Jerry Quarry Died for Our Sins

Jerry Quarry Died for Our Sins

By Al Walentis

Xyla Press

~~~

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© 2017 by Al Walentis. All rights reserved.

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For those who could still find beauty after loss,

as they fought through the night

The Heavyweight Championship of the Multiverse

The Field (listed alphabetically)

Muhammad Ali

Record: 56-5, 37 knockouts

Career: 1960-1981

Best night: November 14, 1966. Ali stopped slugger Cleveland Williams in the third round at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, flooring the Big Cat four times and introducing the Ali Shuffle.

Jack Dempsey

Record: 60-7, 51 knockouts

Career: 1914-1927

Best night: July 4, 1919. Won the heavyweight title by massacring champion Jess Willard in three of the bloodiest, most lopsided rounds in ring history. The Manassa Mauler dropped Willard seven times in the first round.

George Foreman

Record: 76-5, 68 knockouts

Career: 1969-1977, 1987-1997

Best night: January 22, 1973. Flattened Joe Frazier in two rounds to capture the heavyweight crown, the champion driven to the canvas six times.

Joe Frazier

Record: 32-4-1, 27 knockouts

Career: 1965-1976

Best night: March 8, 1971. In a battle of unbeaten champions, Frazier earned a unanimous victory over Muhammad Ali in Madison Square Garden in what was billed as the Fight of the Century, leaving Ali sprawled on his back in the final round.

Larry Holmes

Record: 69-6, 44 knockouts

Career: 1973-2002

Best night: June 9, 1978. In a war that pushed both warriors to the limit, Holmes scored a split decision over Ken Norton to win the heavyweight crown.

Evander Holyfield

Record: 44-10-2, 27 knockouts

Career: 1984-2011

Best night: November 9, 1996. Opening as a 25-1 underdog, Holyfield outboxed and outclassed Mike Tyson to score an 11th round TKO and reclaim the heavyweight belt.

Jim Jeffries

Record: 19-1-2, 14 knockouts

Career: 1985-1910

Best night: June 9, 1899. Challenging heavy hitter Bob Fitzsimmons for the title, Jeffries dominated start to finish, knocking out the champion in the 11th round.

Jack Johnson

Record: 56-11-8, 36 knockouts

Career: 1897-1931

Best night: July 4, 1910. Johnson outclassed unbeaten Jim Jeffries, lured out of retirement as the Great White Hope to challenge the flamboyant champion. Jeffries’s corner tossed in the towel after 15 rounds of the 45-round bout.

Vitaly Klitschko

Record: 47-2, 41 knockouts

Career: 1996-2004, 2008-2012

Best night: June 21, 2003. Although he lost on cuts, Klitschko dominated heavyweight king Lennox Lewis through six rounds. Lewis retired afterward rather than face Klitschko in a rematch.

Wladmir Klitschko

Record: 64-5, 53 knockouts

Career: 1996-2017

Best night: July 2, 2011. Klitschko executed a 12-round demolition of David Haye, pinning him with his ramrod jab and clubbing him with rights.

Sonny Liston

Record: 50-4, 39 knockouts

Career: 1953-1970

Best night: September 25, 1962. Liston delivered power shot after power shot to Floyd Patterson’s heavyweight crown, which Patterson wore for only 2:04 of round one.

Joe Louis

Record: 66-3, 52 knockouts

Career: 1934-1951

Best night: June 22, 1938. Avenging the only blemish on his record, Louis knocked out Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in 124 seconds in one of the major sports events of the twentieth century, a battle that pitted the Brown Bomber against the pride of Hitler’s Germany.

Rocky Marciano

Record: 49-0, 43 knockouts

Career:1947-1955

Best night: September 23, 1952. Hopelessly behind on points against Arnold Raymond Cream, also known as Jersey Joe Walcott, Marciano uncorked a right hand for the eons, knocking the champion unconscious with a punch that traveled no more than six inches, yet landed with the force of an asteroid slamming into the earth — the greatest one-punch knockout in boxing history.

Max Schmeling

Record: 56-10-4, 40 knockouts

Career: 1924-1939, 1947-1948

Best night: June 19, 1936. Schmeling handed Joe Louis the first defeat of his career, knocking him down in the fourth and out in the 12th round.

Gene Tunney

Record: 65-1, 48 knockouts

Career: 1915-1928

Best night: September 22, 1927. In one of the most famous matches in ring lore, Tunney arose from the infamous long count to outbox Jack Dempsey and retain his title with a 10-round decision.

Mike Tyson

Record: 50-6, 44 knockouts

Career: 1985-1991, 1995-2005

Best night: June 27, 1998. The richest bout in boxing history to that date proved a devastating mismatch. Tyson made short work of unbeaten Michael Spinks, knocking him out 91 seconds into round one.

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Whenever I hear the name, Jack Dempsey, I think of an America that was one big roaring camp of miners, drifters, bunkhouse hands, con men, hard cases, men who lived by their fists and their shooting irons and by the cards they drew. America at High Noon.

— Jim Murray

"I look at my past

Great memories abound

For I fought, I bled, and I cried

I gave it my all round after round

And the world knows that I tried"

— Jerry Quarry

Time is a motherfucker and it’s coming for all of us.

— Jonathan Lethem

Contents

Jack

A Thousand Years

The Lives We’ve Lived

Jack

August 31, 2035

The day he met Muhammad Ali, nineteen years after Muhammad Ali died, Buck Lazarus feared the champ was drunk.

Ali wobbled. His knees buckled and his arms dangled as his hips swayed in a woozy dance.

No way was Ali drunk, nor ravaged by Parkinson’s disease, not the Muhammad Ali of November 14, 1966, the fighter Buck anticipated greeting today, a gladiator at his peak.

Buck dreaded something worse.

He dreaded his heavyweight championship of the multiverse might sunder into chaos and ruin before the competition even took wing.

Ali was clad in a full battle uniform: white satin trunks, tasseled boots, scarlet gloves. His chest glistened with perspiration as he parked himself under the gym entrance, a troll guarding his bridge, ragging the dour figure who sat hunched twenty feet inside on a decrepit wooden stool beside the ramshackle ring.

Radio chump, radio chump. Ali spat the words while he showboated and sashayed, pantomiming the role of a sot struggling not to pass out, rather than a boxer reeling from a haymaker.

Jesus Chrysler drives a Dodge, Buck sputtered, thrusting himself toward Ali.

The archway peered into a drab cinderblock cavern. Chipped-paint peeled from its lime green walls surrounding a ring mat dusty with resin. The faded leather turnbuckles remained unadorned by company logos. A row of skip ropes hung on pegs on the back wall, and two heavy bags dangled from silver chains. The musty odor of dank, humid sweat and acrid tobacco smoke permeated the gym. Buck ordered the aroma pumped in to set the mood, a duplicate of the spartan training camp of a champion whose finest days lay between the pages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Come on, champ, everyone’s on board. You are the Greatest. Buck clasped Ali in a half-assed bear hug—a cub hug.

I whup you right here, not on a white man’s radio show, Ali bellowed, waving his glove across the gym at James J. Jeffries, whose sable hair slicked from Brilliantine.

Radio? Jeffries laughed. We got pictures where I’m from. Moving pictures. Flickers.

Ali’s eyes glittered with scorn. Jeffries kept Ali in a harsh, steady fix. Buck’s sour grimace, confusion dissolving into panic, betrayed that his tournament had gone hideously wrong.

Face to face, Buck was strikingly angular and dark in an Italian way. From the profile, his hawk nose dominated, a beak so hooked it might pop open a can of beer. Not quite forty and ravishing in a peacock-striped jacket, Buck projected the flamboyance of a man-child first experiencing the pleasures of the world. Buck’s swagger faded fast. His sneezer sniffed trouble.

Jeffries sprung from his stool. He sported woolen boxing tights stretched halfway down his thighs and clinging to his bulging crotch, flaunting alpha dominance. In fine fettle, he matched Ali: six feet and two inches, 225 pounds, his square shoulders so splendid he might haul a deer carcass nine miles while never flinching, something this steely athlete once did.

Ali blazed into his shuffle, feet a blur, daring Jeffries to storm over and mix it up.

Buck propped himself as a shield between Ali and his nemesis. His sandy-colored hair, a Don King electro-cut, was a wiry smorgasbord of tangerine, lime, canary that jutted straight up in crinkled waves, eager to collapse in submission.

Come on, champs, I’m your promoter. Plenty of time to slug it out soon in the ring.

Buck tugged at Ali, aiming to guide him back to his own training quarters. Buck assigned each fighter private workout space, Ali’s halfway around the arena. Ali wandered here purposefully, vengeful, eager to torment Jeffries. Buck knew from the films he studied that Ali was playacting, egging on Jeffries, a hot dog with mustard and relish and all the fixings.

Jeffries had never witnessed Ali’s shtick before today. Buck was certain he could not distinguish the Greatest from a nutty boxing wannabe. Jeffries, a fighter from the faraway past, a duelist with whom Ali should have no quarrel, somehow worked Ali into a high state of agitation. Buck’s palms dampened with sweat.

Ali juddered, pretending he lacked the force to slip free from Buck’s meager grip and flutter across the gym.

Without warning and with a ferocity that shuddered Buck, Jeffries walloped a heavy bag. His fist crunched a deep imprint into the sand-packed canvas. Such vim threatened to crackle the apparatus from its moorings: a sound of thunder that might only come from someone capable of pounding rivets into steel with his bare knuckles, a Boilermaker.

Your boy here, he looks intemperate, Jeffries drawled, basking in the shocked quiet that spasmed through the gym after one pulverizing hook.

The word intemperate, Buck concluded, referred not to Ali’s brashness, but to suspicions that Ali overindulged in intoxicating spirits. Or that Ali was cuckoo crazy. Jeffries was a warrior, too polite to flaunt the n-word, however popular the slur had been in his time. Calling Ali boy was hideous enough.

Ali unhooked the dazzle. Playing make-believe no longer, he flicked free of Buck’s puny vise with the ease of gelatin dessert popping from a mold. Now Ali wasn’t just popping off. He popped off whiplash jabs—pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop! pop!—ten in three seconds, a salvo threatening to crack the sound barrier.

Buck admired it as bebop; a lyrical and physical jazz. He basked in the moment, even as the first of many panic attacks sank in, even while something did not sit right. History spiraled through the building, history not yet made.

He tried to smother Ali, hugging biceps that seemed chiseled from caramel marble, gazing at a face Adonis would envy. He was the most beautiful specimen the boxing gods ever spawned.

Champ, come on, your training quarters are over here.

Hope it’s my Deer Lake training camp. Else I ain’t doin’ no fighting.

This Old Armory lacked the elegance and space to replicate Deer Lake. The training quarters Buck designed were throwbacks to other eras. Knotty, cloth-covered ring ropes, weathered speed bags waiting to deflate. Everything lived-in, some of it altogether spent.

Ali offered no struggle, but he toyed with Buck, a Technicolor-attired promoter fruitlessly aiming to halt a serious rumble. Turning square to Buck, Ali brayed, a mad torrent of syllables mashed together, decades of poetry and fury condensed into one riff, machine-gun rapid, subhuman, unintelligible, except to Buck.

BiguglybearSonnyListonuglygorillaJoeFrazierThrillaManilaMummyyoutooslowGeorgeForemanMummy.

Buck froze, not only in space, but in time, across multiple dimensions, in this multiverse he wished were not his own.

When quantum theory proved a decade ago the existence of multiverses, everything changed. Once the conclusive evidence verified an infinite number of parallel universes stacked atop each other, separated by subatomic particles that came to be known as keloidtrons, the inevitability of time travel grew near, before the world government’s obscurantism throttled research. The laws of science proved that for every choice a person makes, the opposite choice renders in an alternate reality. The concept of freedom came unhinged. For some, these discoveries brought hope, for others despair.

Pinskie! Buck required reinforcements.

Lester Pinskie schlepped into view. A squat, rumpled man, with a horseshoe of chestnut hair and a pencil-thin mustache, Pinskie served as Buck’s personal assistant, his fixer, his flack, his go-to guy.

Buck caught Ali’s smirk, his shoulders relaxing, catching a breather after a hard-fought round.

It’s Ali, Buck said, hoping to take ten himself. He’s provoking a tussle with Jim Jeffries.

Pinskie caught his first glimpse of Jeffries. That guy looks pissed. Wouldn’t want to start no rumpus with him.

He ran a saloon for a spell, farmed alfalfa crops in retirement, toured the vaudeville circuit. For six years, starting in 1899, he was the baddest sonuvabitch in the known multiverse.

Ali had no interest hearing Buck sing Jeffries’ hosannas, so he fired off his own verses now. It was poetry so bad, but so street smart, it sired rap music.

Ali improvised a couplet.

"What kind of chance should you give this Jeffries named Jim?

Slim."

Buck wheeled Ali out to the corridor, as much as Ali allowed himself to be wheeled, while Ali flapped his mitt with disdain. Jeffries sprung forward. Eyes smoldering, he coiled like a pillbug, his left hook cocked to snap and strike.

Ali wasn’t drunk before, but he was drunk now, on his own beauty, his vigor, his pizzazz, his aura of invincibility. Octopus. You need more than eight arms to hit me. I’m too pretty, I’m too fast.

"Only sissies, they’re