The next morning after the police caught me, my father had gone to work as usual. He still hadn’t said a word to me. My mother and I were alone in the kitchen while I was having my breakfast.
I wasn’t hungry but I still nibbled at my cereal. My mother was busying herself with some dishes in the sink. She kept rattling the dishes and with her back to me she said, “Roland, you are not to go away from this house for the next two weeks. Not for any reason. Do you understand?”
“Can’t I go outside at all?” I asked.
“Not away from here,” she answered. “You must stay in the house or in the yard. That means no riding your bike or playing with your friends. You can work in the victory garden, but that’s all the further you can go.”
She still had her back to me and I kept my eyes down and stared at my cereal as I stirred my spoon back and forth.
“You will also start practicing the piano for two full hours each day instead of just one. You need something to keep you busier than you have been,” she said. Her voice was growing stronger as she continued, “Your father said he wants you to go back to the bowling alley after the two weeks is up to see if they’ll take you back.”
I waited to see if she was going to say anything else, but she just continued to wash dishes.
After she had described my punishment, I gathered up my courage, crossed my arms across my chest and asked, “Mom, do you know why I ran away?”
“No, and I don’t want to hear any of your excuses,” she replied with a very nervous, tight tone of voice. She turned to face me and I could see that her face was red and splotchy, which was normal whenever she was in a difficult position like this. She closed her eyes, put her hands on her hips, and continued, “What you did was wrong, and you must be punished for it. This is your home and you will have to learn how to behave according to our rules.”
I stood up from the table and put my hands on my hips as a way of mimicking her. I could feel my jaw jut out in what was, for me, a rare display of defiance. “But, Mom, it’s Dad that makes me want to run away. When he takes me up into the attic, he’s really hurting me, and you don’t seem to be trying to stop him,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter. He is your father and you will just have to learn to behave like a good Christian boy. When you do bad things, he has to punish you!”
“But, when he takes me up there, I haven’t been bad.”
She turned away from me again and went back to her dishes. This was one of her ways to avoid eye contact when she was arguing. I had watched her do this at times when she and my father were having an argument.
“All children do things wrong. You are committing sins every day. He is actually being kind to you when he doesn’t punish you every day. Now, stop arguing and go to your room until I find some things for you to do.”
I left my unfinished cereal on the table and went to my room.
There wasn’t anything further to be gained by arguing with her. I could see that I wouldn’t be able to find any protection from her as long as she felt the way she did. My mother was not a forceful woman; in fact, she was probably quite typical for the women of those times. It wasn’t in her nature to stand up to her husband or to voice her own opinions about anything. She was raised in a large family that was under the iron rule of her father. There were nine children in her family, four boys and five girls. Her sisters looked just like my mother—short, buxom and sort of square in their body shapes. A good way to sum up their general appearance would be “matronly”.
Neither she nor my father ever said anything further about my running away.
Both my mother and father were raised in the strict, Calvinistic, Dutch Reformed Church. The beliefs of this faith left little possibility for avoiding what they considered to be sin. Just about any behavior of a youngster, or anyone, for that matter, would fall into the category of being sinful. The religious teachings also gave parents complete control over their children, although my father had taken the concept far beyond what most other fathers in their church would find acceptable.
However, child rearing was not a subject which was discussed openly. These matters were private and were considered the business of the family unit alone. I believe this is why my father was able to get away with as much of his abuse as he did, plus the fact that harsh, physical methods for punishing children were still the norm at this time—even in the schools. Getting a good “whap” across the back of the head or a ruler across the back of your hand or a paddle across your rear, were common forms of discipline in school. There were some teachers who even carried it further without any risk of criticism from their administrators or the parents.
One of the other factors which made my parents different from those of most of my friends was their complete lack of ability to show affection, not only to me, but also to each other or to any of their acquaintances. I have absolutely no recollection of ever being held, stroked or kissed by either of them. I also have no memory of seeing my mother and father kiss or hold each other—not even holding hands. Their demeanor towards each other was always stiff and formal. Even general conversation between the two of them was rare and consisted of a minimum of words. I would sometimes see my father joke with other men around the church, but my mother was always stern with everyone. They had very few friends; only one or two couples with whom they would play pinochle from time-to-time.
There is no doubt in my mind, that the summer of 1942 was a major turning point in my life. Even at the age of eight I was beginning to learn some lessons about how to survive. I made one more attempt to run away later that summer, but was caught again after only five days. That time, just like the first time, I was caught while riding my bike on one of the main streets after dark. My immature brain made the connection that either I needed to quit using my bike for transportation, or I had to start using side streets, or both. I also needed to be figuring out some way to get from one place to another at times of day when I wouldn’t be so conspicuous.
At no time did I ever give up on my thoughts and plans to run away again.
My father continued to stay very quiet and never said a word to me about running away. When he came home from work at night he would immediately go to his chair in the living room with the newspaper. To see him sitting there in our small living room, with the newspaper in front of his face so you couldn’t see his expression, just the cigarette smoke curling out from behind the paper, was nerve wracking, to say the least. It wasn’t like he was a big talker anyway, but his silence during this time was deafening.
My father was a tall, slim man. He stood about six feet tall. He had reddish-blond hair that was rapidly thinning. His upper body was slim and strong, plus he had very large hands. He was in good shape because his work kept him that way. He was a salesman for the National Biscuit Company. (It’s now known as Nabisco—but in 1942 it was still called the National Biscuit Company—or NBC, as he called it.) His job was to go around to all the food markets in his territory and take orders for the crackers, cookies and cereals that NBC manufactured. Then he would go back to the markets after the NBC trucks had delivered his orders. He would pick up these huge cartons of product in the stock rooms at the back of the store, carry them out to the main part of the store and pull open the cartons. Then he’d put a price on each individual box of product in the cartons and arrange the boxes on the shelves.
“His Chair”, which was off-limits to anyone but him, was in our sparsely furnished living room. It was an upholstered chair with a fitted chair cover that had a small floral pattern on it. My mother was an extremely fussy housekeeper, so all the upholstered furniture had some sort of cover, all of which she made herself. The couch, or what we called the davenport, had the same patterned cover on it that was on his chair. The piano was an upright piano, and it was against the back wall of the room with a piano stool in front of it. There was another small straight chair next to his chair, two end tables, one next to his chair; the other on the other side of the room, and our Zenith radio. The radio was the kind that sits on the floor, rather than on top of a table. There were table lamps on the two tables and another floor lamp by the couch. The Bible sat on one of the two tables. There were three windows in the room, one facing the front of the house, and the other two on the side facing the next-door neighbor’s house and driveway. The only other room on the front of the house was the dining room.
There was a hallway from the living room that led to the bedrooms in the back of the house. The doorway to the attic was in that hallway to the right and the door to my parents’ bedroom was just beyond that. The door to the bathroom was on the left and my bedroom was just beyond the bathroom.
During those two weeks that I had to stay home, I was usually in the kitchen helping my mother with dinner chores when my father came home from work. The kitchen was next to the dining room on the side of the house where our driveway was located.
The only conversation that my mother and I had while we were busy getting dinner ready were her instructions to me.
“Roland, cut up these carrots and put them into the pot of water on the stove.” Or, “Roland, wash this pot and dry it so I can use it again.”
She never called me Rollie, or Rollo, which some of my friends did, only Roland. I never said a word to her, but just went about doing whatever she asked. The tension inside of me was always there. When he would drive up the driveway the tension would build even further. The car would go right under the kitchen window as he drove toward the garage in the backyard. My heart would turn to ice and I would have a sense of trying to become smaller and smaller—wanting to disappear.
Since I was home in the afternoons during this time, my mother would tell me to open the garage doors before he was expected home. Our garage, like most others in our neighborhood, had two doors that opened in the middle. I would push the right one back and hook it to the fence so it wouldn’t swing shut. The left hand door would go back so it anchored itself at the edge of the grass.
After the car went by the window toward the garage, there would be a short period of silence, and then the car door would slam. That was followed by the squeak and scrape of the garage doors closing. Then would come the sound of the back door opening and closing and hearing his feet thump, thump, thump up the three stairs to the kitchen door.
The kitchen door would quickly open and he would let out a sound that was sort of like a grunt—“humphh!” as he stepped into the room. My mother would say, “Hello, Henry” in response to his “humphh”. I always made sure I was doing something so that my back was to him. He never said hello to me, nor I to him.
This would all be followed by more thump, thumps as he went through the kitchen into the dining room where he would pick up his newspaper from one of the dining room chairs and thump off into the living room.
Every day I expected to hear him say, “Roland, come here!” but he didn’t say a word to anyone.
When dinner was on the table in the dining room, he would take his seat to my right, my mother was to my left. He would say the before-dinner prayer, which was always long and drawn out, and which I would invariably tune out. (We must have looked a little like that famous Norman Rockwell painting of the family saying a prayer at dinner—you know, the one where the lady’s butt is sticking out the back of her chair.) Then we would eat in total silence. After dinner, he would get his Bible from the table in the living room and slowly read a chapter from it, which I would also tune out. Then another long, similarly tuned-out prayer before he would go back to his paper while I helped my mother with the dishes. As soon as I was done with dishes, I would go straight to my room to either read or listen to the radio. The hard part was that I had to walk through the living room to get to my bedroom. My heart would beat wildly with every step I took, wondering if this would be the time he would stop me.
That was life in the Van Buren house—day after day after day.
I did go back to the bowling alley after my two weeks of restriction were up and the boss was glad to have me back.
It was a full month before my father gave me another beating.
This time in my life was getting to be interesting because of the piano studies. I began taking piano lessons when I was six, although when I was even younger than that, I was able to pick out the notes of music I would hear on the radio by plinking them out with my small fingers. At first, my mother was trying to teach me, but she soon became frustrated because, unknown to either of us, I had an unusual skill with the piano, a skill that went quickly beyond her ability to teach effectively. She was primarily an organist and knew very little about the techniques needed for piano.
She hired a new teacher, Mrs. Wolpert, a very strict teacher who recently came to the United States from Germany. Mrs. Wolpert spoke with a strong German accent which I found hard to understand most of the time. She was also the teacher of my next-door neighbor, Charlie Saunders, who was just a year older than me. She came to teach both Charlie and me on Wednesday each week. She was an imposing woman, tall in stature and built in a rather masculine way, with broad shoulders, strong wrists and large, but graceful hands. She was probably in her early thirties and had one of the sternest faces I had ever seen, which was contrasted by her amazing blue eyes that seemed to pierce right through you when she looked at you. Everything about her mannerisms was brusque and officious.
The realization that I, perhaps, had a special talent came during a lesson just a short time after Mrs. Wolpert became my teacher. I was in either the third or fourth grade John Thompson lesson book at the time. She had assigned me three of the lessons to practice before she came the following week. Since my mother insisted that I practice for two hours every day, I had easily finished those lessons in the first couple of days, and was going on to the next few lessons in the book and finishing those as well.
When Mrs. Wolpert arrived at our house, she would give a very loud knock at the front door. We did have a doorbell but she would never ring it for some reason. She would just bang, bang, bang on the door. When I would open the door, she would be standing on the front porch perfectly straight and tall.
She would look down across her nose at me and say in an extremely brisk way, “Roland, I am here, let’s get to work. We don’t want to waste my time!” Of course, it would actually come out as, “Roland, I am here, let’s get to vork. Ve don’t vant to vaste my time!” Later on, as the weather turned cooler, she would add in, … “und take my coat und scarf” as part of her opening phrase. This entry routine of hers never varied, it was always exactly the same.
Relationship building with her students was never one of Mrs. Wolpert’s strong suits.
On piano lesson days, the straight chair would already be at the piano for her to sit on. She would tromp over to her chair as I sat on the piano stool and instruct me to play some of the Hanon or Czerny exercises she had assigned. These were some of the most brutal finger and piano technique exercises in existence, and even though they were quite boring, I did relish the challenge of conquering them. I would play them with vigor as she would count the beat at the tempo she wanted, which was generally at a lively clip. “Vun—Two—T’ree – Four,” she would count as I played, her foot tapping on the floor while her hand would rap the rhythm on the piano itself. “Curved fingers – raise your fingers higher — wrists up” she would scold periodically as I sweated my way through these exercises, my hands getting more and more tired as we continued. When she felt she had “tortured” me sufficiently, we would go on to the lessons she had assigned.
Since I had a tendency to be a bit of a smart-alec anyway, I thought I’d be cute and play the lessons she assigned to me without looking at the book, since I had not only learned them, but had memorized them as well. After I had finished playing the lessons she had assigned, I went right ahead and played the next three “by heart.” She never said a word — no “whoopee” or “hooray” — not even a “vunderbar”.
Without a smile or any expression on her face, she opened the Thompson Book and turned to the next lesson after the last one I played for her and said in a very tight voice while looking at me with those piercing blue eyes, “Now. You vill play this one, yah?”
I did — and apparently quite well, because she then reached into a cloth bag she always carried with her and pulled out another book. She flipped through the pages and selected a short piece written by Mozart. I don’t recall exactly which piece it was, but it was considerably more difficult than those in the Thompson books. She put the music on the music stand and with those amazing blue eyes boring right through me, said, “Now. You vill play this one also, yah?”
I was able to read it and did get through it, although with a bit of a struggle. Mrs. Wolpert took the John Thompson book off the music stand, tossed it onto the floor beside the piano, and pronounced in a voice totally devoid of any emotion, “With this we are done—no more of this for you!”
She called my mother into the room and asked, “Mrs. Van Buren, you can buy this book? It is one dollar and fifty cents.”
My mother nodded affirmatively. The book was 52 Studies For The Piano. I remember feeling excited about this because I was getting bored with how easy the Thompson books were for me. She assigned three pieces from it for my next weekly lesson and also started me working with more scales and more difficult Czerny and Hanon exercises.
Even though my parents had imposed the extra hour of practice as a punishment, I loved every minute of it and often did more than the two hours. My progress moved along quite rapidly from this point on.
Unknown to my parents, I was spending more and more time working at the racetrack in the mornings during the summer. They figured I was nearby in the neighborhood riding my bike or playing with friends. It was an excellent way for me to earn a few extra dollars my father wouldn’t know about. I never lost sight of my goal to get away from home permanently, so any way I could find to stash more money away was important. As I spent more and more time at the track, the people who worked there got accustomed to seeing me around, so doing chores for some of the people other than just the old guy I had been working for, became easier.
My love for horses was growing stronger each day I spent at the track. Everything about them was appealing to me. I loved their smell. I loved the way they walked and ran. I loved the sound of their whinny, and when they snorted, it would make me laugh. The animals which were boarded there were young, well cared for, graceful and beautiful.
One of my favorite jobs, and one I didn’t get asked to do very often, was to help groom the horses. Unless I stood on a stool I wasn’t tall enough to reach the upper regions of the head, neck and back, but the act of brushing the chest and flanks allowed me to feel a calm peacefulness I rarely felt otherwise. As I think back, I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that, to the best of my recollection, I had never personally experienced any of the stroking and gentleness which was such an integral part of the grooming process.
The horses would just stand there, almost mesmerized, as I ran the brush over their bodies. You could see their flesh quiver with what I imagined was the pleasure they were feeling. After a few minutes of brushing, the horses would slowly lower their heads and their eyes would sometimes close. They would often make small noises that sounded to me like little groans of pure pleasure. The process was soothing to me, especially compared to the loudness of the crashing pins and rolling balls at the bowling alley, or the tension and fear that I felt at home. It was almost as though the horses were transferring their pleasure back through the brush to me.
There was something about the freedom of being at the track which added to my sense of well-being. No one knew I was there and I was anonymous among the people who worked there. I experienced feelings and emotions I didn’t experience at home unless I was at the piano—I could get lost inside myself when I was practicing. In so many ways, the grooming and the piano practice gave me similar feelings.
One beautiful, warm, sunny day at the track, I was helping a woman that worked at the track groom one of the horses. She had asked me to do other jobs for her from time-to-time, like hauling hay to the stables or carrying water, but I think she sensed that I loved grooming and often asked me to help her. She was always kind to me even though her mannerisms were rough and manly. She rarely ever spoke more than a few words whenever I worked for her—just enough to tell me what she wanted me to do. She wasn’t a lot taller than I was. Her appearance was hard, stern and tough. She wore the same western clothes that most of the men around the track wore; cowboy boots, ten-gallon hat, shirt, vest and denim dungarees. I had never seen her without a cigarette hanging from her lips. Her face was dry, wrinkled and weathered although she didn’t appear to be very old. She wasn’t a heavy woman, but she did have a large bust.
She was on one side of the horse, and I was on the other as we brushed. On that day she did something she hadn’t done the other times I groomed with her. She began to softly sing this song as she stroked her brush along the horse’s flank:
“Go to sleepy little baby.
Go to sleepy little baby.
When you wake, you patty-patty cake,
and ride a shiny little pony.”
Daddy’s comin’ home to baby,
Daddy’s comin’ home to baby,”
Stop your cryin’, Daddy will be buyin’,
You a shiny little pony.”
She sang it so quietly and gently. I listened to it as she sang it over and over again, and then I started to sing it with her as I brushed. We would sing it in time with our brushing strokes. It felt strange to be singing, but it also made me feel a new emotion, an emotion of inner warmth and peace. Other than the hymns in church, I rarely ever sang, and this was so much more pleasurable than singing hymns.
After a few minutes, I was so lost in the soft beauty of what was happening, that I didn’t notice her coming over to my side of the horse. Her cigarette was gone. She was still singing as she took me into her arms and held me close to her. She rocked me back and forth while we sang this simple, but beautiful song together. She felt so soft and warm. I felt so safe and comfortable. We stayed like that for a while — just singing softly and rocking with our arms around each other.
Finally, she stopped singing, looked at me with those weathered eyes and smiled. She had a tear running down her cheek.
That was the first time I had ever been hugged.
I looked for her every time I went to the track to work, but I never saw her again.
Later in the fall after the racetrack work was over for the season, I started to hang around more with Billy from the bowling alley. Some days he would be working double shifts so we didn’t get a chance to do anything after my shift was over. However, on days that he didn’t work extra, we would go and mess around together, at least until it was time for me to go home.
Sometimes we would play catch with either a baseball or a football. One of our favorite games was mumbletypeg. (We didn’t spell it that way, but the dictionary does. We spelled it mumble-de-peg when we bothered to spell it). This was another of the many kids’ games which were built on the essence of war — taking and holding territory. It depended on two properties of the pocketknife that we didn’t even think about in those days: the fact knife blades are flat, and the fact they’ll stick in the ground if you throw them correctly.
Needless to say, in the days when I was just a kid, carrying around a pocket knife wasn’t something frowned upon as it would be today. Most children, boys anyway, had a pocket knife with them.
We’d start by drawing an outline in the dirt — maybe a big, wobbly circle (although Billy could draw circles that looked just about perfect) — or maybe some kind of polygon. All that really mattered was it needed to be a closed figure. Then we’d scratch a line across the playing area, dividing it approximately in half. We’d each throw our knife to see who could get closest to the dividing line. Whoever was closest would win the right to toss his knife first.
When it was time for the first throw, whichever kid won the toss threw his knife so it stuck upright (roughly) in his opponent’s territory so a line extending the gash the blade had made would cut into the initial dividing line — the “internal” boundary. He’d draw the line, dividing his opponent’s territory into two pieces, and cutting the original dividing line into two segments. He would then erase one of those two segments, adding part of his opponent’s territory to his own.
Now it was the other kid’s turn. He’d throw his knife, draw the line that extended the gash made by his blade, and reclaim a piece of the other guy’s territory.
At any one point in the game, there would be two territories inside the outer boundary. The line that separated them could get pretty jagged, and eventually, one of the players would “own” most of the land.
As one player’s territory shrank more and more, it got harder and harder for that player to throw the knife so the resulting line would reach his territory. With skillful players, though (or where the losing player happened to make a very lucky throw), a game could last a long time. With just a smidgen of territory left, you might get just the right angle on your knife, so one end of the extended line did touch your land and essentially split your opponent’s holding in half.
This was a real favorite game of ours and it was something that I could do and have an even chance of winning. Many times we had to quit before a winner was decided because I had to get home.
The days of playing fun games with Billy ended one day when we were having a slow afternoon at the bowling alley. I was sitting up on my shelf waiting for someone to start using my alleys when Billy came walking over behind me and asked, “How’s it going with your old man? Is he still beating the shit out of you all the time? I still see marks on your face and arms sometimes.”
“Yeah—it’s still happening pretty often. I ran away twice this summer, but I got caught by the cops both times after just a few days. I’d do it again right away, but it’s starting to get cold out and I don’t know where to go to stay warm during the daytime. I don’t want to freeze my ass off!”
He just looked at me with an expression of exasperation, leaned up against the back of my shelf and shook his head. “You gotta learn how to take care of yourself on the streets. You gotta learn how to fight good enough to keep the creeps from giving you a bad time. You gotta know where to go so the cops won’t keep finding you and bringing you back home all the time.”
Just thinking about how much I wanted to be on my own and realizing how difficult it would be had me hanging my head. “I don’t know where to learn how to do stuff like that. Do you know how to do those things?” I asked.
“I don’t know too much about running away, but I do know how to take care of myself on the streets and how to keep away from the cops”.
Billy kept looking up at me and shaking his head. “I belong to the State Fair Dukes. We’re doing battle all the time with other gangs, and we never lose. We got some of the best street-fighters on this side of town,” he said as he swaggered around over behind his shelf and got another cigarette.
I knew Billy was tough because the guys at the bowling alley never gave him a bad time. There were always fights breaking out among the other guys who worked there, but nobody ever tried to start anything with Billy. He was treated with a lot of respect.
“So, could you teach me how to street-fight?” I asked with as tough a voice as I could muster for a little eight-year old kid.
“I don’t know—you’re still just a kid and you could get hurt. If you go running home crying, then I get in trouble.”
I puffed myself up and said, “I don’t care if I get hurt, and even if I did, I wouldn’t go crying to anyone. I gotta learn sometime. I’m already getting beat up by my old man. It can’t hurt more than that.”
Billy looked at me like I didn’t have a brain in my head and said, “Oh yeah—it can hurt a lot more than that.”
I jumped down off my shelf and walked over to where Billy was standing. He and I stood facing each other as he looked me up and down. I was hoping he would say he would teach me how to fight.
He pushed himself back up onto his shelf, ground out his cigarette against the wall, and said, “Come over to my house after work today and I’ll show you some stuff. Nobody’ll be home so we don’t have to worry about anybody stopping us.”
If I weren’t trying to be super cool, I would have jumped for joy. Instead, I just nodded my head, kept a straight face, and said, “Sure, man, sounds good—let’s do it.”
Billy lived on Hawthorne Street on the other side of State Fair. His house was a lot older than mine and was in need of some major work. It was a frame house like mine, but the boards were wider. The paint was peeling off and in some places it was completely gone. His front porch was sagging down in the middle and one of the steps was partly broken off. There wasn’t any grass in front of his house — it was mostly all dirt. There was a tricycle with a broken wheel and an old wicker laundry basket lying on the front porch.
We went around the side of his house and through the gate into his back yard. The yard was fenced in and there was an alley behind it. Although they had a garage, the doors on it were gone and it was filled with boxes and other junk. They didn’t have any grass in the back either and there were empty milk bottles lying around on the ground. His mother had hung up some laundry on the clotheslines. It looked like there might have been flowers along the fences at one time, but now it was just weeds. The steps up to his back door weren’t even attached to the house and one of them was missing completely.
As we walked into his backyard, Billy suddenly whirled around and pushed me with both hands on my chest as his leg came around behind my knees and I was suddenly on the ground looking up at him.
“The first thing you gotta learn is to always surprise the guy you’re fighting. You gotta get them on the ground as fast as you can. You gotta stay on your feet, too. Don’t’ try to wrestle on the ground with them,” he said as he stood over me with his fists cocked and his eyes like slits. “The next thing you’re gonna do is start stomping him!”
I realized I was darn scared about then, but Billy didn’t do anything else, so I got up from the ground.
“What do you mean you start stomping him?”
“You start kicking the sonuvabitch as hard as you can before he can get back on his feet. Once he’s back on his feet, you have to start all over again. Keep the bastard on the ground and use your feet. It don’t matter where you kick him, either.”
Billy was getting more excited as he talked. He was jumping around and making kicking motions with his feet. “Kick him in the head. Kick him in his back. Kick him in the stomach. Just kick him and kick him anywhere. Keep the fucker on the ground and don’t let him up.”
Billy gave one of the milk bottles a good, swift kick, and it went flying across the yard. “Watch his hands while you’re kicking,” he went on, “because he’s gonna try to grab one of your feet and get you off balance. Keep moving around as fast as you can while you’re kicking so he can’t grab you. If you’re moving around fast enough he’ll be using his hands to try to protect himself and won’t have the time to grab at your feet.”
Billy kept dancing around and demonstrating how to move around and kick at the same time. Another milk bottle went flying. Only this time it flew across the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
“You gotta win the fight,” he said. “The only way to do that is to make sure the sonuvabitch stays on the ground. If you keep letting him back up, you’re gonna lose the fight.”
“Yeah, but you jumped me by surprise so it was easy for you to push me down,” I argued. “What about when you and the guy know you’re gonna have a fight with each other? Ain’t he gonna dodge away so you can’t get him down?”
“You gotta be faster than he is. Most creeps will start out trying to box with you because that’s what they think fighting is. But you’re gonna be a street-fighter, Van Buren. You gotta remember that you got your hands, your feet, your head, and your body. You can use anything you want to get him off balance. You don’t have to live by any stupid rules like boxers do.”
Billy started prancing around like a boxer with his hands up like he was going to hit me. “Pretend to box with me and I’ll show you what I mean.”
At that time the boxer all of us knew about was Joe Louis. He was still the heavyweight champ, although he would retire in a couple more years. I had seen some pictures of him in magazines and there were posters about him everywhere, not only because he was the heavyweight champ, but also because he was a Detroiter. I had even seen short movies of him boxing when they would run the newsreels at the movie house.
I assumed a boxer’s pose and Billy started to box with me but kept his hands open rather than making them into a fist. He started to dance around me and kept flicking his hands out in little jabs and sort of slapping me lightly with his fingertips. I tried to throw jabs at him too, but he was moving very fast and had me backing up most of the time.
“C’mon, Van, spar with me,” he chided with a sneaky, smart-ass smirk on his face.
I started to dance around and spar with him when all of a sudden he moved in close to me and brought his knee up sharply between my legs. This made me bend over and drop my hands to protect myself. Billy then put both hands under my chin and lifted my head up sharply.
When I straightened up I was already off balance and falling backwards. Then he got his leg behind my knees again and threw his shoulder into my chest. I was once again lying on the ground looking up at him without too much understanding of how I got there. He stood there poised with his right foot in a position ready to kick me.
“You get the idea?” Billy asked.
I looked up at him from the ground and nodded my head.
“You gotta be faster than the other guy. You gotta be thinking all the time about how you can get this guy on the ground. There ain’t no rules, man—anything goes. Keep finding ways to keep him off balance. Remember, if you don’t win, that means you’re gonna lose. If you lose it’s gonna be your head that he uses like a football!”
Billy was definitely enjoying his role as fight trainer. His eyes were alert and wild looking. He was talking more at one time than I had ever heard him talk.
“The guy you’re fighting is gonna be doing everything he can think of to get you down, so you gotta know lots of tricks and you gotta be faster then he is. You can’t get scared, ‘cuz when you’re scared you can’t think—and you gotta be thinking all the time.”
Billy and I continued these “practice” sessions over the next several months. We even did this during the winter because, as Billy said, “You can’t pick the time of year you’re gonna need to fight somebody.”
He taught me more street-fighting tricks and eventually we got to the point where I could give him a good run for his money. He could still surprise me, but I was also surprising him more consistently. My confidence level was growing rapidly. I found that even as Billy made it harder and harder to compete with him, I was able to keep fear out of my mind and keep my focus solely on how to get the advantage over him and win. My street-fighter training cost me some serious bumps, cuts and bruises, but I knew I was gaining important experience, especially if I was going to survive on the streets. I could hardly wait to try my new-found skills out for real.
As it turned out, it wouldn’t be much longer before I would get my chance.
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