Algren at Sea (14 page)

“He seldom forced himself,” she told me, “because he seldom had to.” There was something to what the girl was telling me, because this Donoghue, at one time, might have been welterweight champion of the world were it customary to give the title to the most articulate contender. Actually Roger Donoghue was the unrecognized champion of the world at not getting hit, but there now they don't give the title for that either. The fact is that at one time nothing stood between this athlete and the welterweight title except four fellows named Young, Graham, Vejar, and Gavilan. Young and Graham were ready to concede as they were furious about being shifted around in the rankings every other week and Gavilan was out of town, so nothing stood between Donoghue and the title except
Chico Vejar. But instead of matching him with Vejar, the people behind Donoghue let him take on an unknown to whom Donoghue lost with such sudden grace that he was immediately advanced in the rankings from sixth to twenty-third, thus breaking the world's record for the longest leap ever made backward by a welterweight from Brooklyn sponsored by Budd Schulberg. This unexpected windfall gained young Donoghue his choice of carrying his own bucket or writing for the movies. Long past his prime at twenty-two, the sensible youth made the right decision and has never been heard from since.

“Roger was the last fighter wearing a shamrock on his trunks who could whip top contenders,” she told me. “Could he have whipped Gavilan?”

“No, but he
could
have whipped Chico Vejar.”

“Then I could have gotten a draw!”—I leaped up, keeping my left in Chico's face, the right cocked and ready to cross, only the girl pulled me back down. She was a very strong girl. Anybody who didn't admire her inordinately was no longer among the living.

“What happened to Donoghue?” I wanted to know. “Did we get to fight Vejar? I've been away for some time.”

“We never got to fight Vejar,” she told me gently, “they got us an opponent who wasn't even ranked in his own family and he knocked us cold almost immediately.”

“At St. Nick's?” I asked, trying my very best to remember.

“What's the difference?” she asked, “It was Solly Levitt, who used to come out saying, ‘Keep punching, Solly,' to himself so he wouldn't forget what he was there for. Roger hit him twenty straight lefts, but Solly still knew what he was there for. Roger leaned in with the right but he leaned too far and when he came to he thought he'd been dancing and one of the chandeliers had fallen.”

“I once knew another fighter who could whip top contenders with ease,
nonchalantly—one-handed,”
I recalled, “but
always
had trouble with opponents. He fought Satterfield in Chicago after Satterfield had been kayoed by Rex Layne, of all people, and got himself knocked out
twice
in one night. In fact, this fellow did this sort of thing so often they finally had to put him in a jail—and right there is another funny thing, because every time this fellow went to prison and everybody would say he was through, he would come out a better fighter than when he went in. The
reason for this was that, outside of jail, he never went to bed, whereas he always did time in prisons where the warden put the men to bed early.”

“If you're talking about Vince Loman,” the girl told me, mentioning a former heavyweight whose name isn't Vince Loman, “the letter you're holding is from him. I used to date him. You had to be careful not to leave money around when he was drinking, because he would tear it up. Vince really
liked
to tear up money.”

I was pleased with myself at swinging the conversation to a fellow like Vince Loman who could get himself knocked out twice in a single night whereas the best Roger Donoghue had ever done along those lines was once in a night and to this very day never tears up money.

Fighters who go into the tank leave my interest in boxing undismayed, because I feel that so long as our businessmen stay corrupt our fighters will continue to do their part.

Apparently the girl shared this clever view, as she began to tell me how the fellow whose letter I was holding once went into the tank for the champion of Inner Soho.

“Vince
really
stank the joint up that night,” she recalled with genuine pride in Vince. While Soho was running up and down hill strengthening his leg muscles, Vince and his manager were training with two hookers from Piccadilly. They had to do this to protect the ten grand apiece they had bet against Vince, to keep him from getting into shape. They always shared fifty-fifty on tank jobs arid were already sharing the redhead and the blonde.

“The DO NOT DISTURB sign was out, but they'd left a call for noon of the day of the fight to give Vince eight hours to strengthen
his
leg muscles. But all four were sleeping the sleep of the stewed, so nobody heard the phone until late afternoon, when the redhead knocked it off the hook and the clatter woke the blonde, who shoved the manager off the bed because he was snoring. He landed on Vince, who had been sleeping on the floor for two days. Somebody looked at the calendar and, between the manager and the two girls, they got Vince into the shower and into his trunks and into his corner, where he started falling asleep again.

“The sixty-second buzzer woke him, the bucket-man pushed him out and what Vince saw scared him, he told me later, because it was something like a double-image out of a TV screen coming right at him. He threw a right-hand shot and hit the correct image and there was the correct
image on the floor and the half of Soho hollering ‘Heah! heah!' and Vince's manager hollering something else Vince couldn't quite make out, but it sounded like ‘Pick him up! Pick him up!' so he went over and tried to pick Soho up, but the ref waved him off and wouldn't start a count until Vince found a neutral corner. He tried three of them before he found one that seemed to satisfy everybody, and by that time Soho was on his feet and Vince realized what an awful thing he had just almost done.

“So he jumped Soho up and down and danced him around the rest of the round to bring him around as Soho was still suffering since Vince had fractured his jaw in two places.

“When he came back to his corner Vince said, ‘This guy is going to faint on me.' ‘Hold him up,' the bucket-man told Vince, so Vince did, and in the fourth round Soho was his old self again and threw a hook like he was playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and Vince went down as if the donkey had fallen on him.

“It was purely awful. I never saw anything so raw in all my life. What a
ham.
He made them carry him to his corner and he wasn't through then. He decided to milk the situation, and the bucket-man and the manager had to lift him back to the dressing room before he would admit he was conscious. Vince was a
terrible
ham.”

The letter I had been holding was written by a man with large hands not used to holding a pencil, so I figured it must be from a correspondent of
The Chicago Tribune.
But no, it really
was
from the fellow who liked to tear up money.

His boxing career had been interrupted three times by prison, and the burden of the letter was that it might turn out that it was only his prison career that had been interrupted by boxing, because one more offense could send him to the joint for keeps and he'd recently committed it.

He was working as a bartender on a transatlantic liner, and had crossed the Atlantic seventeen times without disembarking as he didn't wish to go back to the place where the warden puts the boys to bed early. Why this floating bartender felt he was better off on an ocean I don't know, as the Atlantic closes down at nine. I don't know about the Mediterranean, they may stay open all night there.

“Why,” I asked the girl, “can't the New York Police Department dispatch a couple flics to climb the gangplank if the boat should make the Port of New York any time other than the Jewish holidays?”

“Because The Department doesn't know Vince is at sea,” she explained; “they're looking for him on dry land.”

The idea of anyone looking for Vince Loman on dry land struck me as slightly hilarious. “I have an idea how to get your friend loose of the law,” I suggested; “have them pick up Archie Moore instead—he
never
goes into hiding.”

The girl didn't laugh, possibly because nothing comical had been said. She wanted to finish her story.

“In fact, he wouldn't even get dressed until they had collected their twenty grand apiece. Then they had to get right out to the airport. If they had tried to get back to the hotel it would have been a pinch.

“I called the girls to bring the baggage out to the airport, and they were good kids, they really showed up with the stuff. It looked like the boys would make it. But somebody had tipped the customs people about all those pounds going out of the country. They couldn't make the plane till they came clean.

“‘Give me the roll'—Vince told the manager right in front of a customs man—and handed 13,000 pounds over to the hookers and kissed them both goodbye. That was all there was to it. Vince
liked
getting rid of money, that's all there was to it.”

“Hemingway wrote that one up,” Zane kind of boggled up looking vague.

“No,” I felt obliged to correct him, “Hemingway's was about a fighter who bet fifty grand against himself. Vince only had twenty going.”

“Same story all the same,” he insisted, “there're six basic stories, all the rest, made up from them six.”

“Where's
my
drink?” the girl wanted to know, but he didn't hear. He was focusing on me: I was the one who kept hiding his ham.

“The best way to know the ins and outs of the boxing game,” I informed everybody authoritatively, “is just you talk to an ex-fighter—any ex-fighter. Once I talked to Tony Zale about his fight in Chicago with Al Hostak, and when I got through he asked me if my hand had healed. He thought
I
was Hostak.”

Zane eyed me steadily. He was digesting the news piece by piece. Putting his hands on both arms of the chair brought his chin up close. “You're not Hostak.”

“No,” I told him, “I've gained weight.”

The girl poked him in the side.

“Where's my drink, buddy?” She was being jocular.

Zane wasn't to be jocularized. “You've had it,” he told her without unfastening his eyes from mine.

“How long does it take
you
to get ham and eggs?” he demanded of me.

“I get them right away because I tip so heavy,” I told him talking over my head as I haven't tipped a waiter in years and am not planning to begin now.

“You go for this serv
ees
compr
ee
thing?” He put it to me. It was a political question.

“I'm
very
strong against it,” I assured him. After all, it isn't easy to stay on the good side of everybody when they are standing so close together.

“If everybody on our side keeps adding something extra, where is it all going to
end?”
I asked. “Before the summer is over
they'll
be eating the steaks. No, we have to draw the line,” I painted the Federals' position darkly, “we can't let their side shove
our
side around.”

Apparently it was something along these lines he had been waiting to hear.

“Buddy,” he told me, “I was in the Service four years, four months, and eighteen days. How long were
you
in?”

“Long enough to be offered promotion,” I assured him, “but I didn't feel I was ready for the responsibility of Pfc.”

The girl poked him again. He didn't feel it.

“My grandmother was a Cherokee squaw,” he told me,
“nobody
shoves this soldier around.”

“Don't apologize for your folks,” I suggested, “My people weren't exactly hipsters, either.” I thought he'd said “Cherokee square.”

“Honey,” the girl told him, “look
out.
You're talking to Solly Levitt.”

It sounded like she might be trying to set something up.

He studied me again. “You're not Solly Levitt,” he decided.

“You're not exactly Hurricane Jackson yourself,” I had to point out.

“I just wish you was heavyweight champ,” he warned me, “'n I was the channelger! You never whipped nobody your whole life!”

I couldn't recall any recent triumphs. “No,” I had to admit, “but at one time I could have whipped Chico Vejar. He was the channelger.”

“Anybody
you
whipped went into a dive,” he decided, and turned on the girl—“Vince Loman never fought a clean fight in his life,” he accused her, “it's why he's in a fix now. He never made a nickel except when it was fixed. He was born in a fix.”

“We're all born in a fix, baby,” she told him gently, “but we're not all at sea.”

That had the earmarks of a pointed observation, but she handed him her glass before he could catch up. “That last one was for Mother,” she told him, “now get one for Baby.” He moved off with one shoulder higher than the other. He couldn't whip Chico Vejar either. He couldn't even whip me.

“Do you know why Donoghue quit fighting?” I asked her, just to get things going again.

“Because the Mexican died their second fight is what you're going to tell me,” she told me. “Schulberg wrote that one up. Go see what Verina is doing. I'm going to bed. “

“Any man who wears canvas suits can't be all bad,” I defended Schulberg. But the girl was gone. She wasn't Ava Gardner. But she was a beauty all the same.

Verina, I judged, must be the girl wearing horn-rimmed glasses who was having trouble finding a husband for her boxer. I was sure that if she let her bitch off the leash for ten minutes on any side street the problem would resolve itself. All that remained was to choose a street. I decided to recommend the Rue Tiquetonne simply because I like the name.