The Executioner and the Alien

Just as a thought experiment, let’s say you’re born in Hell, or the closest thing to it. Your world is crumbling brown high-rises, cinderblock favelas, and the highest structure you can see as a child is a smokestack in the middle distance that guarantees you’ll probably get cancer when you’re forty, assuming you don’t get a bullet in your ass or a knife poked through your lung in your teens. Actually you do get a knife poked through your lung as a teenager, but you survive the attack. Adolescence is still some years in the future, however. First you must endure a mostly mirthless childhood.
Unlike most of the kids in the Rosen Housing Projects, your father is in the picture, and he even has a job. But it isn’t a good job (he works for the Department of Sanitation) and when the day is done he doesn’t throw the ball with you in the backyard like the white dads with their sons on TV (you don’t really have a backyard anyway). At the end of the day your dad goes into a backroom at a certain time, takes his “medicine,” and then you don’t see him again until the next day. You see that your father does the right thing (for the most part) and gets screwed for it.
There are some older boys in the neighborhood who do the wrong thing and (this is the late seventies maybe) the result is that they have the flyest gear, gold medallions draped around their necks, five-finger rings, minks and leather, gunmetal Benzes, and canary-yellow Ferraris. Also, the girls who make a face like you stink when they pass you are hanging all over these blaxploitation-esque Super Heroes, these girls with the cherry lip gloss and titties bursting out of their tube tops who know your daddy is a junkie and works in a place that makes him smell like garbage.
You hear the call of the street and it’s almost like in that one story you read at the local PS about the boy whose wolf runs away from him because it must, because that’s nature. You’re thinking about deciding on the street, but your mom lifts you up like a cherry-picker and sets you down with her in a place that isn’t a housing project. It’s a new neighborhood. Mom’s gotten a decent paying gig (maybe as a nurse) and she watched you at Rosen when you didn’t think she was looking. She saw the way you stood at the window and watched the boys with the girls and the gold hustling in the street. Her options were to handcuff you to the radiator, let the streets devour you, or flee for somewhere better.
Luckily for you she takes the third option. Unluckily for you, your father’s medicine puts him to sleep permanently. Now you’re a statistic, raised by a single black woman in a rough neighborhood. No, it’s not Rosen Houses, but Germantown is scruffy working class, and bordered by crumbling ghetto encroaching onto its cobblestone charm, and your options remain the same: smell like a garbage man and get dissed or smell like money and get girls and gear and cars. Also, there’s a deep humiliation eating you alive that makes you angry because your father is dead and your ancestors were enslaved by the people who have everything you want, who lord over you seemingly from remote high-rises in the sky, whose only visible proxies are some roughneck Italian and Irish white boys who hide behind badges and cars and rank and rules to hassle you and stop the hustle that gives you a little bit of dignity and glory.
You stand on the corner with other boys who feel like you, and you do on your block what white men did to continents. You discover that your anger and hopelessness that eat you alive are assets the second you turn them away from yourself and toward the world. You get in fistfights, use a gun a couple of times but prefer not to, because you’re nice with your hands. And even though you’re at ground zero for the Crack Boom and the street is flooded with enough hardware to take Kandahar, being able to scrap bare fisted is still a display of raw power that both the OGs and younger heads respect. Philly is a place, but it is also an adjective. Your degree of mettle, balls, “machismo” as Roberto “Manos de Piedras” Duran would have it, can be quantified by ascertaining exactly how Philly you are. Nameless bums who are braindead from canned heat and get pissed on dwell in the alleys between these blocks, but world champion boxers also emerged from this concrete labyrinth and their names and deeds were carried on the wind long after they drew their last breath.
Philadelphia is known for being the home of the smallest boxing rings allowed by sanctioning bodies, 16’ X 16’ “postage stamps” where there is no room to run or hide, the pugilistic equivalent of a cage holding two rabid dogs. But perhaps as good as being world champ (or even better) is “leaving your fight in the ring,” asking someone to spar and instead ending up in an unholy war that turns brains to oatmeal and bones to crushed powder, for no prize larger than pride. When you get angry (even as a grown man) and are ready to let someone know you are not to be trifled with, you will shout, “I’m ready to get fucking ignorant.” Stupid and brave are indistinguishable, and there is a Jake Lamotta-esque blurring of the line between the damage done to someone else and to oneself. Violence is magic, and you quickly go from sorcerer’s apprentice to full-blown alchemist high on your strange decoction distilled from mixing your own blood with the droplets collected from your prey.
Your mom realizes she cannot save you, that there is no escape, and you realize your father is never coming back. You are dangerous and reckless but you’re not stupid. You start smoking weed, you drink malt liquor sometimes and pour out libations on the concrete for your friends who are already dead, but you don’t touch fortified wine. And while you sell crack you’ll never suck a glass dick and you only tooted coke just that once to see what it was like. You even get curious enough to wet a cigarette once, and you bug out on PCP, slapping the Mylar shell of the walls at the local bus stop, making your homeboys laugh and scaring the girls.
You’re in and out of juvie, but juvenile detention is a joke and, like the neighborhood, a place where you can hang out with friends and play basketball. Even better, your mom’s not there. All your pain suddenly becomes funny, hysterical even, and there’s a smile on your face constantly.
Until you go too far, and one of your robberies goes wrong. The lame fights back a little too hard and you must use more force than you planned, just to reestablish who is predator and who is prey. Life has been a bad dream until now, but it has still been circumscribed by the dream logic of the ghetto whose numbing quality has perversely become a comfort, where the cloud cover is constant even on the sunniest day.
Your first taste of reality, your wakeup call and emergence from the dream, is in a courthouse. You get eight years in prison, and it’s only after that bus you’re on with the caged windows goes inside those dark, Great Walls of China that you leave reality again to return the dream world, only now you’re in a nightmare.
You were a badass on the block, but now you are around men who make you realize you are a boy, a “church mouse” in your own words, compared to them. These men have had years to figure out the niceties of prison etiquette, like which cooking grease works best on opening the noncompliant rectum of a young boy trying to resist rape, or how to take the batteries from their headphone set, strip the aluminum coating from the double As and then stomp on that foil until they’ve fashioned a small spear that can go through a throat like a knife through wedding cake. All your survival skills have been honed for this moment, and you will be tested. If you pass, you will be a monster and lose some of your humanity. If you fail, you will be a fuck toy and weak, which is less than subhuman. There are no good men; only men who are good at being men. Violence is still magic, only moreso here than on the street. If you cannot be violent, then you will not be able to have a moment’s peace or the smallest pretense of dignity.
While you’re doing your bid in prison, you hear from your mother, who tells you that your brother has been murdered on the street. Some of your mutual friends and acquaintances have also died from a new disease called AIDs. There’s some good news, too. If your mother can get someone to cover her shift at work, she might visit you for your birthday.
When you return to the tier, one of the older heads tells you that he heard about your brother on the grapevine. He also heard that the guy who killed your brother got caught and is being sent here, behind the walls of this ancient granitic Egyptian Revival monstrosity in whose belly you’ve dwelled and watched the bloom fade from your young manhood.
You prepare to do what you must, to prove to the wolves that you are one of them. If your brother’s killer comes in here and you don’t kill him (or at least fuck him up until he needs a cane to walk and wires in his mouth) you are going to look weak, and you can’t afford that.
Then maybe someone drops a dime, or whoever oversees housing decisions uses that same cherry-picking claw your mom once used to airlift you somewhere else into a different part of the prison, away from the man you will kill if you ever get the chance, a man who probably had designs of killing you in self-defense.
An older head helps you get adjusted to the new cellblock and one day at chow, in passing, mentions that Graterford has a good boxing program. You agree to check it out, figuring that the chances of static popping off or knife play are lower in the gym than on the yard, where men with mirrored shades and high-powered rifles watch you from their perches on the catwalk or in the guard towers.
You’ve been in a couple of gyms before, back on the streets, and observed that boxers, like the pimps and drug dealers, got the respect of men whose respect it was not easy to obtain, as well as the attention of girls who would otherwise roll their eyes at you. Even better, the same white world that put you behind these walls respects some of these fighters too, paid them well to do what you did for free on the street, to whip ass.
The gym becomes your church and your mother who can’t make visits down here. It becomes your father who died of a heroin overdose years ago. You don’t tell anyone your strange thoughts, but in a weird way this gym is a womb, a secret chamber that sweats liniment and blood and rewards your own sweating labors. You become addicted to the acrid smells of the place, the sounds of the skipping rope and grunts of your fellow warriors. At night in your cell you read the bible, and the next time you return to the gym and work the fraying leather heavy bag, you see yourself as Jonah in the belly of the whale.
You are going to escape. There is light. You are going to be reborn. There is not, as in the reckless days of your childhood at Rosen or the wilding nights in Germantown, only the moment. There is both a future and a past, because you have entered into some prison boxing tournaments and not only stood your ground, but have beaten grown men, have danced circles around them and even unmanned them. You’ve learned something about combat that is secret thousands of years old, that men do not fear death anywhere near as much as they fear humiliation. It’s why Muhammad Ali with his glowing, innocent and slightly babyface features psychologically whipped the mafia-backed and dead-eyed king of intimidators, Sonny Liston.
You get out of prison, find a gym, and decide to try your luck as a professional boxer. You train, but your heart really isn’t in it. A fight purse on an untelevised portion of an undercard will net you less than five minutes’ work on the street (and you still know people from your time in the joint) and how many guys make their way up the ladder in the fight game, anyway? Do you want to put in the kind of hard hours you might working with a scaffolding crew, without the benefit of union wages or the kind of guap guys in construction or landscaping bank? A white-collar gig is out of the question, since you’ve got a rap sheet and every application has that one question about felonies that you can’t get around. Also, those GED courses you took are not going to help you when everyone else in line has a college degree. And you’ve spent so much time in the upside-down inverted mirror world of the ghetto that you couldn’t bluff your way through the normal white world even if you tried. Everything that was an asset in the streets or in prison is a liability in this world. Once again, you smell like garbage.
So you train, halfheartedly, feeling foolish about your earlier dreams you nursed nights lying awake in your bunk in Graterford, turning on your thin mattress as your cellie snored above you and his sweat-sock covered feet dangled from the foot of the top bunk. You wanted to be a pro fighter, you knuckle head!
You get your first pro fight, in Atlantic City. You lose, and you feel the darkness descending. Before you only thought it, but now you know this boxing shit is just a pipedream …Speaking of pipes, the Crack Boom has gone bust and left massive craters in the ghetto, but if you can stand on the lip of a volcano and maintain your balance without falling in …The temptation to walk the tightrope is there, to risk your freedom for easy (or at least quick) money.
Another old head enters your life. He’s been in the fight game forever, and looks a bit like Clarence Williams the Third, with the papulose freckles on his face and his shocks of white, activator-free, kinky hair. He looks sort of like a more subdued Don King, if King had a soul. You beg him to take a chance on you and he finally relents.
You remember your first fight, looking back on the humiliation of that loss, the red clouds in your brain gathering as you deliberately relive that “L” and rub that psychic wound raw. Maybe if you dwell in that humiliation and hopelessness right now you can avoid feeling it again in the future, in your next fight.
You remember the good habits you picked up in that hell that swallowed so many men, who would kill to have five minutes of the twenty-four hours of each day you take for granted. There are men you’ve left behind who cried secret tears at night for daughters and even granddaughters they’re never going to be able to take to the zoo on a Sunday. They are doing time that even philosophers can’t comprehend, life-plus-thirty, natural life plus twenty years. They are going to die in the heart of a massive blue-grey crypt. They want you to succeed but figure you will be back in prison, as does your parole officer and the cops who watch you from the open windows of their cruisers that glide like soaring hawks through your neighborhood. In some ways you are a lion, but you know you’re kidding yourself, you are a mouse and it’s only a matter of time until you’re clutched in the talons again. Or maybe not.
You train like you’ve never trained before, introduced to that high plateau of monastic masochism you’ve heard only a few fighters can obtain, sex and blandishments and everything except boxing cast away like an illusory veil that has blinded you up until this moment and hidden this ultimate reality from your eyes. You pity people who don’t know the agony of the two-thousandth sit-up, that raw feeling in the tailbone, or the pulsing fire in your calf muscles as you jump rope like a girl with braided hair that tapers in conches who does double-dutch when she isn’t jumping on mattresses left out for the sanitation man. You feel the strength of your soul like a poor black girl who doesn’t know she’s poor. You will go the next twenty-five years without drinking a Coca-Cola (or even a Diet Coke) even though your father died of an overdose and broken glass phials that contained crack outnumber blades of grass in your neighborhood where you do your morning roadwork. You are an eremitic, a weird mystic who was forged in hell, lives in the ghetto and yet exists apart from it. You are silent so long and you become so attuned to the workings of the world around you that it gets to the point where it’s almost as if you have echolocation and everyone else is moving in slow motion (including your sparring partners who are baffled by your mix of heart, intelligence, and resolve). You fight like an old soul, a hybrid wily reincarnation of everyone from Jack Johnson to “Jersey” Joe Walcott and Ezzard “the Cincinnati Cobra” Charles. You are a conundrum no one can solve and you grow beyond the tutelage anyone can offer, save what you can give yourself or learn in the heat of battle. A kind of singularity is achieved so that what once seemed complicated is now a grid of black and white squares laid out before the boy who has graduated from fumbling candidate to grandmaster.
You listen to the sound of the pigeons cooing in the eaves of the brownstones, the church bells tolling, the police and ambulance sirens competing to feed on corpses and wondering why they haven’t already devoured you, trains rushing over rusted tracks, the staccato of gunshots traded between thirty-eights and .22s, these lowing manmade threats vying with the growl and bark of pit-bulls raging against absentee owners. You ignore this all and you fight.
You rattle off something like twenty wins in a row. You appear on cable television, racking up stunning knockout after knockout victory. Surely your streak must end soon. The pundits who’ve been watching boxing for decades and analyzed the game from every angle know your comeuppance is overdue, that a fall from grace is nigh. Except it doesn’t happen. You keep winning. You make more money in thirty-six minutes in the ring than you could in a hundred centuries in Graterford. What’s more is you’re doing it legally, and the friends you’ve left behind those Great Walls know of your success and don’t begrudge you one iota of it. You have saved a small part of them by saving yourself.
You become world-champion, and then later you defy the odds again by becoming the oldest man in history to win a world title. Your most scornful detractor among the punditry must concede that Father Time remains undefeated, with one draw, against you. Now you are mentioned in the same breath as Muhammad Ali, you, the man who lost his first pro fight and got a lung punctured as a teen in a street brawl and looked like he was going to spend his life behind bars, or maybe, if he was lucky, you might live as a free man with a colostomy bag sitting in a wheelchair on the corner sending young cats to pick up quarts of Irish Rose for you from the local bodega. Maybe you are suffering all these slights and indignities in some parallel universe, an alternate timeline. In this world, however, you are considered perhaps the second-greatest light-heavyweight of all-time, after that other ageless warrior, the Old Mongoose Archie Moore. You are a legend. The odds and actuarial tables and a couple of judges and some guards from Graterford say you should not be alive, but an impartial algorithm that measures boxers using a metric called “quality points” actually has you ranked ahead of Muhammad Ali. You are better than “the Greatest” by five points, which would make you the fifth greatest man to ever lace up the gloves. Some would disagree, but you are in that conversation, already a ghost consigned to grainy reels of footage and pub debates that take place a thousand miles from the city of your birthplace. Your name will be tossed into fantasy matchups across generations and will be the catalyst for arguments that erupt into fistfights occurring a hundred years after your death and in languages you never learned to speak. You planted an acorn in a graveyard, which grew into an oak that ruptured the tombs surrounding your tree and woke the dead. And notwithstanding their advanced state of decay, even the corpses must concede you were a bad motherfucker. Maybe the baddest.
Bernard Hopkins.