Bunches of Bananas Inside Boxing Gloves

by Gerard Rudolf

He was never a tall man but he was solid as a Frigidaire. Strong hands, chunky fingers. He called them his bunches of bananas. Poor and rough, the youngest of fourteen, he had to use his hands to be heard. Twelve years old he beat the living shit out of an older boy who made a snide remark about his shabby shoes. He was proud so he broke the boy's nose and jaw, left him unconscious in the red dust. The attack was vicious, so bloody gym-slipped girls screamed and fainted, crew cut boys went white and quiet and knew for the rest of their lives never to tease a poor boy about the holes in his soles. Shortly after this he took up boxing lessons at a youth club. Far more constructive, he said, than fighting like a hooligan on the streets. His thrift and thunder father looked daggers, grumbled about money and sin. So his soon-to-be-dead-mother pinched pennies from the rainy day coffee tin. He smuggled his kit out of the house: vest and boxing shorts hidden under his regular shirt and trousers. Gloves, boots and bandages were stuffed inside a locker at the gym. He learned to skip rope for hours on end, days even given the chance. He gulped down stamina-enhancing breakfasts—raw eggs in glasses of milk before five-mile runs. After bouts against other clubs he and his black and blue teammates walked down to the Hamburger Hut and placed their trophies on the counter for girls to admire. They celebrated their victories with cheeseburgers and Cokes, conned wild American tunes from the Bel Ami with washers the exact weight and size of coins of the Realm—

                   The Inkspots,
                   Bill Haley,
                   The King,
                   Little Richard,
                   Louis Prima
                   and The Cadets. . .And when I got to Lover's Lane I was almost

                    dead.

                                     But my soul was gone and here's what I said. . .

Back home he hid his trophies from his father under a bed.

There is a photograph of him circa 1952: seventeen but somehow looking older. A clean-faced kid with jet-black hair Bryll-creemed flat against his head, green Everlast trunks shimmering like petrol in moonlight, soot black boots with laces white as crocodile teeth. His sunburnt legs are strong as bridge supports, the body barrel-hard, compact, teen-toned. He wears the white vest of an amateur, his bunches of bananas hidden inside boxing gloves. The eyes, roofed by a unibrow, blaze with the vim and vigour of pugilists past—

                  Fullmer,
                   Graziano,
                   Turpin,
                   Louis,
                   LaMotta,
                   and Sugar Ray.

That gaze punches through the glass and the frame and seems to reach beyond the curve of his future. In that photograph my father-before-he-was-my-father is every man at the start of his life, ready to take on, beat to a pulp and break the jaw of anything that might get in his way. But in the final round, like most men, he was taking swings at shadows and lost on points.

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