Sweet Jesse
Sweet Jesse got KOed in the first round. His opponent threw a hook that connected with his jaw, making him twirl and land face-down on the canvas. A blue rubber mouthguard shot out of his gob and tumbled to the floor. His foot twitched and made a scratching sound against the canvas. I heard it after a hush fell over the crowd.
It was all gone: Jesse’s championship. His undefeated record. The belt. All pulverized in less than a minute.
The referee held up the other boxer’s hand. He did a little victory shuffle, but nobody cheered. This was Jesse’s neighborhood. That other guy was just some hulk from out of state with a lot of tattoos and a graying beard. Nobody cared about him.
We filed out of the arena slowly, barely talking. When we reached the front doors, an arctic wind blasted us in our faces. Maria huddled close to me as we waited for a bus to take us home. I hoped she wouldn’t cry. It was sort of embarrassing, having my little sister tag along with me to fights. But she loved Sweet Jesse and wouldn’t just stay home. Plus, I’d been bringing her to fights ever since our dad died.
The bus was warm and bright with fluorescent lights. I sat next to the window and watched the darkened city streets float by -- a blur of vacant lots, boarded-up buildings and rusted chain link. While Maria slept, the weight of her head resting on my shoulder, I played the knockout punch over and over. For years, Sweet Jesse had been known for his ability to slip away from anything that came at him. This time, he didn’t move at all. Jesse just stood like his feet were glued to the canvas and watched the punch come around and smash into his face. What could he have been thinking?
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was throwing the fight on purpose.
I woke Maria when the bus reached our stop and half-carried her the three blocks to our house. Our mother stood at the door when we arrived. I didn’t have to tell her what had happened. She’d heard the whole thing on the radio.
Sweet Jesse vanished. A few days after the fight, Jesse’s coach went over to his house only to find it completely cleaned out, save for a few plastic forks and scraps of paper that turned out to be old takeout receipts. So he went straight to Jesse’s mother’s house, demanding to know where he’d gone.
Her reply echoed throughout the neighborhood: “What do you mean, ‘gone?’”
The next thing I knew, my friends were forming a search party, and Maria held prayer vigils in her room. She swiped candles from church, crammed them into old beer bottles and set them in front of the pictures of Jesse that she’d torn from magazines and taped to the wall.
“Tell her to blow out those candles before she burns down the house,” Mama said to me, but Maria burned the candles until there was nothing left of them but the wax that had dripped down the sides of the green glass bottles.
For years, rumors of Jesse sightings flew blindly, like bats in the dark. Someone saw him pumping gas two towns over. No, said someone else. He was in Michigan assembling cars. No, not Michigan. Indiana. Maria heard he was in South Carolina, living on a houseboat on the Atlantic. We looked at roadmaps and called Directory Assistance in all the towns we thought he might be in. But no operator could find him, and none of us had the time or money for a road trip, so eventually, we gave up the search.
Someone new rose through the ranks to become our town’s new boxing hero, someone who could challenge the man who had ended Sweet Jesse’s career.
He wasn’t anything like Jesse. He taunted his opponents in the ring, holding his arms wide open as he danced around them and winding his hips as if he belonged in some kind of tropical nightclub. He was the first to say he was the best boxer on earth. He didn’t cast his eyes down and blush with a shy smile like Sweet Jesse used to whenever a newspaperman said he was great. He didn’t shake hands with his opponents after fights as Jesse did. He didn’t have eyelashes that made women fall in love with him. (My sister Maria was determined to marry Sweet Jesse when she got big enough.)
He attracted a new set of fans who liked his brash, showy style, but many people turned away and refused to go to matches. Reluctantly, I bought a ticket. Maria wouldn’t come with me.
During the first two rounds, the referee warned the new hero three times to stop aiming below the belt. I was sure he’d wind up forfeiting the match. Instead, he went all ten rounds and won by split decision. I watched him gloat as the ref held up his arm. As he stepped out of the ring, he slapped the ring card girl on the ass.
It was the last boxing match I went to see.
Years later, when I had a steady job and a wife, I saw Sweet Jesse in a bar that I stopped into after a long day at work.
It was almost Christmas, and gold tinsel garlands and plastic holly leaves edged the ceiling. The bartender poured me a beer and gave a slight nod, indicating that I should look to my left.
There was Sweet Jesse, his hands wrapped around a glass of whiskey. The hot glaze over his eyes told me it wasn’t his first. Most of his hair was gone. Even the eyelashes that had made him the fantasy of every woman in town seemed thinner.
I had so many questions. Why did he stand still when that punch was coming at him? Why didn’t he ever try to make a comeback? Why did he disappear? What had he been doing all of these years?
But by the way he swallowed his drink and slid his glass across the bar to be refilled, I could tell he didn’t like to make conversation. I took my drink with me to a back corner, where there was a pay phone. I called Maria.
“You won’t believe who’s here,” I told her. I could hear her baby son crying in the background.
“Oh yeah? Not my louse of a husband?” Maria had married a man who spent three weeks each month on the road for his job. He always came home with a paycheck that he handed over to her, but he also didn’t hide the fact that he saw other women on his trips. I had told Maria more than once that she could bring her son to live with my wife and me, but she stayed in that house with her baby, alone.
“It’s Sweet Jesse,” I said.
The other end of the line was silent, except for the baby’s whimpering. Then, finally, Maria asked, “How can you be sure it’s him?”
“Believe me, Maria. It’s him.”
“Well…how does he look?”
I glanced over my shoulder to make sure there was no one nearby who could hear me. “Bad. He looks really bad.”
“He was afraid of losing,” Maria said. Somebody put a quarter in the jukebox and I plugged my ear so I could hear Maria over the strains of Gimme Some Truth.
“What?” I asked.
“He knew he would lose it all someday, and he was terrified, so he decided to get it over with. That’s why he took that punch.”
Cue balls clacked over the music. “How could you possibly know that?”
Maria paused. “I just know,” she said.
I hung up the phone and went back to the bar. Sweet Jesse was gone.
When I was thirteen and Maria was eleven, our father died. There was a ravine behind the foundry where he worked. That’s where his coworkers found his body. Even the autopsy couldn’t explain how he’d ended up that way.
Our mother collected his life insurance, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from losing the house. We moved into a neighborhood where the bungalows had sagging porches and broken blinds hanging in the windows. On the corner was a half-burnt house where some of the older kids liked to meet to drink beer and smoke drugs. Little squares of scorched tinfoil jazzed the sidewalk in front of it.
The kitchen in our new place was dingy even though Ma scrubbed it every night with the window propped open to let the Tilex fumes out. She put up yellow curtains that made the morning sunlight seem a little brighter. Most nights, I put the fan on in my room before I went to bed so I wouldn’t hear her crying.
I got a job stocking shelves at a grocery store three days a week. With the money I had earned, I bought tickets to a boxing match: one for me, one for Maria. Dad liked to listen to boxing matches on the radio. I told Maria that we’d go to this match to honor Dad.
A young fighter in purple silks shadowboxed while the announcer told the crowd who he was: new to the scene, a featherweight with a record of 20 wins and 10 KOs, a kid people liked to call Sweet Jesse.
In the first round, Sweet Jesse threw flurries of punches and slipped out of range every time his opponent tried to hit him. In the second round, Jesse’s jab made his opponent stagger backward. His opponent knocked him to his knees in the third, and I held my breath. Jesse looked shaken. The ref counted, and I was sure he would reach the end of his count and declare the match over. But Jesse slowly unfolded his legs and stood, and a cheer erupted around the arena. Maria screamed and hopped up and down on her toes.
Sweet Jesse went seven more rounds, trading punches and backing his opponent against the ropes. The final bell rang. Sweet Jesse and his opponent stood in the ring with the referee between them. I held my breath as he read the judges’ decision. Maria’s hand curled around my arm.
“By unanimous decision, the judges have decided that tonight’s winner is Sweet Jesse Cortona!”
I hugged Maria as the referee hoisted Sweet Jesse’s gloved fist. Jesse’s eyes twinkled as he thanked his coach. He thanked his opponent for the fight. Lastly, he thanked everyone in the audience for coming to see him fight and promised that we would see a lot more of him from then on.
Afterward, Maria and I sat at the back of the bus and talked about the fight all the way home.