They’re All Rough at This Point

by Roberts Jekabsons

Pete’s head whipped to the left, courtesy of a left hook. His gaze met that of a woman in the audience. She looked graceful, with a comforting gaze and a genuine smile. He visualized a life with her: morning coffee, smiles, and late-night conversations. His dream was violently cut short. His head whipped back to neutral and directly in front of him, pupils, dark as rosaries, etched with cruelty. His opponent, who was just a kid, was a born puncher. A bone rattler. Some cats have heavy bones, and heavy bones have heavy hands. Heavy hands hurt. Pete knew what came next, like watching a film you’ve seen dozens of times. The vaseline-laced glove curled under his elbow. It landed flush on his liver. All oxygen left his body as he dropped to one knee. Pete was one second late. In boxing, when you are late, you pay.

“One, two, three,” the referee counted.

The view, from one knee, was different. "four, five, six,”

In thirty-seven professional bouts, he had never been on one knee. Now, he was.

“seven, eight.”

Pete stood. The referee took his gloves, looking at him as he had looked at hundreds of fighters over the years, directly into the pupils, looking for the unspoken words.

“Are you good to go?” the referee asked.

“Yeah,” Pete nodded. He lied: He was not good to go.

However, he was good to go—a pugilistic conundrum.

“Do you wanna continue? I need to hear it, Pete.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?” the referee extended the final olive branch.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Pete said, lying again.

Lying and telling the truth at this juncture—at this time— in this ring in New Jersey were the same. The referee wiped Pete’s gloves and released him into the squared circle of pain. His opponent charged him like a Spanish bull. Pete curled into a tight guard, bent his knees, and braced for impact.

Goddamn, this kid can punch. He shook Pete like a pinata that was ready to burst.

Pete was a good inside fighter and felt an opening. He could fight blind on the inside. He knew the curves of the shoulder, stiffness of an elbow, and soft spots of the midsection as he slid his left arm between his opponent's bicep and upper rib cage, immobilizing his right hand. His opponent began to pound Pete's kidney with his left. Pete, being a veteran, trapped the left hand as well and dropped his shoulder into his chest, pushing them backward onto the ropes. The audience booed loudly. They wanted blood. More blood than had already been spilled–never enough blood. Now tied up, his opponent began to rattle like a pit bull in a cage. The kid was strong and angry. The fumes shooting from his bull-like nostrils left snot on Pete’s shoulder as he held on for the ride.

“Break it up!” the referee demanded. He worked to pry the two men apart.

Pete’s nose was dripping like a broken spigot. He rested his head on his opponent's shoulder and waited for the final bell. The referee finally wrenched him off as the bell rang–six rounds of eternity.

His opponent sneered at him, "Fucking holding-ass bitch-ass motherfucker.”

The kid’s promoter hopped into the ring. It was a party in the kid’s corner–the scent of victory, in boxing, is narcotic-like. The promoter wore a crisp suit. His eyes bobbed like buoys at sea–eyes to not be trusted. Pete wished he knew that then. Things might have been different.

Pete’s opponent was a talented kid–the type of kid who would have a chance if they guided him right. The type of kid that Pete used to be.

Back in his corner, disinterested assistants waited. They didn’t offer him a slug of water. They cut the tape from his gloves and left–vultures of the sport. They weren't his trainers. They weren't his friends. They were freelancers of pain and flesh. They had hustle embedded in their eyes and money in their minds. Professional boxing, the hustle of pain and cash. They doused him with water between rounds, smeared him with vaseline, and told him to keep his hands up, double-up his jab, and work the body. They got thirty percent of his purse. Pete would leave tonight with a hard-earned seven-hundred and fifty dollars.

The kid had been hitting his hip, which was beginning to bruise. Come morning, Pete's hip would be purple and black; he would walk with a limp for a week. It would be a long bus ride back to the city. Man, that kid could crack. He kept telling himself that.

The referee called them to the center of the ring. “The winner by unanimous decision…”

Pete's hands remained at his sides. It had been two years since he had a hand raised in the squared circle. He had forgotten what it meant, what it felt like.

He didn’t care anymore. He cared a lot.

Pete was 39 years old, a relic in the boxing world. He had to be at work at eight in the morning at the hardware store in Brooklyn. He felt unloved and unseen. It was a lonely walk back to the locker room.

The bus rattled over potholes in New Jersey, while the Union men worked with jackhammers and drills, patched up potholes, and laid asphalt. The smell of tar permeated the air with such vigor that its fumes perforated the light red toilet paper in Pete’s nostrils used to stop the bleeding. Every spring, they would repave and fix these New Jersey roads. A mediocre job and good pay mean the job's never done. It's always a work in progress. The pay is good, though–seventy-five dollars an hour. Pete’s cousin, Thomas, had offered him a similar gig doing construction in Brooklyn: jackhammering, trucking, asphalting, sawing, hammering, and laying cement. Surely, it was more than seventy-five dollars an hour now. Pete turned him down, though; he was on the cusp of a big fight. He turned him down, and the fight never happened.

Pete sat at his cramped window seat, his knees jutting into the chair before him. He was looking at the orange vests of the working men and the bright construction lights. The foreman with a white hard hat was smoking a cigar. He was laughing, being his jovial self. 

Pete thought about the woman in the audience again. He thought about how he turned down the job from his cousin. His life choices washed over him like a deluge of dirty nostalgia. Choices that led him to this Greyhound bus on this night in New Jersey. He thought about his childhood trips to Maine. His father would chase him on Acadia Beach, grab him, and throw him into the ice-cold Atlantic. He would laugh and demand his father do it again. He missed his father–to sit at a table with him once more, to feel his presence, to hold him in his gaze. Pete smiled at the thought and remembered he had to work early in the morning. His smile faded.

The bus rumbled into the depths of the Port Authority–a refuge for the city ghosts that live on the tattered sidelines of polite society. The homeless with taped boxes, heading up the eastern shorelines to the great unknown. The drug fiends running from trouble to new trouble and back for more. Weathered faces that could only afford a one-way ticket. The eyes of wolves, coyotes, and mad shamans roamed this level.

Neon lights burned Pete’s eyes as he walked up the subway stairs. The night became fluorescent day as Pete entered Times Square. He headed to Jimmy's Place on 44th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenue, an old boxing bar with pugilistic memorabilia lining the walls. It was a narrow establishment with bartenders who were lifers.

Pete ordered the special: one beer, two shots, eight bucks—a journeyman’s budget. He had forgotten the bartender’s name, though he remembered sleeping with her; she had a tattoo of a star that surrounded her right nipple. She talked through the entire thing, looking at him lustfully.

Pete was still handsome and charming, even when battered. He downed one shot and drank half the beer. Pete saw himself in the mirror. He saw a man trapped, never destined to change. The walls began closing in. He felt the entirety of the bar was looking at him, judging him–past, present, and future. The water of shame was rising, and he was drowning. He downed the other shot and finished the beer. A tourist from Minnesota was under the spell of a prostitute next to him. He could tell by the man’s accent. Pete had fought in Minneapolis once. He stole the Minnesotan’s pack of Marlboro Reds. The prostitute winked at Pete. The wink felt good. Pete thought of the woman in the audience, again. It hurt–more than the punches and his unraised hands. With a cigarette dangling between his dry lips, he exited.

A French Bulldog was taking a shit on 44th Street in front of a hotel. The dog’s owner was on the phone, in flip-flops smoking a joint. She didn’t pick the shit up. A well-dressed doorman a few feet from him was smoking a Menthol. He was looking at a group of Icelandic Airlines flight attendants. Their wide eyes and smiles revealed that it was their first time in the city. They would stay long enough to tell their friends how great it was. How fun. How energetic.

“Hey, buddy,” he addressed the doorman, “you got a light?”

"Rough night," the doorman voiced as a statement, not a question, in a Bronx accent.

Pete remembered the toilet paper stuffed in his nose and removed it.

The doorman lit Pete’s cigarette for him.

“They’re all rough at this point,” Pete said, inhaling the nicotine.

“I feel that.”

“I appreciate the light.”

“Be safe out there,” the doorman said.

Pete walked to the Q train. By the time he would crawl into his single bed, it would be three in the morning. His alarm would ring in four and half hours to rouse him for work at eight.

He had his self-respect. Whatever that was.

He still had it.

He carried it deep and hidden from the world.

BIO: Roberts 'Bobby' Jekabsons is a retired prizefighter living in New York City. He was born in Latvia, raised in Chicago, and resides in Harlem. Roberts is an actor and a writer and tends bar at one of the oldest saloons in New York City.