March 2002
Kid Gloves
Growing up in Wichita Falls, I was a skinny kid with buckteeth and an inconveniently feminine first name. So I did what I could to work out the anger and fear in my head: I learned how to box. But not very well.
PUT 'EM UP: The author, age 11, spars with coveralls behind his house.
THE COURAGE OF A BOY CHILD in Texas is equated with his balls. It's a crude metaphor, but it declines to go away. Male Texans are supposed to be rough, tough, and ready for whatever comes down the pike. In the 1830's the makers of this myth gave up the relative safety of life in the United States and, allied with a few independent-minded Mexican settlers, risked all they had on reports of well-watered timberlands and prairies that billowed in the wind like ocean waves. When the Mexican claimants to that wilderness turned out to be bullies and despots, why, Texans licked their army and kicked them out without help from anybody. And then we beat back the ferocious Indians who had denied the Spaniards and Mexicans real settlement of their Texas province for 150 years. At all costs we stood our ground. It's a rousing story, though in the mythological version significant details get left out. As a birthright, it's dangerous, and as a code to live by, it's horseshit. But who would we be without our myths?
I WAS BORN IN THE ABILENE hospital the evening of March 18, 1945. Daddy put a fair-sized crimp in my boyhood while I still looked scalded. At least Mother claimed the name was mostly his idea. There are fads in naming babies like fads in choosing breeds of dogs. Just after the war, great numbers of American couples named their babies Jan. It was my bad luck that about 99 percent of them were daughters. Many people have since assumed my parents were sophisticates who gave me the European name, pronounced "Yahn." It's common throughout Scandinavia and Central Europe—there are Czech national heroes named Jan out the kazoo. But nope, Daddy didn't know beans about Europe. He just thought it was a handsome name. I never really blamed him. It's not like all those parents of the baby boomers got together and had a mass consultation. Still, I would be a grown man before I could shrug off some lout sneering, "'Jan!' That's a girl's name!"
My memories of my earliest years are indistinct and few. The images took on sharpness and sequence when Daddy hitched a trailer to his new black Chevrolet and we made the move to Wichita Falls. It was 1949. We first lived in an apartment house downtown. The units opened onto a central hall at the end of which was a single bathroom that all the tenants shared. Mother and Daddy hated that. Daddy was consumed with building us a home. He bought a lot on a new street called Keeler that was just four blocks from his dad's broad-porched house on Collins.
Though he always voted with labor and the Democrats, my dad was a conservative man. He wanted my sister and me to grow up exactly the way he had. He planned for us to go to grade school at Alamo—built with a brick facade that resembled the iconic Texas fortress—just like he had. Our friends would come from families similar to ours. But Daddy miscalculated: By three blocks, he learned after buying the lot, Keeler was in the district of Ben Franklin, a new school built near the mansions of the Country Club area. I started school with kids whose dads were oil millionaires.
My name wasn't the only problem. I was skinny and had buckteeth. Other kids at school mumbled through a mouthful of braces; I looked in the mirror and saw Bugs Bunny. I was unsteady of emotion and thought I was ugly. We were blue-collar middle class, but I thought we were poor. Once I was proud of my dad's '48 Chevy; now it embarrassed me. Every morning in front of the school there was a line of Cadillacs. I was uneasy when my mother took a job in a laundry. Why was our own wash hung out on clotheslines in the back yard? Why didn't we have a washer and dryer like everybody else? At the refinery Daddy wore thick one-piece cotton garments called coveralls. Drying on the lines, they hung in beheaded mannish forms, twisting their arms in the constant breeze. At night I would square off with the coveralls and pound them with my fists. My mother and sister thought it was funny, and they took snapshots of me doing it. I wasn't pretending to get back at Daddy for some wrong. I think it was more like my first boxing gym. I was trying to work out the anger and fear in my head and turn them into bravery and skill. For sure as sundown, I was going to have to fight.
The fights took place after school in vacant lots and were great fun unless you were one of the fighters. For me they fell into a pattern. I would back up while my opponent walked forward with his fists raised and his friends jeered me. Finally I'd run forward spewing shrill jabber and throwing windmill punches. I lost more fights than I won, but a couple of times my outbursts were so furious that bullies decided to leave me alone. I got in trouble, I eventually noticed, when I started the fights. One foe, Danny Mulligan, was a dark-haired pretty boy who must have been born with a smirk, and he ran with the real toughs. I could be pushed around by that bunch, but I was not afraid of Danny. His scorn of me pissed me off, and I called him out one day right beside the Ben Franklin flagpole. We fought until I staggered around blindly, feeling the blows whang off my head but just not believing the outcome. Finally Danny dropped his hands and said, "Boy, do you want me to make soup out of you?"
IN A TOWN WHERE ATHLETICS WAS everything I was a nobody. I came into my teens when Wichita Falls was enjoying its run as the state's kingpin of high school football. Our Coyotes reached the state finals four years in a row and won the title twice. I couldn't play football worth a flip, but I wasn't smart enough to walk away from it. I hung on, riding the bench in the games and getting run over by bigger and tougher boys in practice, until a broken collarbone relieved me from a second tour with the B-team. I alienated an assistant coach who managed the baseball team in the spring, so I didn't get the chance to show off my real love and modest talent, playing the outfield. Another coach's invitation to join the track team ended badly; I hadn't the wind or the discipline to run the mile. I quit in a particularly self-demeaning way—pretending to get tripped up by a competing runner, taking a fall in the hard, sharp cinders, just to put an end to it. I heard the coaches' unsympathetic murmurs, about how I used to fake being hurt in football. Daddy tried to pass on his love of golf, but it bored me. All right, bone up for the college entrance exam. Do something constructive. Learn to play the harmonica. But the winter before graduation two friends dared me to join them in a dramatic alternative: boxing.
Joe Haid was the poorest of my friends. His father had died when he was little, and his sweet-natured mother provided for them by working in a grocery store. But Joe was always first at something—reading Kerouac's On the Road, getting up at five in the morning to throw newspapers near the country club so he could buy a Cushman Eagle motor scooter that he painted metallic chartreuse, moving on to a pink '57 Chevy that we drag-raced on Kell Boulevard to the limits of its 283 horses and four-barrel carb. Joe found a black man on the east side who would buy us bottles of Southern Comfort and cherry sloe gin. The parents of Joe's girlfriends always hated him. Joe and his mother scraped together enough money for him to spend his seventeenth summer at the Culver Military Academy in northern Indiana, and he returned to us a boxer. He was sort of an effete boxer at first—the footwork they taught him resembled that of fencing—but he was fast with his hands and eager. Wayne Hudgens was a tall, strong rawboned kid who was game for anything. I was the nervous and glum one in the back seat.
I remember clearly my first awareness of boxing. It was 1953 and I was eight years old. I was playing on the floor of my Shelton grandparents' farmhouse, and their console radio brought on the heavyweight title bout of Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott. The exotic names gripped me. Then in the static the bell rang, soon the announcer started shrieking, and in seconds it was over, a first-round knockout. Wow! Rocky Marciano. Radio was the perfect medium for boxing; imagining most fights was far more exciting than seeing them. Six years later I jumped around my bedroom and whooped and danced out in the back yard throwing punches when Ingemar Johansson bombed the senses out of Floyd Patterson. Mother came to the kitchen window and stared, wondering what had come over me. Movie theaters showed films of the big fights along with cartoons and newsreels then, and to learn the magic of Ingo's right—his "'toonder' and lightning," his "hammer of Thor"—I watched a Kim Novak picture repeatedly so I could study every move of the fight on the big screen. An usher finally shooed me out.
