CAUTION Men in Trees

Pronto Bucks

P R O N T O B U C K S ou got older. Yougot opinions," Plugg said. He talked that way. Like an after-dinner speaker. Like he was celibate . Wewere shooting pool, nine ball. He'd run the table on me, and Iwas racking next game.He said, "Solife goes. Steptwo builds on step one." He built steps in the air, said, "You climb so high you're looking down like one of those spaceship photos. It happens , and the world comes into being. Youwere a kid. Now you express yourself stubbornly and without reservation. Now you call your own press conferences." Plugg talked like Judgment Day. He claimed he'd read Plato. Aristotle. Knew how to make a point, how the A's,B's, and C's fit together, how to use upper and lowercase Romannumerals, their backstitching and tuck and roll, their this-in-support-of-that format. Their one-hand-washes-theother geometry. I'd one minute earlier told Plugg that Hector Macho Camacho was going to dismantle Sugar Ray Leonard and toss Sugar's leftovers in a body bag. I said the fight wouldn't go two rounds. I joked that Sugar Ray couldn't run fast enough. I had gone so far as to refer to Sugar Ray as geriatric and a windbag. I said, "He's Y forty and in great shape, great shape for forty, which is like the one about Lincoln. Other than that, Mrs.Lincoln, how did you like the play?" I read in the Las Vegas Sun where Sugar Ray is telling reporters he wants to get it over with and go home. Is that fighter talk? Not in my book. It's embarrassing he's talking like that. I'd said to Plugg, "Do the math. Fortyisn't twenty." Isaid, "The bloom is off the rose." I do my own reading. Poetry, if you must know. I broke our next rack, weak as always, nothing dropped. The good news was I left Plugg buried and with a table I didn't mind giving up, balls clustered like plastic fruit. We traded safeties until I let the cue ball loose off a rail. Plugg, not even glancing my way, frozen in that five-hundred-year-old snooker stance of his, his stick alongside his cheek and brushing the necktie he'd wear into the twenty-first century, should he live that long, he said, "We get you a bout and we got an event people will bet on." I said, "That's not happening." "It'd be an afternoon card, is all," Plugg said. "Upside is it's at Caesar's. The downside is it's not the ballroom. Upside, it's televised and you get purse and percentage. Pronto bucks. Youarguing you can't use the money?" "I can't use the money." "You farting in silk these days?" he said, knocking home the three, his cue ball trailing it like a puppy, then softly smooching the rail and coming off it before settling in position on the four. He sank the four and five, said, "I've negotiated somewhat with people who can put this together." He froze the cue ball on the six, had the seven in his sights. Translated, negotiated means dicked around. Plugg said, "Sanchez, Augie Sanchez, is this a name you've heard?" "I know Papa Sanchez." "His dad." Pronto Bucks 175 "I've seen Augie around." "For one reason, he's hometown. For a second reason, you're hometown. You're a big puncher. They say he's a big puncher. Likes to brawl. He wants Mayweather and the title." "So he needs some walkovers." "You see yourself as a walkover?" I said, "I don't need to. He can haveMayweather." "You think I'm pouring piss in your ear?" Plugg said. I said, "I think I don't need this." "Sure," Plugg said, "you got roofs to roof." First words I ever heard out of the mouth of the man I'd learn to call Plugg were, "You got hands palookas ten years older and light-years more desperate than you would kill for."I was fifteen. Plugg had hotfooted it two rows at a time down the mostly empty bleachers at the City Rec on Bonanza, Las Vegas, Nevada, and stopped me mid-dribble of a three-on-one fast break. It was a weekday afternoon...