The Real Thing Read online

  “Three rounds.”

  How did “a round or two” become “three”?

  “Nine minutes,” Red says. “We don’t spar much to protect his hands and keep him from getting dementia pugilistica.”

  Punch drunk. Granddaddy told me that Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Willie Pep, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Floyd Patterson all had it.

  “Dante doesn’t have any of the symptoms yet,” Red says, “but he has fought fifty-two pro fights and had close to a hundred amateur fights. I don’t want to risk it.”

  He fastens on an incredibly uncomfortable headgear that smells like motor oil.

  “You don’t think I can hurt him, do you?” I ask.

  “No one has ever hurt him, Christiana.”

  Except Evelyn.

  Red holds out a mouthpiece, and I back away. “Don’t worry. It’s never been used.” He places it inside my mouth. “Just jab him to death, okay?”

  Suddenly, I don’t feel so winded, tired, or sore. Red doesn’t think I can hurt Dante. Red thinks I weigh 160 pounds. Red wants me just to jab him.

  Well, Red doesn’t know diddly.

  I climb into the ring and pound my gloves together. “Let’s get it on,” I mumble through my mouthpiece.

  Andiamo!

  Chapter 11

  I can do this.

  I think.

  I hope.

  Ow. I have a cramp. In my entire body. Ow.

  Feet comfortably apart, my weight on the balls of my feet, I am balanced. My knees are bent, but I’m not crouching. I stand slightly sideways, my left hand up, my right fist close to my chin, elbows tight to my ribs, my neck and shoulders relaxed.

  Granddaddy taught me well.

  DJ holds up an egg timer, turning it to three minutes. “Ding,” he says.

  Nice bell.

  I circle Dante, who wears no headgear, several times, measuring him up, looking into his eyes. He throws no punches for thirty seconds, so I get bold. I extend my left foot and throw my left hand, rotating my fist and bringing it back. I have a decent jab, and I snap it close to his face, grazing his chin. I pop the jab again, thudding it off his chin. Geez, I just hit him hard! He doesn’t blink, though, throwing a lazy jab of his own. I twist away from it, popping him in the nose with a short right. He throws a jab that falls a foot short, and I pop him in the nose again.

  “I can see it coming,” I mumble, popping him in the left shoulder with a jab.

  He jabs and falls short again.

  “I can time that jab with a calendar,” I say, jabbing him twice on the right cheek.

  I stick out my face. “Pop it.”

  He flails with a right and misses.

  “Use your jab,” I hiss.

  He winds up and throws a straight right, but I duck and hit him with a right to the body, dancing away because the pain in my hand is excruciating. What is this man made of, granite?

  He tries a right cross, but I duck under it and throw a right uppercut to his chin. Backing away, I chant, “Too slow, too slow.”

  “Time!” Red calls.

  And just in time.

  I’m about to throw up, collapse, and die.

  I return to my corner where DJ has a stool waiting for me, but instead of throwing up, collapsing, and dying as I should, I stand and stare Dante down. I am amazed I still remember what to do. I am also amazed I’m not barfing over the top rope. I am not amazed I can’t feel my right hand. I’ll have to throw a lot more lefts this round.

  “Ding!” DJ yells, smiling. At least someone out here is having a good time. I know that wasn’t a minute just now! Geez!

  I stalk Dante as best as I can, jabbing, circling, bobbing, and staying away from the left hook I know is coming. I check his feet, waiting for him to transfer his weight to his left foot. I see him transfer his weight! Here comes the hook! I step in close, the hook whooshing behind my head. Since his right is down at his waist, I hit him with a right uppercut to his chin.

  Backing out, I know I’ve hurt him. He has to be hurt. My right hand is one fused bruise. Why isn’t he blinking or even wincing?

  As he moves in on me—he is relentless!—I go into a peek-a-boo stance, both gloves covering my face, my elbows glued to my sides. He feints with another weak jab, then dips to throw a right to the left side of my body and—

  I’m dying.

  Oh, shit!

  I cannot breathe. Who stole the air?

  I know my ribs are broken, but I’m not going down.

  “Time!” Red calls.

  I stumble back to my corner and hit that stool this time.

  “You all right?” DJ asks.

  I nod, though I’m not all right. My kidneys and pancreas have congealed into one big blob, and my lungs are just now reinflating. I have no feeling from my waist to my neck. My calves are on fire. My pinkie toe is one large blister. One more round. I just have to stay away from him.

  “Ding!”

  Damn Canadians and their crazy units of measure! Was that a metric minute or what? Sixty seconds is way too short to rest.

  I pop my jab and move away, dancing left and right, my legs lead weights, my arms and shoulders weeping with pain.

  He pops me with a jab.

  Ow.

  Where’d that balloon on my face come from? It wasn’t there a few seconds ago.

  The word “better” forms on my lips for a millisecond but vanishes when he hits me with that left hook of his.

  I now know what the interior of Halley’s Comet looks like. I now know what is at the end of the tunnel. I now know what it feels like to have a hundred paparazzi taking my picture.

  I stagger toward the ropes and hold on, my eyes filling with tears, my head pounding, my whole face swelling, a voice from a movie somewhere in my past exhorting me to “run to the light, children!” I’m not sure where the ground begins and the sky ends.

  “Time!”

  I slump onto my stool, my right cheek throbbing like a bass drum.

  “You can stop any time, you know,” DJ says, squirting water onto my face.

  “Tenere provare,” a voice says weakly. Hey, that was my voice. Why is it speaking Italian? Has Dante knocked me all the way to Palermo, or what?

  “DJ,” Dante says. “Andiamo.”

  DJ jumps into the ring.

  “No,” I say, and I stand, or at least I think I’m standing. I’m a few feet higher than I was before. That’s the definition of standing, isn’t it? I’m taller than the stool anyway. Why isn’t my left leg working? I spit something from my mouth. Oh. My mouthpiece. I won’t need it. They don’t bury people with mouthpieces. “You haven’t knocked me down yet, Dante.”

  Dante and three others who look just like him move a few feet away from me. “And I have not hit you hard yet,” the four of them say. “DJ, andiamo.”

  I take a step to grab DJ’s shoulder, but I fall face-first to the canvas. I like gravity, I really do, but right now, I don’t. Gravity is standing on my back. Both my legs won’t work. Talk about a delayed reaction. Why is the world spinning counterclockwise? Am I in Australia? I thought I was in Palermo. I catch my breath and stand, my right leg shaking uncontrollably. C’mon, leg. Move. The other one is moving. Get your ass in gear.

  Walking like the Mummy and dragging one leg behind me, I will myself toward Dante.

  “I do not want to hurt you,” Dante says.

  “I’m not hurt,” I lie. I wave him to me. He stalks to within an arm’s length, and I throw out the weakest jab. I watch it fall onto his shoulder where it stops and rests. I try a right and it drops like a rock to my thigh. I fall forward and bang my head on his chest.

  Ow.

  “Okay, okay,” I say. “I’m done.”

  Dante picks up my chin with his glove. “Who taught you?”

  Even my chin hurts! “My granddaddy.”

  “He is a good trainer.”

  “Was,” I say. “He died a few years ago.”

  “Mi dispiace. Come sta?”

&nbs
p; How am I? Isn’t that Spanish? I thought I was in Canada fighting an Italian. Or was it an Australian in Palermo? “I have a headache. How do you say that in Italian?”

  “Ho mal di testa.”

  “Ho mal di testa.” I put both gloves on his shoulders. “I haven’t sparred in a long time. How’d I do?”

  “Sto andando troppo forte. Andare lentamente.”

  I blink, but I’m not rude like Evelyn, and don’t say, “In English.”

  “You are going too fast,” he says. “You must pace yourself.” He smiles. “You have had a long layoff, yes?”

  I nod, focusing on his chests until the world stops spinning a little. “I didn’t, um, hurt you, did I?”

  “Your first jab, sì. Pericoloso.”

  “Dangerous, huh?” Ha! “The uppercut didn’t rock your world?”

  “Certamente!” He smiles again.

  I like this Dante. He smiles a lot. I just wish he didn’t have two of them. No man should have sixty-four teeth in his head.

  “But I deserved it,” he says, guiding me to my corner. “I left myself open. I did not expect it. The unexpected ones hurt the most.”

  I sit. “I didn’t see that hook coming either.” The act of sitting clears my head a little. DJ squirts water into my mouth this time and helps me remove my headgear. “What’s next?”

  “Oh, you must rest now,” Dante says.

  “What’s next?” I repeat.

  “More shadowboxing,” Red says.

  Where no one can hit me. Unless shadows suddenly have developed lightning left hooks, I can do that. I grab for and latch on to the top rope, pulling myself to my feet.

  “Are you sure?” Dante asks.

  I look him square in the chest. “Andiamo,” I say. “Andiamo.”

  Chapter 12

  We face each other in the middle of the ring.

  “I will play southpaw,” he says. “Shadow me.”

  I try to mirror him as best I can, my legs unsteady at first, but eventually I’m moving forward, backward, and side to side like him a full beat after him. He throws a right jab, and I throw a left jab. He throws a right hook, and I throw a left hook.

  “Chin down,” he tells me.

  Ow. Even that hurts.

  “Bene,” he says, even though I’m not snapping my punches anymore.

  “Molto bene,” he chuckles when I nearly corkscrew myself into the canvas trying to throw a left hook.

  While we literally dance, he says “lentamente” and “ottimo” and “seta.”

  “What’s seta mean?” I ask.

  “Silk,” he says softly. “You move like silk…”

  His voice is like silk, too.

  He switches back to his normal, conventional stance, and DJ joins us in a game that reminds me of Twister. Red says, “Double jab cross,” and we do it. “Right jab left hook…Chop some wood…Jab uppercut cross…”

  “Time!”

  I am beginning to love that word. It is a good word.

  “Now, we rest,” Dante says. “DJ, check the gas in the ski boat. If it is low, go to the landing and fill it up.”

  DJ nods and leaves. He is such a dutiful son.

  Dante helps me with my gloves and starts sweeping pine needles and dust from the canvas with an old broom.

  “I’ll do it,” Red says. “There’s some fresh lemonade down there.”

  Sugar. I need sugar.

  “Shall we?” Dante nods down the hill.

  “Sure.” I take a step. “Andiamo, right?”

  He smiles. “Andiamo.”

  After I suck down several glasses of lemonade, Dante leads me to the outcropping, sitting on a bench made out of half a log and two stumps.

  “Tell me about Red Hook,” Dante says. “I am sure it has changed since I was there last.”

  “It’s always changing,” I say.

  “From the beginning,” he says.

  “From the beginning…of time?”

  He smiles. “Your time. Since you were femminuccia, a little girl.”

  “Oh.” He wants my life story. I guess that’s okay. “Well, I grew up on ‘the Front.’” The Front is the nickname for Brooklyn’s largest housing project. Over half the residents of Red Hook live there.

  “You lived in the Red Hooks?” he asks. “Wasn’t that pericoloso?”

  “For most of the time I lived there, it wasn’t so bad,” I say. “I lived on Lorraine, what folks called ‘Peyton Place.’ The village raised the kids back then. Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and black families made sure we were safe and inside for dinner, to do homework, to get to bed early.” I sigh. “That was until the late eighties when crack exploded onto the scene. Before crack, the cops used to play with us on the ball fields. Afterward, they only watched us and arrested us.” In 1988, Life magazine ran a story about Red Hook ice-cream trucks dispensing crack and candy stores selling drug paraphernalia. “It was an ugly scene and the reason I did everything I could to get out.”

  “I had heard it was getting better,” he says.

  “Well, most of the grass is gone,” I say. “Lots of concrete and walkways going everywhere like a labyrinth. Unemployment is still around thirty percent, the schools are near the bottom in achievement for all New York City schools, most families barely make ten grand a year…” I shake my head. “We still only have one McDonald’s and one bank for eleven thousand people, but…murders, robberies, and assaults are down considerably, so I guess things are getting better.” I smile. “I don’t live on the Front anymore. I live on ‘the Back.’”

  “Ah, you are on the waterfront,” he says. “So you like it up here at Aylen Lake then?”

  “Very much.” And I’m not just saying this to suck up to him anymore. I do like this place. It’s rough, raw, and incredibly beautiful.

  “I remember going to Red Hook as a boy,” he says. “It was all cranes and old red brick, gray wood, narrow cobblestone streets, arched windows and doors.”

  He has Red Hook down pretty well. “It’s still all that, but we have culture now.”

  “Really? There is culture in Red Hook? I have been away a long time!”

  I ignore his sarcasm. “A few years ago I went to see Puccini’s Il Tabarro performed outside on the Mary A. Whalen, a tanker at the Marine Terminal.”

  He knits his eyebrows together. “They performed Puccini outside on a boat?”

  “Yes. Seagulls were hovering over the performers’ heads for most of the night.”

  He smiles. “Pericoloso.”

  “Definitely.” I finish my lemonade and set the glass on the ground.

  “What else can you tell me?” he asks.

  “There’s so much to tell.”

  He touches my hand. “I miss Brooklyn, okay? I have not been home in ten years. You have just been there, what, yesterday? Tell me of my home.”

  I look at my hand, and his hand is still there. Then, I start to ramble about Red Hook. I tell him about the carousel horses made of scrap metal, cherry tomatoes at the Red Hook Community Farm, barbecue smoke rising on Old Timer’s Day, and the imploding sugar factories and other brick castles making way for the “Great Blue Wall of Beard Street” (aka the Ikea furniture store).

  “It is really a great blue wall?” he asks.

  I nod, watching his hand slide away. Come back! I whisper in my head.

  “Who would think of such a thing?” he asks.

  I describe a particular German shepherd–pit bull I often see searching for food on the Erie Basin. “If there’s any animal on earth, that animal represents Red Hook best.”

  “I do not understand,” Dante says.

  “He’s a mutt, a big mutt, and somehow he’s surviving in a less than nice place.”

  “Oh. Yes. I see.”

  I remind him of the brine, the smell of diesel, the natural gas fumes drifting over from Bayonne, New Jersey.

  “Make me hungry,” he says. “Tell me of the food. What does Red Hook taste like?”

  It is the most amazi
ng question anyone has ever asked me. “It tastes…” I turn to face him. “Red Hook tastes like day-old cookies sold two-for-a-penny at Larsen’s Bakery.”

  “Ah. Day-old. The best kind.”

  “Red Hook tastes like moussaka from Mazzat, venduras relleno from Alma, spicy brownies from Baked, the Red Hook Burger from Hope and Anchor, and a Swingle”—a frozen mini Key lime pie dipped in chocolate—“from Steve’s Key Lime Pie.”

  He holds his stomach. “You are making me hungry.”

  “Red Hook is an Italian hero from Defonte’s.”

  “Oh, you are killing me.” He laughs. “Please continue.”

  I smile. “Did you ever go to Red Hook Park on a weekend?”

  He grabs my hands fiercely. “Sì. The vendors! I ate so much, and so cheap!”

  I grab his hand this time. Then I remind him of the baleadas, mixto ceviche, and huaraches the Central and South American vendors serve to long lines of people from all over New York every summer.

  “I remember watching softball and eating pupusas,” he said. “The line was so long I was afraid they would run out!”

  I throw out a series of names like Fuentes, Carcamo, McCann, Novakovich, Lopate, Jerard, O’Connell, Lam, McGettrick, Hellerstein, Masri, Balzano, and Hammer. I tell him about Markita Nicole Weaver, a ten-year-old who was making snow angels in a snowbank near PS 15 when a snowplow killed her.

  “So sad,” he says. “So tragic.”

  I talk to Dante Lattanza, my long-ago neighbor from Carroll Gardens, for thirty minutes straight, and he listens the whole time, sometimes grabbing my hands, sometimes talking with his hands. He focuses, you know? He isn’t just asking questions to be polite. And the way he grabs my hands with those big ol’ mitts of his…

  “Why don’t you go back?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, just before the fight,” I say. “Go for a walk-through like the politicians do.”

  He shakes his head. “No one will recognize me.”

  “Are you kidding?” I say. “They’ll have to close the streets.”

  He only pats my hands this time. “You are too kind.”

  “You’re still a hero in Brooklyn, Dante,” I say. “I mean that.”

  He looks out over the water. “Maybe I was once.”