The Heart and the Fist Part 3

We were told to wait until registration closed. I went upstairs and later Earl came up holding a piece of white paper. On it, my name was listed in the "Blue Corner" column next to "156 NOVICE." I was fighting "Vs. UNOPPOSED."

I looked down at my gym bag and the small cooler at my feet. I felt ridiculous for having made such careful preparations.

Earl and I watched a few fights. We waited until I was called in the ring and given my trophy for showing up to scattershot applause.

As we walked out through the lobby, Earl spoke to my back. "Hold that trophy right." I held the trophy limply, upside down, in my left hand. "Hold on," Earl said. We stopped in the lobby and Earl turned me to face him. "Now look here, Eric. You are the Golden Gloves Novice Champion. You earned that trophy. Now go on and hold it right. You been workin' hard three years now. Real hard. And you can box. You did everythin' you needed to do and more. You did everything you could. You earned that. That there trophy is goin' up on the mantel. Right for everybody to see. Baby, all we can do is do right. That's all we can do. And you've done that. Everything else is up to my Father. You know how to fight. Look at all the guys you beat in the gym. You been workin' hard. Almost three years."

"Yeah, but I would have liked to have fought for it," I said.

"I know you would have, baby. Don't you think I know that?" Earl put his hand on my shoulder.

Earl did know I wanted a fight. One evening a pro fighter named Mo "Too Sweet" came down to the track where Derrick and I were sparring. Maurice was a professional fighter whom Earl had trained off and on. Mo did his road work on the track at Central, and sometimes he'd come down to work the bag with us.

"Earl! How you doin'?"

"Beautiful, beautiful. How are you?"

"All right. I got a match coming up in a few weeks and I've been looking for someone good to spar with. Can I work with Derrick?"

"How about Eric?"

"Eric?" Mo looked at me.

Earl said, "Eric's no joke. Plus he's closer to your weight."

Derrick fought at 168 pounds, and I fought at 156. Maurice fought around 147.

"Eric, huh? All right." Mo smiled. "I'll be sure to take it easy on him."

I had watched Maurice fight and win at the Ritz in Raleigh. He was a talented professional fighter. I thought to myself, Earl might have lost his mind. Earl might have lost his mind. But after the Golden Gloves disappointment, I wanted a fight. But after the Golden Gloves disappointment, I wanted a fight.

I stood in front of Earl as he held my glove open for me, its hollow fist aimed at the ground. I slid my hand down and into the cool glove until the tips of my fingers touched the end and I curled my fingers back into a fist. I set my gloved fist firmly against Earl's stomach and Earl bent slightly, his powerful fingers tightening and drawing and tightening at the crisscross of the laces.

Earl doubled the knot and tucked a loose end of lace into the glove. He tied my other glove and I turned to face Maurice.

Earl set down orange cones to carve out a ring on the track. Maurice and I touched gloves. I was used to fighting Derrick, who, at six foot two, had a much longer reach. Maurice was shorter than I was, and so I was able to close with him easily. I jabbed and felt the full force of my punch crack on his face. I watched as his head snapped back. It was probably the best punch I'd ever thrown. I followed Mo around our makeshift ring, and I kept jabbing and the jabs kept cracking.

As Maurice slid around the ring, I realized, He's running from me. He's running from me. I hit Mo and he cracked me back hard, and our sparring grew in intensity. I threw a right that knocked Maurice in the side of the head and he stumbled. I pursued him. He turned and unloaded a right hand full of malice that flew past my head. We weren't sparring anymore. We were fighting. I hit Mo and he cracked me back hard, and our sparring grew in intensity. I threw a right that knocked Maurice in the side of the head and he stumbled. I pursued him. He turned and unloaded a right hand full of malice that flew past my head. We weren't sparring anymore. We were fighting.

Earl had been working with me on throwing a right hook to the body followed by a right hook to the head. I jabbed first, then I shot my fist into Mo's ribs, and then with a twist through the hips I turned the punch over and brought my fist barreling over Mo's low left hand and smashed his temple. Mo stumbled again, then turned his back on me and walked out of the boundary of the ring.

"I told you Eric could fight," Earl said.

Derrick said later that night, "Eric, I thought you were 'bout to kill Mo in there. You got yourself a little fight in you now."

That night Earl called me. "Need you to come over the house. Come when you can." And he hung up.

"Hey, Earl," I said when I walked in.

"Well, all right."

"How you feeling?" I asked.

"Oh, I feel good," he said.

On his dining room table lay a little piece of gold-colored metal next to my Golden Gloves trophy. Earl picked up the piece of metal and handed it to me. My name was engraved across it. I held the piece of metal and felt oddly formal knowing that Earl had used my last name.

"Now," Earl said-he wasn't going to give me a chance to say anything-"turn that over. See that piece a tape, that backing there? Take it off."

"OK.".

"Now, press it right into that marble part. Right below the man."

I pressed my name into the trophy, right below the golden figurine of a man jabbing.

"It looks like you, the way you fought Mo. How's it sticking?" Earl asked.

"It's good."

"All right, well, you take that on home with you. See you tomorrow night if the Lord spares me."

"Thank you, Earl."

PART II: HEART AND MIND.

4. Bosnia

MY MATERNAL GRANDFATHER, Harold Jacobs, was born in Chicago in 1916 and grew up during the Great Depression. His father, Samuel Jacobs, was a bookbinder from Warsaw, Poland, and his mother, Rebecca Newman Jacobs, was from New York. We always called my grandfather "Shah." He thought it was a reference to the former kings of Persia. My mother and my aunt have a different interpretation. When my grandfather was talking one day, I ran up to him (I was about two years old at the time) and yelled, "Shah!" My mom and aunt think that what I meant was "shush." "Shah," it turns out, is also a word for "quiet" or "shush," and my grandmother used to say it a lot to my grandfather. My grandfather could talk.

One time I pulled a frozen pizza out of the oven, and Shah began, "What's that you got there? You know, that's not really a pizza. The only real pizza they make is in Chicago. The stuff people have in St. Louis, that's not pizza. Chicago pizza, that's real pizza. Some people think that if you put a little bit of sausage on a pizza, you got sausage pizza. That's not real sausage pizza. You want a sausage pizza? You put on sausage and there's sausage on the whole thing. See how there are some pieces there that don't have sausage on it? What is that? What's a sausage pizza without sausage? What did I tell you? The only real pizza is made in Chicago. You know, when I grew up in Chicago..." And so it would go, with Shah talking about everything from the Harlem Globetrotters to forklifts to the stock exchange to baseball-"The problem today is that they rush these kids. No time in the minors. Used to be every ballplayer was trained. Take Rod Carew. Incredible hitter, sure, but he still knows how to bunt if he has to. These kids today, they don't know how to bunt 'cause they get rushed."

As a kid, I loved to hear him talk. His stories about fighting during the Depression-"We carried our clothes wrapped in newspaper to the boxing gym"-first fired my interest in boxing.

For the last eight years of his life, after my grandmother died, my grandfather was on his own. He filled his time with travel and study, and told me wonderful stories about his experiences. Shah went to Mexico to take a cla.s.s on art, and he walked the museums of Mexico City. He visited with us in St. Louis, and he took cla.s.ses at the local community college.

One afternoon when Shah was living in Cleveland, my aunt Audrey came home and pressed the play b.u.t.ton on her answering machine. She heard my grandfather's slurred speech and called for an ambulance. Shah had suffered a stroke.

When I first saw him after the stroke, Shah was seated on a stationary bicycle, wearing a white shirt, gray sweatpants, and new sneakers. The wisps of gray hair that normally lay flat over the top of his head were waving in the air as he pedaled with great effort-push the right foot down, left foot down, right foot-and despite the effect of the stroke on his speech, he told me about his plans to get to Mexico again.

He never did make that trip. By the summer of 1994, he had suffered a second stroke. I visited him a few times that summer. At one point, he had to be fed through a tube connected to his stomach because he couldn't swallow. By then he was unable to speak. I remember him holding a pencil and scratching a note to my mom and aunt that read, "Don't let them starve me."

I was preparing to make a trip of my own, and he was excited for me. I was going to fly into Vienna and then take a train to Zagreb in Croatia, to work with children who were orphaned by the war in the former Yugoslavia. He communicated to my mother that Vienna had great coffee; Eric should have a cup in Vienna. If he had been able to talk, I can only imagine the soliloquy I would have received about coffeehouses in Vienna. Shah even gave my mom a few dollars so that I could enjoy a coffee.

On my last visit to see Shah before my trip, I went to the nursing home alone. I had stopped to buy him a tube of chapstick, knowing that his lips were often dry and cracked. When I arrived he was lying in his bed. I put a hand on his shoulder, and he took my other hand in his and gave it a good squeeze. I handed him the chapstick and he grasped it lightly. He focused his eyes and pursed his lips. He lifted the chapstick to his face and tried to apply it, but the tube wavered an inch away and the balm never touched his lips. I stood there and watched. The effort tired him, and he set his hand back down. I should have reached across, taken the chapstick from him, and helped him. Instead, I only watched as he struggled. Since that moment, I've looked back many times, disappointed with myself. I was motivated to fly across an ocean for adventure and a good deed, but there I was incapable of a simple helping hand with my own flesh and blood. It was the last time I would see my grandfather alive.

Shah's life had been full of real, hard experience-struggling through the Depression, fighting in World War II, raising a family in a poor neighborhood-and I know that he would have understood my desire to box, and he would have also appreciated my desire to serve.

In the summer of 1994 the war in the former Yugoslavia was raging, and campaigns of ethnic cleansing were ravaging Bosnia. After Shah's war, World War II, and the horror of the Holocaust, the world had said, "Never again." Yet every day people fled burning homes, women were a.s.saulted, and children were orphaned by vicious acts of violence. I volunteered to work with the Project for Unaccompanied Children in Exile. Together with several other students, I raised money to cover our expenses. We intended to fly to Europe and live and work in refugee camps in Croatia.

I took a semester of Bosnian, but I found the language difficult. When I was on the train from Vienna, I was very proud that I was able to use the one complete sentence I knew in the language: Ja sam u vlaku za Zagreb Ja sam u vlaku za Zagreb-"I am on the train to Zagreb." How that sentence was supposed to carry me through weeks of work in refugee camps, I had no idea, but if I were ever again on a train to Zagreb, I could let people know.

On the train, a middle-aged Bosnian woman wearing jeans, a rumpled jacket, and thick-framed brown gla.s.ses heard my accent and stopped me in the pa.s.sageway.

"Are you an American?"

"Yes."

She asked me where I was going and where in America I was from. Then she said, "Why isn't America doing anything?"

"Doing what?"

"Why isn't America doing anything to stop the ethnic cleansing, to stop the rapes, to stop the murders? Do you know what is happening to the people of Bosnia? You know what's happening. Now why don't you do anything about it?"

I had no answer. I tried to explain that I was here to help.

"If you're going to help, why don't you do do anything?" Her hands were shaking. She added, "You'd help us if we had oil." anything?" Her hands were shaking. She added, "You'd help us if we had oil."

I walked past her and stood at the window of the train. We had crossed into Croatia, and I took my first look at the hills of the Croatian countryside. A red compact car was driving on the road parallel to the train tracks. I raised my hand to the open window and waved. The man riding in the pa.s.senger side of the car stuck his hand out his window and flicked me off.

I was dropped off with another volunteer next to a gravel path that led to the Puntizela refugee camp. As the car drove off, kids from the camp came running toward us. They looked like any group of American schoolchildren. Most wore clothes that had been donated by Americans or Europeans and they smiled and they were clean and they seemed well fed and healthy and happy. The only refugees I'd ever seen were on the news, and they were always portrayed as dirty and distraught and lost in misery.

The kids swamped us. They asked, "Have bonbons?" or "Have chocolate?" Those who could not speak English simply opened their hands or scrunched the tips of their fingers together and touched their lips to signal for treats. The more inquisitive began asking, "You're volunteering here?" Two boys grabbed my hand. I thought that they wanted to hold it, but they turned my wrist-they wanted to look at my watch. Another boy was running circles around us as we walked. One of the boys looking at my watch glanced up at me and then at the running-in-circles boy and then back at me and frowned and shook his head and rolled his eyes, the international signal for "that one's a bit crazy."

Behind the kids followed Dario and Jasna. A married couple, they were refugees themselves and ran the volunteer projects in the camp. Dario was about five foot seven, a barrel-chested guy with black hair and a face covered in stubble. Beneath the stubble his smile was full of joy, but twisted just enough at the corner of his mouth to make you think he was about to fire a sarcastic bullet. I reached to shake his hand.

"Hey, how are you doing? Welcome to paradise," he said with a chuckle. He spoke to the kids in Bosnian, then told us, "The kids love you already, and they'll keep loving you as long as they think you've got candy." He laughed again.

Jasna was a little shorter and much quieter. With dirty-blond hair and a meek but warm smile, she walked slightly behind Dario and barely said a word in our first meeting. Later I'd learn that Jasna's English wasn't great, but she managed a wicked sense of humor. She was the more practical of the pair. She made sure that as volunteers we had a place to stay and that we knew the work schedule. She told us when lunch would be served. It was a good team: Dario kept everyone's spirits up and Jasna kept the camp running.

The Puntizela camp was outside Pula, Croatia, a beautiful city that was home to Roman ruins, including the Arena, one of the largest amphitheaters in the world. The stone walls of the ancient structure still towered 106 feet in the air, providing shade for the ice-cream vendors who set up shop on the stone streets. The refugee camp was set in a park on the edge of the Adriatic Sea. Bright blue water glistened off a rocky beach, and the area was surrounded by tall cypress trees. The refugee families lived in trailers. The trailers were cramped, but given my expectations about how miserable refugee life was going to be, I was surprised when I saw families living in trailers at a seaside resort.

I started a soccer team with one of the refugee boys, helped in the kindergarten, played chess with the teenagers, and talked with the adults. I sat in trailers with families and drank endless cups of coffee. Beyond my one complete sentence in the language, I knew enough Bosnian phrases and could say them with enough conviction to give the false impression that I actually knew what I was talking about. I'd often sit for long periods not understanding a word as my hosts took long drags on their cigarettes, paused, and then exhaled a flurry of words and smoke, animatedly chopped the air with their hands, and kicked away from the table in disgust. I tried to nod my head at appropriate moments. At times a refugee who spoke good English-often a teenager who would roll his eyes because the old men were repeating themselves-would translate their conversation for me in dollops.

"Then the Serbs came to his house. He told them to go away, but..."

"And now he is talking more about his cousin..."

"Still more about his cousin. He was, like, twenty-eight year old."

The beautiful setting of Puntizela couldn't mask the underlying reality of what had happened to the people who had come here. I heard stories of horrific violence. Although I knew that Dario and Jasna were refugees, I didn't connect the word "refugee" to direct violence until Dario and Jasna said they were from Banja Luka.

Banja Luka was strategically important to the Serbs because it was where the old Yugoslav Army had built major military complexes and stored munitions. When the war broke out, the Serbian Army took control of the city, hanging white rags on door frames to mark Bosnian homes. Soldiers stormed these homes to take dishes, televisions, furniture, jewelry-whatever they wanted. Serbian soldiers beat old men with the b.u.t.ts of their rifles, smashed fingers with crowbars, and dismembered bodies with their knives. Serbian soldiers repeatedly raped women and girls. They shot or slit the throats of anyone who resisted.1 Mosques in Banja Luka that had stood hundreds of years were riddled with bullets; others were sh.e.l.led. For some mosques stubborn enough to outlast the sh.e.l.ling, explosives were laid at the foundations and detonated. The fresh rubble was cleared and the land designated for use as parking lots and garbage dumps.2 Men, women, and children were rounded up and taken to concentration camps like Manjaca. Community leaders were singled out and taken to other locations where they were severely beaten and tortured. They often "disappeared," never to be seen again.3 Bosnians were forced to give up the houses that they had lived in for generations, and they were made to pay for the "privilege" of leaving for refugee camps. Bosnians were forced to give up the houses that they had lived in for generations, and they were made to pay for the "privilege" of leaving for refugee camps.4 Many of the families that I met, victims of the ethnic cleansing, had been forced to grab what they could and walk away from their homes. Often, the buses packed with refugees were diverted to killing fields. Many of the families that I met, victims of the ethnic cleansing, had been forced to grab what they could and walk away from their homes. Often, the buses packed with refugees were diverted to killing fields.

Torture and deprivation were, however, not limited to Banja Luka. In cities and towns across Bosnia, the Serbian Army forced men, women, and children into mosques and held them there for days. Occasionally they threw the Bosnians a s.n.a.t.c.h of bread or gave them a few ounces of water. The prisoners were forced to defecate on the floor of the sacred mosque where many of them had prayed and worshiped nearly every day of their lives. After starving them for days, the Serbians "offered" pork to the Bosnian Muslims and asked them to denounce the teachings of the Qur'an.5 The details I heard were often so sickening, I found it hard to believe that the people sitting in the trailers telling me these stories were in fact the same people who had lived them; the stories seemed to come from another world entirely.

A Bosnian man in one of the camp shelters told me that his wife had been dragged from their house and later raped. Both of his brothers had been killed. He had heard from a neighbor that one of his brothers had been tortured before he had been shot. His sister and parents lived in a different city, and he was not sure if they were alive. He lifted his shirt and showed me the scar on his stomach and chest left by a grenade that had been thrown into his house. He considered himself lucky that his children and wife were alive. He started to cry. His children-a boy and a girl-sat listening in the corner of the shelter.6 One night all of the refugees in Puntizela gathered for a party in a common room that sometimes served as a cla.s.sroom for the school. Music played, and everyone was drinking beer. After a while some of the teenagers started to throw the empty beer bottles on the concrete floor, and shards of brown gla.s.s soon littered the room. One drunken teenager hung on my shoulder and said, "This is Bosnian tradition. Don't be scared. We drink this s.h.i.t beer and party in this s.h.i.t place." But many of the older refugees left and walked back to their trailers. One boy cranked the music painfully loud and yelled something I didn't understand, and then two boys jumped into each other as if in a mosh pit and started to wrestle standing on the gla.s.s-covered floor. More bottles smashed on the concrete.

I was twenty at the time, and it seemed to me that the older teenagers struggled more than anyone else in the camp. Those who were parents and grandparents in the camp were actively involved in taking care of their children, and they found purpose in that love and that work. The younger children were generally resilient, as kids are. But the war had hit the young adults just as they felt their real lives should have begun. They were trapped in the refugee camp with no prospects for a job, no prospects for further education. They had limited opportunities for fun, few chances at marriage. In their situation, I might have been smashing bottles myself.

On many nights, I sat in the common room as a radio played and the refugees talked and played chess. Denis, fifteen years old, was one of my frequent chess opponents. He wore jeans and a donated T-shirt, and often had a cigarette hanging from his lips. As we played, he would ask me questions about America, questions about where I had traveled, questions about my education.

The conversations were one-way. Every time I asked him a question, he laughed and shook his head. He didn't want to talk about his life, and what was I going to ask him? I couldn't ask him the kinds of questions I'd have asked the average American kid: What do you want to do when you graduate? What subjects do you like in school? What do you want to study? Do you have a girlfriend? What do you like to do on the weekend? Denis had no school, no job, no girlfriend, no way to think about a future beyond the camp.

Denis always used the word "s.h.i.t" to describe his current life. "s.h.i.t trailers, s.h.i.t food, s.h.i.t clothes, s.h.i.t TV." He didn't want to talk about the past. He'd smoke while we played, and most of the time he angled away from me, talking to other people while I studied the board. I would move my chess piece, he would turn his head to look at the board, move quickly, and then return to his conversation.

I'd often play chess for hours. I was a weak player, and even the eleven-year-olds sought me out. One young boy always sat and stared at me while we played. He played on the soccer team that I had started, and chess was his chance to turn the tables and coach me. After each one of his moves he would watch as I a.n.a.lyzed the board. When I took too long to move, he would roll a short circle in the air with his hand: "OK, OK." A moment came in every game when, after one of my moves, he would begin to shake his head, as if he had hoped that just maybe this time I might have provided some real compet.i.tion. Disappointed, he would proceed to put me into checkmate. The only way I could maintain my pride was to remind the eleven-year-old, "Well, I'll see you on the soccer field tomorrow."

"OK, OK.".

We gave vitamins to the kids in the kindergarten, and one day I brought a bottle of vitamins to soccer practice. With all the boys standing in a line, I handed out a "vitamin for athletes." I used a combination of English and Bosnian and charades to tell them that this would make their muscles grow. But one of the kids-nine or ten years old-yelled, "Those are the vitamins from the kindergarten." I said, "Yes, but the kindergartners can't do the exercises to make their muscles strong. If you take the vitamin and and do pull-ups, you'll grow strong." do pull-ups, you'll grow strong."

One of my happiest moments in the camp came when an older man in a wheelchair rolled himself out to watch our soccer game. Soon others came out with blankets. They smoked and talked and clapped as they watched the kids play. The game became an afternoon ritual. One afternoon, however, almost all of our fans were gone. Had I done something to offend them? I asked the man in the wheelchair, but my Bosnian and his English couldn't connect. I asked one of the kids where our fans were and he said, "They are watching Dallas. Dallas."

"The TV show?"

"Yes." Every day, I learned, the women of the camp crowded around a tiny black-and-white television to watch episodes of the American show, broadcast-I believe-from Italy.

Because everything was new to me-the language, the location, the Bosnian coffee, the chess-I was learning and having a great time, and I lost sight of how hard this life was on the people around me. At some level, this trip was for me another adventure, a diversion away from the comforts of home. I could leave at any time.

Walking back to my trailer with another volunteer after lunch one day, I complained about the food: the same hot mush again. She gently suggested that my problems paled next to the refugees', and I snapped out of my selfish concern.