Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?

05

5

I tugged open the heavy, green-painted door at Joe Bazooka's Gym. A terrific wind belted me in the face, nearly hard enough to bowl me over. For a minute I thought the janitor had replaced the ceiling fans with airplane propellers, but the breeze came from Joe's lightning jabs as he shadowboxed the opponent provided him by the hundred-watt bulb shining over his shoulder.

Wham, bam! He flattened the shadow with a combination too quick for the human eye to see.

Joe Bazooka, the one and only retired, undefeated, heavyweight champ of the world. I took a seat on an overturned spit bucket and watched a genius at work.

Joe spotted me and gave his shadowy opponent a final bang-on-target one-two flurry. The shadow doubled over. Joe spared him the indignity of total collapse by reaching overhead and turning out the light. The shadow froze in place. Its edges crinkled and lifted, and it peeled slowly off the wall. Joe scooped it up and tossed it into a large wheeled cart half full of wet towels. "Hey, uh..."Joe scratched his tousled blonde head. After three hundred fights, the ink in Joe's well didn't flow easy anymore.

"Eddie," I reminded him.

"Yeah, Eddie." His large, solid, punching-bag-shaped balloon hung motionless in the air. I rapped it, none too gently, with my knuckles. It arced away, though in true championship tradition, it came right back for more.

Joe extended a hand the size and color of a baked ham. "I'm Joe Bazooka." As if I didn't know.

He turned to the wall and eyeballed the levelness of a photo already aligned with a transit. He rapped the bottom right side with his fingertip, moving it a gnat's eyebrow closer to perfection. "This is me and Jersey Joe Walcott. Madison Square Garden, June 16, 1934. That's the night I won the title." Joe sunk into a crouch. Left arm slightly out, right tucked into his chin. "I came out hard at the opening bell..."

If I don't have much of a future, I don't mind reliving the past, but right now I had a paying customer. "Great fight. I saw the newsreels on the Cavalcade of Sports."

Joe's arms dropped to his side, his face not far behind them. "Right," he said in a balloon so low it scuffed my shoes. "I guess you know, then. About the night I won the crown." He dusted the picture with his sleeve. "This your first visit?"

If you didn't count twice a week for the past five years. "Yeah."

"Glad to have you." He pointed proudly around. "We got a full range of weights. Light and heavy body bags. Incline boards. Speed bags. Weighted jump ropes. You here for a workout or you planning to take up boxing as a career?"

Boxing could get me hurt, I'd recently been told. "Strictly exercise. "

He sized me up. "Just as well." He peppered his stomach with his fists, duplicating the sound of twin woodpeckers beating against a steel flagpole. "Try to remember. You are what you eat."

Given my diet, that made me a beer nut.

Joe looped his arm around my shoulders with enough reach left over to do it again. "You need help, holler. I'm always around. "

Joe cocked a cauliflowered ear toward the silent wall phone. "I better answer that."

He handed me a shadow from out of the cart and picked up the telephone's earpiece, surprised to find nobody on the other end. He jiggled the hang-up hook. I left him telling the operator about 1934, the glorious night he decked Jersey Joe in two.

I went into the locker room and stripped to my underwear. I tightened my thigh garters a notch, slipped back into my steel-toed black brogans, strapped on a pair of Everlasts, and went looking for a fight.