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**Vincent Lane** · (06-04-2017)

"Well it's hard to believe that somebody tricked you
When you can see you were only high
It's all up to you so you gamble
Flat on your face and into the fire."

“Vinnie, this is crazy.”

Roxy wouldn’t let it go. She’d been hounding me ever since she found out I was getting back in the ring.

“You’ve got nothing left to prove. Nothing. You had the belt. You run the show. This is just asking for a trip to the hospital.”

“Thanks for the faith, babe.”

I ground my cigarette into an ashtray I dug up in a closet somewhere. Something kitschy from a tourist trap out on the pier. My empty vape had been sitting on a shelf for nearly a week now. I lit another.

“You know I have all the faith in the world in you, baby… but you heard the docs when they had you in for the surgery. One bad bump. One. It could cripple you.”

“So I don’t take a bad bump. Easy. This is a big deal, Rox. This is everything. This is what Shane was hoping could happen when he handed me the reigns, dude! Look what I’ve done! Raven? Brown? In an XWF ring? NO one could have made that happen but me. Not even Shane himself… and definitely not Theo Pryce. There’s only one language anyone understands in this business, and it’s spoken between the ropes.”

The second bottle of Jack on the table in front of me was a little tougher to open than the first. My fingers were tingling. I got the cap off and poured a glass, looking down at a swirling reflection of my face in the brown liquid before taking a sip.

“You don’t have to do it yourself, Vinnie! You run the company. You could have put anyone else in there. Anyone. You could have had Caedus take care of the Kings. You could have gotten another old vet to return, like Blizzard or any of the others you talk to. Their bodies are in ring shape, yours isn’t.”

“I’ve been working on it.”

I had. Hitting the gym five days a week after leaving the office. Getting some ring time in down at the training center with some young rooks. It’s why that reflection in the glass had such dep, black bags under its eyes.

“You can’t work on making your neck better. You think the Kings won’t target it? Theo isn’t stupid, Vinnie, none of them are.”

“They’re parasites.”

Roxy stood there with her hands on her hips, looking every bit the centerfold that she was. There in the dining room of this massive compound I’d had built out in Malibu just for her, the place we dubbed the Pink Palisades to go along with the hot shade we painted the exterior, she stood there and even with a frown on her face she wasn’t able to look any less like an angel. She wasn’t going to stop trying to get me to back out of the match, I knew, but she was going to fail. And she knew that just as well.

“What have they even done that’s so bad, Vinnie? Sure, they snuck their way into the company, but what bad have they caused? Isn’t it possible you’re a little… obsessed?”

That was a button I wasn’t expecting to be pressed. I didn’t really mean to throw the glass, but I did it. I was just tired. Exhausted, really. The shattered fragments hit a brick wall across the room, next to a small bookshelf, and the last sip of whisky ran down the stones like blood. I just stood there and breathed heavy for a second, not wanting to look at Roxy and see whatever emotion what I’d just done had caused.

“I’ll get a broom.”

She said it vacantly and walked away. I picked up the chair I’d knocked backward when I jumped up to my feet, then walked calmly over to the broken glass, picking up the bigger pieces with my bare hands and opening a cut across my palm. On the shelf nearby was a family album of mine, and I grabbed it before heading back and placing it on the table, then throwing the glass shards into a wastebasket hidden under the kitchen sink.

I ran my hand under the water until the bleeding slowed, then wrapped it in a dish towel and went back to the table. I started flipping through laminated pages of old photos that my mom had spent meticulous time putting inside the sticky film at perfect angles and spacings to one another. One was of a little blonde kid standing next to a muscular man, both holding their fists up in front of their faces and posing for the camera with big smiles across their faces.

“Who’s that guy, Vinnie?”

I didn’t know she was back, but the hand on the nape of my neck told me we were fine. That we didn’t need to talk about it right now. That a new subject was fine.

“That’s my Uncle Gerry,” I told her. “He was almost the best in the world.”

Gerry Cooney’s last professional fight was hard to watch.

It was in early 1990, and even though he was boxing another veteran (they never call athletes “old,” they always call them “veterans”) by the well-known name of George Foreman, it was obvious that Cooney was outclassed and past his prime. In the second round, Foreman knocked Gerry Cooney to the canvas, then waited until he stood up, and knocked him down again. It was a sad end to the career of a man I considered family. I remember the fight well because it happened so soon after my mother and father split up.

If you told me my old man hadn’t shed a tear in his life between infancy and the day he told us he was leaving, I’d have believed you based solely on the tone of his voice. It wasn’t so much the weight of the announcement – he and I were both adept at shouldering the burdens of our emotional baggage by then. I was just a Middle School kid and a new decade was looming a few months off, after all. I was preparing myself to be one of the most stoic and uninspired Generation X-ers to ever wear a flannel shirt. In four years I’d think that the most horrific moment of my life was when Kurt Cobain swallowed his shotgun, but at the moment I was watching my little sister scream.

“Why do you want to go, Daddy?” she wailed. She was so much younger than me. It was probably her unexpected conception that kept my parents together for as long as they were.

“I don’t want to, don’t you see I don’t want to?”

Something about the desperation in her voice is what first cracked Dad’s stone-carved face. I don’t remember feeling sad, because I’d seen my parents’ divorce as inevitable for a while, but I was fascinated by the way his face trembled and the way his normally strong voice wavered. Grooves in his weather beaten face twisted like fault lines.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he kept saying to her. His eyes, an identical blue to my own and my sister’s, were welled up and spilling over. My dad had never given me any hint that he could feel something even remotely close to sad enough to cry before. Crying was what my mother and sister would do when Dad’s rage inevitably rose to a snarling, shouting crescendo. Crying was for girls, and I was reminded of that with every derisive, disappointed look I got from the old man if a tear dared roll down my cheek.

My sister was still bawling into dad’s yellow bathrobe when I got tired of watching and went to my room. I spent the next few hours wondering if my dad would be ashamed of crying, of being a girl. I pictured giving him the same look he would give me. When I finally fell asleep I felt far away.

After the split, my dad and I would see each other mostly on weekends. We’d go to stores sometimes, or to burger joints, but mostly we’d just go back to Mugsy’s, his favorite bar for as long as I could remember. We were walking that way to go to the fight when he told me the story of Gerry Cooney and him at Mugsy’s for probably the hundredth time in my life.

“Gerry, he was just a kid then, you know?”

“I know, Dad,” I said, more interested in whatever tape I’d put in my Walkman that morning. Guns N’ Roses or Alice In Chains, something loud.

“He was a big kid, though. Huge. Your old man don’t take no shit from anyone, though.”

It was true. My father was a hard man. He had hands that felt like granite and carried a bullet from Vietnam somewhere in the flesh of his leg. Anyone who gave my dad shit got shit right back, and it went Dad’s way more often than not. Even my friends at school had heard about the three unlucky muggers who got beaten into the dirt when they’d tried to get the old man’s wallet.

I started daydreaming while he went through the familiar lines of his story. I thought of when I first heard it, riding in the back of the station wagon as a nine year old kid. It’s amazing what you can remember, or what you think you can remember.

The inaugural trip to Mugsy’s. Dad was driving, and Mom was laughing a little too loud, as she always did after a glass or two of wine. She had undoubtedly heard the Gerry Cooney story dozens of times by the time I was that age, but she smiled and laughed at all the right spots, just like she was supposed to.

“So, this kid, obviously no more than seventeen, comes in to Mugs’ and tells me to get him a beer,” Dad said, then slipped his can of Schaefer back into the cup holder between the front seats. “He didn’t ask me, you understand, he told me to get him a beer.”

That was the sticking point for my dad, you see. He didn’t care that Gerry Cooney was underage when he came into the bar – it was the way he approached him.

“I still can’t believe that!” my mother said.

“Yeah, well, Mugs couldn’t believe it when I looked right at Cooney and told him to go fuck himself!” That elicited another bleat of laughter from Mom. It was the big punch line of the story.

As a little kid, on my way to watch a huge prize fight at a bar with my parents, I was wide eyed and excited. The story was new to me then, and hearing about how much of a superhero my dad was thrilled me.

“Mugs came around the bar, and I swear, Sha, his eyeballs were as big as paper plates,” my dad went on, seeing me lean forward in my seat to hear him better. He looked back at me then and did an exaggerated impersonation of Mugsy’s Italian-New Yorker voice, with his eyes darting back and forth like flies in a porch light. “’Ay, Joey,’ he says, ‘ay, don’t you know who dat is, dere?’” My mom thought this was a riot, or at least she acted like it.

“He was probably terrified, Joe!”

“Yeah, well, I might have been terrified too if I’d known I just told a New York Golden Gloves winning boxer to fuck off.” Another choking laugh from Mom. “Anyway, Mugs told me it was Gerry Cooney, and then I looked back over at the kid and he had this smirk on his face, you know? He looked right at me and said ‘So, are you gonna get me that beer or what?’”

Dad was getting animated in his storytelling now. His eyes were wide and his hands were moving around like he was trying to ward off a swarm of bees. We were pulling into the bar’s parking lot by then, so he was trying to wrap it up.

“So’s I come around the front of the bar, you know, and I put my hand around the back of Gerry’s neck, Mugsy’s about shitting himself, and Gerry’s looking at me like no one’s ever told him no before. ‘You know who I am?’ he says. I says back, I don’t give a damn who you are, you can get the hell out of this bar walking or being carried!”

Thinking of my dad tossing Gerry Cooney out of a bar made me feel like I was the son of Superman. Every time Gerry would come to the house for dinner or drop off Christmas presents for my folks and me, all I could think about was how big and strong he looked. He had a face that looked like it could knock down walls, and his hands were the size of baseball mitts. If my dad sent that guy scurrying out of a bar the way he said he did, then he must have been the most terrifying man on Long Island.

We got out of the car and went into Mugsy’s then, walking through the parking lot that was full of cars in the cool summer evening breeze. When we got inside, Mugsy immediately rushed over and gave my mother a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“Sharon, look at you, beautiful, you ain’t left this goon yet?” The three of them laughed. Mugsy then bent down towards me and tousled my hair. His fingers smelled like old cigarettes. “Hey kiddo, how you doin’?”

“Dad was just telling me about when he threw Uncle Gerry out of your bar!”

They exploded into laughter like I was on stage at a comedy club. Mugsy had tears in his eyes from laughing so hard by the time he collected himself and bent down toward me again.

“Kiddo, listen – your father, God bless him, is either stupid or crazy. And I’m pretty sure he ain’t stupid, you know what I mean?”

Mugsy led me to the side of the bar, where he had an arcade machine. We must have passed half a dozen life sized pictures of Gerry Cooney, and there was a big green banner hanging over the bar that said “Gerry Cooney – The Great White Hope!” It was true, too, even though Gerry didn’t like to make it into a race thing. All the old timer Irish and Italians in New York were rooting for the hometown boy, and Don King was quick to bring up that there hadn’t been a white world champion in over twenty years. To me, though, he was just Uncle Gerry. He wasn’t the hero of a race or of a city, he was just a nice guy with a funny shaped nose who bought me a pair of boxing gloves for my birthday and taught me how to put my guard up.

“You just put one hand on either side of your face, kid,” he told me, demonstrating with his sledgehammer fists, “you keep them hands up and your head down, and you’ll be fine.”

When Mugsy got me in front of the machine, he showed me how the front of the game was broken open. He showed me how to slide the panel over and flick the little metal arm with my finger, so the machine thought I was dropping quarters into it. It was one of those typical early 1980s space games, with a big red track ball ready to pinch the skin of your palm in the middle and one yellow button to shoot the asteroids or whatever with. Funny thing, there was no winning. You never ran out of asteroids. You just tried your hardest to shoot more than the last guy did.

Mugsy brought me a huge, fizzing glass of Coca-Cola, with what looked like a ton of cherries in it. The maraschino syrup sweetened it up even more, and it tasted like a glass of candy. I spent hours shooting the asteroids while the bar full of my dad and his friends cheered for Gerry Cooney and booed for Larry Holmes. My soda glass never got empty.

It felt like forever before we got back in the car to go home that night. I was still excited from my dad’s stories and from drinking gallons of Coke while demolishing meteorites for free. I had no idea that Gerry Cooney threw in the towel in round thirteen.

The ride home was different. There was weight in the air. Dad looked like he was the one who got knocked around the ring that night. My mother tried to break the tension, but she was immediately and brusquely rebuked.

“Well, you don’t have to be an asshole, Joe, it’s just a fight!”

“Would you shut your fuckin’ trap, hah?”

I knew the routine. They were going to keep digging at each other until they were both hollering incomprehensibly. I had dug out my newest toy, the Walkman I still had ten years later. I usually used it when Dad would insist on playing his old Elvis music on long car trips. Like all tri-state area kids back then I was obsessed with Bruce Springsteen, and while my mom and dad started gesticulating and screaming at one another on the ride home, I turned up “Born to Run” and laid my head against the cold glass of the car window. I stopped looking at them. I watched the black road and imagined it lifting up like a bridge into the night sky, and I pretended I was in an airplane rushing down a runway somewhere, going to fly off into the dark. My hands were up. My head was down.

My dad and I finally got back to Mugsy’s to see Gerry Cooney fight George Foreman. It wasn’t full of excitement and fanfare like when he and Holmes had set the purse record back in 1982, but there was still some optimism. Cooney hadn’t fought in three years, so it could have been a bit of a comeback. Mugs had even found the old “Hype” banner and hung it in the corner over the arcade machines.

Mugsy looked older than dirt, his face had more wrinkles in it than the advertisements for the bar on the back of bus stop benches, but he still made me my soda full of cherries and nodded towards the arcade machine like he always did when me and Dad would show up at the bar. I was just slurping down half of the Coke and sliding open the little broken panel to drop in a hundred pretend quarters when I overheard my dad and Mugsy talking in the empty barroom.

“The bar’s dyin’, Joey.”

“Mugs, come on, you do alright. Hell, I’m in five days a week.” They laughed, but it wasn’t the happy laughter from before. Mugsy coughed after everything he said now.

“Don’t nobody give a crap about boxers like Cooney no more, Joey. They just wanna watch Tyson kill someone in thirty seconds.”

“Tyson’s a fucking punk.”

“Yeah, he’s a punk, but he’s a killer, Joey. You wouldn’t a’ thrown him out of here.”

“Like Hell.”

“You’re crazy, Joey.” Mugsy coughed for a solid minute. “You talk to Sharon lately?”

“No, Mugs, we don’t really talk. I just take the bus over or walk the kid over, you know?”

Dad had lost his license earlier that year after another DWI. Mugsy didn’t say anything else and I went back to blowing up the asteroids until the fight started. I wanted to watch the match with the rest of the men, but, Mugs told me I couldn’t legally sit at the bar anymore. I set my coke next to dad’s beer and watched in silence as the two boxers slowly circled one another. There was a brief moment, when Cooney staggered Foreman, that my pop put his hand on my shoulder and I kind of felt like one of the guys. People were smiling, but it was short lived. Soon Foreman was knocking Cooney around, and the slump of defeat was in his shoulders. My dad and Mugsy slumped the same way.

When Gerry Cooney hit the canvas the second time my dad grabbed for his beer but picked up my coke instead, and when he put it to his lips it sent him into a fit. His eyes bugged and he threw the glass behind him, where it shattered on the floor. The brown liquid was still fizzing in the puddles across the hardwood, and the six cherries slumped sideways against their stems like a group of sinking ships.

In the 20 years since Foreman knocked my Uncle Gerry flat in the middle of the ring, Mugsy’s had changed hands and names more times than I can count. I know for a while it was a biker joint, and then a gay bar. Good thing Mugs was long dead by then.

These days, Mugsy’s is just a bar. The walls and the doors and the windows are all in the same place, but the bar itself is in a different spot and the arcade game is long gone, replaced in a way by the little raised platform the DJ uses for karaoke. I came to say goodbye. Goodbye to Mugsy’s, goodbye to New York, and goodbye to my father. It took me a couple of months to accept that Dad was gone, and even longer to come to terms with the way he went out.

They weren’t ever able to pull his car apart from the other one he’d hit on the Jericho Turnpike. The two hunks of metal had essentially become one, permanently intertwined with each other. He wasn’t allowed to drive. He wasn’t sober enough to drive. But he wanted to go back to Mugsy’s and so he found a friend willing to lend him a ride. In some ways, he had never left there anyway, and one wrong right turn made sure he never would.

A girl got on the stage for her turn to sing, and it was "Born to Run." I hummed along and moved the cherries in my glass around with the stirrer and left when she was done.

Goodbye.

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