On a bench beside the black metal steps to an elevated ring sits a semitransparent and well-gnawed gumshield with a lemon-yellow frontispiece and several layers of blood and slobber that film its ridges. It balances too perfectly atop a bloodstained handtowel atop a mildewed t-shirt.
“What’s this, Fortino?” says a tall Mexican with a black goatee, prickly but straight, and a gentle handshake.
“Quinteros left it,” says the manager.
“Quinteros?” says the tall Mexican. “It’s not his, is it?”
The manager’s smooth brown face, taupe in the basement’s dim light, unfolds in a smile. “It’s Quinteros’. He left everything – mouthguard, shirt, headgear – and took off.”
“It was his turn, eh?”
“Seth made a little altar on the bench.”
“Pinche Seth.”
*
“Do you think nine pounds is too much?” he asks the older guy sitting next to him on the periwinkle paint of the wooden bench, its ankle-level scars splintered and glowing yellow.
“That’s not so much the way to think about it, I don’t think,” the older guy says, still in his navy sweatshirt from the trip southwards, his white Everlast boots coffee brown on the edges where the outsides of his feet sometimes fold over their treads. “Nine pounds for me would be, what, three-, four-percent difference?”
He hopes the lovely boy doesn’t do the arithmetic and learn how much he weighs, or shame him for lowballing.
“But for me, it’s a much bigger difference?” the younger guy says.
“Isn’t it?”
“I sparred with a guy who was 117 earlier.”
“How’d it go?”
“I felt slow. He felt big.”
“That how much he weighed?” the older guy says, and he looks at the kid’s thick dark hair and delicate features and wants to ask why he puts himself through it. “What’re you at?”
“A hundred this afternoon.”
“Why’re you jumping rope six rounds after your workout?”
“You think I should?”
“I think you should pick up 12 pounds for next year’s Gloves,” the older guy says. “Or lobby that writer guy to lobby for a men’s light flyweight.”
*
“You know Saturday’s my birthday?” the kid says, trotting over to fist bump the gym’s oldest practitioner, a writer nobody at the gym reads but the manager abides because while he never wins trophies for the gym he brings souvenirs from Vegas, and makes fun of himself.
“How old?” the writer says.
“I’ll be ten.”
“Perfect for the 2020 Olympics, I tell him,” says the kid’s dad, who once trained under Joe Souza but is now the age of the writer. “Where are those going to be held?”
The writer shrugs.
“I’ll be ten,” the kid says, and he studies the writer.
“Hey, man,” the writer says, and he pokes Manny Pacquiao’s face on the kid’s black t-shirt. “I already got you your present.”
“I’m having cake, here, Friday,” the kid says.
“He’s lobbying for another t-shirt,” the writer says to the kid’s dad, and both men laugh.
“So much for the surprise party,” the kid’s dad says, and he self-consciously plucks the black cotton twill of his polo shirt off his belly. “Try keeping a secret round here.”
*
“So I told him, ‘Padre, we need a big cooler for beer,’” says a man who walks with a cane, cannot raise either hand above his head, and supervises whenever Fortino goes upstairs to watch gals do roller derby. “Once Padre got us that, we had no trouble getting Special Forces in to protect us.”
“The fog of war, huh?” says a tall Puerto Rican trainer, a handsome barber who does saintly work with kids on weeknights after nine hours of cutting heads till six.
“Not yet, not yet,” says the assistant manager, and he chuckles theatrically. “That was ’65. It wasn’t too bad yet.”
“Hold on, I gotta take this,” the trainer says, and he raises a blackberry to his ear and uh-huhs till lowering the phone and glaring at its face.
“Lady troubles?” the assistant manager says. “Oh man, after the war, I started with the city, this is before SAWS –”
“A mugroso barcode reader,” says the Puerto Rican. “My wife found a sticker on the floormat of the ride last week. It says nothing about nothing, right? Just a barcode.”
“Uh huh,” says the assistant manager. “Uh oh.”
“My wife’s friend, like some forensics master, tells her they make apps that read’em. My wife downloads the stupid app, and it’s for flowers.”
*
“What’s up with southpaw?” says a portly Texan who will start with USAA’s mortgage department in March.
“Just trying it out,” says an 18 year-old, Jesus, whose worried grandmother paid for his move from Santa Paula, Calif., in December. “The left isn’t there, but the right hook, man?”
“Excellent?”
“Excellent!”
“If I could do what you do standing regular –”
“But you can’t,” Jesus says. “So leave it to the ones who can.”
Both laugh.
“I like to consider myself as ambidextrous,” says Jesus.
“You spar southpaw yet?”
“Next week.”
“We’ll see if Life considers you ‘as ambidextrous,’ then.”
*
“I’m proud of you, mija,” says the gym’s oldest trainer to a voluptuous Mexican girl in a shaved head, olive sports bra and black sweatpants. “That’s what you got to do every night here.”
“Thanks, Coach,” she says. “I no getting tired.”
“Because you’re using the big muscles.”
“It felt much more hard.”
“Remember that on the hook, OK,” he says, and he rises from the back steps where his charge sits, a brown roll of flesh above the band of her sweats. “Picture like your hitting the bag with the inside of your left hip, first.”
“I go now?”
“Yes, mija,” he says. “Everything OK with your tía?”
“Más o menos,” she says, and she raises her right hand, thumb over pinky, pinky over thumb. “She feels it.”
The old trainer rises after she’s gone, straightens his black ball cap – “Army Strong” in shiny gold script – slaps a wrinkle off the right thigh of his slate-grey slacks, and raises his right hand.
“Taking off?” calls the manager.
“Have a good night, Fortino.”
Bart Barry can be reached at bartbarrys.email (at) gmail.com
