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James Toney: In the beginning
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In the beginning...
Sherry Toney, refreshed and resplendent in canary yellow, arched an immaculate eyebrow as the three of us sipped iced tea in the Bonaventure in downtown LA. Even though Skid Row was only a couple of blocks away, the glitzy Bonaventure made Tulsa's Doubletree look like a dialapidated Motel 6. the Toney's had been staying there for weeks, rising towards the stars, but Sherry had more lasting things in mind.
She smarted with the indignity of memory. 'Look, you gotta understand this one fact. With Toney Snr we're dealing with somebody dangerous. He's schizophrenic, pscychopathic. And James knows that. He has a built in grudge against his father. He's hated his father ever since he could walk.' She stared hard at Alison, as if to warn her. 'This is serious ****, girl...'
'And doesn't that wory you,' I said cautiouslyly, afraid of angering the mighty Sherry,' when your own son talks about murdering his father?'
'Yeah, it worries me 'cos I dont want james to wind up in prison too - though I couldn't care less what happens to his father. Like I told you last time, if he thinks he can creep back into our lives he's got another thing coming. james'll Kill him!
'are you sure?'
'Damn right! The hate is that deep. You can see it in the build-up to this next fight. i know he's got his father's face planted at the front of his brain. It's payback time for all that Toney did to him. So this boy he's fighting next, Tim littles, he's gonna be the one who'll get busted up...'
'You don't have any fear when James fights?'
'No,' she said, sounding like an echo of her son.
'But I'd be a little wary of a boxer who looks as accomplished as Littles, a guy who is the number-on contender, a fighter who's also young and unbeaten.'
'Yeah - but you ain't no boxer.'
'No,' i agreed stoically.
'James will turn his rage on Littles. you see, unlike his father, he knows how to channel it.'
'But what about the other guy's potential fury?'
'James'll chill this kid. He's gonna knock him out..'
Sherry spoke so easily about the coming violence, as if she was as inured to brutaity as her son. But her refusal to be squeamish about boxing had the strange effect of making her appear more, rather than less, compassionate. she played the role of supportive mother to the hilt, proving herself articulate in grisly boxing discourse. Sherry also transformed the Toney history into an evocative discourse, uncovering the reasons why her son turned to such a business for salvation.
James Toney Snr came from the South. 'As far as I can tell,' Sherry suggested, 'even in the South, even when he was a little boy, Toney was troubled. he told me he never had much of a father. An' he hated his mother from the moment he saw her with another man. Sex got him into strife early. He quit school at the age of ten because of a **** charge. Yeah, Toney was that kind of man even then - ten years old and up for ****! You had to know him to believe it possible.
'But his trouble really started when he moved to Detroit. He bought a gun. He robbed, burgled and pushed dope. Seems like his first wife, Geraldine, came from a decent family. Her mother was a teacher, her father a preacher. That didn't stop Toney. She fell pregnant. They married but Toney still called her a whore. he used a clock to beat her in the face - over and over...'
'Yeah - he beat her with a clock. In the face. He went to prison for that - eighteen months.' sherry looked at us searchingly before she asked me an odd question. 'You know Mike Tyson's number?'
I looked blankly at her.
'You writing 'bout Tyson too. You must know his prison number...'
'Er..922..333..' I stumbled, feeling a boxing eghead for knowing such jailbird trivia.
'Yeah? Well, I still remember Toney's. A-5111632. that's why I'm gonna write this screenplay. Shake him from my mind forever..'
'Did you know Toney when he was in prison?'
Sherry peered down at her nails to ensure that the varnish was unchipped. 'No, but in Febuary '67 he was paroled to Grand Rapids, Michigan. That's where I lived. I was a senior at South High. In my spare time I worked as a cashier for Mac and Howard's Supermarket. that's where I first laid eyes on Toney - not long after his release...'
'What did you think of him, when you first saw him?'
A look of gauzy recall filtered across Sherry's made-up face. She remembered herself at eighteen, exactly twenty-six years before. 'He was a good-looking guy. Well built with a tailored waist. He always wore shades - very much the cool dude. For three months or so he dropped by the store. He made out he was just picking up a few beers but I knew he was comin' to see me. Then, on 29 May, it was his birthday, so i gave him a candy bar. It was then that he asked me my name.'
She looked at Alison and smiled.
''Sherry,' he says, 'What a pretty name!' That Saturday he came over. My mother liked him. She thought he was a gent. But my father was su****ous. Toney gave him this expensive-looking gift moments after they met. I remember what my father said after Toney left: 'Too much sugar for a dime!' Y'see, my dad saw he was a con-man.
Date-by-date, |Sherry weakened and, by the December, 1967, she was pregnant and living upstairs with Toney in the small apartment above her mother's house.
'It was then that everything turned. Toney drank heavily; and whiskey made him mad. One night he tried to kill a neighbour. He got nineteen days in County Jail for that - it should have been a whole lot longer but I pleaded to get him off on a lesser charge. that was my worst mistake. It nearly cost me everything.' He started to beat me up, usually at gun-point, keeping me prisoner in my own home.
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