Raw Fish Like Boxing Gloves
Manny Weinberg was laid out like a knocked-out lightweight at his Madison Square Garden debut. The old unfulfilled fighter turned unfulfilled trainer clinched his chest on the ambulance gurney, as it rushed under the Brooklyn L train.
But this was no French Connection. No Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle snaking his car in a crashing train pursuit of a pea coat dressed European, who exports white powder death through New World channels to make Old World criminals richer.
He thought of this movie as the ambulance's red lights reflected off the windows of franchise coffee shops filled with gentrified young professionals who thought some how they could be Brooklyn without a Brooklyn past. Without a Brooklynese old man teaching a young man how to throw a punch, or catch a threadbare baseball. How to survive on a street of tough boys who grew into tough men. Some became doctors, lawyers, captains of Wall Street, politicians--while others never left, never gave up throwing punches. Never stopped watching the prissy present eat up the past. Where the neighbourhood that was always home would soon be never more. When the last cannoli, last blintz, last beer and sausage, would be surrendered to a vegan butter cookie.
Manny grabbed his chest. His heart felt stuck, frozen, like it couldn't move the blood through his aged arteries. Word on the street was the One Lucky would be bought out and turned into a chocolate mousse cafe where baristas in made in China black aprons poured ironic cups of Cafe Americano. He'd heard the Carney Boxing Club would be converted into a California style Pilates studio with long fingered Shiatsu massages on the side.
"Pop, Pop, don't die on me," his newly connected Nova Scotia son Hickory begged of him as he rode in the ambulance. "We were going to be a father and son team after all these years. You were going to make me Champ."
The edges of CTE. The onset of senility. He still had patches of reality. The clarity of reflection. "Ya, know," he said. "My heart, my chest, it don't hurt so much, no more. He shook his head a bit. "Maybe I don't got no heart attack. See's I was hungry last night and I dropped into the only place open. Some Japanese sushi place. What do I know what sushi is. So they's send my d'ese small plates with little pieces of raw fish on rice. They's look like little boxing gloves. And they's don't serve no beer in dese places. I know. I asked. Just little cups of green tea like your drinking out of a shot glass. So I's get the check, and it's $200. For what, little pieces of fish d'at they's don't even bother cooking. Da whole thing must a made me sick."
Hickory, begins to laugh. "Know what you mean, Pops. We're fried fish and beer kinda guys."
"Get me outta this place," Manny says to the driver.
The driver shrugs. "Nah, we still got a check you out at the hospital. You sound a lot like my old man, though. A straight shooter. He died six months ago. Used to take me to the fights as a kid. Some fancy lady fashion designer from Los Angeles rents his apartment now. $3,000 a month, can you believe it? I see her sometimes at the sushi bar. Even though I'd a guessed she was a vegan."
The driver turned off the flashing lights. He ended the siren. The ambulance drove up to the hospital gates.
Then, out of no where, a man in a pea coat crashes a French Citroen into the side of the ambulance...
