Million Dollar Baby (32 page)

His next fight was six rounds again, and then I moved him up to eight. Then I tried him at 10 rounds against a solid Mexican opponent. KO win in five.

Every time, he’d get so spooked before a fight that he’d piss himself in the ring. I had to spill water on the canvas so nobody’d know, had to keep him in black shorts so nobody’d see. Don’t misunderstand. All fighters are spooky before a fight, even the ones who go to sleep on you in the dressing room. It’s a natural thing. So I’d tell him that he wasn’t scared at all, that it was just his system putting itself in high gear. I told him how fighting bulls shit and piss during a bullfight and how they’d still tear ass. That made Ernie laugh.

“Yeah, like a raging bull, that’s me, like Jake LaMotta.”

The story worked every time. Now that he was back fighting 10-round fights again, he won six in a row, all with good fighters, four by KO. Ernie was countering like a champion from bell to bell. Now my dick was hard.

Ernie took out a couple more opponents. He worked his way inside behind his jab just like in the gym, waited for the guys to commit, and then he took them out with body shots. Busted the ribs of one boy. Hit the other in the heart. Boy went stiff, arms and legs went all shaky like he’s electrocuted, and then he pitches face-first onto the canvas.

“Peachy! Peachy! Peachy!”

There was no more us paying out the money. Hadn’t done that since after the first eight fights. The purses coming in were not that big. They never are, unless they come from big-time title fights on pay-per-view. Even some title fights are for short money. I was hustling to make another good fight for Ernie, but the problem was that nobody wanted him.

We hung around almost six months, no fight. That’s no good for a fighter, specially one Ernie’s age. When we were offered a shot at the NABO belt, I took it.

It was for short money with Abdul Rashad Mohammed, a Black Muslim boy out of Chicago. NABO’s a second-level title the WBO runs to generate excitement with the fans, a stepping-stone fight for a real title. I had always stayed away from Abdul because he’s got a bad mouth on him. But winning the NABO would set us in line for the WBO title. WBO ain’t like WBC or WBA or even the IBF, but if you’re a knockout puncher like Ernie, it gives you leverage towards a unification bout.

The deal was the fight’s in LA. That’s our hometown, and we figure to get lucky with the judges if it goes to a decision. Money’s only 8,000, and Ernie don’t like that, but I explain if we don’t take the fight, they could move us down in the rankings. “And we ain’t getting any younger.”

Abdul shot his mouth off at the weigh-in. He acted like he was going to throw a punch at Ernie, and Ernie stepped back. Abdul and all the other blacks were slapping, touching hands, the usual.

I told Ernie, “You gotta get respect, son. You don’t, these fucks’ll run a train on you.”

“Peachy! Peachy!” screeched Abdul through the loudspeaker. “Peachy be a punk name!”

Ernie stepped forward, talked like he was black into the microphone. “Abdool-dool, he a fool-fool!”

Now the whites were laughing. Abdul started forward and so did Ernie. Commission guys got between them. I was feeling better.

When we got to the arena, right away I smelled something was off. We went down the steep ramp into the belly of the old Forum and were clearing with security when I noticed that all the black guards were smiling and looking at us sideways. Just after we swung into the long, narrow corridor leading to the dressing rooms, we saw blood-red gang shit scrawled across the pale-blue walls: DAGO PIG DIE DIE DIE.

On the dressing-room door was a photo of some dead white man, part of his face blown away. Ernie went stiff, tried to back away. I shoved him through the door.

He was greener than I’d ever seen him. In the two hours we had to wait, he threw up twice. I couldn’t give him the Hennessy, so I got a can of Pepsi, which lifted him a little. He couldn’t stand still or sit still. I had to get somebody to hold him down so I could wrap his hands. Piss was all over the place.

The fight went off on time. On the trip to the ring, there was a trail of water behind us. Sooner or later, everybody loses, so I figured this was it I took losing as part of the game. It’s how you lose that counts.

Abdul was quicker than anyone Ernie’d fought and jumped all over him the first round. Ernie was shook, reverted to his old style. His head was sticking up like a cabbage. I was yelling at him to bob and weave, when Abdul caught him with an overhand right that knocked him down and broke his nose. Blood is running like coffee from a spout. A bloody nose and a broken nose ain’t the same. I worked on it in the corner. Coagulant stopped it for a minute, but once you break that bone up in there, most of the time there’s no way to stop the blood unless you pack it, and in a fight there ain’t no packing.

Second round’s the same. Abdul jabs to the broken beak, and Ernie’s eyes fill with water from the sting. The jagged bone is slicing the meat up there inside, and the nose starts squirting again. Blood’s down all over Ernie’s belly and smeared across his face. As long as I can stop it between rounds, the ref’s not going to stop a title fight. So forget blood. But Ernie can’t forget it, keeps wiping at it, and Abdul keeps whacking him. For the first time since I been with him, Ernie just backs away.

Three chiseling rounds, and we’re dead meat. Even the Italians are booing. I hit him with a ice-cold towel on his back, stick ice cubes down his balls. I got swabs up both holes of his nose. It’s illegal, but I swab adrenaline inside his mouth to try to jack some life into him. He stays slumped in the corner. His eyes are wide as a rabbit’s. There goes my Kewpie doll.

Ernie whined, “When he hits me I can’t see, for Chrissakes! It’s like somebody’s throwing boiling water in my face.”

I say, “Keep your hands up, he won’t hit you. Get inside and bang like you’re supposed. This guy ain’t nothin’ but mouth.”

“Bullshit, he ain’t nothin’! I can’t breathe, and I can’t fuckin’ see!”

I’m thinking,
Punk, now you know what the guys you been whipping on all this time been feeling.
“Breathe deep for me, Ernie. But through your mouth, not your nose, so your face don’t blow up on us. Here, take some water.” I tried to grease him.

“Fuck water and fuck grease. I can’t fight like this. Stop the fight.”

“Ernie, look, all you gotta do is get inside and work.”

“Fuck you, man. Throw in the towel. Stop the fight or I will!”

He says fuck
me?
Me, who’s been changing his fucking diapers? I take out my scissors and I stick one blade up each of his nostrils. I squeezed the scissors so they pinched on the nose gristle there above his upper lip. He tried to pull back, but the ring ropes in the corner held his head in place.

I talked to the boy colder than a cheated-on wife. “You go out there and fight like you know how, mothafucker! You fight, or I cut you up to your eyebrows and I pull your nose back over the top a you fuckin’ head!”

Ernie’d thought he was afraid of Abdul, but once he saw the picture I painted for him, he sat straight up on the ring stool. At the bell, he shot out of the corner. In 56 seconds he broke Abdul’s jaw and knocked the prick into the front-row seats.

In the dressing room after the fight when we were alone, Ernie closed the door. He shook my hand.

“I know what you did for me out there. I’ll never forget it, Pops.” He hugged me to him. “Man, I owe you forever.”

“Part of my job.”

Ernie never pissed his pants again.

“I got to ask you,” he said. “Would you have done what you said?”

I shrugged. “Try me again.”

Getting so many KOs, Ernie’s in all the papers and on TV. They interviewed him about his comeback from jail and booze, made him like a lily. Everybody’s proud of him, they’re talking role model. All the attention gave Ernie confidence he needed outside the ring.

Me? I keep on punching.

Vinnie Vincenzo and his boys showed up in the gym, talking Italian like they’re in Palermo. Vincenzo’s making faces like he knows what Ernie’s doing in the ring, but I know it’s his act.

A movie star is a big thing in a gym, and everybody started sucking up. But it wasn’t no big thing between Ernie and Vincenzo. They shook hands, a little kiss on the cheek, that dago bullshit Vincenzo signed some autographs, posed for some snapshots, took off with his dead-eyed ginzos.

Right after that, Ernie hooked up steady with a redheaded German girl out of Hannover, Inge, a scholarship track athlete running the 880 for UCLA. She had blue Mongol eyes and was so clean and shiny you needed sunglasses to look at her. Her legs made your heart do the cha-cha.

I cornered her when Ernie was in the showers one day. “Is he drinking? Tell me the truth. Even if it’s a little wine.”

“No,” she said, and her eyes danced for me. “And I would know.”

Ernie had three more fights. Blew the opponents away, two KOs out of three. Newspaper and TV guys are matching him against the champ, making him the favorite because of his power. We get rated number two and four by three different sanctioning bodies. A German kid, Willyboy Wächter, KO’d some Africans and was right on our tail. But by then I figured we could beat anybody behind us or ahead of us, and I slept every night with the WBO champion in my dreams.

The champ is Ugo Lagalla out of Naples, a slick European stand-up boxer who liked to move. In between us and him, the sanctioning body let Lagalla have another payday fight with the number nine guy, and Lagalla won from his bicycle.

Then it was our turn. But there was a problem. The fight was to be in Germany, and the purse was for only $35,000. We had to sign a contract to fight a second fight for the same German promoter, in Germany, if we beat Lagalla. The opponent would be Willyboy Wächter. That’s not a problem, but Ernie’s bitching about money again. Besides, once we’re over there, we learn that the German government will automatic take 30 percent income tax off the top. That’s $10,500, or only $24,500 to split between me and Ernie. It was a detail the kraut promoter didn’t bother to tell me about until we got to Germany, and Ernie already signed the contract. It had never happened in any other country I fought in, so up front I never even thought to ask. Willyboy Wächter was on our undercard against a Dutch nobody. That set him to fight the winner of our fight. The promoter’s the guy backing Willy, and his idea was to build up Wächter, make the German public hungry for a German champ. A Pescetti-Wächter fight in Germany would be a money fight, Ernie being an American. But it was my screwup, so I told Ernie I’d only take five grand as my cut. He still ain’t happy.

“We win the title, then we got some leverage, Ernie. It’s business.”

“Business is supposed to mean money, right or wrong?”

“Ernie, when you fight the bear, they pay you to fight the bear. When you fight the bear’s sister, they pay you to fight the bear’s sister. Lagalla’s a cupcake.”

“Don’t seem right when other guys get so much and I don’t.”

Though he don’t say it, I can see that Ernie’s thinking maybe I did some kind of business on him with the promoter. I’m cleaner than a unblown whistle, but he don’t credit me for it. I was about to say screw the fight and walk out, but I think about it and decide to hang in until we beat Lagalla. Making a champ, after all, that’s the propeller in my ass.

The Lagalla fight was to be held in Leipzig, which is Wächter’s hometown. It’s 80 miles or so south of Berlin and close to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Leipzig had been part of East Germany only a few years before, and you could still see the dead spots left over. But we stayed in a new hotel behind the big post office and about a half mile from the center of the old town.

We’d brought a black sparring partner with us out of Dallas, Danyell Harris, and it was clear that the people this far east weren’t used to seeing brothers. It’s not that they were hostile, in fact people would stop us and ask if we were talking English and then try to practice talking English with us. I’d tell them we was there for the fight. That got them excited, and now they ask about Willyboy. I tell them he’s the best, and they’d walk off pumped. We got there 10 days before the fight. We had one room for Danyell, and one for me and Ernie. See, you got to sleep and eat with your fighter, you got to check his shit and the color of his piss. You got to watch how shiny his eyes’s getting and make sure he’s not in top shape too long before the fight, or he gets crazy on you and starts punching walls. You got to squash temptations of broads and food. With Ernie, you got to squash any chance of liquor.

First day we’re there, two hookers come prancing up to the room, the kind with that sulky look. Somebody is sending them, and they keep coming back every day. It ain’t easy for me to run them off, especially when I’m alone and Ernie’s watching TV down in the lobby with Danyell. I finally sent them to Danyell’s room, told them that he was Ernie. That kept them away from Ernie and got Danyell a daily double freebie on whoever is trying to drain us. Then food starts getting delivered to our door. Cakes and fruit pastries. We got 10 days and only five pounds to lose. I gave the food to the housekeepers, bitter-looking old white ladies who started to love me. Somebody is scared for Lagalla, but the housekeepers was all dancing in the halls.

And every day Ernie is working better with Danyell, always moving in, slipping shots and coming back. People in the gym never seen nothing like it.

As the fight comes close, Italian fight fans start flying into town. Trains dumped them into the depot in big crowds, and you’d see them in the old quarter. Some of them march and sing and carry red, white and green banners with Lagalla’s name and face on them. It was like being in the south of Italy at Easter, and you looked to see if maybe somebody’s carrying a statue of the Virgin with money stuck all over her outfit. Near the crowded square, I thought I saw somebody familiar, but they were gone in a blink and I decided I was wrong.

At dinnertime the day before the fight, the three of us were supposed to go down to eat, when I get a long distance call from Sophia. She talks with Ernie, and then she wants to talk to me. She keeps talking and Ernie’s waving at me he’s hungry, so I send him and Danyell to the dining room. Sophia’s all proud of her baby brother and says she’s been talking to her father. Looks like the old man is softening up about Ernie, and she chokes up. “God bless you both,” she says.