galoshes blog

A Short Story

based on actual events 

By Gavin Murphy

The fight started in a crowded high school hallway.  My shoulder bumped his and he snarled something like “watch where you goin mutha f—ka!” I responded with an equally unimaginative expletive. He taunted me, demanding to know if I wanted “to make something of it.” Stupidly, I stuck my chin out and said: “Yeah, I wanna …”

That’s the last thing I clearly remember about the actual fight.

He hit me in the eye before I could drop my books. I didn’t even see the punch. After that I was basically unconscious but still on my feet, swinging wildly. The other students scattered as we exchanged blows. One of my wide rights ended when my fist apparently smashed a hallway locker. I remember hearing the metallic echo but not realizing what had made the sound.

Even though I was dazed, and my right hand was now useless, he still couldn’t knock me down. So he tackled me and we hit the cold tile floor – hard. This served to bring me around a little, but by then he was on top of me. I tried to fend him off, but he pounded me for what seemed like several slow motion minutes.

I came around only after the fight was over.  My adversary already had fled down the hallway, pulled off me by some of his friends. Somehow I managed to get up off the floor. I stood in a stupor, my left eye swelling into an awful purple contusion. The other students stared and grimaced at the sight of my injured face. A flustered teacher quickly scribbled out a pass to the nurse’s office and handed it to me. I grasped it weakly, my wrist pulsating. I stared at the piece of paper for a few seconds, then dropped it to the floor. I reeled down the hall to the nurse’s office.

It wasn’t long before the vice principal showed up, and after a brief and perfunctory consultation with the nurse, removed me to his office. There, holding ice to my face, I provided him with a description of my fleet-fisted opponent. It didn’t take long for the vice principal to figure out who it was.

He was a black kid named Reggie, and he had a rep as a tough scrapper. Reggie wasn’t any bigger than me, in fact he was rail thin and not too tall. But it turned out he was 16 or 17 and still in the tenth grade. I was 15 (white) and in the tenth grade. Before our encounter that day, Reggie and I had never crossed paths. These were the peak baby boom years and the school was so overcrowded we were on split sessions, juniors and seniors attending in the morning and freshman and sophomores in the afternoon. The crowded stairwells and hallways added to the tension in the school.

They tracked down Reggie and brought him into the vice principal’s office. They asked me if this was the kid. I took one look and, despite my injured eye, recognized him immediately. He had a wisp of a mustache and an afro haircut that peaked above his forehead. I said yeah, and then I sobbed a little.

We were both suspended. 

******

O’Malley’s Gym was on the second floor of an old two story building. The first floor housed a pool hall.

It was after school on a fall afternoon not long after the hallway fight. I climbed a long dark flight of stairs up to the gym. It was deserted at that time of day. There wasn’t a lot of natural light and the place was dank. A regulation size boxing ring with a dirty canvas mat occupied most of the large room. The ring was surrounded by exercise equipment – rowing machines, bench presses and the like. There were large mirrors on the walls. Jumping ropes and boxing gloves dangled from wooden pegs between the mirrors. A grimy canvas heavy bag hung from a chain attached to a beam in the ceiling and an aging leather speed bag occupied a corner of the room.

I noticed a large pile of dog shit on the canvas of the ring. About then a good-sized German Shepherd appeared. It stood between me and a doorway in the back of the gym. A man’s voice called from the room beyond the doorway.

“Gigi, who is it girl?”

Gigi studied me with red Alsatian eyes, decided I was no threat, then went to lie down in a corner. A short but stout black man came through the doorway. He wore a pork pie hat, a shirt with a flower pattern, soiled navy blue polyester pants and Converse sneakers. 

He shouted, “How you doin? I’m Jimbo.”

It was hard to tell how old he was, but I guessed he looked to be in his forties, although I later learned he was only in his thirties. He had a street strut and his arms were long and thick. He held out a hand that I immediately noticed seemed to be disproportionately large for a man his size. We shook. He held my hand in a grip that was like some kind of fur trapper’s device. I had never felt skin so calloused. 

I told him my name. He smiled and held on to my hand for a long minute saying, “Murphy. You’re Murphy. O.K. Murph, what can I do for you?”

“I want to take boxing lessons.”

“Good. That’s good,” he said. He motioned for me to sit down on a folding chair. He pulled a chair over for himself and sat on it backwards. He lit a cigarette and said, “Sure thing Murphy, we can take care of that. Let’s say, $20 a month. Three lessons a week, and you can come in and work out whenever we open. Cool?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Cool.”

“Well, when you want to start?”

“Now. I want to start now.”

Jimbo laughed and said he had time for a quick lesson. “Watch me close,” he said. He slid sideways and held up his hands in a fighter’s stance, with his feet spread apart. “The first thing you gotta learn is footwork.”

He started hopping on the balls of his feet, forward and backward, never crossing his legs, but keeping his feet the same distance apart. He didn’t hop from one foot to another, but hopped with both feet at the same time. He shouted as he bounced. “Up and back! Up and back! You try it! That’s it! Keep movin! Most important thing in boxin – leg work! It’s like dancin!” I got the impression Jimbo could have danced like that for about twelve hours straight. 

There was a lot of this kind of thing for the first few lessons. Repetitive drills. Jump roping. Shadowboxing in the mirrors. Jimbo would hold up his right hand and shout which hand I should use to hit it. “Right!” “Left!” “Right!” “Left!” “Left!” “Left!” Then he would move his hand and I would miss and he would admonish, “Watch the hand!”

After a few lessons I started working out on the “heavy bag” that dangled from the thick chain attached to a sturdy rafter. Jimbo taped my hands because if your hands weren’t protected, the raw canvas of the punching bag would shred the skin on your knuckles like lettuce, even with gloves on. This procedure took a good ten minutes. We sat face to face on backward folding chairs. Close up like that, I  could see the creases in his face, his dark skin like the thick pelt of a jet black seal. I could smell the tobacco on his breath as he patiently wrapped the cotton bandage around my wrist, around my thumb and over my hand until it just covered the knuckles, leaving the fingers loose. He wrapped white surgical tape around the bandage. Sometimes his hands shook as he tore little strips of tape and placed them between my knuckles and fingers to hold the bandage in place. Then he would do the same for my other hand. 

All the time he talked to me like I was back in my corner between rounds, giving me pointers and a pep talk. Sometimes he talked about other stuff, like the “sweet thing” he had the night before. He smacked his lips and chortled “Yes sir Murphy, she was so fine. Just like butter… You know what I mean…” He raised his eyelids and winked at me, like I knew what he meant.

Then, cigarette dangling from between his lips, Jimbo showed me how to hit the heavy bag. He didn’t bother with tape or even bag gloves. His knuckles were thick layers of scar tissue and his fists, when clenched, were like small anvils. He would toss out a couple of quick left jabs. Wack! Thump!. Then he stepped to the bag, leaned into it and brought his left arm up in a neat arc. The bag shuddered with the impact. Then his right arm would come across and land on the bag with a bone cracking thud.

The small speed bag required no brute strength, but a lot of concentration, balance and body rhythm. You had to have your timing exactly correct or you couldn’t keep the bag in motion. This was the art part of boxing, and Jimbo could still work that bag like he had first encountered it in the womb. The small bag thumped against the backboard. Wappata! Wappata! Wappata! Wap!

Jimbo had been a prize fighter in his day, but like most, he never made it big. Now he slept on a cot in the back room at O’Malley’s Gym. There was a bathroom and showers and a refrigerator. And there was Gigi. Sometimes I arrived in the middle of the afternoon, after school, and often there was no one else there. Jimbo might be just waking up and sometimes he was hungover. He went out for coffee while I warmed up, then he came back with the coffee and started the lesson. Whenever I offered to get the coffee for him he would say something like “you’re a good boy Murphy, I don’t care what anybody says.” Then he sat on a folding chair, smoked a cigarette, slurped the hot coffee and watched me with blood shot eyes.

“Lead with that left Murphy, Jab! Jab! Jab!”

The real action at O’Malley’s was in the evening and weekends when the pros and the semi pros worked out. Eventually Jimbo sometimes used me as a quasi-sparring partner for a pro, with rules designed to protect me in the ring. The rule was I could swing at the pro and they could block and move, but they weren’t supposed to swing at me. Sometimes, when one of us amateurs would somehow manage to connect on a pro, the guy would forget the rules and pow! A guy like that could punch right through your block, as if your fists and arms weren’t even in the way.

One night old man O’Malley came in and Jimbo introduced me as “Murph the kid.” O’Malley was thin and frail looking and he never bothered to take off his long overcoat. He had bleary eyes and he gave off a sour smell, a combination of whiskey and cheap aftershave. The old guy was a former boxer. He started giving me pointers and spent a lot of time with me that night. Later, in the locker room I heard one of the guys talking about how O’Malley “likes boys” and I remembered how the old man, when he was working with me, put his face close to mine and smiled a little grin as he showed me how to block a punch. For a long time he held my gaze with pale blue irises, the whites of his eyes sallow and laced with pink veins.

After a few months, I started to skip lessons. I had landed a part-time job and had a girlfriend, and we were coming to the end of the school year. Soon, I stopped going to the gym all together. The urgency of learning to defend myself had waned as the memories of my hallway encounter with Reggie faded, even though Reggie was still around. We gave each other space.  He had basically kicked my ass but told others he didn’t want to tangle with me again.

One afternoon that spring I stood in front of the school with a friend. It was sunny and warm. We were leaning against the front of the building between a couple of marble columns, holding up the building so to speak. About then I noticed some black students milling around us. There had been a lot of racial tension in our school that year. The black students were angry, what with Martin Luther King Jr. being assassinated and everything else that was happening then. They also had taken offense to the fact that, for some reason, the buses from their neighborhood were unloaded in the back of the school.

That afternoon, when I saw them coalescing into a pack and drifting our way, I knew what was going down. My friend, a white kid like me, noticed too, because I heard him say “Oh shit…” in a tone of voice that was part fear and part exasperation as we suddenly realized we were backed against a wall with no escape route. Seven or eight of them surrounded us and the expressions on their faces were not friendly. One of them took a swing at me and that set them all off. 

I quickly decided this was not a good time to test my newly acquired boxing skills. Instead, I ducked, held my binder up to shield my head, and pushed forward through a gauntlet of fists and feet. They were cursing and shouting at me and I heard the blows as they landed on my binder. They were so busy swinging and kicking that it took several seconds for them to realize I was no longer against the wall. 

I saw my friend take a couple of blows before he also broke through and took off running. I regained my balance and stumbled in another direction. With four or five of our attackers pursuing me I ran as fast as I could. I came to a side entrance, recently completed during expansion of the school building. Still clutching my binder, I burst through the doors and got about twenty yards before a teacher stepped into my path and shouted for me to stop. 

It was Mr. Winslow. He was a science teacher who sometimes wore a white laboratory coat. That day he was dressed in a rumpled blazer.

I stopped.  By now, more students were running about and screaming as rage and panic spread through the hallways. I looked back and saw my pursuers barging through the doors, angry and shouting. I turned to Mr. Winslow and saw that he had noticed them too because the color started to drain from his cheeks. Mr. Winslow was a pretty big guy, but the expression on his face didn’t inspire me that this confrontation was going to go our way. Nevertheless, he stepped forward and ordered the mob to stop. 

Just then I heard Jimbo’s voice.

“Murphy, what’s the first rule in a street fight?” 

I heard his answer: “Murphy, run your ass off.”

I looked back once. My pursuers had forgotten about me but now Mr. Winslow was going down.

Postscript

When I was a senior, my younger brother and I used to take the bus to high school together (when I actually woke up in time to catch it). We would swing by a brick public housing apartment complex where a bunch of kids, including Reggie, climbed aboard. He was still in high school and one of the more animated at that early hour among his peers who, even though they outnumbered us white kids, never bothered us. They basically ignored us. Sometimes I would look for Reggie to acknowledge my presence. He knew who I was. He never did.