I pulled out the gold-banded fountain pen Beth had given me for my birthday, and made a couple of notes on what Charles was saying. He was made to order for that play I was going to write, the play on the fight game I had been talking about so long, the one Beth seemed to be so sure I was never going to finish. ‘Don’t spill it all out in talk,’ she was always saying. Damn Beth and her bright sayings. If I had had any sense I would have found myself a nice dumb broad. But if I could only set the play down the way I felt it sometimes, in all its sweaty violence – not a nine-dollar bill like Golden Boy – no violinists with brittle hands, no undigested poetry subtle as a train wreck, but the kids from the street as they really were, mean and money-hungry, and the greed of the mobsters who had the game rigged; that was the guts of it and I was the boy to write it.
One solid job could justify all the lousy years I had frittered away as a press agent for champions, deserved and otherwise, contenders and bums, plenty of the latter. You see, that play would tell Beth, I haven’t really fallen so low as you thought. All the time it seemed as if I were prostituting myself by making with the adjectives for Honest Jimmy Quinn and Nick (The Eye) Latka, the well-known fistic entrepreneurs, I was actually soaking up material for my masterpiece. Just as O’Neill spent all those years as a common sailor and Jack London was on the bum.
Like O’Neill and London. It always made me feel better to make those notes. My pockets were full of notes. There were notes in every drawer of my desk at the hotel. The notes were kind of an escape valve for all the time I wasted getting loaded, cutting up touches with Charles, sitting around with the boys, going up to Shirley’s, and ladling out the old craperoo about how old Joe Round-heels, who couldn’t lick my grandfather and who had just been put away in two over at the Trenton Arena, was primed (I would be starving to death without that word primed) to give Jack Contender the fight of his life.
‘What are you doing there, Mr Lewis?’ Charles said. ‘Not writing down something I say.’
A good bartender, Charles never pried into his customers’ affairs. But he was beginning to break down with me because he liked the idea of getting into my play. I wish Beth had as much faith in me as Charles. ‘You know what you ought to do, you ought to quit leaning on your elbows and get to work,’ she was always saying. But Charles was different. He’d tell me something and then he’d say, ‘You ought to put that in your play.’ We talked about it so long that my work of art came to have a real identity. ‘If you’re going to put me in your show,’ Charles would say, ‘please call me Charles. I like to be called Charles. My mother always called me Charles. Charley sounds like – a puppet, or a fat man.’
The door swung open and Miniff popped his head in again. ‘Hey, Charley, still no signa the Mumbler?’
Charles shook his head gravely. ‘No signa the Mumbler whatsoever, Mr Miniff.’ Charles was a snob. It gave him pleasure to exercise his talent for mimicry at the expense of his ungrammatical clientele. Miniff came in and climbed up on the stool next to mine. His small feet didn’t reach the footrest at the base of the stool. He pushed his brown felt hat back on his head desperately. He ran his hands over his face and shook his head a few times, his fingers covering his eyes. He was tired. New York is hot when you run around all day.
‘Have one with me, Miniff,’ I said. He waved me off with a small, hairy hand.
‘Just the juice of the cow,’ he said. ‘Gotta keep my ulcer quiet.’ From his breast pocket he took a couple of short, stubby cigars, shoved one into his mouth and offered the other one around.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘If I smoked those six-for-a-quarters I’d have ulcers too. If I’m going to have them, I want expensive ulcers, bottled in bond.’
‘Listen,’ Miniff said, ‘it ain’t the hemp. It’s the headaches I got. Nervous digestion.’ He drank his milk carefully, letting it trickle slowly down his throat for maximum therapeutic effect.
‘Jeez, I gotta find the Mumbler,’ he said. The Mumbler was Solly Hyman, the matchmaker for St Nick’s. ‘I looked everywhere already, Lindy’s, both of them, Sam’s. Up at Stillman’s I hear Furrone can’t go Tuesday. Gotta bad toot’. Jeez, I gotta guy to take his place. My bum’ll look good in there.’
‘Who you got, Mr Miniff?’ Charles said, still mimicking.
‘Cowboy Coombs.’
‘Oh, my God,’ I said.
‘He can still go,’ said Miniff. ‘I tell ya he c’n stay three-four rounds with the shine, maybe go the limit.’
‘Cowboy Coombs,’ I said. ‘The grandfather of all the bums.’
‘So he ain’t no Tooney,’ Miniff said.
‘Fifteen years ago, he wasn’t Tunney,’ I said.
Miniff pushed his hat back an inch or two on his forehead. His forehead was shiny with perspiration. This Cowboy Coombs thing was no joke. It was a chance to hustle a fast fifty. The way Miniff works he picks up some down-and-outer or some new kid from the amateurs and he angles a spot or two for him, if he can. It’s strictly quick turnover. If the bum goes down, Miniff can’t do anything more for him anyway. If the kid is good, smarter managers with better ‘ins’ always steal him away. So for Miniff it’s mostly a substitution business, running in a bum or a novice at the last minute, so the box office doesn’t have to buy the tickets back, or picking up a quiet C by arranging for one of his dive-artists to do an el foldo.
‘Listen, Eddie,’ Miniff said to me, working all the time, ‘Coombs has got a wife and five kids and they gotta eat. All he’s been doin’ is spar work the last year or two. The bum needs a break. You could maybe write up something in one of the rags about him. How he got canned for settin’ the Champ down in a workout …’
‘That’s not the way I heard he got canned,’ I said.
‘All right, all right, so it happened a little different, maybe the Champ slipped. I suppose you never write stuff it ain’t a hunert per cent kosher!’
‘Mr Miniff, you impugn my integrity,’ I said. The stuff a guy will write to pay his rent and keep himself in whisky! The things a guy will do for 100 bucks a week in America! Eddie Lewis, who spent almost two years at Princeton, got As in English, had a byline in the Trib and has twenty-three pages of a play that is being systematically devoured by a little book club of hungry moths who can’t tell a piece of literature from a square meal.
‘Go on, Eddie, for a pal,’ Miniff pleaded. ‘Just one little lineroo about how the Cowboy is back in great shape. You could work it into almost any colyum. They go for your crap.’
‘Don’t give me that Cowboy Coombs,’ I said. ‘Coombs was ready for the laughing academy when you had to talk through a little hole in the door to get a drink. The best thing that could happen to Mrs Coombs and those five kids is for you to climb down off Mr Coombs’ back and let him go to work for a change.’
‘Aaaah,’ said Miniff, and the sound was so bitter it could have been his ulcer talking. ‘Don’t sell that Coombs short. He c’n still lick half the heavyweights in the business right now. Whadcha thinka that?’
‘I think half the heavyweights in the business should also climb back on their trucks,’ I said.
‘Aaaaaah,’ Miniff said. He finished the milk, wiped his lips with his sleeve, pulled some of the wet, loose leaves from the end of his cigar-butt, stuck it back between his teeth again, pulled down the brim of his old brown hat, said, ‘Take it easy, Eddie, see ya, Charley,’ and got out in a hurry.
I drank slowly, letting the good warm feeling fan out gradually from my belly. The Harry Miniffs of the world! No, that was taking in too much territory. America. Harry Miniff was American. He had an Italian name or an Irish name or a Jewish name or an English name, but you would never find an Italian in Italy, a Jew in Palestine, Irishman in Ireland or an Englishman in England with the nervous system and social behaviour of the American Harry Miniff. You could find Miniffs everywhere, not just the fight game but show business, radio, movies, the rackets, wholesale houses, building trades, blackjack unions, advertising, politics, real estate, i
nsurance – a disease of the American heart – successful Harry Miniffs, pushing their way to the top of steel institutes, oil combines, film studios, fight monopolies; and unsuccessful Harry Miniffs, born with the will but not the knack to catch up with the high dollar that keeps tempting them on like a mechanical rabbit which the whippet can’t catch unless the machine breaks down, and can’t eat if it does.
‘The last one in the bottle, Mr Lewis,’ Charles said. ‘On the house.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You’re an oasis, Charles. An Eighth Avenue oasis.’
Someone in a booth had dropped a nickel in the juke slot. It was the only good record in the box, the Bechet version of ‘Summertime’. The haunting tone of Sidney’s clarinet took over the place. I looked around to see if it was Shirley. She was always playing it. She was sitting in a booth by herself, listening to the music.
‘Hi, Shirley, didn’t hear you come in.’
‘I saw you was talking with Miniff,’ she said. ‘Didn’t want to interrupt a big important conversation like that.’
She had been around for ten or twelve years, but there was still a little Oklahoma left in her speech. She came to town with her husband, Sailor Beaumont – remember Billy Beaumont? – when he was on the up swing, after he had licked everything in the West and was coming to New York for a shot at the big time. He was the boy who crossed the wise money by going in on the short end of 10-1 to win the welterweight title. He and Shirley rode pretty high for a while. The Sailor was an unreconstructed reform-school graduate from West Liberty who threw most of his dough into such routine channels as the fleshpots, the ponies and the night spots. All the rest went for motorcycles. He had a white streamlined motorcycle with a sidecar on which, if you were good at reading print cutting through downtown traffic at sixty miles an hour, you could make out the words ‘Sailor Beaumont, the Pride of West Liberty’. That’s the kind of a fellow he was. Lots of times, especially in the beginning when they were still getting along together, I remember Shirley riding in that sidecar, with her dark red hair flying out behind her. She was something to look at in those days, before the beers and the troubles caught up with her. You could still see some of it left, even with the crow’s feet around the eyes and the telltale washed-out look that comes from doing too many things too many times. She still had something from the neck down too, even if her pin-up days were ten years behind. She was beginning to spread, just this much, in the rump, the belly and the bust, but there was something about the way she held herself – sometimes I thought it was more in her attitude toward men than anything physical – that made us still turn around.
‘Have one with me, Shirley?’ I called over.
‘Save it, Eddie,’ she said.
‘Not even two fingers, to be sociable?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe a beer,’ Shirley said.
I gave Charles the order and went over to the booth. ‘Waiting for anyone?’
‘For you, darling,’ she said, sarcastic. She didn’t bother to look at me.
‘What’s the matter? Hung?’
‘Aah, not really, just, oh, the hell with it …’
Shirley was in a mood. She got that way every now and then. Most of the time she was feeling good, a lot of laughs – ‘What the hell, I’m not getting any richer and I’m not getting any younger, but I’m having fun.’ But once in a while, especially when you caught her alone in the daytime, she was this way. After it got dark and she had had a few, it would be better. But I’ve seen her sit there in a booth for hours, having solitary beers and dropping nickels in the slot, playing ‘Summertime’ or ‘Melancholy Baby’ or another of her favourites, ‘Embraceable You’. I suppose those songs had something to do with the Sailor, though it always struck me as profane to associate the tender sentiments of those excellent lyrics with a screwball slugger like Beaumont. He’d lay anything that stood still for thirty seconds. If Shirley ever asked for an explanation she got it – on the jaw. He was one of the few professionals I ever knew who indulged in spontaneous extracurricular bouts in various joints, a practice which did not endear him to Jacobs Beach and brought him frequently and forcibly to the attention of the local gendarmerie. When he finally had a blowout on that hotcha motorcycle of his and left in a bloody mess on the kerb at Sixth Avenue near 52nd Street what few brains he had salvaged from ninety-three wide-open fights, the people who took it hard could be counted on one finger of one hand, and that was Shirley.
She reached into her large red-leather purse, took out a little white bag of fine-cut tobacco, carefully tapped it out onto a small rectangle of thin brown paper with a practised hand. She was the only woman I had ever seen roll her own cigarettes. It was one of the habits she brought with her from the hungry years in West Liberty. While she twirled the flat wrapper into an amazingly symmetrical cylinder, she stared absently through the glass that looked out on Eighth Avenue. The street was full of people moving restlessly back and forth in two streams like ants, but with less purpose. ‘Summertime,’ she sang under her breath lackadaisically, a snatch here and a snatch there.
The beer seemed to do something for her. ‘You can draw me another one, Charles,’ she said, coming up out of her mood a little, ‘with a rye chaser.’
After all these years, that was still one of the pub’s favourite jokes. Shirley looked at me and smiled as if she were seeing me for the first time.
‘Where you been keeping yourself, Eddie? Over in Bleeck’s with my rival again?’
This had been going on for years. It had been going on so long there probably was something in it. Shirley was all right. I liked the way she was about men. She never really let you forget that there were anatomical differences between you, and yet she didn’t make a conflict of it. I liked the way she had been about Sailor Beaumont, even if he was a wrongo. There were so many American wives who gave most of their energy to trying to make their husbands vice-presidents or head buyers or something. Twice a week they did him a big favour. That was called being a good wife. Shirley, if she hadn’t fallen in love with an irresponsible, physically precocious kid who came in wide-open but had a knockout punch in his right hand, would have made somebody in West Liberty an exceptional wife instead of making Eighth Avenue an exceptional madame.
‘Favour us with your presence this week, Eddie,’ she said. ‘Come in early and I’ll have Lucille fry us some chicken and we’ll play a little gin.’
‘Maybe Friday night, before the Glenn-Lesnevich fight,’ I said.
‘That kid Glenn! A jerk thing Nick did, bringing him along so fast,’ Shirley said. ‘Those overgrown boys who get up in the heavy dough because they can sock and can take it – thinking they’re King of the May because they got their names in lights outside the Garden, when all they got is a one-way ticket to Queer Street. Glenn draws four good gates to the Garden because the customers know he’s going to try, gets himself slapped around by men he’s got no business in the same ring with, goes back to LA to be a lousy runner for a bookie or something, and the manager gets himself another boy. That’s what he did with Billy. Nick Latka, that crumb!’
‘Nick isn’t so bad,’ I said. ‘Pays me every Friday, doesn’t look over my shoulder too much, kind of an interesting feller, too.’
‘So is a cockroach interesting if it’s got Nick’s money in the bank,’ Shirley said. ‘Nick is marked lousy in my book because he don’t look out for his boys. When he has a good one, he’s got the dough and the connections to get him to the top, but down under that left breast pocket, he’s got nothing there for the boys. Not like George Blake, Pop Foster. Their old boys were always coming back for a touch, a little advice. Nick, when you’re winning nothing’s too good for you. You’re out to that estate over in Jersey every weekend. But when you’re out of gas, that’s all, brother. You got about as much chance of getting into that office as into a pay toilet without a nickel. I know. I was all through that already, with Billy. And how many has he had since Billy? And now Glenn. And next week maybe some skinny-le
gged speedball from the Golden Gloves. They’re so pretty when they start, Eddie. I hate to see ’em run down.’
Now that Billy was gone, I think Shirley was in love with all fighters. She loved them when they were full of bounce and beans, with their hard trim bodies moving gracefully in their first tailor-made full-cut double-breasteds with peg-top trousers narrowing at the ankles in a modified zoot. And she loved them when the shape of their noses was gone, their ears cauliflowered, scar tissue drawing back their eyes, when they laughed too easily and their speech faltered and they talked about the comeback that Harry Miniff or one of his thousand-and-one cousins was lining up for them. Lots of ladies have loved winning fighters, the Grebs, the Baers, the Golden Boys, but it was the battered ones, the humiliated, the washed-ups, the TKO victims with the stitches in their lips and through their eyelids that Shirley took to her bosom. Maybe it was her way of getting Billy back, the Sailor Beaumont of his last year, when the younger, stronger, faster boys who did their training on Eighth Avenue instead of on 52nd Street were making him look slow and foolish and sad.
‘Well, first one today,’ Shirley said, and tossed it off, exaggerating the shudder for a laugh.
She reached into her purse again and took out a very small Brownie snapshot, slightly overexposed, of a well-set-up kid grinning under a ten-gallon hat.
‘New picture of my kid the folks just sent me.’
While I took a dutiful hinge at it she said, ‘He’s the image of Billy. Isn’t he a doll?’
He did look like Beaumont – the same overdevelopment from the waist up, with the legs tapering down nicely. On his face was a look of cheerful viciousness.
‘He’ll be nine next month,’ Shirley said. ‘He’s with his grandparents on a ranch near home. He wants to be a veterinary. I don’t care what he does, as long as he stays out of the ring. He can be a card player or a drummer or a pimp if he wants to. But, by God, if I ever hear that he’s turning out to be a fighter like his old man, I’ll go home and kick his little annyfay for him.’