Pound for Pound Read Free

tree.
    The gym was in an old building that had survived earthquakes that had destroyed prettier, newer buildings, and had knocked down segments of freeways, wrecked bridges, and tumbled hospitals. Behind the boarded-up windows at the front was an interior of high ceilings and exposed metal beams. Like a fighter’s body, it was lean and spare. Places on the hardwood floor showed smooth, bare wood through worn varnish where fighters down the years had shadowboxed or jumped rope. There were circles of bare wood around the body bags and beneath the speed bags. There were sixteen-inch spit funnels crusted with years of dry mucous. Hoses ran from the funnels to five-gallon white plastic spit buckets on the floor. Neither ring had padding beneath its slick canvas. These were
boxers’
rings, no padding meant fast. A workout timer against one wall would mark off three-minute rounds and one-minute rest periods. Once fighters had been in the game for a while, they knew instinctively when the warning buzzer should sound, when the bell would ring. There were no stools to rest on. Fighters don’t sit between rounds when sparring.
    A hand-lettered sign on one wall read, “Good Fighters Don’t Need Water and Bad Fighters Don’t Deserve Water.” Another read, “Learning’s Hard, Doing’s Easy.” A third sign, “Remember the Easter Bunny,” showed an amateurish drawing of a boxing ring scattered with faded Easter eggs. Another sign read, “The First Rule of War Is Don’t Shoot Yourself.”
    The gym was located directly behind the rear of the shop. The shop faced Cole Avenue, while the gym faced narrow Wilcox Avenue, the next street west. Back to back, both buildings were part of what remained of an old Hollywood industrial/residential area. The gym could be entered directly from the back of the shop through the rear door. That’s how the few fighters still using the gym entered it.
    The address and main entrance to the gym were on Wilcox; a small, hand-painted sign that read “GyM” had once been nailed to the right of the front door. Until the day Dan tore it off and hurled it to the ground, under the huge eucalyptus tree that still afforded its gentle shade and pleasantly medicinal smell.
    After he had fought off the idea of burning the place down, Dan had Centcor Security install a fire-and-burglar-alarm system in the gym. Because he had boarded up the front windows and door, the building looked like it had been abandoned. Anybody who decided to break into the place and trash it would find Dan Cooley confronting them with a twelve-gauge pump shotgun long before the police turned up. Dan lived, slept, and ate mostly in a room on the second floor. And he was a very light sleeper these days, when he slept at all.

Chapter 2
    D an was first-generation Irish, the youngest of five brothers—Cathal Michael, Liam Francis, Dermot James, Finbar Joseph, and himself, Daniel Aloysius. The first three were born five floors up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, the Irish slums west of Times Square; Fin and he were born in a converted first-floor loft on the Lower East Side. His mother told how she made the sign of the cross when she walked down the last flight of Hell’s Kitchen stairs she’d ever have to climb.
    Dan’s father, Padraic Timothy, was from County Armagh; his mother, Nora Ann McGeough, from County Louth, counties whose borders touched, but they were married a few miles to the south at the massive, stone St. Pat’s “chapel” in Dundalk, County Louth—”chapel,” not church, because only the “churches” of the protestant Church of Ireland were called “churches” back then.
    Ireland and its people were still scarred from the famine, the Great Hunger, which had begun in 1846. Work, good work, was hard to find and black poverty infested both town and countryside. Like thousands of others, Dan’s parents saw America as the only way out and they worked day and night to save money for their passage. Nora was