Liner notes from the song “A Confrontation with Larger Mammals at Central Library

By Bart Barry-

My new friend Sammy and I became friends at a coffeehouse in the Pearl Brewery complex because of our socks or fate. I didn’t ask if his brand were Happy Socks and he didn’t ask my brand either but neither of us needed to ask with as much ankle as we both showed; a man who orders his socks from that website never alights on the best pair instantly and necessarily scrollcombs dozens of varieties before landing on the pair(s) he’ll purchase. Such considered scrolling familiarizes him with patterns more than he knows till he’s across from a man wearing a pattern he didn’t realize he considered till that instant – and still mayn’t realize he considered till he begins to write a story opening with another man’s socks in a coffeehouse.

I admired Sammy’s stature while he stood in line beside his wife. His was a physique I decided to call Tex-Mex in the moment; someone sometime in his family tree came from some country south of Texas but many generations of Texas residency made him much taller and thicker and assertive than ancestors of his whom I imagined like Israel Vazquez or Rafael Marquez. Sammy’s wife was not from Texas but somewhere much norther and more eastern and seemed uninterested in our banter about the cultural and tempo differences between Texas and places less fortunate. Sammy was a native of San Antonio very much unlike me and had a hardened intelligence about the city’s boxing scene I did not have and couldn’t passably fake in my first decade for the same reason a young man who lifts weights fewer than ten years, no matter the poundages he moves or pharmaceuticals he ingests, does not have to his muscles the gnarled girth of a professional bodybuilder – which is a meandering way to define maturity, muscular or cognitive, I guess.

Sammy asked what sort of work I do and since he didn’t preposition the ending – “for a living” – I told him I was a writer, as a means of explaining my dress more than my identity, and because when one says he’s something other than a writer he finds himself explaining that other thing which devolves insipidly but when he says he’s a writer he often gets to hear the other person’s idea for a novel. Sammy did not have an idea for a novel but asked what sort of writing, and imagining the most-interesting conversational fork, I said, “Boxing.”

“Once you see MMA, man, it’s hard to go back to boxing,” said Sammy.

I didn’t agree with him not because I didn’t wish to be accommodating or initially reciprocal but because I’d never seen MMA with an interested pair of eyes and didn’t wish to start things dishonestly with Sammy because he seemed the serious sort of South Texan who’d know a man fibbing and hold it against him by abruptly ending the conversation. I was reading a story by Hemingway on my lap and inverted the characters to imagine myself bolting Sammy’s disapproval, much to his wife’s dismay, and thinking such a show of cowardice’d ruin the next morning’s camp breakfast, and instead of disagreeing with Sammy I began to list local fighters like Ayala and Leija. Sammy knew them both from hours spent in his adolescence at San Fernando Gymnasium, and now we had something in common and there’d be no bolting, no lions laid flat in the grass breathing pink bubbles, no buffalo in a thick swamp where it was impossible to get a shot.

Sammy knew a trainer who had a kid recently signed by the promoter, the, what’s his, the guy who beat Leija, the golden – oh, Oscar De La Hoya! who was building like a farm system or something. I didn’t bore him with the particulars of addiction and poor choices and a scrofulous bastard who posed like a friend and sold a man’s lifework to someone else and just now returned to boxing, because it was a mean, bitter path senseless to Sammy.

“Who was the last fighter you truly cared about?” I asked instead.

“Julio Cesar Chavez.”

I recounted a tale from a Mexican writer seated beside me 11 years ago at Chavez’s final fight, a loss to Grover Wiley in Phoenix none of us who attended thought’d be historic:

“And he told me, ‘For those terrible ten years, Chavez was the only thing that went right for us’.”

Sammy’s eyes were blank as he searched for something surely unrelated to my unimpressive anecdote about the last man who interested him in a sport that no longer interested him slightly.

“Salvador Sanchez, though,” said Sammy, interrupting my account of all the things other than Chavez that went wrong in Mexico during Chavez’s tenure as El Gran Campeón Mexicano – like the peso’s collapse, the assassination of Luis Donaldo . . . “Sanchez, man, I idolized Salvador Sanchez. Never been anybody like him.”

Killed in a car accident, boxer-puncher, Top Rank tried to sell us a knockoff with the same coif – these were the only ideas that came in my head. Sammy was older than me than I thought or else privy to entirely different public programming in 1980 South Texas. We talked about Wide World of Sports till Sammy’s wife went outside.

“Once you’ve seen MMA, man,” Sammy said, and he shook his head, stood up, shook my hand and left for a seat by his wife’s side.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry