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the accident. I drove that electrified tongue from the shadows of death back into life.
    I was getting sentimental with age.
    Benoit’s Gym was across the street from the May Company department store on Crenshaw. It was half a block long and deep, a bungalow that would fly apart if a small tornado ever passed through.
    There were no windows but the front door was open.
    It was hot inside even at nine in the morning.
    There were three rings in the center of the single room that the gym encompassed. Leather-helmeted men were battling in each one. The six heavy bags were all occupied, as were the dozen or so speed bags that took up the back wall. There were jump-ropers, shadowboxers, sit-up partners, medicine ball circles, and enough sweat to slake the salty thirst of ten thousand flies.
    Some men were yelling instructions while others grunted either in pain or from the exertion of inflicting damage, and everywhere was the concussive sound of blows being delivered and received.
    This was where aimless young men came to hone their rage to a fine point of violence in an attempt to shed the skin of poverty, hatred, and fear. Poor men of every race had taken this journey. Most of themfell along the wayside, becoming the stepping-stones of the few that conquered.
    In a corner, behind a battered ash desk, sat a man poring over a ledger. I assumed this was the man who took in money and pointed the way and so, inhaling the strong scent of human toil, I walked up to the blunt-faced concierge.
    “This where I check in?”
    His skin was a light molasses-brown, and his eyes had some green to them. It took me a moment to register that he was wearing coppery wire-framed reading glasses. His lumpy, battered face denied everything but the pain it had survived. Sixty or more, that face had seen a hundred thousand punches coming and avoided maybe two.
    “What you doin’ in here, main?” he said. “You ain’t no trainer and you too old to get in the ring.”
    “Charlie Tinford,” I admitted. “I hear Bob Mantle got an exercise class on Mondays.”
    “Buster,” the man said.
    Buster stared at me, wondering about words I had not uttered. Boxers get a sense of people from their bodies and expressions. He was sizing me up.
    “Why?” he asked.
    “Why what?” I replied even though I knew what he was getting at.
    “Why you wanna take Bobby’s class?”
    “Tryin’ to get back in shape,” I said. “My girlfriend, Gina, been lookin’ at younger men lately. She’s only twenty-seven and still thinks a man is mostly just physique.”
    I shouldn’t have used that last word, it made Buster wince.
    “Physique?”
    “Muscles.”
    He didn’t believe what I was saying but the gym wouldn’t pay its bills by turning money down.
    “Eight dollars,” Buster said.
    I had the wad of ones folded in my pocket. I handed it over and watched him count the bills—twice.
    “Bobby’s gone for a few weeks but Tommy Latour is teachin’ his class,” Buster said after the money was safely in a gray metal box in his bottom drawer.
    “Is this Latour any good?” I said as if I might have to ask for my dollar bills back.
    “You never heard of Hardcase Latour?”
    “Should I?”
    “He fought Carmine Basilio in an exhibition fight. He didn’t win but he didn’t get knocked down neither.”
    Charlie Tinford was placated by this and nodded to say so.
    “That’s Tommy over there with the big dude on the heavy bag,” Buster told me. “You could change anywhere and then ask him where you go.”
    “Don’t you have a dressing room?” Tinford asked.
    “The whole place is a dressin’ room. Your locker is that gym bag in your hand.”
    I was ready, in my gray sweats and navy blue T-shirt, to take my class and covertly interrogate the general populace concerning the whereabouts of Battling Bob Mantle.
    “Mr. Latour?” I said to a gold-colored man who was holding the heavy bag for a dark-skinned heavyweight banger.
    “Yeah?” Latour said, still