“I didn’t say that.”
“But that what you mean,” he said. “You a wise guy. Right?”
“I’m just waiting for a bus. If I insulted you, it was unintentional,” I said.
“Don’t give me unintentional. I unintentional you.”
He kicked the puddle, splashing my pants with water, and said he was going to knock me down. Then he stepped back, dropping his hands to the level of his belt, and measured me. I picked up my suitcase and moved it a few feet, setting it on a narrow ledge just below the window.
“Man, I’m gonna wipe you out,” he said, opening and closing his hands several times.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked very strong, and I am of medium height and rather frail. “Well,” I said, “you’re going to have the worst fight of your life.”
“You gonna give it to me?” he asked, smiling.
I told him that I was going to beat the hell out of him, and then I brought my hands up.
“Man, will you look at that!” he said. “This is gonna be some fun.”
He touched the brim of his hat, dropped his hands into position again, and, five feet away from me, began to bob and weave. “You come on in,” he said. “I’m a counterpuncher.”
I didn’t move, but watched him closely, keeping my hands high. I told him I was a counterpuncher, too. He began to circle me, and I turned with him. He kept on going through this little shadowboxing routine, paying only nominal attention to me. He looked very good, very agile.
After a few minutes of circling and jabbing and hooking at the air, he stopped and looked at me. “You looks terrible,” he said. We had maneuvered ourselves out into the rain, and the water was streaming over our faces. “You off balance,” he said.
I told him not to worry about it, that I had fast hands and a good punch.
“The only thing you doing right is standing up,” he said, shaking his head. He held up his hands in a truce gesture and walked over to me. He said he wanted to give me some basic instruction. He adjusted my hands slightly and pushed my head down so that it was protected by my left shoulder, and then he kicked my feet to a different position, saying I was standing flat-footed. “Now you looking good,” he said.
“Well, it feels unnatural,” I said, resuming my old position.
Then, to prove that my style was poor, he asked me to try to hit him. He said he wouldn’t try to hit me but would just give me a little demonstration that would do more for me than all the talk in the world.
“I don’t want to hit you,” I said.
“Don’t worry, you ain’t going to,” he said.
“Look, I’ll take your word for it,” I said.
“Come on, now,” he said. “You got to see what I mean to really believe it.”
So he began to bob and weave with his hands low, presenting his head as a slowly moving target. I watched his head bob for about thirty seconds, and tried to measure him. He kept talking the whole time. “You can’t get set, see. Now you see it, now you don’t. You all tied up.”
I pulled my right hand back a few inches, and he broke into a wide grin, and then, while he was grinning, I feinted with my right hand and came hard with a left hook, catching him squarely on the side of the jaw. He whirled around and pitched forward on the pavement, landing hard on his chest and then rolling over on his side. He wasn’t hurt. He grabbed his hat and jumped quickly to his feet, looking annoyed and embarrassed. “I’ll be goddam,” he said, one hand on top of his hat.
“I’m very sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Some rain got in my eye,” he said. “I ain’t seen your left.”
He said he wanted to give me a few more demonstrations, but I told him I’d had enough. I suddenly felt sick again, with the hot-and-cold business returning — the nausea and cramps and the rest. My legs became weak. Feeling I was going to faint, I walked over to the window and leaned against it. I decided to forget about the bus, for the time being, and go back to the men’s room in the gasoline station. I took up my suitcase and started to walk away, when the man trotted over and grabbed me by the arm. “Where you going?” he asked.
“I’m not feeling well,” I said, jerking my arm away. “Leave me alone.”
“Man, what’s wrong with you?” he asked, smiling. “You knock me down and you is mad.”
Then he began to throw a flurry of punches at the air in front of me, bobbing and weaving, going into a series of strange forward and lateral hops and skips, dancing, and finally winding it up by running in place. I think he felt he was cheering me up, for he kept up the running for about two minutes, making faces, and then he stopped and said, “Now how you feeling?”
I told him to get out of my way, but he continued to block me, and I was too weak to try to run around him.
He jumped up in the air and closed his eyes and flapped his arms. “Now how you feeling?” he asked, after a few jumps.
I told him I was feeling worse than ever, and that if he really wanted to help me he would go away and leave me alone.
He said that I was just a little down and out, and there was nothing to worry about if I listened to him. He told me about his Opposite Theory. “If you feel like lying down, then stand up,” he said. “If you feel like crying, then laugh.”
I tried to get by him, but he grabbed me by the shoulder of my coat. “Maybe if you lie down you never get up. You thought of that?”
I broke away and started to run, but he caught up with me easily and clapped a huge hand on my shoulder and pressed down. I whirled around, dropped my suitcase, and threw a wild right hand at him, but he ducked under it neatly and countered, though intentionally missing, with a classic one-two. “Sickness all in the mind,” he said.
I told him my sickness was in the stomach and that he should get the hell away from me, but he shook his head, half closing his eyes. “I ain’t gonna let you give in to it,” he said. “I gonna help you fight it.”
He said he knew all about the body, because he was an ex-fighter, and most ex-fighters knew more about the human body than any doctor, and that every man has a secret place in him which fights sickness and pain, and the trick was to have faith in that secret place. He said you had to turn on that little secret power by doing just the opposite of what your body asked you to do.
While he was talking, I developed a headache, and I was about to ask him what this headache was telling me to do, so I could do the opposite, when I began to see objects in pairs and threes, and I knew I was going to fall. The nausea was so bad that I couldn’t keep my mouth closed, and the ground seemed to tilt. I dropped down on one knee, pushing at the ground with both hands. “Get up,” I heard him say, his voice far off. “Is you gonna lay down? Is you gonna quit?”
As I pushed at the ground, fighting it and the nausea, a bus went by, and the next thing I knew the man was grabbing me under the arms and pulling me to my feet. “We gonna make it,” he said.
I tried to push him away. I succeeded in breaking free of one hand, but he had me by the collar with the other. “You doing fine,” he said. “You got to keep moving around. It good for the circulation.” The word “circulation” seemed to give him an idea, for he began to slap my face with his free hand.
I called him a stupid son of a bitch, hit him hard on the mouth, lurched and spun away from him, hearing my coat and shirt rip, and fell onto the pavement, where I crawled to the gutter and threw up. He stood near me. He kept saying, “You doing fine. You doing fine. You gonna be a new man now. We gonna clear you out.”
As he was talking, the street lamps came on. I looked over at him and watched the rain bounce off his shoes. One of his pants legs had come unrolled in the scuffle, and the cuff was ripped.