Shadow Boxing With Apollo Creed

Andrew Furman

Mark spotted Apollo Creed (whom he didn’t know as Carl Weathers) in the parking lot of the Ole’s in Northridge. Mark was on the way back from the McDonald’s on Reseda and Devonshire, short-cutting it home on his BMX bike. First thing that caught his eye was the burly black man in a convertible Mercedes-Benz 450SL, his muscled arm leaning against the doorframe, conspicuous for taking up a spot at the far end of the lot away from all the other cars, conspicuous for being a black man driving a Mercedes in the Valley. Apollo Creed! it occurred to Mark in a flash, prompting him to circle back toward the fancy car he had just passed. Apollo Creed seemed to be waiting for someone, maybe a wife or friend shopping for light bulbs or paint or something inside Ole’s. His modest Afro sparkled against the afternoon sun on account of whatever pomade, dressing, or oil he’d applied.

“Were you in Rocky?” Mark mustered the courage to inquire, straddling the top tube now maybe six feet from Apollo Creed, his sneakered feet planted on the sunbaked asphalt.

“Yes,” the actor answered. “Yes I was.” His voice was very deep, somehow quiet and loud at the same time.  

Mark hadn’t thought ahead to whatever his next question ought to be. He struggled to come up with something to extend the encounter with Apollo Creed. Rocky’s nemesis clearly wasn’t going to help him out. Apollo Creed was probably waiting here at the far end of the lot, it occurred to Mark, to avoid walking the aisles of Ole’s, to avoid the people who’d recognize him and badger him for autographs. 

“Okay,” Mark uttered. “Goodbye.”

Jack Jones moved into a house just down the block from Mark. It was a creepy-looking house, hidden behind overgrown foliage. Jack Jones was the singer who sang the theme song for The Love Boat. That’s what Mark’s mother announced to him and his brother, Noah, as they drove past the creepy house in her new Oldsmobile Delta 88. The real estate sign was still planted on its post. Mark’s mother had tried, unsuccessfully, to land the listing from the previous owners. “Jack Jones is on Johnny Carson all the time, so Johnny must love him,” she continued, as if she knew Johnny Carson personally. Mark’s best friend, Chad Cooper, convinced Mark the next week to knock on Jack Jones’ front door with him and ask Jack Jones for an autograph, even though Jack Jones didn’t mean much to them. It wasn’t like he was Apollo Creed. But it was something to do. Jack Jones opened the door himself upon Chad’s knock, which surprised Mark. He was wearing fancy-looking purple pajamas, even though it was already afternoon, and he looked old, a big mop of gray hair sweeping across his darkly tanned forehead, though he couldn’t have been so very old at the time. It was what his mother called “premature” gray. Chad would do the talking, it was silently understood between them. Chad was a year older than Mark. Chad asked “Mr. Jones” if they could have an autograph. He extended a pad of paper and a pen that he’d brought, Mark following Chad’s lead with his own paper and pen, but Jack Jones shrugged off the gestures. They weren’t going to get Jack Jones’ autograph, Mark thought for the split-second before the singer reached toward the table on his right in the foyer, then handed them each a large black-and-white photograph of himself wearing a tuxedo with a ruffled shirt, his autograph scrawled in black felt-tip marker at the bottom. He must have kept a whole stack of those signed photos there to hand out to neighbors. “Thank you, boys,” he said, which was sort of a weird thing to say, then closed the door softly enough so as not to quite shut it on them. After a few weeks, Mark and Chad knocked on Jack Jones’ door again, just to see if the semi-famous singer would recognize them (he didn’t), and if he’d give them each the same signed photo (he did). Jack Jones moved out of the neighborhood — probably to a better house in a better neighborhood somewhere, where kids wouldn’t pester him for autographs — a few months later. 

Mark spotted the kid who played Willis on Diff’rent Strokes at the Northridge Fashion Center, which Mark simply knew as the mall. Mark and Chad were at the mall to buy an Orange Julius, mostly because it was summer and too hot to ride their BMX bikes through the undeveloped, though soon-to-be-developed chaparral hills of Porter Ranch. “That’s Todd Bridges,” Mark said, because Diff’rent Strokes was just popular enough that Mark knew the names of Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges. Mark and Chad watched as Todd Bridges walked inside Spencer’s, maybe to buy Pop Rocks or some lewd novelty gift. Mark wasn’t allowed inside Spencer’s. Todd Bridges looked like a bad seed to Mark, mostly on account of the feathered roach clip dangling from the back of a cowboy hat. Lots of boys in the Valley (weirdly) wore these cowboy hats at the time, but only the bad seeds decorated them with roach clips. 

“He’s a total fucking stoner,” Chad said. 

Three other boys were walking with Todd Bridges into Spencer’s. They were clearly with Todd Bridges. But there was something about the space between Todd Bridges and these other boys, or maybe their heights, that seemed off to Mark. Todd Bridges seemed to be very much alone.  

Mindy Feldman was one of Mark’s classmates in fourth grade. She was a cast member, everyone knew, in The Mickey Mouse Club reboot. Mindy Feldman had blonde hair. Mark thought that Mindy Feldman was very pretty, but he was too shy to talk with her during recess or lunch. Mindy seemed shy too, which seemed weird as she was on TV. Her younger brother, Corey, also went to Mark’s school. He wasn’t on TV or in the movies yet. He was just Corey, Mindy’s younger brother. He was a punk, everyone said, which didn’t give Mark very much to go on. Punk was one of those umbrella terms that seemed to cover all manner of bad behavior. Todd Bridges, for example, was a punk, everyone said. One day, Mindy brought stacks of those Mickey Mouse hats to give to everyone in the class. The sheepish way she handed them out, walking down the aisles, her fingers fumbling awkwardly through the stack, inspecting each one before setting it down, told Mark that her mother or her father probably put her up to handing out all these Mickey Mouse hats to her classmates. Mark wondered if Mindy liked being on The Mickey Mouse Club or if her parents just made her audition. Mark said thank you when Mindy placed the hat on his desk before him, and Mindy smiled toward him, briefly. He was surprised to see his name stitched onto the hat in gold thread. 

At the famous Farmer’s Market downtown, the one with the clock tower in the parking lot, Mark saw Joyce DeWitt. She was that actress on Three’s Company who wasn’t Suzanne Somers. Mark wasn’t the one who spotted her. He was busy looking at the old-fashioned machine grinding peanuts into peanut butter, while his mother, well, he wasn’t sure what his mother was doing. But she approached and nudged his shoulder, then said, “See her?” raising her nose toward a woman wearing a lot of makeup. Her hair was very short and very dark, the black blued through like a grackle. He told his mother yes, he saw her. “Who’s she?” he asked. Mark watched Three’s Company — everyone watched Three’s Company — but he wasn’t used to seeing Joyce DeWitt looking so fancy, or so pretty. Suzanne Somers was the pretty one, everyone said. Her blouse, which he didn’t know to call silk, was all shiny. Like Jack Jones’ purple pajamas. She stood before a pyramid of citrus fruits as glossy as her blouse, either very large oranges or very small grapefruits. Even though there were lots of people crowding about everywhere, no one crowded about Joyce DeWitt. It was as if she were protected by a force field. This was why his mother could gesture so clearly to Joyce DeWitt with just her nose. Mark noticed other people noticing Joyce DeWitt. Two teenage girls, much older than Mark, giggled into their sweatshirt sleeves. A man with too much Dep in his thinning hair, a sunburnt scalp beneath, pretended to scan his grocery list. Joyce DeWitt must have noticed all the people noticing her, but she didn’t act like she noticed. She leaned over the pyramid of fruit, picked one up, then set it back down on the pile. She held a market bag, which seemed mostly empty.    

That thick mop of straight blonde hair was the first thing Mark noticed about Jimmy Ladd, who might or might not have been the nephew of Cheryl Ladd. His hair was so thick and long that it tended to drift over his left eye, forcing Jimmy to shake his head an awful lot to clear the wayward strands from his vision. Mark, whose Jewish curls only grew up and out, to his dismay, never down, wondered why Jimmy just didn’t cut his hair shorter so he could see better. Mark played Pop Warner football for two seasons with Jimmy, whose acting career started around that time in all those TV commercials for Underoos. Underoos were basically just kids’ Fruit of the Looms briefs with matching tops designed to look like the costumes of various superheroes. Jimmy, in one of the ads, wore Spiderman Underoos. He flexed his muscles for the camera and stuck out his bottom row of teeth, more like a chimpanzee than Spiderman, though who knew what Spiderman did with his mouth behind that mask? No one that Mark knew wore Underoos, because Underoos were gay. Gay was a word that lots of boys and even girls threw around casually back then as a catchall insult. Sometimes, boys who didn’t know Jimmy very well would tease him for being in those Underoos ads, which wasn’t very smart, because Jimmy knew how to fight and seemed to like fighting. 

After football practice at CSUN one afternoon, Craig Foster (new to the Valley) called Jimmy gay for being in those Underoos ads, which was all Jimmy needed to hear, slugging Craig right in the nose, blood pistoning out of Craig’s nostrils onto his sweaty white cutoff undershirt before he even figured out he’d been hit. Jimmy landed a few other wild blows before Mark and a few others could pull him away, the coaches (busy gathering the cones and blocking pads) lagging to the scene. That’s the way Jimmy always fought, with an unbridled fury that astounded Mark. It wasn’t any sort of combat technique picked up, say, at karate or boxing, but dazzlingly effective for its simple aggression. Sometimes, usually at Topeka Drive El during recess on the macadam or whatever, Jimmy would involuntarily shake his head between windmill punches to clear his mop of blonde hair from his eyes. Sometimes, he’d mix in a kick to the shins between punches. Unlucky opponents could rarely fend off so many blows coming from every which direction and appendage, much less counterstrike with any effectiveness. His face, Mark always noticed, turned beet red as he fought. Sometimes, tears streamed from his eyes after he fought even though he always won. Mark didn’t know what to make of those tears. 

Mark was friendly with Jimmy, but never actual friends. Jimmy seemed too busy with his acting to be friends with anyone. Friendships back then took up afternoons and weekends. But by junior high, Mark had watched Jimmy play the friend of one of the lead characters in a bunch of sitcoms. Silver Spoons. Who’s the Boss? Family Ties. Alf. He always seemed much happier on TV. Handsome too, Mark’s mother said, who’d never seen Jimmy fight. Everyone thought that Jimmy would be a big star. But he seemed to have given up acting by high school. Gave up sports too, even though he was a damn fast tailback and could have made the varsity, everyone said. By that time, Mark was only playing baseball. Mark was in honors and AP classes (mostly because Noah had been in honors and AP classes) so he wasn’t in any classes with Jimmy. Mark would sometimes see his mop of blonde hair — of a dirtier shade now — bobbing across the quad between bells. Jimmy hung out with a tough crowd that wore a lot of plaid and paid short shrift to personal hygiene practices. They might have been considered an actual gang had they not all lived in the Valley, had they not all been white. They purportedly injected oranges with vodka at home so they could get drunk during lunch. After school, they drove to one of the Mexican neighborhoods off Parthenia or Roscoe in Sal Antonini’s Chevelle, people said, to jump one of the kids most everyone Mark knew called “beaners.” 

Anyway, Jimmy’s parents paid for McDonald’s for the whole team a week or so after he beat up Craig Foster at CSUN, probably to smooth things over with Craig’s parents, though this didn’t quite occur to Mark at the time. Mark was the last to order so sat in the last open seat across from Jimmy at the hard table with the swing-out seat. Mark had ordered the new McRib sandwich with a large Coke and French fries but forgot to ask for ketchup. “Here,” Jimmy said, recognizing Mark’s predicament before Mark could even say anything, plucking one of his two ketchup packets from his paper-lined tray. “Take mine.”   

Mark met Henry Thomas when Henry Thomas was maybe ten, a couple years younger than Mark. Stephen Spielberg had noticed Mark, Chad, and a couple of their other pals from the block, Gabe and David, straddling their BMX bikes the other side of the metal barricade that looked sort of like a bicycle rack. The famous director of Jaws, as everyone knew by this time, was filming part of his next movie here just blocks away from Mark’s subdivision. Naturally, Mark and his friends had pedaled up Tampa and into the new Porter Ranch neighborhood where all the excitement was supposed to be taking place. But it was boring, straddling their bikes a fair distance from the stucco house with all the trucks parked outside. They hadn’t spotted any movie stars after nearly half an hour. Nothing at all seemed to be going on. They were just about to leave before Steven Spielberg, whom Mark didn’t recognize, walked outside the front door, framed by three other adults. They all seemed to be looking at the morning sun, still low and cold in the sky. The famous director checked his watch, then looked toward the sun again. He might have been wearing one of those Members Only jackets. Then he surprised Mark by swiveling his head to look (it seemed) right at them some thirty yards away. He flicked the back of his hand against the chest of one of the other men standing with him, as if to communicate something, then started walking directly toward them at the barricade before Mark and his friends could figure out whether they should flee.        

“Would you fellas like to be in a movie?” the famous director asked. So Mark actually met Steven Spielberg before he met Henry Thomas. Or Drew Barrymore. Or Robert MacNaughton. It was a navy-blue Members Only jacket the famous director was wearing. 

The famous director needed more “actors” (that’s the word he used, Mark noted, not “extras”) for a bicycle chase scene he had in mind for the movie. Chad asked what the name of the movie was, as if that mattered, and Steven Spielberg, smiling inside his beard, said it was called A Boy’s Life, maybe because they hadn’t come up with the ET title yet. Their parents would have to sign a waiver, one of the other adults said — a woman, her frizzy hair semi-tamed by an old Dodgers baseball cap. David, as it turned out, couldn’t be in the movie because he had asthma. But Mark’s parents signed the waiver along with Chad’s and Gabe’s parents. They were invited to a “sit-down” with the other child actors to discuss the bicycle chase scene. At a long table (actually, two card tables smushed together) inside the barricaded house, which smelled like wet paint and popcorn, the famous director described where and how they’d all be riding their bikes. The little blonde girl was wearing those OshKosh B’gosh overalls that lots of young girls were wearing and she wasn’t paying attention, maybe because she wasn’t going to be in the scene anyway. Her mother, or maybe a minder — something seemed not-mother about the woman sitting beside the little blonde girl — was doling out Reese’s Pieces one by one to the girl, sliding with a single finger each yellow, orange, or brown morsel before her on the tablecloth, which she plucked up and snatched into her mouth right away. She looked up and flashed a gap-toothed, gummy smile toward Mark, maybe to be friendly, or maybe to tease him, because she was the only one being fed Reese’s Pieces. Mark hated Reese’s Pieces. The oldest kid, Robert, wasn’t paying any more attention than the little blonde girl. He was sitting across the table staring down at his lap, playing his Football 2, which made its distinctive Football 2 tackle and touchdown sounds now and again, which was the only reason Mark knew that he was playing Football 2. Henry Thomas, however, was fully engaged, and asked Steven Spielberg a series of questions and follow-ups about the scene the famous director described. The boy used fancy words and phrases that Mark didn’t understand or retain. Henry would turn out to be the star of the movie, along with that weird-looking ET puppet or whatever, which Mark never saw.  

“Can you do one of those table-top jumps?” Henry asked Mark while the grownups at the table talked amongst themselves about the sun, the afternoon light, specifically. 

“Not quite,” Mark answered. “Chad can.”

“Do you want me to scream?” the little blonde girl asked the famous director, interrupting the adults. 

“No, sweetie. Not yet. We’ll practice your scream again later, Drew.” Mark wondered now whether the famous director might be the girl’s father. Something about the kindness in his eyes as he talked to her. 

Mark’s role in the movie wasn’t much more than an extra’s role. They used other real actors, though not Jimmy Ladd, to play Henry and Robert’s closer bike-riding friends. Mark and his friends were just anonymous bicyclists riding off into chaparral hills, diverting the bad men from the government in the final cut (even though the bad man in their cars and on foot weren’t even in the shots that the famous director took of them that afternoon). Mark still receives rather paltry residual checks every year for his role as Boy Five on Bike in the movie.   

When Mark thinks back upon meeting Apollo Creed in the Ole’s parking lot, because this is something that he (perhaps oddly) thinks back upon as a middle-aged man, he wonders whether the laconic actor might have been smiling toward him, mildly, all along. Carl Weathers might have been bored, he thinks, sitting there waiting for his wife or friend in the parking lot. Sure he was. He might have hoped that this little curly-haired white boy (could he sense the tinge of loneliness Mark felt that day?) would ask him another question or two rather than peddle off so abruptly. Something simple. Did you take a lot of punches to the face filming those fight scenes? Is there gonna be another sequel? In a real fight, who do you think would win, you or Sylvester Stallone? Something to amuse him and pass the time. And more, Mark wonders. Had he stuck around, might Apollo Creed have offered to shadow box a bit with him right there in the parking lot? He imagines this now, sometimes, Mark does, shadow boxing with Apollo Creed in the Ole’s parking lot beneath the blazing Valley sun, fake sparring for just a minute or two. He’s experienced heavy times, Mark has, like most people. But look at them now! The balletic bouncing of Apollo Creed’s feet. The light and breezy way he flicks his powerful hands to mimic brutally effective combinations. Look at the child, Mark, bobbing and weaving, feinting from the fake blows, hamming it up. A crowd gathers to admire the pair. Apollo Creed issues little popping sounds with his mouth to evoke the clean strike of glove against flesh. Bap-bap . . . bap-bap . . . bap-bap. Traces of perspiration rise on his forehead, the tiniest pinpricks of sweat. It becomes so clear to Mark, sometimes, shadow boxing with Apollo Creed. Who’s to say it didn’t actually happen?