POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART II

“POET … PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART I” ended with the following:

“Omigod! A memory suddenly clicks on in your mind! Oh SHIT! I know what this is about!”

Everybody leans forward.  The gorilla football coach, sizing you up with a crocodile grin says, “So how ‘bout you and me, we have us a little sparring session out in the gym this afternoon? You could, you know, give me some pointers.”

With a futile shake of the head, you mutter, “For crying out loud, I can’t believe this is happening all over again!”

But it is.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A JOURNEY OF 1000 MILES BEGINS WITH…

“It’s a strange life, no matter how you shake it, it’s a strange life…” – Dave Mallett

Please know that I can’t write fiction to save my life. Believe me, I’ve tried. So whatever it is I end up writing, it always comes directly from real experiences. The above little round-table dialogue happened just as I’ve described it, if not word for exact word. And the conversation left me feeling that our good ol’, typical, every day teachers’ luncheon had (whoosh!) just suddenly deep-sixed itself straight down Alice’s Wonderland rabbit hole! 

I mean, put yourself in my shoes—someone you’d just met, somebody to whom you had spoken only those three, maybe four sentences (in your life), just suddenly willy-nilly turns the conversation inside out and upside down just like that! By outing you as a boxer. I mean, If I’d been as a matador, would that be any more bizarre? I was looking her eye to eye across the table thinking, OK, so who’s the dweeb that let the escaped inmatein here?

Meanwhile, it was a little excruciating, the way everybody just keptsitting there, silently gawking. Things had gotten creepy fast. I was like, C’mon people! Say something! Can’t somebody at least say, “Well. This is a little awkward, isn’t it!” I was all knotted up in frustration.

And then, like I said, it hit me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

You know, it so amazes me how one little decision you make can bend the vector of your life in future ways you’d never imagine. Just as a beam of light bends when it passes through a clear glass of water. And once you make that decision, and then go forward with it, you‘re living in an imperceptibly altered universe.

I made a little decision back in 1966. I was a college junior at the time.

I’d started hanging out in the gymnasium, basically because my roommate and I had taken up playing handball two or three times a week. I was experiencing a lot of stress from some of my classes that year (especially chemistry), and it helped me relax, and burn off some of my nervous energy. Plus, at the same time it was getting me into excellent shape. I’d been jumping rope there, doing pull-ups, push-ups, crunches, etc. almost every week day. And the feeling I was getting from the workouts was so satisfying, so incredibly therapeutic.

But anyway, I started noticing this young guy who was also showing up daily at the gym. A loner, it seemed, just about my height and weight, and short like me. Anyway, he was sticking to a regimen similar to mine, but with one big exception. There was a punching bag hanging down, over in one corner of the room. Not the big bag (no, not one of those Rocky Balboa’s frozen-hanging-steer-carcass-punching-bags in the slaughter house meat freezer), but the small one known commonly as the speed bag or peanut bag. About the size of a football.  

And man, when he went to work on that thing, I couldn’t take my eyes off his “magic.” Yeah, I just called it magic, even though it wasn’t anything you can’s see in the movies from time to time. In fact, most serious athletes training for the ring could probably match this guy’s speed and timing on it. Because those guys all learn to do that, don’t they.

But here’s the thing: (1) I’d never personally witnessed someone doing the routine up close and personal, and never right there in the same room as I, and (2) it turned out that there was a kind of crude beauty to it. This guy’s fists made the little bag “disappear” in a blur! And even watching him up close, I could not see how he was possibly pulling that off.

He’d start off with a probing little punch or two at first, and then more taps, but once he’d let his fists go and got that little blur of a bag purring like a twelve-horse Yamaha outboard motor, his arms would seemingly no longer be moving. And surprisingly his fists didn’t seem to be all that busy either, although of course they were doing what they had to do. I mean, his mitts were just casually rolling, not that fast either, round and round about each other in the air like a large pair of twiddling thumbs. Or, so it seemed, almost like some little old lady’s’ hands when she’s crocheting.

But… man, he’d ply that bag into a frickin’ leather tuning fork! So from my inexperienced point of view, it looked amazing. I mean I saw his two arms, attached to that rackety blur, as a pair of biological jumper cables keeping that noisy little motor running. It just looked so cool.

I definitely knew I would like to try my hand at it.

But I was shy, so I  waited till he’d left. Then I tiptoed over to the bag and gingerly gave it a couple of friendly, nothing-burger, taps. Of course the bag didn’t do anything more notable than swing back and forth a couple of times and then (not being at all impressed with my assault) fell right back sleep again. Just hanging there, practically taunting me with its superior, leathery That all ya got? Punk?

So I followed that up with a serious, sharp punch with my lightning right!

Before my left got a chance to fly up there into the fray to back me up, that rebounding bag of cement whapped my nose one hell of a nasty blow that raced shockwaves of excruciating pain right through my eyeballs and on back to my unsuspecting brain! I was wobbled, nearly dropped right there in a one-punch knockout loss! My eyes, immediately blinded behind a welled-up flood of tears; my wasp-stung schnozz oozing, but not with blood! I mean… hey. Baby, that HURT!

I staggered away like a drunk, desperate to get myself safely out of range before another attack of the damned thing! I mean, bite me once, shame on you! Bite me twice, shame on me!

The pain took only a little while to fade. But the black and blue bruises all over my ego would hang in there for days. I have to admit it: I’m a snowflake. I have a fragile ego. And this… it just felt so… unfair. Blindsiding me with Newton’s Third law like that. I never saw it coming.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I saw the guy again a couple of days later, approached him, and humbled myself. “How the hell do you do this?” I asked. “Not that I’m necessarily planning on trying it, mind you.” And yes, there I actually was. Momentarily lowering my self-esteem by allowing myself by playing the old See, I’m just asking for a friend card. “I mean, you make it look so easy.”

This young man was a true gentleman. He generously took me under his wing and walked me through the ABC’s of it. Who knows? Maybe he took one look at me and saw a potential future heavyweight champion of the world.

“First and foremost, this is not a punching bag,” he began. “It’s a speed bag. Idiots come in here, take one powerful haymaker swing at it, to show how tough they are, and bust the thing. Then, guess what. We don’t have a bag for another a couple of weeks. So. This bag is not about power or strength. It is about speed and timing only. OK?”

“OK!” In my mind, I checked off No punching the punching bag. “Got it.”

“So then…” And he began walking me through the exercise in slow motion. It was like stop-motion photography. “It’s a one-two-three count rhythm you’re after. Like in music. So, think of yourself playing an instrument. A percussion instrument. With your hands.

“So first of course you make fists, right? Only then… instead of striking the bag knuckles-first, you bat it away with the side of your fist. Picture yourself driving a nail into a plank of wood, bare-handed. You wouldn’t use your knuckles for that, would you. No. You’d bang it like your fist was a hammer. Or… think of knocking on somebody’s door.  Normally, you’d tap with your knuckles. But if you were a cop serving a warrant, say, you’d hammer the door with the side of your fist: bam bam bam! It’s the police, OPEN UP!”

“Side of your fist… got it!”

“OK. Now for the rhythm part. Here’s the bag, just hanging there, right? OK. Watch what happens when I tap it with the side of my fist.”

He does that: the bag flies backward, strikes the rear of the overhead horizontal backboard Bang! to which the bag’s swivel is attached. It flies back (just as it did when it nearly coldcocked me the other day) and, in rebound, slams the backboard in the front: Bang! Rebounds back again, once again striking the rear of the backboard. Bang!

“See? Bam bam bam. One two three. That’s your percussion instrument rhythm.”

I was perplexed. “Uhmm… Wait. I counted four. The bag came back again and hit the board for a fourth bam.”

“Oh, right! But like I said, we only want three. So what you do is… you don’t allow the fourth one to happen.”

“Uhm… I don’t?”

“No. You stop the swings after the three-count. And you do that with the next strike of your fist, catching it in motion. Which starts the count all over again. See?” He demonstrates with the bag, very much in slow motion. “Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! One two three. Fist! Bam bam bam. Fist! “And so on and so forth.

“So no, as you see, there’s no fourth bam allowed. And, as you also saw, I was only doing this one-handed. Which is the best way for you, a beginner, to get your timing down. OK, first do it for a while with your right; then switch over and do it for a while with just your left. Then when you get tired of that, you’ll alternate using both: right fist-bam bam bam, left fist-bam bam bam, right fist-bam bam bam…and so on.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oops! We’ll stop here.

OK, a little voice inside my head just whispered all private to me, “You’re getting boring, Tommy.”

So… suffice it for me to quickly say that (A) I managed to get so I could do this using both fists… still in slow motion. Then, (B) with both fists fairly fast. Pretty soon, you could say I was getting pretty fast indeed. Soon after that, if you saw me standing there working that speed bag, you could easily surmise, “Wow, check him out. Now that guy’s a boxer, if ever I saw one.”

But wait! It gets better! My gymnasium friend started teaching me little tricks, like getting my elbows and forehead involved in the fray. Without bragging, I have to say (again, without bragging now) that as a Speed Bagger… I… was… MAGNIFICENT!  I had graduated Maga Cum Laude from Speed Bagging University. I should have had my own float in the Rose Bowl Parade!

It’s a shame they didn’t have Speed Bagger competitions back then. Just sayin’.

OK, OK, OK. Let’s just let it stand that I was… ahem… in my own opinion, pretty darned good at it, alright? (Not to blow my own horn, of course.)

SO, THANKS FOR READING, AND THANKS FOR SUBSCRIBING. AND KEEP YOUR EYE PEELED FOR THE FINALE: “POET… PEACENIK… PUGILIST? PART III COMING SOON!