Christmas Day 1926

Gramps strangest fight was against Chali Hussain, the one eyed arab.
Chali had lost an eye in a factory mis-hap in the early part of 1925. He had a glass eye that always seemed to get knocked sideways during a fight so it looked like either he had a lazy eye or he was eyeing some dame in the first row. Gramps said it was disconcerting because when the eye initially shifted it would cause gramps to look over where the eye was looking and then POW , Chali would hit him with a shot to the head. Sometimes the eye would rotate all the way around so it was just a white eye staring out at you. Gramps said it used to give him the willys.
He and Chali fought several times but the strangest fight was Christmas night 1926. Gramps said It was the coldest night of the year, blizzard conditions, but the promoters had too much invested to re-schedule. Somehow people managed to make it to the arena and by nine o'clock the place was packed. Cigar smoke filled the air and ladies were laughing and yelling to each other showing off the furs and jewelry they had received from "Santa".
The crowd didn't like Chali very much. He had a little pencil mustache and wore a shiny purple robe with arabic writing and images of the pyramids and camels. His second was a man named Roscoe Mohammed. Roscoe was a little skinny guy who always had a cigarette hanging from his lip. Somehow it just seemed to stick to his bottom lip and it would hang there or flap while he spoke, a long finger of ash clinging to the cigarette, waiting for just the right moment to drop onto Roscoe's already ash covered suit. Roscoe wasn't a Mohammedan like Chali. His real name was Roscoe Lefkowitz. Underneath his clothes he had a Saint Christopher medal and a small silver cross that his wife made him wear.
Gramps had been sick with the flu for several days and had been laying in bed until the day of the fight when he had forced himself to get up and start moving around. He was in no shape to fight but he knew if he didn't fight there'd be trouble. Better to go in, fight a few rounds, and get knocked out then to deal with those bastards, gramps said. I didn't ask who the bastards were. Gramps said there was just too much money changing hands for them to let something like the flu stop a good fight.
The first few rounds were horrible. Gramps got battered. Chali was out for blood and the crowd was crazy with hatred, screaming at Chali, screaming at gramps to kill the rat. Gramps had a cut over his eye and the blood was running into his eye. The bell rang and the third round ended. Gramps seconds worked on the cut and stopped it from bleeding.
"Give it up, Roy" Gramps second said. " He's killing you"
Gramps had a ringing in his ear and the crowd was loud. He thought he heard his second say "Give it to him, Roy."
Fuck it thought gramps, one more round, and then I'm out.
As he came out for the fourth round his legs felt a little better. He started punching harder and Chali's eye got slightly skewed. It was looking straight up as if seeking guidance from the almighty.
Coming out of a clinch Chali caught gramps with a sucker punch square on the chin and dropped him a like a sack of dirt.
The arena was spinning. Grown men were screaming at him to get up. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, spinning, twisting.
Gramps shook the cobwebs out of his head and slowly got to his feet. There was a fire in his head and his adrenaline kicked in. Chali had already thought he had won. He had his arms up and was taunting the crowd. When he started to turn toward where he thought gramps was laying, knocked out, it was on his blind side. He never saw it coming. Gramps hit the side of his head with a shot that would have busted a punching bag.
A news photographer captured the moment as it happened. The old sepia toned photo above gramps desk shows the scene - Gramps, bleeding from the cut on his eyebrow is throwing a fierce punch, his whole body behind it. Chali's face is a mass of contorsion, twisted and battered, as the glove mashes it. His body is at a forty five degree angle as his feet start to leave the ground. Behind them, in the crowd, a beautiful blonde woman is spilling her martini on a fat man seated next to her as she thows her body back. Her eyes and those of the fat man, captured in the brilliant flash of the photograph, are focused on an object floating above them.
Chali Hussain's glass eye.