Pa was the first started saying I wouldn’t ever be nothin but a poolroom pug because of the drink, that everybody should try to be champ of whatever line he was in, and he never would stop to figure out how maybe I loved the drink only after I grew to know.
Speciale wasn’t tough, he wasn’t even a little tough. He was strong, he was strong in both hands. But no way so strong as myself. It was the smart lads who beat me, the strong ones with nothing but strong in their hands were the very ones I fought best. I could be mean with the foulest of them, and cared more for fighting the ill-tempered low-hitting lads than ever I did for the easy-natured, claner ones. I liked this Speciale. Just for the low surly look of him.
He hit me with an overhand right when I came out—caught me square on the side of the jaw with everything in the house behind it, and I shook it off before he got hisself set again from the force of his own great blow. I snapped his head back with a short left, not to hurt him but just to show him he couldn’t be hurting myself. He must have struck me twelve-fifteen times with that overhand right, me stopping a few in the air with Elbows McFadden’s old trick, and then just letting them come on. That gave me the chance to hit him and to show him I cared not at all for the strength he had in his hands. That made him a little wild the rest of the round.
That’s how them I-talians are, and the Blackamoors as well: they get a little mixed in their minds, or scared a little, and they no longer hit so sharp. They start throwing all that they have, that’s why they burn out so fast. ‘Tis the Jew fighters that kape their heads: it’s when they’re losing that they fight better and better. But to do it he has to first lose the first four rounds, or get hisself knocked down once or twice. Then he gets up so very calm, and begins, once in a while, to swing. But he never swings once till he’s counted it first: he never pulls that trigger, as they say, till he sees it’s likely to ring the jackpot. And so it is, with a fighter like that, he has his fight hopelessly lost and as yet he’s hardly swung his hands—then of a sudden he does, and the fight is all over right then.
I never felt so calm in all my life as after that first round, when the crowd thought I was hurt. I wasn’t, and Sol knew I wasn’t, and Speciale knew I wasn’t too. I wasn’t near so tired as him, settin across from him with my head thrun back listenin at him givin me the line about roughin him against the ropes and gettin the old thumb in his eye and the heel of the glove across his teeth comin out of the clinch. I opened my eyes at the warning buzzer and stood up too soon, just to show how fresh I was, and Sol took off the stool and I looked straight up to get the bends out of my neck—and way up there in the rafters, up there in the great dark with but one small light shinin on it and small flags flying about it, a sign said PARK AS LONG AS YOU LIKE IN A LOT OF YOUR OWN.
And all the little flags waved a little, like there was a breeze up there you couldn’t even feel down where me and Speciale was. Then the lights was shinin hot on my back and Speciale was thrown that overhand right, mixin low lefts at my short-ribs, and I knocked him down with one I slung from the fourth row flush into his gut. When he got up I knocked him down with two straight lefts into his teeth. He spat out his mouthpiece at six, his front teeth was come too loose to gulp it well, and he come up at nine. The boo-boo birds in the back of the park, the iron-throated lads, begun yellin I should finish him while I was able.
I could not. He was too fast to find, and still too strong. He went into his shell and stayed there, and I threw what I had, and it wasn’t enough. Beside, I wanted to get back to the corner to take another look at the sign with the little light on it and the small cool breeze going past. It had to do with the thing I always wanted, I needed to see it once more.
Sol squatted before me then, workin on my legs and so not seein where my eyes were: PARK AS LONG AS YOU LIKE IN A LOT OF YOUR OWN. I had never thought of it that way before, and surely it was the very thing I’d been wantin all my days and yet not knowin, peace and quiet and a place all my own where I could just lay on my back all the day doin nothin just so long as I liked, and not a scoldin holy voice anywhere near. More than havin a system on the dice or the horses and being married to a wife not named Marge.
“What’s eatin on you?” Sol asks me, lookin up worried-like but not slowin his rubbin, “What are you holdin out on me for when the fellow is out on his feet? I don’t know what it is you’re dreamin of, Blackie, but it’s unfair to myself.” And he starts in a-tellin the many fine things he is soon to do for me, him and myself is going to take in a few night-clubs this very night if I just finish this boy the next round. But even going out on a binge sounded sort of fake to me then, surely I had no heart left in me at all, not even for the drink.
“You act like you’re scared,” Sol tells me, “the wobblier he gets the scareder you look. Are you sick, Blackie? Are you drunk?” And he had the impudence then to smell my breath.
Then he looked pretty scared hisself.
But I just looked straight up at them rafters at that cool small breeze stirrin all them little flags and said just with my lips, like I used to in Cork when I was a tot and so’s Sol couldn’t hear, “Yes, I’m so scared I’m sick, but I like it that way.” Then I crossed myself for the first time since Father Ryan forbade me the church, and went out under the lights laughin to myself. And Speciale hit me with a hand like a housebrick clane between the eyes.
I could hear them yellin, I could feel them standin up, in the rows out there in the dark. They was all far away and goin farther. And I knew I could shake it off, like any other time. Only I didn’t, for that high wind that seemed closer. I liked it, that feelin, it was like the boo-boo birds was going far away for the last time, like this time they was never coming back at all, and I was happy to feel them going—and then I seen myself just as plain, like I was one of the boys way up in the bleachers myself, lookin through opera glasses—I was down there under the great lights in pants with a shamrock on one corner, leanin all my weight on Speciale to make him shove me off and my pants hangin too low and my head wobbling blow-like side to side and my hands too low ever to get them up in time again.
Then all the sounds came back like a great wave. I felt clear just one moment, with everything right up close as never before. The great lights swelled up all over the whole house, till the place was filled with one big white hot light shinin straight down through my eyes, so even them being closed didn’t keep out the whiteness and the burnin. Then some good fellow pulled the switch, I heard him pull it, far back in my head. And all the lights everywhere in the world began going out one by one till there wasn’t but one little flickering one, for all the world like a vigil light, right over the ring, and no sound, not a whisper even, nobody around at all, and nothing to do save to keep watchin that one small flickering thing. But I let the big cool wind come down and blow it out like a puff. Then it was just me and the big cool dark and no wind near at all, as still, as small and safe and warm as the place where I laid as a small sick child.
FIVE POEMS
Utility Magnate
“I was just another helpless victim of the depression,”
Explained the man who had used hard times like a knife, to cut wages to the bone.
“I went down with my ship because I had too much faith in my country,”
Said the man who had scuttled the ship, then deserted it before the others aboard even knew,
And had never had faith in anything save a personal savings account.
“He may grow taller in death,” said the star feature-writer, winking at the citydesk cynic,
And the citydesk cynic winked back something about there being men low enough to sit on a cigarette paper and swing both legs.
“There are few, if any, who will not mourn his passing.”
The reporter went on, speaking for the thousands who went to a movie or sent out for beer or took a stroll through the park, out of the common exhilaration felt when the news came through that at last Slinky Sam was dead, dead, dead.
“He
was essentially a thoroughbred, he knew how to take his lickings,” the reporter wrote of a man who had fled precipitately before the accumulating evidence of years of semi-legalized embezzlement—dressed as a woman to escape identification and attempting to bribe the arresting officers after failing to bully them—of the man who blamed his wife and his son and his associates and the times and the press and the city council and his employees and the Chicago Civic Opera Company for his failure,
And never once blamed himself even in part.
“My investors are as close to my heart as they ever were,” he had said with some truth before he died,
“And I appeal to each of them to pull his own weight in the boat, help save the Midland Utilities Co.”—leaving the women and children to find out for themselves that there was no use pulling any more, because he had pulled out long ago.
“He never was bigger than the day he abdicated as publicity emperor”—
Thus the reporter, describing the day that the mean old man, surreptitious to the last, snuck out of the back door of his Libertyville home a few minutes after promising those whom he had defrauded that he’d stay around and try to mend the situation somewhat.
“He wandered as Ulysses across blue waters in search of the Golden Fleece,” said the reporter, getting a little sick himself by this time;
“And directly above him in the courtroom sat another man of sorrows—Abraham Lincoln.”
“There’ll never be another man like him,”
Said the senile elevator boy who had received a 75¢ necktie from the great man every Christmas for thirty-one years.
“You got to promise you won’t read your stuff to me when Hoover cashes in,” the citydesk cynic made the star feature-writer promise as they both went downstairs for a much-needed shot.
So order a shot yourselves, friends, and all those who knew him in life:
This is indeed a day and a night and an evening for laughter and free beer.
Surely we never got cockeyed in a better cause.
Here’s to all here whom he ever defrauded, one time or another, one way or another—
Thank God the old thief’s dead!
Home and Goodnight
Tell the 26-game nifties they can all go home now:
The streets are getting lighter and the Clark Street cats are running again;
Each can turn off a little green night bulb
Lay the nightlamp lengthwise along the green baize of the 26-board
Put the big colored dice back in the faded shaker,
Have one last cigarette in the can and go home.
For the glasses are empty and the kitty is almost full,
The streets are getting noisy and the music-box is still.
And running a 26-game on North Clark Street
Has sitting all night in a Pixley and Ehlers’ over a single cup of coffee
Beat any fifty ways you could name.
The boys in the three-piece orchestra can go home now,
And the come-on girl fingering a pink paper gardenia and saying,
“My feet is killen me but I’m still dancen”—
Can walk two blocks east and have breakfast No. 9 at the Greek’s with her best boyfriend
And be back dancing in bed; all in twenty-five minutes flat.
But the brown boy who gets an indifferent hand for imitating Stepin Fetchit,
Saying in a studied drawl while kneeling for pennies,
“Thank yo’ all fo’ de neckbones, suh,”
Will have to ride out to 47th and Prairie,
The longest ride of all.
And who can say certainly whether the music-box will ever play My Heart Belongs to Daddy again?
Who can be so sure that the big colored dice will be rolling 26 tonight just the same as any other night?
And even Mushky Leviton,
Ex-pug crawling on canvas in a South State sideshow after even fewer pennies than the brown boy picks up,
After the fake match is over and he starts sweeping out,
When the girl who takes tickets is long gone and her cage long darkened—
Even Mushky, once he’s through sweeping, can go home
Now that it’s full morning, now that it’s full summer,
Now that everything’s going to turn out all right after all,
Now that we know each other so much better,
Now that this is America, now that we’re in Chicago,
Now that neither you nor I have anywhere special to go now that we’re both broke.
(The girl in the little room smelling of Lifebuoy can say for the last time tonight,
“Goodnight, Daddy. But come again sometime.”
And all the boys named Homer, and all the boys named Dewey, all the boys named Grover Cleveland
And all the boys named Blaine and Orville,
All the girls called Queenie, all the girls called Bébé, called Sherry and Roxy and Ginger and Renée,
And the punched-out Madison Street strip-teaser singing Red Sails in the Sunset
Since the State and Congress closed going on seven years now—
All can go home now that it’s morning and the ticket cages are darkened
And the Clark Street cars are running again.)
Travelog
Remember the murmurous breathers at morning
In the stalled bus on the highway
The pale Americans stricken with pale blue sleep
On rented pillows
Beside blind windows on US 61.
Remember above, a rented neon moon
Tethered all night to an all-night restroom:
Bathing American breathers in a blue and rented sleep.
Remember the darkened bus in the ruined town by the levee,
The boarded windows and broken panes by the river,
The abandoned feed-stores facing the moving Ohio.
Long freights passed in the woods in Kentucky,
Their shadows, as any army’s shadows, moved south on the moving waters,
Their engine boilers lit fragments, of flood-time in old October,
Strewn on Kentucky’s shore.
O big rivers of the republic
Running the unplanted land and the littered shores of Kentucky.
Big wet sky of the republic over the big wet land,
That afternoon the cottonwoods crowded in the hot swamp
Behind the abandoned filling station
And a thousand nameless weeds thronged the prairie waterfront:
These grew rankly by day and stank by night
Beside the Civil War hotel where Ulysses S. Grant lay drunken
Before Fort Defiance.
(Leaning muddied boots on the twisted French railings and spitting Old Blue Seal Scrap.)
The Hotel US Grant still squats like a blind red ox,
Blind and squat as Grant himself Staring blindly toward Vicksburg at midnight,
At barricades built against flood-time
Above the blockaded river,
Above fragments of old October.
Above an endless army’s shadows,
Moving south through the woods through Kentucky.
This Table On Time Only
Skidmarks across the street from the 34th Street wall of Comiskey Park indicate Piccioli was thrown from an auto going west. Three .25 calibre bullets fired at close range into the back of the neck.…
—Item, Chicago Daily Times
He was born above a rear-lot garage facing an alley,
And once got lost between Chicago Avenue and West Division.
He was raised between the change of a Damen Avenue stoplight from red to green,
Between the clack of an ivory-tipped cue in a North Avenue poolroom
And the fall of the fifteen ball into a corner pocket.
Between a poolroom grin of triumph and a single dying groan.
Between the time it takes to rack up for rotation
And the time to pay off. No massé shots
allowed.
Between the warning whistle for the first round of a welterweight windup at White City
And the final bell.
Between the hammer
And the anvil.
They found him necking his waltz-night girl at the Cherry Gardens
While the chandeliers were changing slowly from lavender to orchid.
Between the mezzanine and the balcony, wearing patent-leather pumps,
And Jerry Johnson’s Royal Swingsters playing My Last Goodbye to You.
They spoke softly to him in a shadowed corner of the newly-tiled urinal.
While the lights turned slowly to a sad sea-green.
When he asked the cloakroom blonde for his topcoat
The vast marble lobby turned the heavenliest pink.
He left between them with the topcoat slung over his arm
And the toes of the pumps reflecting the pink of the lights.
The Royal Swingsters swung easily into Blame It on My Last Affair.
With a pansy doing the vocal.
PLAYERS WILL KEEP ONE FOOT ON THE FLOOR.
NO TRICK SHOTS OR LOUD TALKING ALLOWED.
KINDLY RACK UP YOUR CUE.
The car moved, as any other shadow,
Beneath the shadowed El.
Two of them held him while another loosened his collar.
There was no use leaving a tell-tale burn in the shirt.
They stopped speaking softly between Wabash and State.