The Domino Diaries Read online

  It’s a sneaky thing, revealing some of the most intimate aspects of your life and having your opponent know less about you afterward. You never know what kind of chemistry you’ll have with a stranger. I met a fighter once who told me his style was based on Mona Lisa’s smile: “I always keep ’em guessing.” There is an overwhelmingly strange, naked sensation when your life comes together with another human being that you’ve never met before, a person who has done no harm to you or anyone you know, and for a handful of rounds you’re expected to find the motivation to shatter his will. If possible, you’re obliged to steal every ounce of hope, hijack any instinct for self-preservation, and take hostage all determination he has to remain standing in front of you. Then there’s the fact your opponent is working himself up to do just the same against you. You’ve made an enemy of a stranger simply by your proximity in a shared, enclosed space.

  It might be true that boxing is one of the only places where people with prison records and otherwise rotten resumes don’t start at the bottom, but then again, nobody’s a more dangerous fighter than a happy fighter. Did Ali ever look like he was having a bad time when the odds were stacked against him? Deep down you feel a bit like that Voyager probe they launched into space with that Golden Record tossed in as the best argument earth could make that we’re worth preserving. The Voyager probe has Beethoven’s Fifth; you have to find your own best excuse justifying why you belong.

  A year after I started, boxing for me was a dirty secret. I had filled out and improved enough in the gym to handle Golden Glove champions and provincial champions for a few rounds. People started treating me differently. But then one day my run ended before it really had a chance to start. I always knew that one day a punch was around the corner that would expose me as a tourist to the sport. I just never expected it would be a punch I landed.

  I never did manage to pull together a boxing career, or a memorable fight in front of a big crowd, or even to lace up a glove for a round as a professional. All my big moments happened in the gym, like an unsent letter I’ll keep tucked away. I think this was because, early on, I did land a great punch against a great fighter. His name was Ronnie Wilson. I was sixteen. It had only been a year since I first started boxing, but I was making up for lost time. I landed that punch on Ronnie’s jaw the first day we met and he ended up in my corner.

  Ronnie was born outside Vancouver a few months after my dad in 1949. At eighteen he moved to California and turned professional. In those days, if they were excited enough, the crowd could double what a fighter earned on his contract. Ronnie had crumpled bills and change tossed into the ring after his victories. And back then if someone got sick or was otherwise unable to fight, you could offer to fight again in their place the same night. This happened many times to Ronnie. Ronnie Wilson fought so often in those first five years of his career that by the time he was twenty-three, he had competed in seventy-eight professional fights. He must have been one of the busiest prizefighters in the world during the 1970s. Before too long Ronnie got married and his wife gave birth to a daughter. I don’t remember anymore if he was the one who mentioned the child, but I knew from a few people she was out there somewhere.

  At his peak, Ronnie was in Ring magazine as a top-rated light heavyweight. But I never found that out from him. He never mentioned—let alone bragged about—anything to do with his accomplishments. After I hounded him to see the magazine in question, he reluctantly brought it in, though he insisted on not being in the same room with me while I looked at it.

  A few times he came within a fight of challenging for a world title, but it never came through for him. Pretty early on in his life drinking followed by drugs became another struggle Ronnie was up against. His career ended in San Diego, on January 25, 1983, after a tomato can named Marcos Geraldo knocked him out in the third round. His final record stood at seventy wins, thirty-five defeats, and seven draws. He spent just shy of a thousand rounds in the ring. That’s three thousand minutes. Fifty hours. Ronnie fought the equivalent of just over two solid days in the ring. I don’t think there was anywhere else on earth he felt safer.

  Physically, Ronnie eerily resembled Jack Dempsey: tall, with the same boyish haircut close-cropped on the sides and a little bushy upstairs, and they shared the same battered yet beautiful face. Ronnie weighed the same at forty-six as he had at eighteen, right at the light heavyweight limit of 178 pounds. There was always a bounce in Ronnie’s step and if he stopped to ask anyone something, he rocked his weight back and forth on his toes. When he sparred he wore an ancient pair of purple Everlast trunks over long johns. Ronnie’s ensembles were straight out of black-and-white photographs from boxing history books. I copied the look immediately.

  Ronnie was never a talker, but his voice sounded a lot like an old blender chugging away. Hard liquor and a lot of leather thrown his way created a kind of rockslide effect with the features of Ronnie’s face. Whenever he smiled it was like he was taking dynamite to all that rubble. Everybody tried to make Ronnie smile or laugh however we could because he was the sweetest presence any of us knew.

  Every snapshot I have of him in my mind includes his generosity. Whatever situation you brought to that gym, you had this supportive man, with all his bias, in your corner to stand up for you. For a lot of us kids who knew him he was sympathetic to us when a lot of people who were supposed to be in our lives weren’t. Really, that was his signature quality. And I suppose he must have been punch drunk after all those wars in the ring because he was always too dumb to ask for anything back.

  The first time I ever saw Ronnie at the gym he’d already spotted me. He was watching me out of the corner of his eye while he was sparring with some other people. Ronnie routinely sparred ten rounds or more, rotating in a new, fresh face every couple rounds. He’d fight anybody. Nobody who saw him at forty-six, let alone fought him, ever considered for a moment he was past his prime. He had boundless energy that only increased if he was pushed to the edge. He loved fighters who could push him out there. For better or worse, that ledge was his soul’s permanent address.

  He had finished seven or eight rounds by the time I got to the gym that day, and was looking over at me from the corner. The whole time I knew him, I never saw Ronnie glare at anyone. But then, he never had to. Ronnie was one of those rare people out there who’d been hurt by almost everyone he’d deeply cared about, yet he never wanted to take it out on anyone, aside from himself. But I didn’t know that up front. I was too busy shitting my pants with his eyes on me. All I saw meeting his glance was someone who had probably seen a lot more with his eyes than I’d ever be able to handle. Far and away the scariest fighters out there are the ones who never have to try to act tough. It never even occurs to them.

  As I was on my way to the changing room, I heard Ronnie ask the gym owner, jerking his head in my direction, “Who’s the kid?” The owner said my name and Ronnie repeated it before the bell rang. “Say, get Brinny in here before I’m done.”

  Only the closest people to me ever used that nickname. Only a handful of people my entire life had thought to call me that. The owner of the gym surely never used it. My heart sunk when I heard Ronnie casually use a term so intimate for me. I knew I was going to get hurt, and any time you got hurt there was a chance you could spend the rest of your life picking up the pieces.

  A few minutes later I was skipping in front of the mirror watching Ronnie fight a young professional fighter he was taking it easy on. Around them were a lot of posters with adages about not giving up, posters of proud champions posing or in battle. Jimmy, a close friend at the gym, came over because he’d already heard I’d be sparring with Ronnie in a few minutes. Jimmy was a featherweight originally from Fiji with lightning feet and hands. He also had an incapacitated, incontinent, career drunk of a father at home whom he regularly had to bathe since his dad had attempted suicide by swallowing battery acid a few years before. We both had alcoholic fathers, but my dad had a much more forgiving environment than Jimmy’s fath
er did. My dad smoked three packs a day but refused to use a lighter. Smokers use lighters. He drank every day (though I never saw my father order a drink in public in my life), but he never missed a day of work, or visibly suffered, or inflicted any of the terrible things they warned us in school alcoholics did. His drinking felt much more like an ominous game for which he created the rules but refused to reveal them to anyone else. It left our home feeling vaguely haunted, empty and claustrophobic at the same time, something like a knockoff Overlook Hotel. The Shining was a film my father and I watched together so many times after my parents separated that the ribbon snapped on the video cassette we owned. Everybody at school joked how much my father looked like Jack Nicholson and it wasn’t stated entirely as a compliment. But I loved how uneasy my father’s presence was for people.

  Jimmy and I were both sixteen and had showed up at this gym at more or less the same time. The owner had twenty-five kids who wanted to get involved in amateur boxing, so he set us all up to spar round robins continuously for two hours a night. After a month, twenty-five kids bled down to just Jimmy and me. While I was a lot bigger, I could never catch up to him.

  “You’ll do fine.” Jimmy smiled. “Keep your hands up. He’ll come at you hard but you can catch him. Wait for an opening and rip his head off. Don’t even think about it.”

  The buzzer rang.

  A French Canadian trainer came over with his familiar words of encouragement. “Tabarnak, what are we waiting around for? Get the fuck in there. Ronnie’s waiting.”

  I tried to lean in and whisper into his ear, “Can we do it another day? I’m really not feeling well today.”

  “Speak up, tabarnak.”

  I pointed at my stomach and shook my head.

  “Listen, tabarnak, after three rounds I’ll buy you a lollipop. Go on, cutie pie.”

  So you take a deep breath and climb the stairs and hold the middle rope open for the last fighter to exit, and keep holding it up so you can enter. The apron is under your toes and you dance around trying to get loose, snapping out some punches.

  Someone turned the music down in the gym and several people broke away from hitting the bags or skipping and took a round off to get cozy next to the ring and watch.

  I was shorter and Ronnie had a lot of reach over me, but by then I’d built myself up into Ronnie’s weight class. I was a little more muscular than Ronnie and I had heavier hands, too. Ronnie wasn’t built like a puncher. He was a grinder who loved getting in wars regardless of whether that made any sense for him strategically.

  Ronnie took out his mouth guard for a second and grinned at me. “You look a bit like Tyson, but can you fight like him, too? I guess we’ll find out.”

  Tyson’s identity was my sanctuary and foxhole. At that time there weren’t a lot of white kids with shaved heads who weren’t undergoing chemotherapy or regularly attending white supremacist meetings. But either interpretation served to keep people away from me and pushed me further down the path I was traveling on my own. I ran every morning at four thirty for five miles and shadowboxed round after round, studying his style in fights and his life and manner in documentaries on VHS I borrowed from the library. Tyson had invented his own menacing legend as a construct of the fighters he most identified with and admired. As a kid competing in the amateurs he even lied that he was Sonny Liston’s nephew.

  When the bell rang and we raised our gloves to each other Ronnie circled me for a while, waiting to see what I’d do. We were both tentative for the first couple minutes. Finally Ronnie settled down and threw a straight right hand poised to break my nose. In a flash I’d slipped it and his fist mopped some sweat off my shoulder before sailing over. He was off-balance with the miss and I was already low and coiled. A split second before Ronnie had his glove safely protecting his cheek, I took his head off with a left hook that landed flush against his jaw. The impact of that punch echoed across the gym and stopped everything that was going on. Ronnie’s feet came off the ground, and when they touched down he had spaghetti legs for a second. From the corner of my eye I saw that French Canadian trainer yank a rope, torn between being excited for me and scared Ronnie was hurt. “Ronnie, you good?” he hollered up. Ronnie was dazed and slack-jawed, but he held up his glove. Just as I was going to try to finish Ronnie off I held up to let him clear his head. Ronnie just smiled over at me, and a few seconds later the bell rang and he gave me a hug.

  “So you wanna be a fighter,” he growled, massaging his jaw.

  The truth was, not after that. And even less so once a couple of shady people in the gym who had watched us spar offered to stake me a couple thousand dollars a month as managers if I turned pro. I didn’t have any other prospects, but that punch drove home loud and clear I didn’t belong in the sport as a boxer. The dirty secret I kept after landing that punch was that I wanted to learn how to protect people like Ronnie a lot more than I wanted to learn how to hurt them. I didn’t give up fighting at that point, but I never dreamed of being a fighter after that.

  But Ronnie still desperately wanted to be a fighter. He had his last pro fight four years later on his fiftieth birthday. He was beaten so badly and bleeding from his face so profusely the referee stopped the fight in the first round. I wasn’t there. Nobody from our gym was. We didn’t know he was fighting. He never told anyone. His age aside, Ronnie was in no condition to fight. He’d started drinking again.

  Before that last fight happened, just after I started my amateur boxing career with Ronnie working my corner as an assistant trainer, he went AWOL from the gym. He disappeared for a few days. We filed a missing person report with the police and finally another trainer found him strung out on Hastings surrounded by other junkies and drunks slumped over park benches in Pigeon Park. My gym’s owner helped him get into rehab, but Ronnie couldn’t stick it out. The owner tried a couple more times getting him back into rehab, but it just never worked.

  Once it became clear that Ronnie wasn’t coming back, I wasn’t sure what to do next with boxing, let alone my life. I stumbled across Ronnie just before he fought his last fight, a few weeks before I flew to Havana for the first time to look for a new trainer. I heard later he contracted HIV and a lot of other viruses on the street. He’d ended up in the hospital a few times after being beaten pretty badly by kids looking to thump someone defenseless. Ronnie was always so hard on himself, I wonder if he even bothered to fight back. Maybe he felt like he deserved it.

  When I saw him he’d grown out a beard and his toes poked out of his shoes and he looked broken and lost. I barely recognized him. He barely recognized me. Some part of me kept hoping it was all just wardrobe and makeup for a movie part he’d gotten. As we stood looking at one another, I could almost feel him absorb the sadness between us like some mournful breeze rattling a wind chime.

  I didn’t know what to say and wasn’t sure what to do, either. I’d tried with him as I’d tried to help my own father to quit harming himself with alcohol, but in both cases nothing worked. You have to get past the pain of knowing who someone isn’t to accept loving them for who they are.

  Finally he did recognize me, without remembering my name.

  “Heya, look at this, hey kid?” he said, exposing some lost teeth. “Look where I ended up, huh? Can you believe it? Look where I ended up. Ah, Jesus. Look at me.”

  “Are you okay, Ronnie?”

  “Look where I ended up. Can you believe it?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m real sorry, ’cause I know I know you. I do. But I can’t for the life of me remember your name. My head ain’t too good. It would really help me out if you could spare anything. I swear I won’t buy any dope.”

  I gave him what was in my pocket and he kept repeating the same thing over and over: “Look at me.” Then, instead of saying good-bye, he just moaned with his voice breaking, “Guess I’m all washed up, ain’t I?”

  5

  HURRICANES AND BREEZES

  In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from
the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns on the passing wall.

  —Vladimir Nabokov

  MY HOMETOWN HAD BREEZES it treated like hurricanes; Havana had hurricanes it treated like breezes.

  In 1492, Columbus first described looking upon Cuba as “the most beautiful land that eyes ever beheld.” On the way over, Columbus was the first man from the Old World to record an encounter with a hurricane. The very word “hurricane” was invented by the native Taino population of Cuba as the name of a deity they feared and sought to soothe, Hurakan. Soon enough Columbus and the Spanish were convinced the worsening hurricanes they endured in Cuba were their Christian God’s curse for their overwhelming cruelty against the island’s inhabitants.

  After all those Tyson biographies, The Old Man and the Sea was the first novel I ever read. It introduced me to Cuba. I was fifteen and the first keyholes I peeked through toward the island were Ernest Hemingway’s novelization of his twenty years there, the enigma of Cuban boxers who casually rejected offers of vast fortunes from American promoters, and Cuba’s courage to stand up to the most powerful nation on earth (Fidel was actually carrying Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls looking for pointers on guerrilla warfare while he was up in the Sierra Maestra mountains during the revolution). These entry points to Cuba were like the Pyramids, but what loomed like the sphinx was the character of the people themselves.

  Why had Hemingway—one of America’s most beloved writers—spent the last third of his life on the island and declared himself a Cuban? Why, in 1976, when America offered Cuba’s greatest boxer, Teófilo Stevenson, five million dollars to leave Cuba and fight Muhammad Ali, had Stevenson turned the tables and instead asked of the offer itself, “What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?” And why would anyone want to resist America, let alone wish to assume the role of David against a Goliath only ninety miles away?