Champ the Boxer
Champ was wearing a green army jacket. His curly, sandy hair was disheveled. His craggy face looked a good ten years older than the thirty-five he later claimed to be. He was about six feet tall, and stocky. He had a light touch as we shook hands, but I could sense that he held strength in reserve.
Inexplicably, he started by telling me he was a boxer. Trying to build a rapport, I told him my father had run the Golden Gloves boxing tournament in New York. He claimed he had an incredible record as an amateur - seventy-two and three, or something - and said he'd fought as a pro, too. Champ said that he'd met Carrick when he saw a group of men circle her in the park. He thought their teasing was going too far. He intervened, and had given Carrick lessons in basic self-defense.
“She confided in me,” he said. “She's upset about things.”
Sometime after midnight, he said, he had gotten word that Carrick was looking for him, and he went to her.
“I talked to her like a brother,” he said. “For hours, like a brother.”
Then he found a place for her and someone else, whom he would not identify, to crash until the morning, he said. There had been a dispute that he couldn't talk about, however, and they had to leave the apartment. He didn't know where Carrick was now, but he was sure he could find her. He just had one condition. Wary, I asked him what it was.
“You have to promise that you're not going to hurt her,” he said.
I assured Champ that I had never hit or hurt Carrick in my life.
“All I want to do is bring her back safely home,” I said.
'She's afraid you'll lock her up,” he said.
I said that I could not guarantee that we wouldn't seek treatment for Carrick that might result in her being sent to a drub rehab program. I said that it was not a given, just an option that we had to leave open, depending on Carrick's health.
How ridiculous is this? I was thinking to myself. Why am I justifying our decisions about our daughter to a guy on the street? But I felt that I had no choice if I wanted any help in finding Carrick. I knew from experience that the police have no legal authority to pick up a child older than sixteen unless she has broken the law, and the East Village streets were filled with runaways.
Champ changed the subject. He told me that he had been living on the streets since the terrorist attacks of September 11. He was from Pennsylvania, where he was a licensed plumber. He had gotten a job helping to renovate a building near the World Trade Center. He had been staying at a hotel in the neighborhood and was walking to work when he saw the first plane hit the tower. Not only did his job disappear, the plumbing company that employed him went out of business, he said. He'd been looking for a job ever since. We bantered a bit more, as if I was being coyly qualified by a social worker. Finally, Champ said he help me find Carrick. He'd walk the streets and ask questions. He asked for my cell phone number and promised to call me when he got a lead. I gave him my Sprint phone card to use.
I let Champ disappear down Ninth St. before heading in that direction myself. I didn't want him to think I was tailing him, but felt Carrick was somewhere around Tompkins Square Park. It was about 11:30. I spent the next hour and a half walking up and down the streets, in and out of the park. The cell phone finally rang about an hour later. Champ told me to meet him at the Odessa coffee shop on Avenue A. He knew where Carrick was, he said.