The Harder They Fall

  Like any fastidious hostess, Shirley glared. ‘In about three seconds,’ she said to me in an undertone the woman should have been able to hear if the flit hadn’t stopped up her ears, ‘I’m going to give that lush the brush.’

  Leaning over the radio was a slender Latin girl with an unexpectedly beautiful face. ‘She’s my new girl,’ Shirley said when she saw where I was looking. ‘Seems like a nice kid.’

  We had had a talk about Latin girls once and she knew I thought they were the only ones who went into this business without losing their basic love for men or their enthusiasm for the act of love. Anglo-Saxon professionals, as a group, are a sullen, miserable lot who dispatch you with businesslike efficiency or cold-blooded bitterness.

  ‘Come here, Juanita,’ Shirley said. ‘I want you to meet an old friend of mine.

  ‘Isn’t she something?’ she said, as we shook hands. Juanita looked down in embarrassment. She patted the girl’s hand fondly. ‘Have a drink, dear?’

  ‘Coca-Cola,’ the girl said, making it sound Spanish.

  While Juanita’s eyes were hidden in the glass, Shirley nodded toward her and then raised her eyebrows in a quick questioning gesture. I shook my head. Juanita was obviously an admirable girl, but she wasn’t what I had come for.

  ‘How about a little gin? I’m leaving for the coast tomorrow and I want to try and get even. This is strictly a business call.’

  ‘Come into my parlour,’ Shirley laughed. ‘You’re just in time to pay my bills for the month.’

  I pulled the oilcloth off the kitchen table while Shirley got some cold chicken from the icebox.

  I dealt. Shirley picked up her cards and said, ‘Oh, you stinker.’

  ‘Sorry dear,’ I said. ‘I feel mighty tough tonight.’

  ‘Want some beer with the chicken?’

  ‘Mmmm.’ My mouth was full of chicken. ‘Damn good chicken.’

  ‘I fried it myself. No one else ever gets it crisp enough for me.’

  Shirley played her hand skilfully and caught me with nine.

  We laughed. I was beginning to feel better. I always picked up around Shirley. She generated an atmosphere of health and – yes, security. It was strange after all these years in New York that a gin game in Shirley’s kitchen with cold chicken on the table and a beer at my elbow was the closest thing to home I had found in Manhattan.

  Halfway through the next game, Shirley said quietly, ‘What gives with you and my rival your last night in town?’

  ‘Oh, hell, I don’t know. I’m loused up over there.’

  ‘Feel like talking about it?’

  Shirley seemed to be paying more attention to her cards than to my troubles, but she always had a knack of listening in a kind of detached, almost disinterested way that made it easier to go into things like these.

  ‘I guess this Molina thing is kind of the pay-off,’ I said. ‘She wants me to quit the business. Hell, I know it stinks. Just between us, I know Nick’s deal doesn’t smell like a rose. But at thirty-five you don’t start over so easy. I like to see the ready coming in every week.’

  ‘How is three?’ Shirley said.

  ‘I’m dead,’ I said. ‘Twenty-nine. That puts you over, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A blitzeroo,’ Shirley said. ‘Well, that’s the phone bill. Now I have to go after the rent.’

  I thought she wasn’t even listening, but after she made her first discard, she went back to where I had left it, as if there had been no interruption.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Eddie, love can’t take any kind of a punch at all. If this chick of yours don’t like the fight business and you think the business is for you – well, maybe the girl is smart to knock it on the head right there.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be too sure. This fight crowd can lead a lady a hell of a chase. Too much of this sitting around with the boys. The wives and the girlfriends don’t get much of a shake. I’d never tell nobody else but you, Eddie, but this town damn near loused up Billy and me. If I hadn’t been with that son-of-a-bitch – God rest his soul – since I was fifteen I sure in hell would have hit out for Oklahoma.’

  Like everyone else. I had heard something of the highs and lows in Shirley’s relationship with the Sailor, but she had never brought it up before and I had never pressed her. But my levelling on Beth seemed to have loosened something that had been fastened tight inside her.

  ‘You know Billy was a wild kid. He drank a lot before he started boxing serious. I guess we both did back in West Liberty. We were a couple of crazy punks. Every time I read of some kid and his babe robbing some guy who picked ’em up on the road, I think that could’ve been Billy and me. Billy wanted things awful bad. And I was so stuck on him I would’ve done anything he said. If he hadn’t turned out to be able to get things with his fists, God knows what would have happened to us.

  ‘But one thing I’ll say for Billy in those days, he never played around. It wasn’t till he hit this town and got to be a name at the Garden and fell in with those creeps who have connections with the clubs. I felt like jumping out the window the first time it happened. It was the night of the Coslow fight that everybody said was going to be such a tough hurdle. Billy won it without even getting his hair mussed. I never went to his fights because I didn’t want to see anything happen to him, but I listened on the radio, which was almost as bad. Well, after I hear ’em counting Coslow out I get myself all fixed up because I think maybe Billy wants to celebrate. It turns out he’s got his own ideas about celebrating. He doesn’t come in till around six in the morning. He stinks of whisky and the smell of another woman is still sticking to him. Next evening when he wakes up it’s, Baby forgive me, I’ll never do it again. Six weeks later he takes the championship from Thompson in five, and I get the same shoving business all over again. After a while, I got to dreading Billy’s winning another fight. Finally he’s signed with Hyams and he won’t listen to anybody about training – tells Danny McKeogh to duck himself – thinks he can mix fighting with funning around. I guess you remember the Hyams fight. Hyams busted his nose and cut him bad under both eyes. If the referee hadn’t stopped it, he probably would’ve killed Billy. Billy was almost crazy, he had so much guts. Well, that night Billy comes home right after the fight. I keep him in bed for a week and he won’t let anybody else come near him but me, not even Danny. And he’s just as sweet and loving as a little baby.

  ‘After that I swear to Jesus I used to actually pray that Billy would get licked. Because every time he got licked it was the same thing. He’d come home just as meek as a lamb and I’d have my Billy-baby all to myself again. I’d put cold compresses on his swellings and I’d wash the cuts and read the funnies out loud to him. I know it sounds screwy, but I swear I’d hate to see him get up out of bed.’

  As she talked, something Willie Faralla told me fell into place. Willie had taken an awful shellacking from Jerry Hyams in the Garden and Willie’s state of mind was even worse than the way he looked. So he decided to drop up to Shirley’s place and have a little fun. As soon as Shirley saw him with that bad eye and his lip split down the middle, she put him right to bed. She doctored him all evening, and at last, when everybody had gone home, she had climbed into bed with Willie and let him sleep with his head on her breast. Willie stayed there for almost a week, he said. ‘And the funny part about it was, it was all for free.’

  Willie was a good-looking kid, and he figured that Shirley just went for him in a big way. Well, a couple of weeks later Maxie Slott gets flattened in a semi at the Garden and he has heard about this Shirley deal from Willie. So he decides to try it. Now Maxie is short and chunky and has a face he could rent out to haunt houses, but Shirley takes him right to her bosom just like Willie, waits on him hand and foot and practically lives in bed with him for a week. And this, to Maxie’s amazement, is also for free. After that, any battered, beat-up pugilist who could even crawl up the three flights checks in at Shirley’s. No matter how busy she is,
she always has time to bathe an ear or bring down a swollen eye. And though there isn’t a day goes by that she doesn’t get invited by the best, the only men Shirley ever goes to bed with for love are beaten prizefighters.

  Not only for free, as Willie had put it, but really for love, for love of a mean little son-of-a-bitch from West Liberty, Oklahoma, who only belonged to her when he was too bloodied and too ashamed to be seen in public. And Shirley would love him as long as she lived, though sometimes he appeared in the form of the tall, lean Faralla and sometimes in the form of the short, squat Maxie Slott.

  ‘Hey, look at the time,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a big day tomorrow. I mean today.’

  ‘You can’t take any more, huh?’

  ‘I know when I’m licked, chum. I’m throwing in the towel.’

  ‘Okay, take another beer out of the icebox. I’ll see what this little visit cost you.’

  It came to forty-two dollars. ‘I wish you weren’t going to California,’ Shirley said. ‘My favourite pigeon.’

  She walked me to the door. ‘This Molina you’re working with, he’s not exactly sensational, is he?’

  ‘How do you know? Someone up from Stillman’s tell you?’

  ‘No, nobody told me – not even you. That’s what made me wonder. Usually you sell your boys like you thought I was Uncle Mike.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got to promise to keep this under your hat or down your neck or wherever you hide your secrets, but this Molina might give a third-rate lightweight a hell of a battle. But don’t say anything. Because I’m going to have him breathing down the champion’s neck.’

  ‘All I know is what I read in the Mirror,’ Shirley said.

  ‘Thanks, Shirley, be a good girl.’

  ‘Not too good or I’ll starve to death.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘And stay away from those movie stars.’

  I slapped her fondly. ‘I’ll say one thing for us, we have the sexiest platonic relationship in town.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Usually when you get off a train in LA, you expect that gag about how hard it is raining in sunny California. But this time it was only a light summer drizzle. I would have been glad to get off in a hail storm. Four days and three nights cooped up with this team could seem like a long time. I shared a compartment with Danny; Vince and Doc had another; and Toro and Acosta a third. George Blount, politely Jim Crowed, had an upper out there with the common people. Danny never gave Vince any time at all, and Vince certainly wasn’t a fellow I’d pick to be marooned with, either. Luis studied English and told any strangers who would listen long enough about his great discovery of El Toro Molina. Danny and I stayed in our compartment, nipping most of the time, sleeping as late as we could in the morning to shorten the ride. Among the things we settled was who had the best claim to be called the greatest all-time heavyweight, an honour we arrived at by a complicated rating system that included points for hitting power, boxing skill, ability to take punishment, fighting spirit and all-around savvy. That is the kind of thing that begins to happen to you on a train. We came out with Jim Corbett on top and Peter Jackson right behind him. The quietest man in the party was Toro, who sat at the window day after day, looking out at the country phlegmatically, never saying anything. Once, as we roared through the great grazing lands of Kansas, I dropped into the seat beside him and said, ‘Well, what do you think of it?’

  ‘Big,’ Toro said. ‘Like the pampas.’

  The day before we got in, when the setting sun was colouring the surrealist southwestern landscape spectacularly, I noticed Toro sitting with a pad propped up on his knees, with his head bent intently toward something he was drawing. I dropped into the seat beside him to see what he was doing. He didn’t even look up. His mind was focused down to the point of his pencil, all the way down to Santa Maria. For the paper was full of rough, half-doodled sketches of village scenes, the bell in the church tower, an uneven row of peasant houses perched on a hillside below a great castle-like mansion that dominated everything below it. And on another hill, on the opposite side of the village, Toro was drawing another great house, even larger. I knew this must be the house Luis had promised him, the dream-castle in Santa Maria. The surprising thing about the drawings was that, although they were the most casual kind of pencil sketches, they were not the childish scribbling I would have suspected. They were three-dimensional and revealed a definite sense of form. I watched his heavy-featured face as he added little finishing touches to the sketch. Like everyone else, I had assumed that Toro was just an overgrown, retarded moron. But the drawings made me wonder.

  When we pulled into the station I looked around for the cameras, for I had wired ahead to alert the local press on the arrival of the Giant of the Andes. LA isn’t much of a newspaper town, for all its sprawling size, with only two morning papers, the Times and Examiner. The Times’ sports editor was an old elbow-bending partner of mine, Arch Macail, with whom I had covered lots of fights before that non-understanding ME caught up with me. So I figured Arch would give us a break. Both papers had their men on the platform all right, but we had a little competition from another athlete, with whom we had to share the spotlight, an All-Mid-West high-school quarterback who was coming out to play for Southern Cal, from whom, he had boyishly confided to me on the observation platform one afternoon, he had received the best offer, including a four-year scholarship for his girl.

  The photographers got their picture of Toro holding Acosta up on one arm and waving the other hand, with a silly grin on his puss. Then the boys wanted one of Toro carrying Acosta and Danny, but Danny wouldn’t play. ‘Leave me out of this malarkey, laddie,’ Danny protested. Danny didn’t buy this high-pressure stuff.

  But Acosta looked into those lenses as if they were the eyes of a long-lost love. It was a big moment for little Luis, his first public recognition. Vince wasn’t exactly camera shy either. He made sure he got his fat face in there, with his arm around Toro’s waist, grinning up at him, the first time I had seen him throw the boy a friendly glance. Toro seemed neither pleased nor surprised by the reception. He just played it unselfconsciously and deadpan as if being greeted by newspaper photographers happened every day. You had to like the big guy. A man his size behaving as shyly and reticently as a child in a strange house isn’t easy to hate.

  ‘What’s the pitch on this big joker?’ a young, pudgy-faced reporter asked.

  ‘He just won the South American heavyweight title,’ I improvised. ‘He’s ready to meet anybody in the world, including the champion.’

  ‘Who’s he gonna fight here?’

  I figured we’d save the Cowboy Coombs announcement and blow that up to another story. So I said, ‘Anybody the local promoters can get to fight him. We bar nobody.’

  ‘What’re the immediate plans?’

  ‘To get some of your California sunshine and fresh air. That’s the reason we came here, because Doc Zigman, the trainer, says it’s the healthiest climate in the world.’

  That wasn’t Eddie Lewis with his lightest touch, but it couldn’t do us any harm. LA papers always have a little space for visitors loving up their climate.

  ‘Will he be training in town or …’

  ‘Ojai,’ I said. ‘But we don’t want the fans to come up there for a while. We know there must be thousands anxious to see him, but I wish you’d tell them we’ll let them know when we’re open to the public. Toro’s just been through a gruelling South American campaign, and, with all this travelling, he needs a good rest.’

  I figured this would keep the sightseers off our necks till Danny had a chance to smarten him up a little.

  ‘Any chance of Molina’s fighting Buddy Stein out here?’

  Stein was the best heavyweight developed on the West Coast since Jeffries. The boys who know had told me he had the hardest left-hook since Dempsey. Nobody in California had been able to stay with him more than five rounds. If there was a heavyweight alive we didn’t want for Toro, it was Buddy Stein.

  ‘We will fight Stein an
ywhere, any time,’ I said. ‘In fact, we’re so sure we can take Stein, we’ll fight him winner take all.’

  Stein was pistol-hot, so I thought we might as well cut ourselves in on some of his publicity. It wasn’t quite as rash as it sounded because I had it straight from the Garden office that Kewpie Harris, Stein’s manager, didn’t want any part of any more West Coast fights. Stein was ready for New York, where the money is, and Kewpie wanted either a shot at the championship or an outdoor fight with Lennert and a fat guarantee.

  The young reporter scribbled our challenge down on the back of an envelope with a weary, sceptical obedience. Suddenly he turned to Toro.

  ‘You think you can lick Stein?’

  ‘¿Qué?’ Toro said.

  Acosta talked to him quickly. ‘The man asks you if you are sure you like California,’ he said in rapid Spanish.

  ‘Sí, sí, estoy seguro,’ Toro said.

  ‘Did you get that?’ I said. ‘Yes, yes, I am sure.’

  Toro was beginning to draw a crowd. ‘Hey, lookit, there’s Superman,’ a little kid said.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Danny said. ‘I want to get up to the hotel and take a bath.’

  ‘Drop up around six, boys,’ I told the reporters. ‘We’re having a little tea party.’

  On our way down the platform we passed the All-Mid-West quarterback. ‘Well, it’s a funny thing how I happened to choose Southern Cal,’ he was telling reporters. ‘Y’see, I want to be an architect, and one of my coaches – I mean my teachers – told me the best school of architecture in the country is out here at Southern Cal.’

  When we reached the Biltmore, Vince told George to take the cab down to the Lincoln, on Central Avenue, in LA’s Harlem. I think George was getting the best of it, at that.

  ‘Sorry we’ve got to break up this way, George,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry about this boy, Mr Lewis,’ George said. His eyes looked as if they were laughing and his whole body shook with a chuckling that came up out of his belly. But I had the uncomfortable feeling that his laugh was on us.