Casino Moon

5

OVER THE NEXT WEEK, Larry DiGregorio’s murdergrew like a fungus in my mind. I couldn’t get rid of this image of him lying there with his wig off and the ice pick in his kidney. I kept thinking the police were going to come by my house at any minute and take me away from my kids. I loved Vin, but I had to get away from him and his crew. Their lifestyle was contaminating me.

And then I got my chance.

I had an appointment on a hot Monday morning with a guy I knew named John Barton. We were supposed to meet at the local P.A.L. and talk about some drywall work he wanted me to do on his garage.

He was a funny kind of guy, John B. He had a long angular face, coalblack skin, and tinted aviator glasses that made him look like some bad-ass pimp hustling girls on Pacific Avenue. But once you got to know him, you realized he was actually a very sweet, soft-spoken guy who painted boats for a living. He was so pathetically shy that he almost never looked you in the eye, and when he talked you had to lean in because he swallowed half his words.

Except when the subject was his older brother Elijah, former middleweight boxing champion of the world. When he talked about Elijah, John B. suddenly got the heart of a lion. Everything he said became clearer and more articulate. Even his posture changed, so he stood up an extra six inches and looked you straight in the eye.

I found him hanging out by the doorway, trying to feed a crumpled dollar into a vending machine. I traded him for a smoother bill and asked him how he was doing.

“Fine,” he said in his regular mealy-mouthed voice. “Wanna meet my bro?”

“Say what?”

“I’m askin’, do you-all wanna meet my brother?”

That was the other thing about John. Every time you saw him, he’d ask if you’d like to meet his brother. It was kind of sad. He just assumed that was the only reason anyone would want to talk to him.

“Sure. I’d like to meet your brother someday.”

“He’s here today, man,” said John B., who wore a baseball cap with the name of a battleship his brother once fought on.

I looked around the gym and saw a skinny black kid jumping rope on the scabby red floor and an out-of-shape cop doing situps on a crusty slant board. Finally, I noticed a middle-aged man standing in the boxing ring near the back, red-gloved hands on hips, trying to catch his breath. I didn’t recognize Elijah Barton at first. He was about twenty pounds heavier than I remembered him and his face was barely visible under his headgear. But here he was, slowly beginning to move around the ring with a strong-looking kid who had to be half his age.

By my calculations, Elijah had to be at least forty-three. He hadn’t been champion for nine years. I hadn’t even seen his last six fights. But as he ducked under one of the younger kid’s punches and swung his arms like a woodsman about to chop down a tree, he didn’t seem overly frail.

“What’s he doing here?” I moved closer to get a look. “Trying to get in shape?”

“He gonna make a comeback.” John followed me, sounding protective. “He gonna move up to light heavyweight.”

I watched as the younger kid moved forward and hit Elijah with a sharp jab that he should’ve seen coming when he woke up that morning.

“You sure he wants to do that?”

“He’s just got to get hisself back to being the way he was—you understand what I’m saying?” said John B., unfazed, as the words whistled through a space in his teeth. “Been away a long time.”

I noticed how little resemblance there was between the brothers, even though John B. was just a couple of years younger. Probably the benefit of not getting beat up night after night.

“Well listen. What about this drywall work?”

“Wha?” he said, swallowing his words again now that the subject wasn’t his brother anymore. “I don’t remember what I said to you.”

“Drywall. The job we were talking about. The one I was gonna bring in for twelve hundred for you?”

“Oh” His face went slack. “Well I been askin’ around. And, uh, I talked to a man said he could bring it in for eight hundred dollars.” He seemed embarrassed about getting a better price.

All right fuck you, I was going to say, but something stopped me. I was watching his brother. He was right up against the ropes, about ten feet away, when the younger fighter hit him with a solid left hook. Elijah’s head snapped back. But by standing this close, I could see the blow wasn’t as devastating as it might have been. Elijah had turned his chin just enough to take the force off the shot.

“He always take a punch like that?”

“Last five years,” said John B., “he learned to take three for every one he throws. Kept his career alive.”

Probably lost him some brain cells too. A right uppercut slammed into Elijah’s jaw and he shook it off like a bad idea. He reminded me of my father shrugging it off after Larry shot him.

“So he must get paid pretty well to get beat up like that, right?”

“Ain’t just the money,” said John. “It’s the pride.”

Yeah, right, I thought. I’d heard about the kind of money fighters made off casino deals and pay-TV contracts. Before they locked Mike Tyson up, he was making twenty, thirty million dollars a bout.

“He feel like he has to come on and prove himself.”

“So’s he got any new bouts lined up?”

John B. rubbed his chin. “Well you know there’s a spot that opened up on that casino bill in the fall, but I dunno if we can git it.”

I’d heard something about that. They were looking for somebody to fight Terrence Mulvehill, the current light heavyweight champ.

“Why can’t your brother get the slot?”

John shook his head. “You know anything about boxing?”

Before I could answer, Elijah landed a strong right uppercut that caught his opponent on the chin and sent him staggering toward the corner.

“You got to give in order to get,” John B. said. “You know what I’m saying? It takes money to make money. You got sanctioning fees, training expenses, you got to pay the lawyers and the sparring partners, and then you got to be down with the right promoters and managers and man, they are the worst. His old manager Frog Nelson ran off with half his money, man. We still suing that motherfucker.” He put his hands in his pockets and his body sagged a little from the burden. “It’s fifty thousand dollars just to get started on the way back.”

“You can’t borrow that kind of money? That doesn’t make any sense. A guy like your brother, used to be champ, they’re gonna get at least a million back on their investment.”

Elijah Barton was chasing the younger guy across the ring, swatting him with his glove like a big old lion playing with his cub. In the meantime, John B. was watching me carefully, like something just occurred to him.

“Say Anthony,” he said, more confidently. “Your family’s got some money, don’t they?”

“Oh no, John. You don’t wanna get mixed up with them.”

I could see what he was thinking. He was desperate to launch his brother on a comeback and he didn’t care who his partners were. All he knew was he’d once been on top of the world with his brother and he liked the view from up there a hell of a lot better than he liked painting boats.

“Why can’t I talk to your father or Teddy?”

“Because once they get their hooks into you they never let go. You think you can just borrow some money from them and return it, but it doesn’t work that way. There’s never an end to it. They always keep coming at you.”

Besides, I thought, boxing was getting to be more of a legitimate business. The pillars of industry were promoting it: Time-Warner, Donald Trump, and my personal hero, Dan Bishop, who grew up on the streets of Atlantic City like me and ended up the most successful casino owner in Vegas. I knew there were still some rough characters around, but I remembered all the movie stars, magazine models, and CEOs sitting ringside at the last fight I’d seen on TV. That was what I wanted to be part of. Not watching two old men trying to bite each other’s ears off on a filthy barroom floor.

“Well, maybe you know somewhere else we could get the money.” John B. sucked the gold ring on his left hand.

I just stood there a moment, thinking and watching his brother in the ring. Elijah had this kid trapped in the corner again and was whaling the shit out of him. There were rights, lefts, hooks, uppercuts, open-glove slaps, closed fists, rattlesnake jabs that slithered past the kid’s ear, and smashes that tore into his rib cage like flying Ninja stars. I never knew there were so many ways to hit somebody.

And I was thinking: This is what it’s all about. You get put down and stomped on all your life; people try to obliterate and annihilate you. And then, just when it seems like you can’t take it anymore, you find that you can take it. And you come back. You learn to take three shots for every one you give. And when you see an opening, you lunge for it.

If I’d been born a rich man’s son, I might have gone to law school. If I’d grown up among honest working people, I might have wound up being a cop or running a grocery store. But I grew up with gangsters and boxing was the only legal way I knew of to make a million dollars without real qualifications. Money I could use to pay off Teddy once and for all. But it was more than that; it was a way out of one world and into another.

Elijah Barton once got three million dollars to fight a man. So when the opportunity came up to be part of his comeback, I lunged at it.

“You know, John,” I said. “There might just be another way to raise that money.”

Later on that day, we stopped by his brother’s house on Maine Avenue. We found Elijah stretched out on a couch in his living room, wearing a pressed yellow shirt and navy trousers. His wife was in the kitchen, cooking and listening to a religious program.

“So you’re the young fella who’s gonna help me get my name back,” Elijah said, getting up slowly to shake my hand.

“We’ll see. I hope so.”

His face was wider than it used to be. Not just puffy, but expanded sideways, like in a carnival mirror.

He began to bend back his arms and limber up his shoulders, like he was about to step into the ring again.

“You know, a lot of these young boys who get in the ring now, they got a lot of spunk, but ain’t none of them know how to go the distance,” he said in a voice as light as pillow feathers.

I noticed that he hardly ever blinked. I guess that reflex didn’t work as well anymore since he’d been hit in the head so many times.

“Can you go the distance?” he said, starting to throw a right hook at my head.

I ducked and then realized he’d just been faking. “Yeah, I can go the distance.”

“Then how you gonna raise the money?” Elijah asked.

“Don’t you worry about that. I’m very motivated.”

A grin broke up Elijah’s face and he weaved and bobbed and popped me on the shoulder with a quick left. It only hurt a little.

“That’s real good,” he said. “It’s important for a man to be motivated. I remember I had a motivation for every fight I ever had. My first fight was for a diamond ring. My second fight was for a car. By my twelfth fight, I was buying my family a house.”

“So what would this fight be for?” I asked, wondering what I was getting myself into.

“To get back everything I had before,” Elijah said solemnly.

John B. broke in, basking in the glow of his brother’s celebrity. “When my brother was champ, there wasn’t nobody who didn’t know who he was. We could go to Zambia or New Zealand and brothers would come out the kitchen, saying, ‘Elijah, Elijah, we love you.’”

A cloud passed over Elijah’s face. “But the last time at the airport, that girl behind the counter couldn’t spell my name right,” he murmured.

“So that’s why you want to fight again? To get your name back?”

“That, and the money.” Elijah put up his guard and rocked from side to side. His wife’s religious program in the kitchen seemed to get a little louder. “Like I say, I’m in it to go the distance. Some of these young boys, who fight now, they just wanna kick butt. I’ve kicked enough butt. Now I want security.”

“All right,” I said, playing devil’s advocate to make sure this deal was going to be worth all the effort I’d have to put into it. “But what about all those people who are going to say you’re too old to fight and you’re just risking more brain damage?”

He threw a big brown fist in my face and for a second my whole world was his knuckles. Then as fast as it came it was gone. The punch stopped short of my nose by less than a quarter inch. If it had connected, I would’ve spent two months in a hospital easy.

“Does that look like brain damage?” He danced away.

“So you’re not afraid of getting knocked out?”

“Hell no.” He threw a quick combination at the lamp in the corner. “Though it must be something. Having the night close up on you like that.” He stopped dancing and punching for a second. “They say it’s hard for a man to live with himself after he gets stopped. I heard tell of one man was lying on the dressing room table after he got knocked out and started to see visions of baby Jesus fighting and boxing with the angels. Imagine that. Baby Jesus, gettin’ in the ring. Man got so scared he ran out naked on the street.”

“Why’d he do that?” I asked, feeling a peculiar chill on the back of my neck.

“I guess he must’ve lost faith,” Elijah said gravely, staring at the ceiling like he’d just seen a ghost flying by up there. “Man spends his whole life fighting, telling himself he’s the baddest man alive. He gets knocked out, he can’t be that way no more.”

He grew still and quiet. No matter how you came at it, this man was forty-three and had been in a lot of fights. There was even scar tissue on the back of his thick, rolled-up neck. But that was part of the beauty of Elijah. In a way, he was just an ordinary middle-aged man trying to chase down his lost youth. Like millions of other paunchy middle-aged men across the country. A fair percentage of whom might be inclined to watch pay-per-view fights on cable TV. I could even imagine a slogan: “If there’s hope for Elijah Barton, there’s hope for the rest of us.”

“So have we got a deal?” I said. “I get twenty percent as your manager for covering your training expenses and sanctioning fees up front.”

“Twenty percent.” Elijah shook my hand. His grip was surprisingly loose and delicate, like an old lady’s.

I started to leave. “Sounds like a helluva thing,” I said. “Getting knocked out.”

“I wouldn’t know.” Elijah sat back down on the couch and took two pills. “It’s never happened to me.”

It was only later that I learned that he’d been stopped cold before the third round in two of his last three fights.