Dec. 4: Electric Angel

 

Cory Mullen was a retired middleweight boxer. During his eight-year pro run, he’d run up a record of fourteen wins and eight losses. The last guy he fought busted his nose open and knocked him out. Cory woke up in the hospital the next morning and realized that the good Lord had never intended him to be champion of the world. So he gave up prizefighting and focussed his energy on training fighters instead.

I was a high school freshman when I wandered into his boxing club for the first time. It was a Thursday afternoon and the club was dead. The gym was dominated by a giant boxing ring, its canvas as drab and as gray as an old tombstone. Cory was in the ring, sweeping up dust with an old whisk broom. Surrounding the ring were an array of punching bags, speed bags, and weights. One of the walls was lined with mirrors and another wall held posters of Rocky Marciano and Muhammed Ali, a few fight schedules, and hastily scrawled notices that said things like: “Don’t leave your dirty towels lying around. Your mother isn’t here to pick up after you.”

The place stank of sweat.

Cory looked up from his sweeping. “Help you?” he asked.

“I want to learn to box,” I said, simply enough.

Cory scoffed. “Oh yeah? And why’s that?” he asked, sweeping the impressive pile of dust he’d collected into a dustpan. “Did you just watch Rocky in your drama class at school?”

 “No,” I said, even though I had seen Rocky more than a couple of times. “I just want to learn to box.”

“Let me guess,” Cory said, stepping out of the ring and emptying the dustpan into a garbage can. “There’s a big kid at school who’s causing you trouble and you want to beat him up.”

“No,” I said again. “Look. I’ve just been interested in boxing for a while, okay? I’m not thinking I’d like to be a world champion or anything like that. I just want to learn to box so I can defend myself if I have to and maybe keep in shape. Do you know what I mean?”

“Kid,” he said. “If it’s self-defense you want, you’d be better off learning how to run really fast. That’s the best kind of self-defense there is for people who don’t have a killer instinct and trust me when I tell you this, you don’t have a killer instinct.”

He was standing directly in front of me now, glaring at me with two icy blue eyes that looked like a couple of saphires in the middle of his tanned bruised face. I was pretty young and pretty dumb, but I guess I was smart enough to know that Cory probably got hit up a dozen times a week by kids more interested in the glamour of boxing than they were the hard work it took to get there. And he was probably getting pretty sick and tired of it too.

But that didn’t mean he was the only one entitled to get pissed off. I was getting pissed off too. I’d paid this dude the compliment of walking into his gym and the only thing he could do was stand there and insult me.

I was wearing my backpack from school; it was heavy, crammed with textbooks. Slowly, I took it off and threw it on the ground, where it hit the dirty tiled floor with a loud thud.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “I have no killer instinct?”

“It means you don’t have it in you to be a fighter,” he said. “And don’t try asking me how I know. I’ve been around fighters all my life and I can tell who has it and who hasn’t. You don’t have it.”

“I can throw a punch just like anyone else.”

“Oh sure. You can throw a punch. No one’s saying you can’t. I’m just saying you wouldn’t throw one if it meant hitting someone.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I’d gone in there looking for a little advice, maybe even to sign up for boxing lessons, and instead I’d gotten an earful of attitude.

Cory’s face softened. He reached out and clapped one cracked hand on my skinny shoulder.

“Look, kid,” he said. “I’m doing you a favour. You’d be wasting your time here. There’s nothing wrong with not being a fighter. Lots of people ain’t. In fact, you should count yourself blessed.”

I shook him off. He pissed me off before by being all judgmental but he was infuriating me by getting patronizing.

“Prove it,” I said. “You tell me how you know I don’t have this killer instinct. You don’t even know me.”

“Don’t do this to yourself, kid,” he said.

“Prove it,” I repeated. “I want to know how you got this magical power of yours.”

Cory actually backed up a little. Maybe, for just a second, he realized that he’d misjudged me. But then he reconsidered and stepped forward again.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll prove it to you. But after I prove it, I want you to hightail it out of here. I’m a busy man and I’ve got work to do.”

“Sure,” I said. “What do you want me to do.”

“I want you to hit me,” he said.

I balked. “What?”

“I want you to hit me,” he said. “In the face.”

He stood there silently and stonily, his arms dangling by his sides.

“You’re serious?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said, stepping back. “You’re stalling. You don’t have the moxie.”

“Oh I got the moxie,” I said. “You just took me by surprise. If you want me to hit you, I’ll hit you.”

“Do it then,” he said, almost screaming. He stepped forward again. “Do it.”

I punched him. Hard. I hit him with the best right cross I could. I heard my fist crunch into his jaw and there was a loud and healthy smack that echoed through the gym. Cory’s head rocked to the side and spit flew from his puckered lips. He staggered back and then fell down, landing ass first on the brown and yellow tiled floor.

Cory looked up at me. “Holy...” he said, and then he stood up and ran over to the mirrored wall. He stood in front of it for a long while, poking at his face.

I wanted to ask if he was okay - almost did, in fact - but I didn’t. I told myself that I shouldn’t care if he was okay and that I should hope he was hurt. So I stood there, both my fists clenched and dangling by my sides, and waited for what would come.

He bared his teeth in the mirror, ran a finger along his gums, and pulled it out to examine it.

“I’m bleeding,” he said, turning around and showing me his bloody finger. “You made me bleed.”

“Do you want me to apologize?”

He looked at me dumbly for a second and then he started to laugh.

“No kid,” he said, pulling a kleenex from out of his pocket and wiping his finger with it. “I guess that I don’t.”

“So you going to teach me how to box now?” I asked. I thought that might be a stupid question. Cory might have even told me that there wasn’t anything he could teach me, seeing as how a kid who’d never even been in the ring before had just knocked him on his ass. Instead, he laughed good-naturedly and said: “I think I’ve got a better deal for you. Follow me.”

He led me to the back of the gym and into a office about the size of a child’s bedroom. The walls were a clinical yellow, the colour of weak lemonade, and were adorned with fading framed photographs of Cory’s boxing memories. The most prominent one showed a much younger Cory, his face damp with blood and sweat, standing in a boxing ring with his gloved fists raised victoriously in the air while a rival fighter lay on his back in front of him.

Cory saw me looking at it. “I was twenty-two when that picture was taken,” he said. “Best fight of my career. I was up against this trash-talking punk from Edmonton who thought he was Muhammed Ali, only he didn’t have the class and he certainly didn’t have the talent. I dropped him in the seventh round.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“Thirteen years ago. If you’re good at math, that makes me thirty-five. Are you good at math?”

“Not really.”

“Well, that’s okay. You don’t have to be good at math if you want a job here.”

“What?” I asked, and the incredulous look on my face must have been comical because Cory laughed again.

“Sit down,” he said, taking a seat himself in a massive swivel chair behind his desk. That left me with the only other chair in the room - a hard backed wood and steel thing, the kind you’d find stored en masse in community centres across Canada.

“Here’s the thing,” he said after I’d sat down. “I can’t do everything around here. I got some fighters to train, some classes to teach, some meetings to attend, and I got a wife on top of all that. And there’s a hundred and one other things around here that I’m always trying to find time for.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“What I’m doing today,” he said. “Sweeping the gym, scrubbing the toilets, washing the windows - which I haven’t done in a year - sanitizing the equipment, mopping up.”

“So you’re looking for a janitor?”

“Oh heck, I tried outsourcing this to a private company. They wanted twenty dollars an hour. I can’t afford that. I figured I’d hire a kid.”

“Like me?”

“Sure, why not?” he asked. “You say you want to learn to box. I say fine, I’ll teach you to box. But normally, that costs money. I don’t run this place for my health you know. I’ve got to eat too.”

“Sure,” I said.

“The guys who come in pay locker fees and training fees. You work for me and you can train here free of charge. And I’ll pay you six bucks an hour. That’s not much but it’s better than shovelling shit. What do you say?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try it.” I tried to play it cool but actually, I was elated. My parents had been after me for months to find a part-time job. Sometimes my mom would come home from work and thrust job applications from McDonald’s or Zellers in my face and she’d become irate when I didn’t fill them out. Now, while I didn’t think she’d be thrilled about the prospect of my working in a boxing gym, I knew she’d be pleased at least.

I started working there that weekend and I was happy to discover how much I enjoyed the job. Some of the fighters gave me a hard time at first, but they liked me and eventually they came to respect me. I spent the rest of my high school years working there and learning to fight. Cory taught me how to punch harder and faster. He put me on a manageable regimen of weight training and calisthenics. “By the end of the year, you’ll be able to get any girl in school just by taking off your shirt,” he said, and somehow, that motivated me.

Cory was an incredibly generous boss. It wasn’t at all unusual for me to collect my paycheque and find a fifty dollar bill tucked in there along with my pay stub. At first, he didn’t give me a lot of leeway but eventually, I think he came to trust me more than anyone in the world. He gave me a set of keys to the building so I could come and go as I pleased. He would also leave me in the gym to clean up by myself while he went to his meetings. Those occasions were happy times for me. I would turn the stereo up as loud as I could and go about my duties while listening to hard rock and roll music like Aerosmith or Guns N Roses. Sometimes Ollie would drop by too and we’d drink Cokes and shoot the shit and laugh the night away without a care in the world.

But while I respected Cory, I got the impression that he was hiding a lot of things about himself. You might even call him an iceberg. All I saw was the tip above the water. Underneath there was a hardened and icy mass that would lurk there calmly, bobbing up and down in the water, waiting to tear a cruise ship apart. Eventually - through my own personal observations and snippets of conversation I overheard among the boxers - I learned that the frequent meetings Cory was attending were, in fact, meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. I also learned that Cory lived in a tiny apartment above the gym. This news made me uncomfortable and for a long time, I didn’t know why. Then one summer, while hauling garbage bags out to the dumpster in the back alley, it hit me. Cory had mentioned that he had a wife and in all this time, I’d not seen her once. She’d never come down to talk to Cory, ask him what he wanted for dinner, or to see if he wanted to watch a movie. For all intents and purposes, Cory’s wife was a ghost.

I never asked him about this because I was either far too shy or far too polite. I just left Cory to his devices and continued to do my job and improve as a boxer.

And I did improve. In fact, after I turned 18, Cory even got me a few pro fights. They weren’t anything spectacular. I won three and lost one and made enough money to pay for my first year’s college tuition.

But all of this is not the main reason why - almost ten years after meeting him - I was going back to Cory’s boxing gym to enlist his help. It was part of it, sure. He wasn’t afraid to throw a punch and had some natural leadership abilities, but the real reason I was going there was because of an encounter I’d had with him about two months before I left for college.

It was late on a Wednesday evening and Cory had locked the gym up for the night. I was mopping the bathroom floors, the radio was on, and I was dimly aware that Cory was in his office, though what he was doing in there I did not know. All I knew was that I wanted to get my work done as soon as I could so I get some chicken from Chicken on the Way before it closed.

When I finished the mopping, I emptied the bucket and went into Cory’s office to collect my pay. I found him sitting behind his desk with his head between his hands. He was reading from a book on the desk and I could tell from both the black leather cover and the red letters interspersed throughout the text that it was a Bible.

I knocked on the door and Cory looked up and his first instinct was to hide the Bible so that I wouldn’t see it. But then he relented.

“I’m going to take off,” I said, even though I didn’t want to take off now. Now I wanted to stay, in fact. I knew that if I did, I’d get to see another layer behind the tough stony man who’d been my employer, trainer, and friend for the past two years.

“Okay,” he said. “You want your money?”

“Sure. What are you reading there?”

I knew what he was reading, and I think he knew it too, but he still lifted the book up so I could see the words Holy Bible stamped on the front in gold lettering.

“Neat,” I said. “But I guess the real question is what are you reading it for?”

Cory leaned back in his chair. “You a believer?” he asked.

I pulled down my shirt so he could see the cross dangling around my neck but he just squinted and waved his hand.

“That doesn’t mean a thing,” he said. “Lots of people wear crosses. What matters is what you believe.”

“I believe,” I said. “Do you?”

“Kid,” he said. “If you want to see the worst sinner in the world, you’re looking right at him. I can tell you right now that I’d be completely lost if it wasn’t for Jesus Christ.”

That did it for me. I now had absolutely no desire to go out for fried chicken. I sat down and Cory and I talked God and faith and religion and politics until six that morning. We ordered in pizza and Cokes and when I asked Cory about some of the things about his life, he gladly filled in the blanks. Yes, he was married, he said, but he and his wife were separated and had been for the past five years. He still saw her around - they went out for dinner now and then - but there was a lot that they had to work out before they could reconcile their marriage.

“What specifically went wrong?” I asked and Cory summed the problem up in one word: “Alcohol.”

He told me that he’d been going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for six years and had been on the wagon for four.

“All that time I’d been asking this ‘higher power’ to change me,” Cory said between bites of pepperoni pizza. “But after a while, I felt like a hypocrite. It seemed kind of selfish of me to want this unknown God to change me into a sober man and after that, have nothing to do with him. Do you know what I mean?”

I nodded my head. I didn’t fully understand what Cory meant but I wanted to hear his story anyway.

“So I wanted to know God,” he said. “I started listening to Christian radio and reading the  Bible and one night, it just dawned on me that I had to get born again. You know? I had to tell God that I was a sinner. They say that that’s the hardest part of the whole process - swallowing your pride and walking up to God and telling Him that you’ve done a lot of horrible things in your life. But it was easy as pie for me. It’s pretty hard to see yourself as righteous when you spent so many years living out of a bottle.”

He’d become a Christian two weeks ago, he said, and started attending services at Calvary Baptist Church the following week. He was going to get baptized the following month and he asked me if I’d come. I went, and as I sat in my pew and watched Cory’s pastor dunk him backwards into the church’s baptismal in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I did not feel that typical Christian experience of holiness and peace. The whole situation just had a surreal air about it. Maybe that’s because for the past two years, Cory had been showing me how to punch harder so that I could inflict more damage. This seemed to be in sharp contrast to Christ’s maxim of turn the other cheek, but maybe Jesus didn’t exactly have a boxing ring in mind when He issued that particular edict. Turn the other cheek was not a helpful strategy if you’re going after the world championship.

I’d like to say that Cory and I became even closer friends after his baptism, but that is not the case. We kept in touch for the two years that I was at Mountain Valley Bible College, but after I went back to Calgary and enrolled in the University’s drama program, I just stopped talking to him. The theatre program is pretty intense as is and I was trying to couple that with singing with Five Yellow Buses and my work on Campus Crusade for Christ. You might think that’s a pretty lame excuse for turning your back on a friend, and I guess that’s just what I did, but I made a point of letting Cory know that I was back in town and in the four years I was at the university, he never looked me up. I guess that means that if I was a mean bastard, then he was one too.

Still, he did have faith, and that’s the reason why I had Mark Murray drive me to his gym that morning. It’s not that I was the only one in the group who had faith. Mark, Lloyd and Ollie were all products of the school’s Catholic education system and that must have instilled something in them (I’d had a few late night conversations with Ollie over the years where he told me he was pretty sure that Jesus did a little bit more on that cross than die, but he still wasn’t quite ready to become one of those “foot-washing Baptists” thank you very much) and Luke had once told me that he grew up in a Baptist household, but I doubted that belief in God was an integral part of their day-to-day lives. With Cory - the Cory I knew years ago anyway - I did not doubt. I knew that he and I saw eye to eye on the Christian faith and I wanted someone like that on my team. Someone who would fight with me in the daytime and pray with me at night.

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