel
For God,
and for my children—
Erin Patricia,
Gannon Michael,
Ethan Patrick—
whom I knew and loved in the womb,
and who saved me from an early death
And since I may not live long enough
to write and dedicate another one of these things,
allow me to express my great gratitude to, and respect
for, that distinguished man of letters himself,
Daniel Patrick O’Halpern,
the Ecco Kid.
LET ME AT LEAST NOT DIE WITHOUT A STRUGGLE, INGLORIOUS, BUT HAVING DONE SOME BIG THING FIRST, FOR MEN TO COME TO KNOW OF.
—HECTOR
And when ye come and all the flowers are dying If I am dead, as dead I well may be You’ll come and find the place where I am lying And kneel and say an Ave there for me.
—”DANNY BOY”
Boxing tempts writers.
It bids them to riff on the contained savagery of the prizefight. It entices them to explore the endeavor in terms of masculinity, race, and class. It lures them into an unapologetically all-male world. It taunts them with the knowledge that they do not and will not ever belong. It humbles them with the knowledge that they must remain circumspect and explicate that world from an outsider’s perspective.
Writers approach boxing as idolaters, inquisitors, wannabes, and
manqués.
They see boxing as an enclosed society and a groovy, blood-and-guts lifestyle. The entry price is high. Non-combatants endure tedium and hitch themselves to stars that never shine. The fighters themselves chase an always-fleeting glory through the sustained cultivation and infliction of pain. Boxing levies high dues in return for short payoffs. Writers want to visit, but not live there. They come for the pathos and drama, then move on.
F. X. Toole was the exception. He worked as a trainer and cut man. He backstopped stiffs, trial horses, journeymen, and fringe contenders. He never brought up a titlist or cable-TV stud. He loved the fight game. He came to it as a non-writer and left it as the best boxing writer of his era. The fight world seduced him. He paid his dues and lucked into a high-end payoff. His fight-world transit led him to write—from the inside out.
His subject matter was preordained and rigorously circumscribed. He understood specific fight-game truths and their symbolic underpinnings as outside writers could not. The Fight World is the Outside World condensed and refracted. It is a world of great toil and pain. Definable laurels rarely accrue. Dubious laurels pale behind the heavy human cost. The satisfactions are prosaic and known only to the participants in the craft. The dividends are wholly those of witness. Perseverance, stamina, fidelity, and bravery come with the job.
F. X. Toole knew all this. I met him once, and knew that he knew it.
My literary agent and close friend, Nat Sobel, introduced me. We had lunch at the Argyle Hotel in Los Angeles. Nat knew that I was a longtime and fanatical fight fan. He had just sold Toole’s short-story collection,
Rope Burns,
to an American publisher and wanted to hit me up for a blurb. I arrived for lunch. Toole and I talked fights for two hours—insider to outsider.
We discussed the craft. We covered great body punchers, shit-for-brains headhunters, our Mexican bantamweight–featherweight ten-best lists. We dissected vexing southpaws of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and mourned the early death of Salvador Sánchez. I brought up the first Archie Moore–Yvon Durelle fight.
It was December‘58. I was ten years old. Moore defended his light-heavyweight crown in Montreal. Moore’s age was up for speculation. He was at least forty-three. Durelle was a brutally strong Quebecois, down from heavyweight. He floored Moore four times in round one. Moore came back and stopped him in six. Their war made me a fight fiend for life.
Toole was thrilled that I knew the fight. I asked him what
he
was doing then. He dodged the question. He told me his fight career commenced years later. He only wanted to talk Fights. The Fights comprised his entire dialogue with the world. The World was the Fights and the Fights were the World. The Fights mediated everything that he saw and felt. The Fights were the fulcrum for and the basis of all his notions of human drama. I read the stories in
Rope Burns,
and saw this single-mindedness strike gold. The book was dead rich in details that only a fight man could know. The book was savage and melancholy, and somehow heartbreakingly sweet.
I queried some fight-game acquaintances. They told me Toole’s real name was Jerry Boyd, and he might have had some moniker before that. He looked fifty-five. He was closer to seventy. He held his mud. He didn’t trash-talk other trainers or fighters. He might have a bum ticker. Close-to-the-vest didn’t say it. With Jerry or F. X. or whoever he was, you never knew shit.
Rope Burns
was well-published. It exceeded sales expectations and received fine reviews. The story “Million Dollar Baby” was turned into an Academy Award–winning film that won Oscars for all the principals. F. X. Toole did not live to visit the set or hug the stars at the premiere. The rumor was true. He had a bum ticker. He died with a single short-story collection behind him—and one big, fat, unfinished novel manuscript.
He carried it to the hospital. He was scheduled for emergency surgery and knew he might not survive. He was desperate to finish the book. He didn’t. He bequeathed nine hundred pages to his three children and Nat Sobel. Nat and a freelance editor named James Wade shaped the draft into the finished novel you are about to read.
Toole’s savage and melancholy tone only deepens here. It’s a fully realized work, with a grace note of loss and elegy. It’s musical that way. It’s unaccountably soft. It’s an unfinished symphony trailing off in minor chords.
F. X. Toole is dead. His short literary life was a notable one, and all about the Fights. To him, the World was the Fights and the Fights were the World. If there’s an afterlife, I hope there’s an 18-foot punchers’ ring there just for him.
J
AMES
E
LLROY
9/26/05
Chapter 1
I
n one way or another, Dan Cooley and Earl Daw had been partners for twenty years in the fight game, and co-owners for twelve in the body-and-fender business. Dan had opened the shop—Shamrock Auto Body—more than twenty years before Earl became a partner. Because of Earl’s bad hands, and because his wife had urged him to stop fighting, Earl hung up his gloves permanently when his first daughter was born. Earl’s deal with Dan was fifty-fifty, and they’d sealed it with a handshake. Like their friendship, the deal had lasted.
Earl Daw was a lean, dark-skinned black man who’d been born in the Nickerson Gardens projects in Watts. As a middleweight, with Dan as his trainer, he’d fought his way out of the projects and made money doing it. Because of Earl’s many one-punch knockouts, he was given the fighting name “Captain Hook” by sportswriters who recognized the devastating power in his left hand. But fight guys, guys on the inside, knew that Earl had
soft hands,
hands that would break under the tremendous force fighters can generate. Fight guys are known for being realists. Earl’s name in the gym went from Captain Hook to Softhand, but, because fight guys are also known to simplify, the nickname was shortened to Soff, and that stuck, as in, “Say, Soff!” What many didn’t know was
that Earl was a converted southpaw, and that under his father’s, Shortcake’s, instruction, he’d changed his stance to move his power from his rear, or defensive hand, to the hand closer to his opponent, his offensive hand. That change in stance often explained the knockout power of a big left-hooker.
Dan Cooley’s skin was Irish skin, still had freckles on his arms if folks bothered to look, though age and the Los Angeles sun had darkened him some. If you looked closely at his face, you could see that something wasn’t quite right with one eye, the result of an injury that had put him out of the ring as a boxer and into the corner as a trainer. Some fight guys called Dan and Earl Salt and Peppa.
Dan would answer, “Yeah, but I’m tired of this Salt bullshit. I wanna be Peppa.”
Earl would add, “Yeah, an’ I be tired a bein Peppa. I wanna be Salt so I can get all that white pussy out there.”
“No good, Earl, I been with white women all my life,” Dan would say, and point to his white hair. “Look at what they done to me, and I’m only twenty-eight years of age.”
It was a show they’d put on, and fight guys, black and white, loved it no matter how many times they watched it.
Earl stood just inside the big roll-up door of the body shop and watched Dan get out of his truck, his movements slow and stiff, like an old man’s. These days Dan would be fiddling with paperwork in his office upstairs one minute and then suddenly gone, destination unknown. Trouble was, Earl never knew when Dan might return. If indeed he would return—that worried Earl a lot, each time. But he kept his mouth shut. And waited.
That day it was hot and dusty, a typical early fall day in Los Angeles, but the grass was green inside St. Athanasius Cemetery. Greener still the
Connemara marble base of the Cooley family gravestone. Dan stood there just staring at it, his eyes moving from one name down to the next. All those dates were burned into his memory, as ineradicable as the letters incised in the stone.
BRENDAN CONNOR COOLEY 1963–1964
TERRANCE DECLAN COOLEY 1961–1985
MARY CATHERINE MARKEY 1965–1992
EAMON DERMONT MARKEY 1960–1992
Little Brendan, his second son, dead of acute lymphoblastic leukemia before his second birthday. Terry, his fireman son, buried alive when a retaining wall at a construction site collapsed as he worked to remove a trapped laborer. His daughter, Mary Cat, three months’ pregnant with her second child, and her husband, both killed when their plane missed the runway in Acapulco.
He could still see the little boy, standing rigid as he looked at the two rose-covered coffins, his eyes aching and dry.
“But why did they put my mom and dad inside those long boxes?” Timothy Patrick Markey asked.
“Shhh, lad,” said his grandmother Brigid. Her voice still had a trace of old-country brogue, thick and rich as Irish brown bread, and her eyes were so green they often looked purple. “Wait until after Father Joe’s done.”
The charred bodies of Tim Pat’s mother and father had been flown back from Mexico in sealed aluminum tubes by the very same airline that had interrupted their second honeymoon when one of its aircraft crashed on final approach.
