Pound for Pound (2 page)

Tim Pat was six, bright as a new penny and full of life, but once he’d been told of his parents’ death, the tears Dan expected him to shed never came, just a frightening stillness. It had taken over four weeks for the
Mexican authorities to identify and return the bodies to Dan and Brigid, Tim Pat’s grandparents. They moved Tim Pat’s bed into their bedroom, where he’d slept fitfully. He hardly spoke once he knew the bodies had arrived, and had said nothing at the rosary or at the funeral mass, but now he shivered like a cold pup and wanted answers.

The priest finished at the grave site, and Brigid had Tim Pat sprinkle a pinch of dark earth on each coffin. As they walked away, Dan gave the aging priest an envelope with the same thousand-dollar donation for a Tijuana orphanage he’d made too often, and then rejoined his wife and Tim Pat. The priest, Father José Capetillo, was pastor at Christ the King Church, a refuge for the soul located near the Cooleys’ home in old Hollywood. Father Joe had lived and worked with his wetback
mojado
parents in Steinbeck’s Salinas, but he had been born in the Spanish-colonial city of Guanajuato, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. His family had made sure that he would not spend the rest of his life in stoop labor in fields owned by other people. The Jesuits took him in hand when he was in high school and put him on the straight and narrow path to the seminary.

Father Joe would join the Cooleys at their home for the wake, as he had joined so many others at their homes, as he knew he would join yet more to come. He lowered his head. Almost daily, he went to what Miguel de Unamuno called the bottom of the abyss.
Lord, there is so much I cannot explain to my flock. From whence do they come? Why are they here? Where are they going?
Faith and hope would lift him from despair.
Lord, I love you with my whole heart and soul and with all of my mind.

Dan Cooley wasn’t so sure that he had any love left for the Lord. Maybe it had died along with all those he had loved and lost.

Once they had angled their way through the other gravestones and arrived at the mortician’s limousine, Brigid cleaned the dirt off Tim Pat’s hand with a white linen handkerchief. The boy turned and looked back. He saw but did not want to believe. Gravediggers were pulling away the squares of fake grass from the dark rectangles in the ground.

Tim Pat said, “Grandma, they’re not going to put my momma and daddy in those holes, are they?”

Brigid had just buried her third and last child, her only daughter. Faith was all she had left to hang on to.

“They must,” she said. “Yer mam and daddy’ve gone to God.”

“The one up in heaven?” Tim Pat asked.

“The same,” Brigid assured him.

“Will God send them back to me?”

His grandmother began to weep, her first tears since the call from Acapulco. “No, little one, He will not.”

Tim Pat had an edge of something like anger in his voice. “But why not?”

Dan put his arm around the boy’s frail shoulders. “Because that’s not how it works.”

Tim Pat looked up at his grandfather. “How does it work?”

Dan said, “Ah, God, I don’t know how it works.”

Brigid and Dan approached their new task of raising their grandson guardedly. They were careful not to coddle him, though that was hard, now that they had lost all of their own children. Both knew that safeguarding Tim Pat in a sealed bubble of their dread could be as lethal for him as a gunshot. They allowed him to remain in his old school up by Sunset Boulevard at first, but a few weeks following the funeral, they enrolled him at Christ the King. For two weeks, either Brigid or Dan walked him the four and a half blocks from their house on Cahuenga to his new school. Both explained that he should go by way of Melrose Avenue; both taught him how to use crosswalks and to obey the signal at Rossmore; and for another week, one or the other would walk a half block behind him to make sure he got to school safely. He was quick to learn, and enjoyed meeting other kids along the way and walking with them on to school.

Tim Pat had grown solemn, and having him walk to school alone was part of Brigid’s plan to help the downhearted little boy back into the world. Dan took him to the shop and taught him how to spread body filler and use sandpaper, to clean spray guns. The plan began to work. The nuns were helpful, and Sister Mary Virginia excitedly phoned Brigid
the day Tim Pat had his first scuffle over who would be pitcher during a noontime ball game. And while he continued to be Tim Pat at home, the growing-up part of him insisted on just Tim in school and the great world beyond.

Tim Pat’s second journey to St. Athanasius was to bury Brigid two years later, dead from cancer. He knew to sprinkle soil on his grandmother’s coffin, and as he stood up with the dirt between his fingers, he said, “Grandma won’t be back either, will she?”

Dan could barely speak. “No.”

Both of them stared at the name freshly incised into the gleaming green stone.

BRIGID ANNE MANAHAN COOLEY 1940–1994

Then Tim Pat asked, “But she’s with Mom and Dad, and Uncle Brendan and Terry, and they’re watching over us, right?”

Dan took ten steps before he could speak, and then it was his mother’s, Nora’s words, not his, that came from his mouth. “Sure, and why wouldn’t they be?”

Dan sprinkled a few grains of loose soil on the green gravestone and hobbled to his truck. He dropped back down North Broadway to Chávez, hooked a right, and passed under the Pasadena Freeway, where Chávez becomes the Sunset Boulevard that leads west through Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and on to the Pacific Ocean. Dan stayed on Sunset until the fork at Santa Monica Boulevard, and then took it on into his part of Hollywood. Instead of pulling into the shop on Cole, he forced himself to drive past it a half block to Melrose, where he turned right after a block, to Wilcox, and circled back to park in front of the gym beneath the eucalyptus tree.

The gym was in an old building that had survived earthquakes that had destroyed prettier, newer buildings, and had knocked down segments of freeways, wrecked bridges, and tumbled hospitals. Behind the boarded-up windows at the front was an interior of high ceilings and exposed metal beams. Like a fighter’s body, it was lean and spare. Places on the hardwood floor showed smooth, bare wood through worn varnish where fighters down the years had shadowboxed or jumped rope. There were circles of bare wood around the body bags and beneath the speed bags. There were sixteen-inch spit funnels crusted with years of dry mucous. Hoses ran from the funnels to five-gallon white plastic spit buckets on the floor. Neither ring had padding beneath its slick canvas. These were
boxers’
rings, no padding meant fast. A workout timer against one wall would mark off three-minute rounds and one-minute rest periods. Once fighters had been in the game for a while, they knew instinctively when the warning buzzer should sound, when the bell would ring. There were no stools to rest on. Fighters don’t sit between rounds when sparring.

A hand-lettered sign on one wall read, “Good Fighters Don’t Need Water and Bad Fighters Don’t Deserve Water.” Another read, “Learning’s Hard, Doing’s Easy.” A third sign, “Remember the Easter Bunny,” showed an amateurish drawing of a boxing ring scattered with faded Easter eggs. Another sign read, “The First Rule of War Is Don’t Shoot Yourself.”

The gym was located directly behind the rear of the shop. The shop faced Cole Avenue, while the gym faced narrow Wilcox Avenue, the next street west. Back to back, both buildings were part of what remained of an old Hollywood industrial/residential area. The gym could be entered directly from the back of the shop through the rear door. That’s how the few fighters still using the gym entered it.

The address and main entrance to the gym were on Wilcox; a small, hand-painted sign that read “GyM” had once been nailed to the right of the front door. Until the day Dan tore it off and hurled it to the ground, under the huge eucalyptus tree that still afforded its gentle shade and pleasantly medicinal smell.

After he had fought off the idea of burning the place down, Dan had Centcor Security install a fire-and-burglar-alarm system in the gym. Because he had boarded up the front windows and door, the building looked like it had been abandoned. Anybody who decided to break into the place and trash it would find Dan Cooley confronting them with a twelve-gauge pump shotgun long before the police turned up. Dan lived, slept, and ate mostly in a room on the second floor. And he was a very light sleeper these days, when he slept at all.

D
an was first-generation Irish, the youngest of five brothers—Cathal Michael, Liam Francis, Dermot James, Finbar Joseph, and himself, Daniel Aloysius. The first three were born five floors up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, the Irish slums west of Times Square; Fin and he were born in a converted first-floor loft on the Lower East Side. His mother told how she made the sign of the cross when she walked down the last flight of Hell’s Kitchen stairs she’d ever have to climb.

Dan’s father, Padraic Timothy, was from County Armagh; his mother, Nora Ann McGeough, from County Louth, counties whose borders touched, but they were married a few miles to the south at the massive, stone St. Pat’s “chapel” in Dundalk, County Louth—”chapel,” not church, because only the “churches” of the protestant Church of Ireland were called “churches” back then.

Ireland and its people were still scarred from the famine, the Great Hunger, which had begun in
1846.
Work, good work, was hard to find and black poverty infested both town and countryside. Like thousands of others, Dan’s parents saw America as the only way out and they worked day and night to save money for their passage. Nora was pregnant
before they got on the boat for New York, and sick all the way across, but she kissed the ground of Ameriky when they landed, and both hoped they had reached salvation from hunger and fear.

Padraic was mad-dog crazy for Irish football and hurling, had played both and had the scars to prove it, but he instantly fell in love with boxing and baseball—he read every inch of the sports pages every day to follow the standings and batting averages—and he used baseball to improve his reading comprehension. He knew the records of Irish fighters, starting with the great John L. Sullivan as a bare knuckler. When there was money enough, he took his older sons to the fights at the old Madison Square Garden, and to St. Nick’s in Manhattan, even took them all the way up to the Bronx Coliseum if the card was right. Nora had the kids, and thanked God from her knees, twice daily, that she hadn’t lost any—so many children had been lost back in Ireland—and for the good man who labored so hard to put food on the table every day.

It was food hard earned in the early days, which included the bread lines of the early thirties. Padraic first supported his family as a roustabout, showing up at the docks or labor sites before dawn, hoping to be picked early and to work late. Then came steady work for New York City as a garbageman. When he got promoted to driver, he was able to move his family from the raging violence of Hell’s Kitchen to their loft near the Bowery, where Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, and Italians were protective neighbors, and a decent girl could walk to school safely. Sidewalk justice was meted out to any punk who even thought of tampering with her. The loft was another step up for the Cooleys. It was where the last two boys were born, and it was in the quiet of the loft late at night that Padraic and Nora studied to become citizens.

The Cooleys would surely have stayed in New York but for the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent gearing up for all-out war. California suddenly had plenty of good-paying jobs and was short of men (and women) to fill them, so in mid-1
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the family moved by train to Los Angeles. They found a place to live in the old dock town of San Pedro, on the westerly rim of what would shortly become the massive Los
Angeles Harbor. Padraic found employment on the assembly line at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach. He worked twelve-hour shifts, sometimes seven days a week, and never missed a day. With overtime, and with Nora cashing every check and marking down every penny he earned and every one she spent, they lived well enough for him to buy his first car, a used 1934 Chevy four-door sedan for
$165.00,
a high price because of the war. Now he could drive to work like an American, instead of wasting hours a day on the bus like some Jerk McGee green off the boat. His children always had milk, and his family ate three times a day. That was why he had come to the United States in the first place.

The two older boys, Cathal and Liam, enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and though neither was wounded or won medals for valor, they hadn’t been draft dodgers, either. By the end of the war, the number of two-car families had grown, but then the war plants closed down. Money was tight and jobs were scarce. Padraic used his experience at Douglas and the money he’d saved to open his own body-and-fender shop. Dan and his brothers worked for their father, Dan after school and on Saturdays, the older boys full-time until they went on to become policemen or firemen once they were sure the old man’s business was successful.

“A man with a trade is worth two men,” Padraic would counsel his sons at the dinner table, “and a man with a trade won’t go hungry, not in this great land.”

Nora would bump him with her hip to let him know who was the real boss, the one with the real trade. “Eejit, ya didn’t like yer dinner, didja, nor the one yer not gettin tomorrow?”

Padraic would answer, his face solemn, “Och, there’s nothin worse than a Dundalk biddy,” but he’d always put his arm around Nora’s waist and pull her back to him.

Dan learned that family meant you fought for and protected one another. As a little boy in a rough neighborhood in New York, he’d been insulated from harm by his big brothers. But in San Pedro, at St. Jude’s school, there were no big brothers on duty—and he was a small freckle-faced kid who talked funny, weighed too much, and looked soft. Bigger
and tougher boys knew a mark when they saw one, and Dan was frequently bullied. He watched others tear into his lunch bag, take the pie or cake, and scatter the rest in the street. In the beginning he tried to fight back, but he was chubby and slow, and he quickly realized that he didn’t know how to fight. Dan finally quit fighting back, but never told the sisters at school or anyone at home because he was ashamed of being fat and weak. He withdrew into himself and began to play at home alone.