The pope speaks out against income inequality and I go cover the fights in an old, cold red brick hall on a one-way side street, across the street from a bar and down the street from another bar, one block from an abandoned church that the junkies have been plundering for copper pipes.

The bar across the street was a rich man's house maybe 100 years ago. The church, of the same vintage, was built by people who lived in houses like the one that's a bar now. The family that lived in the house is scattered or died out now and the names that built the church have mulched down into the anonymous subsoil of humanity.

Down in the basement of the old hall, in a gloomy basement with white walls and a brown floor, they check in the boxers, weigh them like hamburger.

And I'm standing there, with the stump of a very cheap, very wet cigar in my mouth and a trainer with a walrus mustache and tired, humorous eyes is telling me why his best fighter, a kid weighing around 150, won't be here tonight.

"There's a problem between some people he's with and some other people," the trainer says. "They don't want to call the cops. They say they're gonna take care of it themselves," the trainer says as a graceful trio of skinny-legged lightweights drifts by, all of them in navy blue boxer briefs.

"I told the kid to stay home tonight," the trainer says. "He doesn't need to be somewhere if people know he's gonna be there."

This is income inequality, or at least the results of income inequality. I've been out in the suburbs, where the white kids wear their hat brims straight across over a head rag, "talk street" and walk into Target with their pants hanging low.

If the boxer in this story had an Italian last name and it was 1958, this would be an exciting Mafia story, maybe a screenplay, Joe Pesci stuff. Organized crime and shootings on the street make for a compelling mob movie when white people do it, but that cinematic blessing does not cover the new mobs, the new swag, the new gangsters.

A lot of people weren't in that old hall the other night, down in the basement with the skinny-legged boys, down where one boy was missing because he can't go where he might be seen. The pope wasn't there, though I'm sure they would have let him in for free, particularly if he showed up in uniform, which remains unlikely to ever happen.

If you think about it, the boy who missed his fight was in the unique position of having to give up a punch in the head to avoid getting shot — a poor man's problem.

I went out on the sidewalk and tried to relight the wet cigar and couldn't and threw the butt out into the street and said a little prayer for the boy who had to stay home.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Marc Munroe Dion's books, "Mill River Smoke" and "Between Wealth and Welfare," are available on Amazon.com and Nook for $9.99