Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Thirty-three years is a long time to wait for a reunion. Some old friends never change, though.
Our long and winding road began in a white house on Bird Street in Joplin, Missouri, when I was about 9 years old.
My grandfather, Howard Rutherford — Poppy — had trained young Golden Gloves fighters in the low-ceilinged basement of that house, the house he raised my mother and uncles in. My uncles, Don and Jerry, were among the young men he coached in the sweet science of hitting and getting hit. He would begin to train me in that house, at least on the first subject; we never got around to the getting-hit part, though.
Sometime during the summer of 1976, I was staying with my grandparents for a few days, and one evening Poppy came home from the furniture store and told me to come outside with him. He popped open the trunk of his blue Chrysler Newport — an enormous trunk, built for carting golf bags to the course and bodies to isolated dumping grounds; a mobster’s trunk — and there it was: a brand-new, 60-pound canvas Everlast heavy bag.
At first, I was taken aback — my 9-year-old imagination couldn’t see the possibilities in a big ungainly bag of sawdust. If I was going to learn to box, why not give me a nice pair of bright red gloves — eye candy — so that I could learn by actually hitting another person? Poppy was taken aback — he couldn’t believe I was shitting on his gift before he could even take it out of the trunk. Sensing this, and not wanting to disappoint Poppy, ever, I came around over the course of the evening and decided to give it a chance.
The heavy bag would go home with me. My training would commence without it. First things first.
After dinner, we retired to the living room, and as my grandmother sat watching from her gold brocade wing chair, Poppy produced a couple of new rolls of ACE cotton bandage and proceeded to wrap my hands. I don’t know when he would last have wrapped a pair of hands — surely a dozen years or more, since my uncles had stopped fighting — but he did it as quickly and expertly as though he’d done it just the night before. Soon my hands were tightly swaddled and amply reinforced.
Poppy probably held up his hands and had me punch at them for a bit, but the evening became the stuff of legend for me when he opened the heavy, solid front door of the house and braced it for me, telling me to punch it squarely as he had been instructing me. My grandmother was apoplectic — “Stop it, Howard! He’s going to hurt himself!” — but Poppy kept drilling me in his gruff trainer’s voice, commanding me to punch harder. Again. Again. Again.
Thus did I learn by repetition to throw a punch with purpose and authority. Not a flailing, haymaking, windmilling of the arms in the vain hope of hitting more target than air. A punch. With a tight, squared fist. And another punch after that. And another. And a combination. Then a punch again. Always aiming for the target. Always looking to score points. Always looking to make contact.
The lesson ended, and Poppy unwrapped my hands, which were neither bloodied nor broken nor bruised. Grandma was relieved. Poppy was proud of me, which was the most I could ever have hoped for. I was exhilarated.
The heavy bag went home with me, to Neosho. We hung it in the garage of the house we rented on Benton Avenue. I marvel now that we found a beam sturdy enough to support it and to weather the abuse it absorbed. Not necessarily from me, but from my older brother, who could attack the bag with a lot more power than I had and who had apparently discovered the therapeutic value of the bag a lot earlier than I would.
I came about the getting-hit portion of my education the hard way.
The first blow landed when Poppy died the following January. His health had long been in decline — not that you’d have noticed that night he wrapped my hands for the first time. His fourth heart attack had been the one he couldn’t fight back from, and he died at age 63.
I love my father beyond measure, but as male role models go, Poppy was larger than life to me, loud and fearless and profane, an outsize character like something out of literature (inasmuch as I understood the concept at that age). He was the first person in whom I invested emotions much more complicated than mere love. The way he carried himself, the way he treated others, the way others regarded him — I sensed innately that he was someone to be respected, enthralled by, even feared. Toward the end I understood that he wasn’t well, but even as he became smaller, weaker, he was still a giant to me. I couldn’t imagine how he could actually be brought down. Until he was.
The next blow landed about a year and a half later, when my family picked up and moved to suburban Kansas City, away from the only life I had ever known.
The emotions of that time comprise another story altogether. For the purposes of this one, I shall say only that the Everlast bag came down from its moorings, was loaded onto the truck, and made the journey north with us. There was no properly sturdy place to hang it in our new duplex, though, so it was summarily dispatched to a corner of our garage to sit unused, its purpose made moot, its potential unfulfilled.
Had Poppy not died so soon, he could have taught me so much more. Had the bag not been relegated to a corner, I could have worked it to develop my skills. At the very least, maybe I wouldn’t have had my ass handed to me by that sociopathic little freak Bobby Hill that November day in our front yard.
The summer before my sophomore year at KU, my family moved again, into a house across town, where the Everlast bag took up residence in the basement, first propped in a corner, out in the open, then eventually under the stairs. It remained there as I moved out on my own after college, living in apartments even less suitable for it than our homes had been. It remained there when I relocated to L.A.; neither did I live anywhere in that city that would have accommodated the Everlast bag. It was still waiting in my parents’ basement when I returned home from L.A. after eight years and it stayed there for another five as I romanced Adriane from afar and worked toward the two us being together in one place, under one roof.
When we merged our lives and converged upon Sacramento in May 2010, I brought the Everlast bag with me.
Together at last.
Absence and asshats make the heart grow fonder.
If my 9-year-old brain couldn’t wrap itself around the notion of a heavy bag, my 20-something imagination could see nothing but upside. All I needed for a come-to-Jesus moment was to enter the American work force and hold down a steady job among customers and co-workers.
As a highly evolved social creature and a productive member of so-called polite society, I knew I couldn’t actually hit people when they pissed me off. Suddenly the Everlast heavy bag came alive to me as the ultimate absorber of anger and frustration, like a clinical psychologist for my fists.
An irate customer berates you. Take it out on the bag.
A boss belittles you. Take it out on the bag.
Surrounded by idiots and jerks. Take it out on the bag.
In the early ’90s, around the time I was working as a bank teller, often dealing with snotty people who were particular about their money, I read about how the Japanese incorporate into the workplace quiet rooms and other refuges to which employees can steal away for five or 10 minutes to escape stress, if only briefly, to calm their spirits, restore their sanity and help them better engage their responsibilities, clients and co-workers for the rest of the day.
I became obsessed with the improbable dream of a small gym with a heavy bag, a short walk from my work space, to which I could duck away when necessary, during certain opportune windows of downtime, to rain savage blows upon a yielding inanimate object. In short, to obtain some semblance of satisfactory payback, if only against a surrogate, for having endured the most recent of many indignities and grievances. Then to return to my post, cleansed of rage, drained of tension, at least for the moment, to re-engage and, in the dubious parlance of Col. Saito, “be happy in my work.”
Those who know me well, however, would argue that I’d spend a lot more time in the “serenity room” than at my work station.
That no such haven has existed in any of my places of employment means suffering through the day, accruing anger and frustration over the course of eight or nine hours, letting it build up inside and eat away at me like a cancer, then arriving home at 5 p.m. and making Adriane stand in front of the blast furnace while it all pours out of me in torrents. (Always as a patient audience, I hasten to add; never as an unwitting surrogate herself.)
It was on an evening such as this a week or so ago, after a thoroughly infuriating day in the trenches, when I offhandedly remarked, “It’s times like this when I really wish I had the heavy bag to take it all out on.” To which my wise and wonderful beloved replied, “Well, maybe we should go buy you a stand tonight. Would you like to do that?”
It’s been more of an investment than I was counting on. That the two-station stand with speed bag platform was on sale, costing only $20 more than a stand for the heavy bag alone, didn’t necessarily translate to a great bargain. The $70 I saved on the retail cost of the stand — and then some — has since been reinvested in 70 pounds of barbell weights to secure the stand so it doesn’t inch across the floor like an old washing machine; a chain and swivel that I had to order from Everlast to hang the bag; some hand wraps; and a new pair of bag gloves. My beloved hasn’t even blinked. I think she knows the investment will pay dividends over the long term.
And it needn’t stop there. When I move beyond the mere need of an outlet for my aggression, my potential wish list includes the speed bag (once I’m sure I can insulate my neighbors from the sound of it: ratata-batata-ratata-batata-ratata-batata…); a double-end bag with weighted base (which I can attach to the speed-bag swivel; two birds, one stone); some of those fancy, newfangled gel wraps for my hands; a digital round timer, perhaps. There’s a version of this story in which it becomes a hobby as expensive as my father’s healthy obsession with golf.
At the center of it all, however, hangs my white canvas Everlast bag, practically an antique now, a relic of its time. (These days they make them out of durable leather or ballistic nylon or space-age synthetic something-or-other.) That it has weathered years of neglect and indifference without becoming a chew toy, domicile or urinal for rodents is somewhat miraculous, and the bag’s structural integrity has lived up to its brand name.
Most importantly, it is, for all intents and purposes, the last thing my grandfather ever gave me. Even as it sat unused and unseen all those years, it was always present in my imagination as a symbol of the life my grandfather led and the wisdom, intel and basic equipment he wanted to pass down to me — to stand up for myself, to be a man, to take on the world. The heavy bag has endured. It is, as the saying goes, a gift that will keep on giving. Because every time I hang it, and with every jab I stick and every punch I throw, I will think of Poppy, I will hear his voice in my ear, and I will remember that he is still and always in my corner.
