Inside the double blue doors, old wood with matte aluminum handles, the heater is off because with all the bodies inside and the humidity outside even the innocently sadistic traditions of the sport, ways for fighters to make weight by stretching them on a rack of dehydration, cannot find purchase in raising the temperature.
The stairs that descend from the entrance are rows of concrete, thick and soft with layered gray paint. Folding aluminum chairs, their legs scuffed by cheap polish off cheap brown and black shoes, line the stairs’ levels – a few dutiful mothers lying across them, bored by spectacle and tired from downtown-hotel housekeeping jobs, their phones in their right hands for emergencies or texting. A fibrous-patterned slip rope that sees little action in a gym with little head movement stretches wall to wall as a border to complement its handwritten sign: “Only registered fighters past this point.”
The walls sparkle with gold and black paint, oil on cinderblock, in a lost tribute to a crew of handymen boxers lost to a reduced schedule. Spongy black mats at the base of the sparkly walls float on stacked plywood that floats over the once-gleaming hardwood lanes of a collegiate bowling alley from the 1950s. Every so many meters, sporadically placed, stand borrowed trash receptacles, some tin and others blue plastic, one bearing partially a white recycling cartoon of circled arrows. The ring is elevated, four steps above the floor, its bungee-tightened canvas blue, its ropes taped red and white, and its new spit funnel crowned by a metal tray slick with petroleum jelly.
Two boys, grammar-school kids whose small heads take on alien, lopsided shapes under their red headgear, push 10-ounce gloves harmlessly at one another. Both have begun young enough to take punches on the nose impersonally. Ricky, the shorter, slower of the two, carries his lead hand low, mostly because he is tired but partly because his dad took him to see the Mayweather fight on a movie screen a few weeks back, and Mayweather made the low lead hand look more promising than Ricky’s trainers say it is. The boy will be fat someday – a fortune told in his chin and cheeks – but Dad will force the day out far as possible with strenuous hobbies like boxing, which despite their strenuousness are almost helpless to the boy’s fantastic aptitude for detecting, in every venture, the road most traveled.
Skipping rope before a wall-sized shadowboxing mirror is Temo, a youth champion, one of the gym’s best and necessarily cockiest kids, marking time till the yellow metal timer above the mirror makes its electronic enh-enh-enh sound. He floats a centimeter above the spot his leather rope slaps and may never be big enough to make a living at prizefighting, whatever others’ outsized and not-selfless hopes. Temo’s beauty and charisma will take him to an affluent place in 20 years, though his slight frame will doubtfully bear others’ piling on it.
Squared to the softest of the new 75-pound leather bags the gym got for Christmas is Clarence (everyone calls him “C”) tapping with hybrid left and right hooks the low part of the sack where red leather was stitched to black reinforcement and its inner sand is compacted tightest. C repeatedly puts his middle knuckles on the exact places where he can apply greatest force but make the bag swing least. His shirtless back, wet with exertion, is hard and dark and shiny like the wood of an oboe. The Christmas bag’s tight, noisy chain extends 10 feet in the air where it wraps round an exposed metal beam. Upstairs on the basketball courts, pickup games happen on one side and a women’s roller-derby practice on the other, and their exertions come through the gym’s ceiling like base thumps and zipping marbles.
Behind the double-end and heavy bags hangs an ovoid chunk of puke-yellow foam and crusted silver duct tape, its leather entirely shed. It glares resentfully across the floor at a new Everlast – heavier and harder, shapelier – into which boxers now drive their uppercuts and not this old bag, merely the X on a map where instead of buried treasure lies a broken board of floating floor that’d been twisting careless kids’ ankles.
On the second wooden bench, soft with layered gray paint in front of strewn dumbbells with rusted-over poundages and a heavy creaking Universal machine, copper with age and abuse, sits a pudgy kid named Victor. He’s in his twenties and 300s. Promised sparring, he’s been gloved-up and waiting, the toe of his right Ringside boot planted while its misshapen heel vibrates in the air just off the mat, hours now. His supposed partner, a thirtyish guy with a beard who wears a fat-burner belt under dark t-shirts and says he fought in a faraway place years ago and recently declared too loudly that he wanted sparring because he needed to say it to believe it, won’t be in. Tomorrow, there’ll be tendonitis or car problems or food poisoning to blame, and the day after that too.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
