Hickory McCracken Chronicles:

Round II

 It happens on a Brooklyn morning.

Early, before the bakers’ rise their sour dough breads. Before the cold gusts of wind die down. Before the cracked thin ice on New York sidewalks once paved by immigrant men melt under a new sun. It happens in a boxing club before the fighters arrive for their early training. Before the air fills with the smell of aspiration and sweat rolling off the dreams and shiny skin of the next Durans and Mayweathers. It is during this short hour of in between time when success and failure, young and old, light and darkness meet. It is the time when an old man struggles with his mind... he can’t remember where he placed the broom.

Manny Weinberg. Ole’ Pops they call him. Fought a thousand rounds. Trained a thousand fighters. For years now he’s run the Carney Boxing Club near the rolling and creaking L Train that goes one last stop to Coney Island. He’s always kept the club safe and clean from drugs and mobsters, and no good promoters in shiny suits who steal fighting lives with the false glitter of spoken contracts.

This morning he can’t remember where he put things at the club. The things he uses to clean up before the fighters arrive. His memory is dying in the last seconds of the last round against a fighter no one can defeat inside or outside the ring—time.

The CTE. The first stages of dementia. His mind moves from lucidness of a moment to nothingness of not knowing. Manny has seen enough lonely punch drunk fighters jab against imaginary demon shadows to realize that his memories are like the slow drops of water from a drying bottle.

He hears the rumble of the first L train of the morning. The sharp sound of the steel wheels hurt his head. He remembers now the broom is in the tall closet next to his office. He takes the broom and holds it tight and clinches the top of the handle against his chest.

Manny sweeps in short strokes along the floor and under the ring bringing along grit and dust. He feels in an odd way the rhythm of a fighter—a ghost fighter.

He thinks back to the swift days of his youth in the 1960s. When he went to Canada to fight against another swift fighter who had an Irish name and fists that could break down granite walls. Manny thinks he won the fight, or maybe he lost, or maybe he and the Irishman split the decision. His mind won’t decide.

Manny thinks of the girl he met in Canada. A young hippy with long straight hair and beautiful eyes and wanting lips. She with the beads and flowers in her hair. He with his boxing trunks and leather gloves. She the girl who believed in peace and the power of love, saw a sensitive heart inside the Brooklyn fighter. She believed she could tame him, free Manny Weinberg of Brooklyn boxing from his savage urban world and join her in a country commune.

They made love every night for a week. Manny had never been so close to being completely taken by the spirit and soul of a woman. But in the end the dance of the bloody canvas took him away from the girl he loved. He left her a good-bye note. She cried at the edge of a Canadian lake.

Last week Ole’ Pops got a letter. A letter only to be sent after the death of its author: Wanda McCracken. Manny Weinberg had a son. The boy conceived in a cabin along a Canadian lake. Wanda called the boy Hickory after the trees that swayed above their love making in the summer breeze. The boy didn’t know who his father was.

Manny checked the flights to Canada. Tomorrow….