The Boxing Guy

In a Chinese restaurant in Pittsburgh, the waiter fouls up the boxing guy's order, which is not a complicated order, which gets the boxing guy to talking about dumb, which is not a polite term, but sometimes there it is.

Dumb is a subject the boxing guy knows, because before he was a boxing guy, he was a homicide detective for thirty five years.

One of the fighters who got his start with the boxing guy became a champion, then he used a chunk of his championship money to buy his brother a truck, which, it turns out, was dumb, because two days later the brother sold the truck at a twenty two thousand dollar loss for drugs.

Even dumber was the champion's arrest for relieving himself in the street, which is not a crime for which you go to jail, at least if you are a champion.

But you do go to jail for shooting your girlfriend, which is the next dumb thing the champion does, after which the boxing guy talks the champion into turning himself in.

"She's okay," he says, as he eats his vegetables and tofu, which the waiter eventually gets right. "In fact, she visits him in jail, and there is a sheet of bullet proof plastic between them, which is good, because she tells him the pit bull he gave her destroyed the other pit bull he'd left with her, which was stuffed."

"A stuffed pit bull?" I asked.

The boxing guy didn't even have to say "dumb."

But he is not finished with dumb. It turns out the boxing guy stages some dramatic productions as well as the boxing matches. Sometimes he engages the services of his boxers in the dramatic productions, and sometimes he employs card girls, who walk around the ring in high heels between rounds of a boxing match, holding up a card that reminds everybody what round is next.

"Ashley, I think her name was," the boxing guy is saying. "Could have been Ashley. And she couldn't remember any lines, so we just had her stand there on the stage. She was very pretty."

There are times when you don't want to say anything, because if you don't, the guy you are having Chinese dinner with will keep talking, and this is one of those times. The boxing guy sips his tea, and then he smiles at the other thing he remembers about Ashley, if that was her name. And I am wondering if the subject is still dumb, but I don't have to wonder for long.

"I told you she is a card girl," the boxing guy says. "And one night before the fights, she says, 'Hey, I been wondering, those cards that I carry around...what are the numbers for?'"