The Best American Essays 2013 (35 page)

I told him I didn’t have any man questions.

“What about ones about the war? You could ask me about that. I know you ain’t got a father in your life, so fire away.”

I thought for a moment and realized I had absolutely no desire to hear anything Don might have to say about anything. I’d have been much happier to hear about his experiences getting up off his ass to change the TV channel, a chore he liked me to do. The only thing I truthfully ever wondered about Don was what had occurred to his tongue—a chunk was missing from the tip and it made his words sounds mushy, but then so did the six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best that he kept in a cooler next to the recliner.

“You know what the best part of war was?” Don volunteered. “The poontang. I never got more poon than I did in the service. Get you a nice pair of shoes and a haircut, and whoa, boy, you could get some poon too. Come here,” he said. “I’ll show you my wife.” Don reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wallet filled with receipts, scraps of paper, a few bucks, and a sleeve filled with photos. I came and stood beside him and looked down as he flipped through the pictures. Stuffed between a photo of the White House and the Golden Gate Bridge was one of an Asian woman. “That’s her. Met her in Taiwan, married her, and then everything fell to shit and I left her there.”

“Oh,” I said.

He dug around in his wallet some more and came out with a condom. “Here,” he said. “Take it. Show it off at school and the other kids will think you’re cool. I’m sure they think you’re a sissy right now, right?”

“What happened to your tongue?” I said, because, well, that’s what I said.

“Some poon got drunk and bit it,” he said.

“Did it hurt?”

“No more, no less,” Don said.

Don stayed with us another three weeks, and each afternoon he tried to engage me in another conversation about sex or about war or about my mother, who, he confided, was a “foxy lady.” When he came home drunk one evening and tried to have the same conversation with my mother, his term in our home came to an abrupt end, which was fine by me, since I was due to have my tonsils removed and the only bedroom in the house with a TV hookup was my brother’s, which meant I’d get to convalesce in there, eating ice cream and watching TV. Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini was scheduled to fight Duk Koo Kim a few days after the operation. The timing was perfect.

3. I began using the Ouija board by myself. It moved. It answered my questions. It put me in contact with a spirit that said every girl in school had a crush on me. It pointed to “yes” when I asked it if I should keep living. It told me, in painstaking detail, that it was okay if I ate frosting every day. It told me I would one day be president of the United States of America. I swear to God, it moved on its own.

4. At night, after everyone was asleep, I’d microwave pieces of Italian salami and eat them, then lick the grease from the plate.

5. I asked the doctor if anyone had ever died while getting their tonsils removed.

“Of course,” he said. “Any time you go under anesthetic, there’s a chance you won’t come back out.”

“What are the odds I’m that person?”

“Not good,” he said. He was standing in front of me, listening to me through his stethoscope. He smelled like cigarettes and mint gum. His name is lost to me now, but it was something foreign-sounding and he had a thick accent that was actually rather pleasant. I think he might have been French. “Do you want to talk to me about these marks on your stomach?”

I was seventeen the first time I went to Las Vegas. My mother was there to cover an event—she was a society columnist, so her job was to go to parties for a living—and we stayed at the Sands. This was 1988. I was the only one left at home now, and my mother spent the majority of her time dating guys who owned men’s suit stores and who sang or played piano in Italian restaurants and who showed up at our house in cars driven by guys with names like Fat Tommy or Billy the Lip. We’d moved from northern California to Palm Springs, which was like moving from Mayberry to Hollywood, except Hollywood in 1958.

We drove by Caesars Palace, and I remember thinking how strange it was that all of these people were streaming in and out of it, none of them disturbed by the fact that Duk Koo Kim had been beaten to death where they were hoping to win their fortunes.

I’ve visited Las Vegas maybe fifty times in my life, not including the two years I lived there in the late 1990s. I’ve stepped foot inside Caesars Palace maybe ten or fifteen times. I’ve never won a single cent there.

I lived through getting my tonsils removed. I was in the hospital for two days, however, because they also removed my adenoids and then I had a reaction to something—I never knew what—that had me vomiting every few hours. I finally got home on Friday night and got to sleep in my brother Lee’s old room. Don had moved out a few weeks earlier, but the room still smelled of his cigarette smoke, sweat, and something that at the time I thought smelled like vinegar. Now I think that I don’t want to know what the fuck that smell was.

My mother put a bucket next to the bed and told me that if I got sick, well, I should tell Karen, because she needed to get some rest, she had a party to cover on Saturday. If I was in pain, I should wake Karen up and tell her too. If I needed anything, pretty much I was instructed to let Karen know. The problem was that Karen had left for college two months earlier. My sister Linda, who is two years older than me, sat in the room with me for the next several hours and we ate ice cream and read magazines, and then, in the middle of the night, I threw up mint chip ice cream all over the wall.

Duk Koo Kim didn’t actually write “Kill or be Killed” on the lampshade in his room. Whatever he wrote was in Korean. Royce Feour, a former writer for the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
, said in an interview in the paper twenty-five years after the fight that the actual translation was roughly “Live or Die.” Either way you cut it, it’s a strange thing to write on a lampshade.

What I remember about the fight is that it was extraordinarily entertaining. A brawl from the first bell. I sat on the floor of Lee’s room, the smell of mint chip ice cream vomit now mixing with the remnants of Don Olsen, and watched the fight. Unlike fights today, this one took place in the afternoon. Can you imagine? Watching a championship fight in the middle of a Saturday afternoon on CBS? Today it would cost you at least $50 for pay-per-view and you’d need to wade through three terrible undercards just to get to the big fight.

But I didn’t know any of that yet. The Ouija didn’t give me any information regarding how things would change in the boxing world. So I sat there and watched and ate more ice cream. What I recall is that the two fighters never stopped punching each other. Unlike heavyweight fights, for instance, where there’s a lot of stalking around the ring and clinching, the lighter weight classes have always been more electrifying affairs, and in this case, with two fighters of about the same size and weight, it was an unceasing barrage of head and body blows. Mancini looked better—he was more muscular and thick, whereas Kim seemed skinny, owing perhaps to his two-inch height advantage—but once you step into the ring, it doesn’t really matter how you look.

The prefight buzz was that Kim was going to be seriously overmatched, that his number one ranking was a joke, that he was lucky even to be in the conversation, much less in contention, but the fight proved his ranking was earned. I recall Linda coming in to sit with me and then getting up and leaving because she thought it was disgusting the way these men were trying to kill each other. I tried to explain to her that they really weren’t trying to kill each other, that it was a sport of respect, the sweet science—these were the sorts of things I learned reading
Sports Illustrated
, I imagine—and that they’d hug in the end. Linda said it was gross.

Duk Koo Kim’s name was not Duk Koo Kim. His real name was Kim Deuk-gu. His real name was also
.

The last three rounds of the fight—the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth—were absolutely vicious. That’s what I remember. Had I ever even seen the fight since that day? I couldn’t recall. I must have, right? No, it turns out, I hadn’t. Because no clips were released for twenty-five years, until Bob Arum got Mancini’s permission and released the film for use in a documentary. I watched them on YouTube the other day. Duk Koo Kim looks horrible in the twelfth, like he can barely stand, his face is swollen, he’s staggering around, it looks like just one punch will do him in. At one point he nearly stumbles and falls, it’s over, it’s over, but no, it just keeps going. Then the thirteenth comes and Mancini hits him thirty-nine straight times. As a kid, I loved this, I’m sure. As an adult, it sickens me. Why didn’t they stop the fight? How can you let someone take thirty-nine straight punches? How can someone survive that?

It turns out they can’t.

Three people died because of that fight, actually. There was Duk Koo Kim, obviously. And then, three months later, Duk Koo Kim’s mother committed suicide. Eight months later, Richard Green, the referee who let the fight go on even after those thirty-nine punches, also committed suicide.

The fourteenth round started with Mancini storming off his stool. He gets to the center of the ring, and seconds later Duk Koo Kim is flat on his back, and then he tries to climb the ropes, stumbles back, and it’s over. Mancini is jumping in the air. Kim is pulled into his corner, loses consciousness, and that’s it. Except as a kid, I didn’t know that. The camera was on Mancini. CBS interviewed him, he talked about what a fierce competitor Kim was, about wanting to fight Aaron Pryor, there was a commercial, and then, when they returned, Duk Koo Kim was being taken out of the arena on a stretcher. The announcer called him “very game.” His mouth was open slightly. He was covered in sweat. One arm hung off the side of the stretcher, the other was across his chest. His eyes were closed, his face swollen. He was completely limp.

Jews have closed-casket funerals, so I didn’t see an actual dead body again until college, when two of my friends killed themselves and I attended their funerals. Standing over their open caskets, staring at their painted faces, I thought that they didn’t look dead at all. They looked like mannequins. There was no part of them that seemed to have ever been alive. They’d both died alone, one by overdosing, the other by shooting himself in the head, so millions of strangers never saw their final living moments. For many years I have wondered why their deaths don’t haunt me as much as this stranger’s death, this boy who died by the calculated risk of becoming a boxer, and I can only conclude that it’s all about distance. I didn’t see either of my friends die—though in some respect I should have at least seen the signs, but I was a boy too, and they were boys, and you can’t expect boys to see things like pain and depression as clearly as retrospect would like us to believe—I just stood there in the aftermath and wondered why I was thinking of a dead boxer.

I took down all the pictures.

The last time I saw a person die, it was my mother. I felt lucky to be there, even though I’d spent the previous thirty-nine years of my life wishing her gone. She wasn’t a good person, I’m not afraid to say anymore. She was at times cruel, malicious, mentally abusive. At other times she was simply mad. And at other times still, she was the darkness that kept me awake at night as an adult, wondering if I was becoming her.

And yet.

My sister Linda called and said that the doctors were only giving our mother four hours to live, that she’d fallen, that if I wanted to see her before she died, I needed to get to the hospital right away. The hospital was four hours away, with no traffic, but we would be leaving our house right in the middle of rush-hour traffic. We would be lucky to make it there in seven hours.

My wife and I made it there in four hours.

My mother, who’d been dying of cancer for a very long time, was in the hospital bed, her eyes barely open, her face was swollen and black-and-blue from her fall, her mouth agape, one arm was slung across her chest, the other was falling to the side of the bed. She was limp and unconscious.

I sat down beside her and told her it was okay to go. And thirty seconds later she was gone.

I stopped hurting myself after Duk Koo Kim died. I don’t know why. I still have the pocketknife, however. It’s in an old tackle box that’s out in my garage. It’s strange: I have a tendency to hold on to things that are relics of bad memories, as if by knowing where they are I’ll somehow be able to avoid the unlucky occurrence of running into them and being overwhelmed.

The problem is, you can’t mitigate chance. That’s what makes this life so pitiless, so unnerving. Duk Koo Kim died at twenty-three, killed in a boxing ring, and by chance I sat and watched it happen when I was eleven. Twenty-eight years later, almost to the day, I sat beside my mother as she died and he came back to me, the vision of him on that stretcher, the congruence of their bodies, their faces, and I wonder if now those last moments of hers will finally replace his in my mind and who, eventually, will replace her.