Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays

  He was near the end, however. It was time to produce a new sound:

  I believe that America will always have a special place in God’s heart, as long as He has a special place in ours. And maybe that’s why I’ve always believed that patriotism is not just another point of view.… Tonight I appeal to that unyielding spirit.… Tonight I say to you—join me in our new crusade—to reap the rewards of our golden victory—to win the peace—so that we may make America safer and stronger.…

  The president could not help it that he felt contempt for the American people. They had been out there and down there for so long. There they were, that long way off, far from the numberless committee rooms where he had lived and mingled and made his purchase on history for two decades now.

  The last hundred thousand of a quarter-million balloons floated down with the conclusion of his speech, and golden confetti gave an effulgence as it fell, a heavenly light to outline the podium as the singer offered “God Bless America.”

  Yes, God bless us—we need it. If fascism comes from the rotting away of a nation’s virtue until words like “trust” mean “corrupt,” then yes, we are going to need it.

  The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst

  (1993)

  ONE MORNING AT THE Gramercy Gym on East Fourteenth Street in New York, a friend of one of our regulars came along to join us for the Saturday morning workout. He had never put on gloves before, but he was quietly confident. Having finished the New York City Marathon in close to three hours, he was even ready to get in the ring on his first day, and that was notable since it usually took a couple of months to build up to such a moment. Of course, the marathoner was in superb shape.

  He sparred for three minutes with his friend and by the end of that round was too used up to go another. The answer was to be found in the special nature of boxing. If our visitor had been playing baskets one-on-one for the first time, or running after a tennis ball, he might have felt talentless, even foolish, but he would not have been wholly winded in three minutes.

  Boxing, however, is not like other tests in sport between one athlete and another, it arouses two of the deepest anxieties we contain. There is not only the fear of getting hurt, which is profound in more men than will admit to it, but there is the opposite panic, equally unadmitted, of hurting others. Part of this second fear rests, of course, on the well-comprehended equation that the harder you hit your opponent, the more he is going to feel free to bang back on you, but it goes a long way beyond that. To be born into that middle class, which is two-thirds of America by now, is to be brought up not to strike others. Probably it is worth noting that General S.L.A. Marshall’s classic study of infantrymen in battle for World War II, Men Against Fire, came to the conclusion that the large majority of soldiers in combat for the first time could not bring themselves to fire their rifles.

  No surprise then if it is difficult to deliver a good punch. It not only requires about as much coordination as to throw a football in a spiral for thirty yards, but, in addition, the punch must find some inner sanction. You have to feel justified. The marathoner wore out because two wholly opposed anxiety systems had been working at full thrust in him. It is one thing to be frightened—some part of yourself can sometimes pull you through. When your cowardice and aggression are both in a flurry, however, quick exhaustion is the consequence.

  Be it said that for professionals such opposed fears still exist—it is just that the ante has gone up. Now, you can kill a man in the ring or be killed yourself.

  Muhammad Ali once paid a press-inspired visit to Floyd Patterson’s training camp in the Catskills a few weeks before their championship match in Las Vegas, and on arrival proceeded to savage Floyd. “You’re nothing but a rabbit,” Ali told Patterson in front of the reporters, and then decamped in high operatic disgust. Patterson managed to throttle his visible perturbation down to a wry grin. “Well,” he said, “I won’t have to worry about motivation with that guy, will I?”

  One can take one’s pass at Ali’s premise. For a man like Patterson, an overload of sanction could prove disastrous. He would feel too murderous. On the night that the bout took place in Vegas, Floyd was so tense that his lower back went out on him in the second round. He managed to keep on his feet, fighting from one contorted position after another until the contest was stopped in the twelfth round, but he never had a chance. Ali was a genius.

  In the ring, genius is transcendent moxie—the audacity to know that what usually does not work, or is too dangerous to attempt, can, in a special case, prove the winning move. Maybe that is why attempts are made from time to time to compare boxing with chess—the best move can lie very close to the worst move. At Ali’s level, you had to be ready to die, then, for your best ideas.

  For our pugilistic fold, however, out there on Saturday morning in the gray, grimy, now-closed Gramercy Gym, where even the ropes and the canvas were gray, and the windows, summer or winter, were a greasy patina of dishrag gray, it was enough that we were ready to show up, each at our own private frequency—some regularly once a week, some once a month, and all variations between—were, yes, ready to wake up on Saturday morning with the knowledge that no legitimate excuse was there on this occasion to get us out of it. We were not hung over, had had enough sleep, yes, we would have to show up. Nonetheless, it was also true that once there, one did not have to box; one could merely work out, hit the speed bag, the heavy bag, do sit-ups, jump rope, shadowbox, or even less—there were no rules, and no obvious rewards, and virtually no shame for doing too little, other than a faint and subtle queasiness concerning macho matters.

  Or, one could get into the ring. Sometimes there were weeks in a row when you went one or, better, two three-minute rounds on every Saturday. It varied. No one judged anyone else. Given our separate lives, we were nonetheless not that unalike when it came to our guts and our skill. Most of us did not have a great deal of the latter. We were there to make delicate adjustments on our ongoing workaday ego. Sparring honestly for several weeks in a row, just that once-a-week submersion into three minutes or six minutes of high-speed (for us) boxing did wonders for the self-esteem one could bring back to one’s social life.

  Of course, most of us went our separate ways outside. We had among us a cabdriver, a bearded editor of a porny magazine, a high school English teacher who suffered a broken jaw one Saturday morning, and an actor who worked nights as a dealer in a gambling joint and purchased headgear with a vertical bridge to protect his handsome nose—which we all found ludicrous until he went on to become a star in a TV crime series.

  We also had a couple of young writers and one Golden Gloves aspirant who lost his first and only bout, and we had an established older writer, myself. For the record, I didn’t hang up my fourteen-ounce gloves until I was fifty-eight, but by then my knees were gone, I had beaten them half to death jogging on sidewalks, and if you cannot do a little running for the requisite three times a week, you certainly don’t have the wind to box on Saturday. It does not matter then how much you know about boxing’s systems of anxiety: the fact is that when you have no wind, you cannot be any kind of pugilist unless you are as sly as Archie Moore or as wise as George Foreman. For an average man to go into the ring without wind is equal to going in without blood. So I gave it up, I eased out of it, and have never felt as virtuous since.

  We had others who came on Saturday morning, transients. A criminal lawyer was there for a few weeks and a Greek fencer who could never come up with a way to convert fencing to boxing, although he did muster a kind of long left jab. The friends of friends showed up for short periods, and there was one year when we had an instructor, a fast Puerto Rican bantamweight professional, who was too small and too good to impart anything to us that was not in slow motion. He had been brought in by José Torres, our resident dean, who used to enjoy sparring with all of us despite the fact that he had been light heavyweight champion of the world. Torres won his title from Willie Pastrano in 1965 by a TKO in the ninth round at Madison
Square Garden and, after several successful defenses, lost it to Dick Tiger in 1966 in fifteen rounds in the same place in a very close fight.

  Why Torres enjoyed getting in the ring with us, I never quite understood. It bore comparison to the bemused pleasure Colin Powell might take in teaching close-order drill to recruits. On the other hand, we all enjoyed being able to say we had been in with a former light heavyweight champion. He was impossible to hit and that was an interesting experience—you felt as if you were sharing the ring with a puma. Be it understood, part of his honor was not to hurt anyone. When you made a mistake, he would tap you. If you repeated the error, he would tap you harder. Defensive reflexes developed in the student. One’s offense, however, had to fend for itself. Over ten years of boxing with José Torres I was able to catch him with a good right hand twice, and the first occasion was an event. He ran around the ring with his arms high in triumph crying out, “He hit me with a right—he hit me with a right!” unconscionably proud that day of his pupil.

  It was thanks to José that we had the use of the gym. The management had provided him with the keys. When he did not show up on an occasional Saturday, a poet who lived in a fourth-floor loft above the third-story gym would let us in by opening his begrimed window long enough to drop a key down to us in a rolled-up sock, and when we climbed the stairs, the premises still reeked of the serious sweat of the professional and Golden Gloves aspirants who had trained there from Monday to Friday.

  Such was our club. But for one or two clear exceptions, we were all more or less equal, and we went at it like club members. There were few wars, and most of us went out to eat and drink together afterward. We worked on what we considered most lacking, a better left hook, a sharper jab, a hook off the jab, a heavier or faster right hand. Some of us even ventured into combinations, but never too far. Mediocre condition was the scythe that cut into the rate of one’s improvement. It is hard to describe how tired you can get in a three-minute round when you are forced to labor at your utmost. Two-minute rounds, the duration employed in the Golden Gloves for subnovices, would have been a considerably more satisfactory interval for us, but at the Gramercy, our bell was set on a three-minute professional interval, with only that quick sixty seconds of rest before it rang again. So we worked through three-minute rounds, and paid the price: the last thirty seconds of a three-minute round can get to feel as long as the first two and a half minutes. Going a couple of such rounds in a row (which total of six minutes is equal to a three-round subnovice bout), you often got tired enough to find it considerably easier to take the other’s arm-weary punch to your head rather than to raise your own bone-dead arms in defense.

  Ryan O’Neal came to join us, however, and our Saturdays were altered. Ryan was making a movie in New York that season, and José Torres was his friend; José had worked as a boxing adviser on The Main Event, a comedy O’Neal had made with Barbra Streisand. Now, each Saturday morning, after five days of shooting on his film, O’Neal would come into the Gramercy.

  He was good enough to have been a ring professional. When they boxed, Torres could not play with him, and once Ryan even managed to catch José with a shot to the mouth that drew a little blood. That was equal to sacrilege. Torres nodded curtly and stepped out of the ring. It was a sizable rebuke. The retaliation he had chosen not to express was as palpable as the air in summer before a storm and O’Neal looked sheepish, like a man who is too far from home to be caught without a raincoat.

  After that, he and José did not box too frequently, and when they did, all the parameters were kept in place. O’Neal began to work out instead with whoever was there. By our measure, he was in impressive condition. He would take us on serially, each of us going for a round or two depending on our ability to continue, and by the end of his workout he had boxed his way through eight to ten rounds against such easy opposition. Then he would go off to play racquetball with Farrah Fawcett.

  Getting in the ring with Ryan O’Neal became not only the focus of each Saturday, but the point to what some of us had been half-looking to do for years, that is, get extended a little in the ring. Ryan could be mean as cat piss. Even when he was carrying a man, he would punish him, and when he had dislikes, he liked to take them out on the opponent. In spite of every love affair in his private life, public fodder for more than a decade to the gossip columns, Ryan had his dry spot—the puritanism of the Irish. He took a secret dislike to the bearded editor of the porny magazine who happened to be not much of a boxer. The editor was awkward in the ring, so it was not hard to play tricks on him. He had surprising stamina, however. Until Ryan came along, the pornographer had, in fact, the most notable stamina of any of us. Maybe Ryan equated that ability to sexual prowess and disapproved of its presence in so unworthy a vessel, maybe he just disliked hirsute New York lumpen intelligentsia, but, in any case, he all but disemboweled the man, throwing cruel left hooks to the stomach until the editor collapsed, still conscious, in the middle of the second round, wholly unable to go on. What made it worse was that the pornographer’s lady love, a good-looking girl who worked in a massage parlor, was witnessing it all at ringside. Something in their love—and it was, after all, their love—was lost that day.

  I happened to be next in the ring with Ryan, which proved to be my good luck. After every discharge of mean feelings, Ryan would turn angelic. A little ashamed, I expect, of what he had just done to the pornographer, he was not now boxing like a movie star—he certainly did not protect his face. Since the man he had hurt happened to be a sweet guy, extraordinarily optimistic about life (which is probably how he had gotten into pornography in the first place), I liked the editor. When I saw him take this beating, I recognized that I saw him as a friend. If this seems something of a digression, let me say that it helps to carry the auctorial voice around the embarrassment of declaring that I boxed better on that day than I ever did before, or since. I was in a rare mean mood myself, mean enough not to be afraid of Ryan, and—it is very hard to do any kind of good boxing against a superior without some premise to carry you—I was feeling like an avenger. And here was Ryan boxing with his face. It was hard not to hit him straight rights, and he reacted with all the happiness of seeing a beloved senior relative get up from a sickbed. In our first clinch, he whispered, “You punch sharper than anyone here.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I told him.

  We fell into a mutually pleasing pattern. He would give me his face for a target, I would bop it, and he would counterpunch. He hit harder than anyone else in the club, but that was the day when my two systems of anxiety were in quiet balance, and I never enjoyed boxing as much.

  Following that Saturday, Ryan and I took up predictable weekly behavior. I would invariably be the first to box with him (mainly, I think, so I could enjoy watching the others now that I was done) and he would continue to spar with his hands low, daring me to catch him. I would, often enough, and he would counterpunch. How much he took off his blows I do not know—at whatever level he gunned down his motors for me, his punches still took your head half around, or left a space in your gut, and I, in turn, reduced my punches very little for him. Whatever the equilibrium, we had found it, and it was as close as it ever came for me to gain some knowledge of how a professional might feel in a real bout for money with a hard-hearted crowd out there and the spirit of electricity in the ring lights. Damn, it was exciting. I even came to understand what it was to feel love for the man you were fighting because he had forced you to go a little beyond yourself, and I never took as many good punches or threw as many as in those one or two rounds each Saturday with Ryan O’Neal.

  Life, in the form of Luce publications, caught up with this romance. Ryan, having produced my Saturday illumination, would then box with another three or four of us and kept to his habit—I always thought it was penance for having become a movie star—of showing that good-looking open face, so relatively easy to score upon.

  There came a day when I popped him in the left eye a few times running and the b
oxers who came after me did approximately as much in the same place, and when he was done, he had a mouse. That little animal got into the papers. One of the gossip columns recounted how Norman Mailer had given Ryan O’Neal a shiner.

  People magazine called up. They were ready to do a story. The dangers were obvious. We would all be famous for too little. So I turned the reporter from People over to José Torres. José would know how to protect Ryan.

  He did. For my money, he protected him too well. “Ryan could have easily beaten Norman up,” said Torres for publication—which was exactly true. I understood that it was true with all the hard objective core of my pride in being a writer who would always look into the eye of the truth, that severe gray lady, gray as the Gramercy Gym, but, José, José, I whispered within, how about a little transcendence?

  Torres was much too agile, however, to sacrifice one friend altogether in order to protect another. So, for People magazine, he added: “Norman could whip Sly Stallone in one round.”

  “Yes,” I said later to José, “and what happens when I run into Stallone?”

  José shrugged. More immediate problems were usually waiting for him around any corner.

  I do not recall if it was one year or two or three before I encountered Sylvester Stallone, but it did happen one night in a particularly dark disco with a raked floor.

  “I understand,” said Stallone, “that you’re the guy who can beat me in one round.”

  He had never looked in finer shape.

  “Yeah,” I said, applying all the thickener I could muster to my voice, “I remember when José said that, I said to him, ‘Yeah, swell, but what happens if I don’t knock Stallone out in one round?’ and José said, ‘Oh, then he will keel you.’ ”

  Stallone gave his sad, sleepy-eyed smile. “Mr. Mailer, I can assure you, I don’t go around killing people.”