BooksBarbecue
Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

We drive to Medina, the nearest city with a sports equipment store. My father buys a heavy bag and two pairs of boxing gloves. The cashier looks at my busted lip and smiles. He knows exactly what’s happening: a father teaching his son to fight. I doubt it’s the first time he’s seen it. When we arrive home, my father, who has never been what one would call a handyman, sets about hanging the bag in the center of my bedroom, which is small to begin with; I’ll have to shuffle around the bag to get in and out. He screws a thick eyebolt into the center of the ceiling without bothering to check for a stud. He stands back for a moment admiring his work, and I too look upon the bag with pride.

“Whatcha think?” he asks.

“I love it.”

He walks to the bag, grabs the top of it with both hands, and puts a little weight on it. The bag puts up no resistance whatsoever and comes tumbling straight down, ripping a softball-size hole in the ceiling and scattering chunks of plaster all around the room. My father falls over the bag and crashes shoulder first into my dresser, knocking everything on top of it to the floor.

“This fucking house,” he says, as though the house is merely continuing on with some long-standing grudge my grandmother had started. He stands and massages his shoulder while peering up into the hole. He shakes his head. Beside the hole, and now visible, is the thick, heavy stud required for the suspension of heavy weight. “Missed the damn beam by an inch,” he says, confused at why the damn beam wasn’t in the center of the ceiling in the first place.

He goes through the same ordeal again, this time screwing the eyebolt into the stud’s center. When he’s done he hangs the bag, gives it a good jerk, and then jabs it a few times. Satisfied, he shows me how to hit it, correcting my technique until I get it right.

“Good. Now do that no less than a thousand times each day and you’ll be good to go in no time. Then nobody’ll fuck with you.”

2

I punch the bag every day, not a thousand times, but a hundred, fifty times with each hand when I wake, fifty more before I go to bed. My father watches some nights, corrects me when I get sloppy, hits it himself while I hold it from behind. After a few weeks he no longer has to correct me. I’m becoming sure of myself, and this newfound confidence finds me in far fewer fights, as though it was my apparent insecurity that had opened the door to discord in the first place.