A Cut Man’s Triumph

Up until a few days ago, if you ducked into the L.A. Boxing Club, at the ragtag corner of Washington and Hope, asking after a certain “F.X. Toole,” you might be rebuffed with a blank stare. A lifted eyebrow. A beat of silence.

In the warren of sky-lit rooms overtaken by blue-canvas boxing rings, men and women who hit the bags and dance the canvas here don’t know jack about an F.X. Toole.

They’ve seen neither hide nor hair of this so-called legendary, 69-year-old Irishman claiming kinship in “the fancy.” This storied, picaresque cut man, who with his magic bag of tricks stops the flow of a boxer’s blood. This man who has written a much lauded new collection of documentary-harsh yet poetic boxing fiction, “Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner” (Ecco/Harper Collins) set in a quartet of L.A.’s spirit-proving boxing gyms.

F.X. Toole? Doesn’t ring a bell. But they can tell you an earful about another Irish cut man, trainer and gym rat, Jerry Boyd.

Everyone knows Jerry Boyd: Tall and lean with silver hair cut brush short and neatly trimmed whiskers and round tortoise-shell spectacles. Looking more professorial than pugilistic, today he’s touring the busy rooms in a polo shirt, khakis and running shoes; the only clues giving away his fighter’s life are a badly banged nose and a missing piece of right ear.

“Hey! Jerry! I didn’t know you wrote a book!” says a boxer with a tumble of wavy hair known as “Samson.” He ambles over with a photocopied semi-bound manuscript curling at the edges. “I’m working on a book too. Trying to get these kids offa the street. And out of gangs. Inta the gym.”

“Good for you!” booms Boyd--Toole--over the blare of warring boomboxes pumping rap and banda.

“Who wrote a book?” asks a bare-chested kid. Someone crooks his thumb in Boyd’s direction. The kid peeks around the doorjamb. Boyd sits under a skylight, beneath a flood of summer sun--exposed. The real-life cut man, born and baptized as Geraldum Boyd, speaks of this unveiling as “opening the curtain.”

F.X. Toole, the pseudonymous author, would sum it up this way: “You never know what’s inside a boy until the boy gets hit.”

*

“I really wanted to keep all this separate,” says Boyd, leaning back in his folding chair. He looks like a man at home with the world--wherever it may take him. “There’s my training partner over there. There’s Dub Huntley.” He points out a trim, muscular man, arms folded, studying the action. “He’s my daddy in boxing. He’s my man.”

Though they’re all close, though they’re family, he kept all this tightly under wraps. So he understands the shock. Expected some of it. And figures that he can handle some of the head-scratching that’s bound to go for a while in each opposing corner. This writer who has appeared to come out of nowhere; this expert cut man who is an elegant writer.

But the truth of the matter: The writer has been at it 30 years, and this born fighter has been sparring in one world or another for more than twice as long. He’s not so much a late-starter as a late-bloomer.

The nom de plume, Francis Xavier Toole, was a gift from God, says Boyd, who is quick to point out that he’s no saint but, rather, a work-in-progress Catholic who has “bouts with the pagan” and “prays for more faith every day.”

The name is a nod to the 16th century teacher, philosopher and Jesuit saint, and the rapscallion actor Peter O’Toole. (A poor typist, he dumped the O’ for extra keystrokes’ sake.) Under this cloak, he’s scribbled short fiction and plays and novels--adventure tales, meditations on faith and luck, belief and unbelief--always examining both sides of the coin. He likes conundrums. The either/ors and what ifs?

And with not a word published, nor a play staged, these worlds, he felt, could be separate--but that was when he didn’t expect to write about boxing. His book’s large first printing (50,000 copies) and enthusiastic advance praise have suddenly sent reporters sniffing into his past and present, upsetting his carefully compartmentalized world.

Before this, says Boyd, who has inhaled Hemingway and J.P. Donleavy, Kant and Spinoza, “I’d tried writing things with an idea of writing toward something, in quotes, commercial, and I’d say to myself: ‘Well, self, here you’ve written this thing and you don’t even care that much about it.’ You don’t even have the satisfaction that ordinarily writing something that was important to you gives you. I went ‘Boomp!’ Since then I’ve written what was important to me.”

Boyd spent years getting hit--by the publishing world. He collected rejection slips that would send him crumpling. “I would be destroyed,” he recalls. “I didn’t really understand that you had to send things out for a long period of time. So I’m down on my face. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. . . . Somehow I’m getting back on my feet. But this is not a matter of courage. This is the ass-whippin’ that you have to take. And try to get up from,” he says, letting out a gust of a laugh. “So I just quit writing. I put it completely away.”

Though he didn’t start to haunt the local boxing gyms seriously until 1979, he knew that he was predestined. Boyd can conjure pictures of father and son huddled around the radio listening to ring announcers like Bill Stern and Clem McCarthy in the mid-’30s. “My father was a stone fight fan. I remember as a little boy he’d say, ‘Hit ‘em right in the gut! Hit ‘em in the breadbasket.’ ”

But these stories aren’t just exercises in fight facts or play-by-play. They are beyond-the-ring survival tales. What it takes to defend oneself. How not to go down and stay there.

The sport itself sets up the classic warrior story, explains Howard Junker, who gave Toole his first break, publishing him last year in his San Francisco literary journal, Zyzzyva. “And F.X. writes in a tough-minded voice, not a tough voice. It’s about what men battle against to maintain their honor in a world that has very little respect for what they do. A lot of fiction is confessional these days. This isn’t. This is naturalism, this is walking through the door and there it is.”

Told through seen-it-all eyes, their vision dimmed, the stories are grainy vignettes that steer far away from the big-purse, heavyweight champs. These contenders take the redeye, eat and sleep in cut-rate motels--gone-crooked fighters and greedy promoters.

“Rope Burns” animates the humid, ill-lit contemporary world of struggling boxers, their trainers and their magic cut men. Shifting in voice and point of view, Toole moves easily from the thoughts of a black super-middleweight to wild schemes of the Mexican featherweight to grand hopes of the twangy Missouri tough gal. Not just the fighters, but their corner men.

“They say we,” writes Toole of the boxer’s corner, “because they fight when their fighter fights and when their fighter gets hit, they get hit. When the fighter wins or loses, they win or lose, and together they feel what that’s like.”

In top-drawer fight fiction, says James Ellroy, a 40-year fan and author of “L.A. Noir” and “L.A. Confidential,” the readers should feel the high of the win or the crush of the loss. “What I want when I read boxing fiction,” says Ellroy, “is to find out about the combination of physical bravery and boldness and stupid ideals that lead guys to do this.”

More often than not, the opponents in these stories are the odds stacked against one. From gangs to poverty--it’s what you confront daily--whether it’s the circumstances you were born into or the future you are trying to duck like a punch. “This is a brutally male world and a drama oftentimes between people of color, of the lower classes,” says Ellroy. “You’re allowed into a secret world, to watch the inner workings of race and class and the machismo of Latin cultures.”

It’s that heat, that tension that circulates through those gyms and within those racially mixed neighborhoods that Toole uses as not just backdrop, but fuel.

*

If you can slow him down, freeze the frame, Boyd will lay it all out--like a fortuneteller’s deck of cards.

He was born in Long Beach and raised in Gardena. After graduating from Gardena High in 1949, he worked as a shoeshine boy in the local gambling clubs during World War II. Married and divorced three times, with as many children, the road from there to here is full of switchbacks--some scenic, others treacherous.

Among them: a stint in acting school studying under Sanford Meisner at Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. (“I wanted to be a stand-up comedian, but back then you couldn’t train for that.”) Later, he tried his hand at playwriting.

He shelved that to knock around Mexico and Spain learning Spanish and then bullfighting. Back home, he cleaned vats at the Good Humor Creamery, drove a cement mixer. He’s tended bar in New York and Redondo Beach, the site of a street fight where he lost part of that ear. His life may make for a good pub tale, but for Boyd the more important moral would be the importance of shrugging off limitations.

Yet, he admits, he had to get hit. Hit hard. To see what was inside this boy. “Two things happened. I had open-heart surgery [in 1988]. And I got my soul back. I came to realize that I didn’t have the kind of soul that could take shots, that would allow me to say, ‘Oh, no sucker, you ain’t going to hold me back!’ In this world you have to absorb shock in order to take the next step forward. So I started to pray to be able to write again.”

In bed one morning an idea for a story about a cut man came to him. “I stop blood” was the first line. “And then that just flowed.” It became “The Monkey Look.”

He wrote until he had a small bundle of stories to ship off. He picked Zyzzyva out of the “Writer’s Market,” he says, because it was in California. He just sent the stories cold. No cover letter. By F.X. Toole.

He didn’t expect all this fuss, the book auction, the six-city tour, film negotiations. “I considered myself a success when the story was published.” In gratitude he baked Junker a gooseberry pie.

On the Hope Street side of the L.A. Boxing Club, the homeless and the near-homeless sometimes make a palette on the sidewalk within the slender piece of shade the building allows. Boyd knows just how slim that dividing line is, how many of those fighters teeter.

Though the book tour will send him away a few weeks here and there, his life of late has been neatly divided between writing at his Hermosa Beach home and working at the gym. He’s finishing up a novel and is at work on a play. But, he says, he doesn’t want to let all this pomp eclipse his gym responsibilities. Boyd, who as an amateur has had his share of crushed jaws, spends much of his time helping Huntley--training fighters, serving as his eyes (Huntley suffers from a detached retina). Their roster may be small--junior featherweight champion, Jesus Salud, super-middleweight Antoine Byrd among them--but it has created something big.

“I always liked the harder things: The idea of the quick fix destroys you. I wrote 10, 20, 30 years before a break. That’s why I like this game. The winners are so few.”

Walking away from the ring, Dub Huntley wanders by and looks at Jerry Boyd, F.X. Toole--whatever--with a bewildered shake of the head. Then he lets out a laugh. “He come in the game so late. But he learned so quick. He’s good at what he does. But I don’t know about this F.X. Toole. Don’t know where he come up with that.”

Huntley’s been in the fight game for 48 years, known Boyd for 20, and he’s never seen someone quite like this. “I’d see this old guy, white hair, in the gym. He asks me if I would work with him. I told him, ‘OK, I’m going to work you like them young boys over there.’ Then I worked him harder. I thought: I’m gonna run this old man out of here! But he’d come right back. I saw that he really wanted it. That old man’s not going nowhere.”