Lights Out

Mickey says: “I’m telling ya Reddy, it’s tough.”

I say: “He was a good little guy.”

“Was,” Mickey grumbles.

“They say there are five stages, Mickey.”

“Huh?”

“Of grief, Mickey. There are five stages of grief.”

“Meh.”

He contemplates his shot and beer.

Mickey’s home from one of his walkabouts (maybe he never leaves Philadelphia, or maybe he goes as far as his money holds out, who knows?) because he’d tried to outrun sorrow over his little terrier, Chump-Change, dying. It didn’t work.

“He was the best, Reddy.”

“He really was,” I say.

My real name — the name on my tax bill — is Richard. “Redsy” growing up because of my hair, which eventually morphed into light brown as Redsy gradually morphed into “Reddy.”

Mickey’s my older half-brother and we’re in Rizzo’s Bar and Grill quaffing a few. Yeah, Rizzo’s. Yep, long gone. So, this happens back in the 1980s when Fishtown was still Fishtown; before the hipsters completely took over. They’d just begun to infiltrate.

Once in a while they’ll amble in, spot the pool tables, take a gander at the clientele — who look like bikers and pirates, but who mostly work the docks or weld together the bones of new buildings. There are some real Mohawks in the mix, too. Native Americans. They’re not afraid of heights, and make great iron workers.

When the newbies learn there’s actually no grill at Rizzo’s Bar and Grill — just stale potato chips and peanuts — they pivot and amble the hell on back out and head downtown to one of those places that sell “craft beer,” words never uttered in Rizzo’s. 

Now, Mickey drops his shot of whisky into the pint, studies the foaming for a second, then dives. That’s four since I come in, but I don’t know what Mickey drank before then, and he’s been here a while. He doesn’t surface until he’s done.

He signals the bartender.

“You?” Mickey asks.

“In a minute,” I say, motioning to my half-full pint. I’m three in; just beer — I don’t swig the hard stuff.

Plus, it’s Mickey. I want to stay semi-sober because I don’t know if I’ll get dragged into some donnybrook like often happens when you’re with Mickey. 

Mickey boxes; professional for a number of years, but after just for the hell of it. He’s crazy. I care about him — love him, in fact, though I’d never say as much — but he’s a drinker, a brawler, a gambler and just generally bad news. 

He’s been stabbed three times and shot twice in altercations for which the cops never even bother to look for the perps because, well, again, it’s Mickey. 

Mickey’s 10 years older than me. Even though he’s a neighborhood legend, I never idolized him as people might assume. Maybe because I’m the oldest of the four children my mother had with my father. My parents married as widow and widower, each bringing one child into the fold. 

We certainly weren’t The Brady Bunch — crammed into our row home with one bathroom and a bitty square of a backyard with its 50/50 ratio of brown grass and dirt, and with weeds that spring up overnight like horror movie zombies to pounce on every flower Mom plants — but somehow we managed to become upright citizens, not counting the half-brother who’s in prison.

Mickey’s the reason I can hold my own mano a mano. Thankfully, though, I haven’t fistfought since my early 20s. Once you turn 18 — once you see guys being hauled off to grownup prison for breaking somebody’s face — that kind of neuters the urge. Anyway, it’s not my nature to fight. It’s not even my nature to argue, which sometimes ticks the wife off, but what can I say? 

“How’s the job,” Mickey asks, suddenly remembering that he’s for once not drinking alone.

“Still there.” 

I am a mailman. 

He belches, gathers his thought.

“The kids?”

“Still there.” I’ve got three who, back then when this conversation takes place, must have been something like seven, nine, and eleven. Busy, busy, busy.

Mickey doesn’t ask about my wife who, for some strange reason, he thinks doesn’t approve of him.

Mickey says: “I hear about Jerry Winters.”

Jerry Winters works for SEPTA, driving the 15 trolley down Girard Avenue. Or he worked for SEPTA. He’d just been shot and killed in a robbery downtown a month or so ago, when Mickey had been on walkabout.

I say: “Big turnout for the funeral, or so I heard.”

“You didn’t go?”

I shake my head. I’d meant to, but one of the kids needed to be rushed to the ER that night with a broken arm.

“You were friends.”

“I guess,” I say.

We were on friendly terms, me and Jerry Winters. It’s not like we hung out. In fact, as kids, he bullied me, but so did a lot of punks up until that turning point.

See, I was a chicken-shit kid, running from boys who wanted to fight me. Then Jerry Winters decided to beat me up. He ruled fifth grade. Deceptively fast with churning legs and fists. Like one of those machines that tunnel through mountains. He crushed any boy foolish enough to challenge him and someone always did because that’s just growing up in Fishtown back then.

The scrawny kids, like me, Jerry left alone or else he even defended us. He bullied the bullies, so we dweebs and geeks hid in the shadow of his default approval, paying for protection by helping him with homework or passing him answers to quizzes. Our “friendship” back then, if you can even call it that, never really went further than offhand greetings in corridors. 

“Yo Redsy!” 

“Hi Jerry.”

Then Mickey “Lights Out” O’Connell wins his first Gold Glove award, and some neighborhood clowns show respect in peculiar, yet predictable ways. They’d pick fights with him. Especially after they’d had a few. The legal drinking age was — is — 21, but my brother, he’s getting served since he turns 16. In our neighborhood, the bartenders don’t just look the other way, they break the law with eyes wide open.

At nearly every bar Mickey hits, some guy challenges him. And that’s OK with Mickey who loves to fight more than he loves to eat. He’ll warn the guy, push him back, the guy charges, throws a roundhouse that breezes by, and then Boom! one quick jab by Mickey, and it’s lights out.

I’m still a kid as this goes down. We live in different worlds, Mickey and me, and never the twain and all that. But it’s Fishtown, a village, really, so sometimes the damn twain does meet.

One of those guys who challenges Mickey and gets his ass handed to him is Jerry Winters’s older brother. 

And that suddenly turns me from one of the nonentities who orbits Jerry’s benevolence — nearly beneath his attention — into somebody he needs to beat up because, well, family is family. 

“You’re dead, O’Connell,” he says to me one day at recess.

“Why?” But I know why.

So, every day after school for about a week I run from Jerry Winters.

His friends say: “Jerry, leave him alone. It’s Redsy the Runt.”

But Jerry Winters is focused. He says: “I will. After.”

My fellow geeks say: “Fight him once. Get it over with.”

“He’ll beat the shit out of me,” I explain.

“Yeah, but then that’s the end of it.”

I say: “Brilliant. After you.”

I’m thinking long-game because these events happen the last weeks of school. If I can only avoid Jerry until summer break, things will be all right between us come next September, I’m hoping. I can’t be so important to him that he’ll hold a grudge over an entire summer, right? He’d get bored with the idea of beating me up and move on to other challenges, right?

Wrong.

Here’s the thing, though: Luck exists. 

This next is mostly luck, very little skill. Sure, I’d sometimes accompany Mickey to Chalky’s Gym and watch for a minute or two as he spars, but then I go to a little table in the corner of the place with a Spider-Man or Fantastic Four or Hulk or, sometimes even a Superman, although he’s so damn powerful he’s boring. Maybe I do some homework. 

Sure, Mickey tries to give me some direction. He tells me how to throw a punch, plant my feet, anticipate your opponent’s moves. How to think like a boxer, to think strategically and tactically while under pressure. And I retain this wisdom — for maybe a few hours. 

Then, one overcast June afternoon, Jerry Winters spots me on Girard Avenue and the chase begins. What’s he even doing here? I thought the Winters spent summers in Wildwood. A map of Fishtown stains my brain, so I don’t know why I cut into that particular alley. I don’t know how I forget that it’s a dead-end. He stops running. He’s catching his breath as he walks toward me, fists clenched.

Even after all these years, I don’t quite exactly know how this next part unfolds. My eyes are closed for most of those minutes that unspool, it seems, over an eternity. My strategy? Escape. This is my Dunkirk. Get me the hell out of here.

I try pushing Jerry aside after I duck his first punch, and one of those shoves hits him square in the Adam’s apple. A three-fingered spike. He gags, stoops in shock, hands on knees and wheezing. I don’t even know what I’m doing, but I strike again. This time with eyes open. This time with a close fist. This time with leverage. I pop him in one the spots Mickey tells me to hit a guy: square in the nose, as if trying to ram it up through the top of his head. 

Jerry Winters goes down. 

I look about, surprised to find a semi-circle of kids who must have come running when this starts.

Oh, shit.

I face Jerry’s posse. But they cheer me; appreciate what I’d done. The underdog effect. I never realized just how much Jerry Winters had been feared more than loved, but a few of the boys slap me on the shoulder and say in amazement: “Redsy O’Connell?”

Yes, Redsy O’Connell just beat Jerry Winters.

A couple of them help Jerry to his feet and I turn, stand square, face him. I am not afraid anymore. Jerry must sense this, makes a “no más” motion.

A few days later, one of the older guys in the neighborhood — and by old, I mean maybe 19 or 20 — tells me, “Attaway to go, Redsy! Just like your brother.”

But I am nothing like Mickey, a fact reinforced about a month later when he fights Mel Pierce at Brawler’s down on Frankford Avenue. They’re both climbing up the ranks of the welterweight division, hoping to one day get a match with DeShawn “Machine Gun” Reynolds for the crown. 

Mickey, he hears about Jerry Winters and I guess he figures he can gradually work me into the sport. He tells me I can be one his “corner men.” Hold his mouthguard — his bit — between rounds.

It’s a Friday night, the rowdies crowd around, pumped by the odds against two promising young boxers who matchup so closely hailing from the same city, let alone the same neighborhood. Bets placed. The noise, the smell of sweat, the feel of the canvas, the give of the ropes, and the color of the.… 

Ding!

Mickey and Mel deadeye each other as they tap gloves. Then they’re off. Pounding, grunting, groaning. Mel lands one, and I’m sprinkled by my brother’s blood and sweat. The crowd braying, insatiably hungry for meat. The distortions of a man’s face being hit by a punch propelled by the accumulated force of 77 pounds a square inch. My brother gargoyled. He counters, gargoyling Mel Pierce. Those images alight my nightmares still. 

The crowd roars as if animals battle. Many of these same men go to dog fights, and demand to see a creature mauled to death. That stays with them. They want more than to see someone beaten. They lust for the ultimate victory. They want to see a man pummeled to death. 

Kill! Kill! Kill! 

I run, run, run. Mickey’s manager tries to grab me, but I twist free, tunnel through the crowd, out into the night. Run home to my family and actually, shamelessly, cry in my mother’s arms. 

No, I think, sipping my beer at Rizzo’s. I am nothing like Mickey with his two ex-wives, four bankruptcies, and three grown children who won’t speak to him. 

This is the first I’d been out drinking with him in years. In earlier days when we’d meet, I’d often wind up in some barroom brawl, so I quickly learned how brush off his invitations to go “grab a few.”

Drinking beer with my older sibling and wondering when he might decide to settle scores with someone who’d broken a ketchup bottle over his head a year ago just isn’t my idea of fun.

But this time, I want to have a few with him. This time I ask him if he’d like to meet up. This time I have news about our mother. 

“But she’s going to be fine, right?”

“There’s always a chance, Mickey.”

He drops a shot of whiskey into his new pint of beer, watches the liquid move about like a satellite view of a hurricane gathering force. Mickey is the half-brother Mom brought in from her first marriage.

They bonded big-time in her years of widowhood, before Mom met Dad. She still sometimes calls him “my brave little man.”

“I am so sorry,” I say, almost as if my heart isn’t breaking too. This is my mother, as well. But I’ve had time to absorb the blow. Mickey’s stunned. When he left, Mom hadn’t yet been diagnosed.

“She home?” he finally asks.

“On the couch downstairs,” I say. “Somebody’s always with her.”

“Keeping vigil.”

“Want something to eat, Mickey? On me.”

This entire outing’s on me, actually.

He shakes his head like a six-month old might avoid swallowing a spoonful of baby-mush. 

That’s about when Mel Pierce comes into Rizzo’s. Mel’s as loud as Mickey’s quiet. He spots Mickey, heads to the other side of the bar. He’s keeping his distance which, makes sense on paper, except he sits so that they’re directly across from each other. 

Mickey motions to the bartender and another boilermaker materializes.

Both Mickey and Mel are about a decade since their last pro match. But like Mickey, Mel still fights in the bars and on the streets. Some guys who fight each other professionally might, after they leave the game, sort of settle into a friendship, even a warm friendship. Think George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. But some can’t. Think Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. Mickey and Mel still hate each other and this might be the first time their paths cross in five years. They fought out on the street that time, too.

“Come on, Mickey,” I say, “let’s go.”

“I’m staying right here.”

There’s some sort of stalemate going on.

Mel gets his pint, but never takes his eyes off my brother. The last time they fought outside the ring, they’d called out insults to each other first as a warmup. This time happens different.

Mickey suddenly slams his pint on the bar and barrels out the door into the night with me behind him saying, “Mickey! Whatcha doing? Whatcha doing?”

Mel Pierce comes out. 

Mickey says “you….” But then falls back against a lamppost, slinks down. He’s too drunk to stand up. 

Pierce laughs.

“Lights Out O’Connell. Looks like it’s lights out for you, you hobo.”

“That’s enough,” I say.

“Is it?”

He walks toward my brother, who’s still yammering away saying that he’s going to commit all sorts of violence against his opponent when he can hardly see, and certainly can’t fight.

I too walk toward my brother.

“Mel, go away,” I say.

“I owe him this,” Mel Pierce says, and spits on Mickey. 

That’s enough.

I try to describe it sometimes, this “whatever” that takes over. The cliche is “blind rage,” but it’s more like “blinders rage.” My world becomes the target: Mel Pierce. It’s not like possession or, rather, how I imagine possession to be. It’s something buried so deep within that it’s not even mine. I like to lay it at the feet of ancestors, of the kind of reaction some distant relative of mine displayed in battle thousands and thousands of years ago. It’s the rage for survival, the reason I exist at all.

A regular Joe, like me, stands no chance against a professional boxer, or even a former washed-up drunk of a professional boxer unless you happen to catch him in a wheelchair in advanced old age. 

Mel Pierce isn’t that old. He also isn’t that sober. He’d tagged a few bars before hitting Rizzo’s and that helps. 

I swing. Mel steps back. Jabs me in the chest. And we’re off. The psychological blinders also block out most sound but I do hear Mickey on the sidewalk cheering me on.

“Give him hell, Reddy. Get him. Keep off the wall!”

Pierce indeed tries to back me into the wall like he might put an opponent on the ropes. He lands one, and I go down but roll off the pavement and onto the street. Purposely doing this to get away from him and buy time.

He’s overconfident. Strides toward me with his hands down, probably wanting to spit on me, too, but by the time he arrives, I’ve gotten my breath back, spring up and sucker him at the same time. Pierce goes down. I spit on him, since that seems to be one of the rituals of street fighting these days. 

That ends the spitting for both of us and we fight like gentlemen, sort of, when you compare how guys mix it up these days.

At family gatherings later I’d proclaim: “I must have gotten knocked down about 75 times in that fight.” Probably about three or four times; the others I slip, so they don’t count. All the while, Mickey keeps trying to wriggle up the lamppost into upright, but fails again and again.

“Hold him off til I get there,” he slurs.

But mostly it is “Give the bastard hell, Reddy! Give him hell!”

That damn fight seems to last forever, but probably no more than five minutes, which is two tortuous minutes longer than a round in profession boxing. 

My arms grow heavy, my legs stiff. What’s this? Early onset rigor mortis? Blood waterfalls over my left eye onto my cheekbone and I have to keep swiping my forehead. I hope that someone will notice, call the cops, end this thing. Suddenly, though, from the same place that releases the ancestral rage coursing through my veins, adrenaline jolts me and it’s one-two, one-two, one-two. Mel Pierce falls.

I lean on my knees, panting as the adrenaline recedes, and the veins in my neck stopped throbbing. Pierce isn’t getting up. It’s over.

Just then, somebody turns the corner.

“Mel!”

He runs toward us, this guy. I’m guessing it’s the friend Mel Pierce was supposed to meet at Rizzo’s. 

I square up as much as I can, which isn’t a lot because Mel Pierce must have bruised some ribs. This guy looks like a nose tackle and he’s heading toward me.

Oh shit!

But he stops at Mel, takes a knee, tries to judge just how much damage. 

Though still wheezing, I manage to say: “He… he started it….”

But the guy holds up his hand like a take-no-bullshit teacher quieting a classroom. He turns Mel on his back more, inspects some of the cuts to the face; cuts from blows that I’m surprised I’d even landed.

Then he sighs and I recognize the sound of a long-suffering caretaker trying to stop somebody from self-destructing.

He knows Mel Pierce started it. I need not explain. He’s had to pull Mel away from altercations, bail him out of jail, be his keeper. Mel’s wife long ago left him, taking the kids and cleaning out their old house except for a restraining order that she left on the kitchen counter. 

“Tend to your own,” the nose tackle says.

I turn and see Mickey sleeping on his side, using the pavement for a mattress, his arm tucked under his head for a pillow. I rouse him, somehow get him to his feet, but he keeps swatting at me, and down he goes again. I won’t give up. I grab him by the coat collar, cry out as only the wounded can as I lift. Every movement ignites a sharp stab in muscles that I don’t even know I have. Even my hair hurts. I lay him down again.

I go back into Rizzo’s, call a cousin, stumble out and keep close watch on my brother. Should he go to the emergency room? Should I go to the emergency room? 

My cousin and her boyfriend arrive in five minutes, right after the nose tackle — finally giving up on making Mel Pierce walk — throws the boxer over his shoulder fireman style and carries the sad sack off into the night. 

Wait. 

I know that guy. The nose tackle. I’ve seen him. He’s one of the firefighters from Engine 29 on Girard Avenue. 

Farewell Mel Pierce. A bag on a big man’s shoulder. That’s my last image of Mel. Within two years, he will be dead. 

Meanwhile, I just want to go home but I’m not driving.

I tell my cousin: “Look, I’m not visiting any damn emergency room.” 

“Give em hell, Reddy. Give him hell.” Mickey mumbles in his stupor, then slumps even more in the back seat, snoring so intensely that his lips flap. It takes 11 “not going to the emergency rooms” until my cousin pulls up to the ER and her boyfriend, a quiet guy, lays his hand upon my shoulder and says, “Come on, Reddy. We need to get you checked in and checked out.” That’s it. The modulated tone of authority ends my resistance.

“I’ll check myself in,” I say. “Get Mickey home.”

“We’ll be back in a bit, Reddy,” my cousin says; a warning that I’d better indeed have a doctor look at me.

I have to blink my eyes into focus when I walk through the sliding doors. It’s Friday night. I’m surrounded by guys who’ve been stabbed, shot, and pummeled along with some poor girls whose asshole boyfriends think beating up a woman makes them more of a man. There’s also regular people here for regular reasons: broken bones, sprained ankles, worrisome chest pains. And people who’ve been hurt doing regular things: Reaching too far when on a ladder, tripping over a curb, floored during pickup basketball.

I give my information at the desk and am told to take a seat. Strange how an ass-kicking or even times when I’m pretty sick from some bug or whatever pulls me into a calm state. The everyday itsy, bitsy concerns that feed anxiety, go somewhere and wait until I get better.

It’s true that there are instances so ramped-up that your life flashes before you. Usually, your past. But there are other very rare instances of hyper-insight when the future flashes before you. 

And that’s what happens. Clairvoyance! I see! I see! I see that Mickey will continue drinking and just when we think he hits rock bottom, we discover there’s yet another lower layer of self-destruction to be claimed. 

He’ll die in about five years from cirrhosis of the liver while on his final walkabout. Die homeless and freezing on the streets of Atlantic City, which I guess might be fitting in a perverse way since that’s where he lost the title fight to “Machine Gun” Reynolds. Everything our family tried to do to help just didn’t take, and some of the clan may have even been relieved when they heard because at last Mickey had found peace and we would never have to worry about being pulled into his dark spiral again.

That’s right: Machine Gun Reynolds. So, Mickey lost to arguably the GOAT of the welterweight class, so there’s that — which I kept telling him — but my brother calls a loss a loss and takes no solace from near misses. 

You couldn’t talk to Mickey when he was in his cups which more and more became his permanent state, without him saying: “I should have won.” “I could have won.” “I don’t know why I didn’t win.” “My whole life would have been different, but I ain’t got no luck!” A litany of regret. It ate at him until the end.

While sitting in the ER, I lean back slowly (the ribs) and, cupping my head in my hands, look at the ceiling, into the intense lighting that exiles shadows from the space.

Suddenly, I think: Why I am here? Not here in the ER. Why I am here? Why does all of it exist? Does it all exist?  

“I think, therefore I am,” Descartes said. Surprised that the mailman reads? Why? Only college grads are allowed to ponder existence? I read all the time because TV and movies suck.

My thoughts wander slowly over strange terrane. 

There must have been a first. There must have been a single Homo sapien who, maybe about 300,000 years ago, broke through instinctive animal survival responses to a brutal world, and realized that he exists. Or she. Sure. Why not? Imagine what sort of shock that must have been. Being the truly first human on earth. 

The horror of realizing that death will come. The glory of shouting: “I live for now! I live!” Imagine stepping out of the fog to become cognizant of your own cognizance. 

Maybe it happened after a fight or battle. The first human being to have truly had some sense knocked into him. 

When the shock subsides, he realizes that the dead need to be buried. He goes about this new business, clawing and scrapping at the soil with the jagged rocks he uses as tools or weapons. It takes a long time, but finally he dumps the body in the grave, and mounds dirt upon it.

He does this while the rest of his herd look on in bafflement. But when he moves to the next body, one by one they, too, go to corpses and begin digging. 

Slowly, already realizing that they won’t get to bury most of the bodies, and the ones not buried will be food for scavengers come nightfall. Slowly, because they don’t yet understand why they do this, and yet somehow, they know that it must be done and that someday soon they will understand.