Max Baer and the Star of David (14 page)

“Then she lay down on a divan, and after a while she lifted her skirt, and when I saw that she wore nothing below the skirt, I covered my eyes and stood, but her brother pried my hand from my eyes, pushed me back into my chair, and sat beside me. He did not touch me again. Instead, while his sister began to move her fingers in and out of herself, he put his own hand inside his trousers.

“Margaret Jane kept smiling at me, but her smile was forced and the laughter that accompanied it shrill, as if she were on the verge of hysterics. At the same time, despite the fact that I remained mute, she kept asking if I had ever done what she was doing, and so astonished was I by what was happening that it was all I could do to shake my head sideways, and look about, frightened to death someone would find me with them, and that my punishment for being there would in fact
become
the death of me.

“A moment later her brother, eyes closed, shuddered and let his head fall backwards. He was soon asleep, a doltish smile on his face, and while he slept, Margaret Jane ordered me to do what she was doing, and said that if I did her bidding there might be a reward, but that if I did
not
do what she said…”

“Dear Joleen—how awful!” I exclaimed.

“Not at all,” Joleen said. “Oh not at all, for when I did what she told me to do, I experienced sensations that, though familiar, opened this time into sensations I did not know I could have, and when these sensations led to an explosion within me, like a rush of brilliant stars crashing down with a great and mighty roar, I also found myself floating happily in the air above myself, and then Margaret Jane closed her eyes, and went into mild convulsions that, I am certain, she knew were not in their intensity anything like mine. And was that not the greatest pleasure of all, to have outdone her at her own beloved game? For I was on my way to the moon, and when I returned, I was able, while Margaret Jane, her mouth agape, watched in awe, to send myself there again, and again, and again.

“And now,” she said, “the sun having set and the moon rising, you may accompany me while I travel there once more…”

This was when she saw that I had, listening to her tale, become aroused, and she reached out to touch me—I backed away at once—and said that Margaret Jane had told her that sometimes her brother did for her what she had been doing for herself, and that Margaret Jane did not know how she could have survived the endless
ennui
of her life—“oh the boredom, the terrible boredom and
ennui
!” she cried—had they not played such games with one another.

“I did not believe her,” Joleen said. “But I believe that if you really love me the way you say you do, you will do with me now what Margaret Jane claims she and her brother do with and for one another.”

I scuttled backwards on the ground, but Joleen was upon me at once, tugging on the thin cloth of my trousers, and asking again, if I really,
really
loved her, why would I not do what she asked, for it was a simple thing no one would ever know about, and that—was this what vanquished the last, frail vestige of my resistance?—even the great patriarchs and matriarchs of the Bible, along with their children, had done with one another.

Awake. O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits. (4:16)

Although, when Max and I were on tour together after the war, just the two of us, and he was either performing vaudeville routines, or working as a celebrity referee, we resumed our intimacies, we did so with decreasing frequency, and without anything like the passion that had informed our earlier times together. Whether this was due to the hiatus in our liaisons necessitated by the war, or to Max’s taking his familial responsibilities more seriously now that he was a father of three, or to a certain calming effect on my emotions that came as a result of the accommodation Joleen and I had reached, or simply to the passage of time, I cannot say. But it soon became clear in these post-war years that Max and I had become to one another good friends and companions in much the way Joleen and I had, and though this transformation was unanticipated and, at first, disheartening, it was not unpleasant.

During the telling of my story, as during the nearly four decades that have passed since Max Baer’s death, in November of 1959, I have frequently found myself wondering how it could be that so much sheer and abundant energy was gone from the world, and—more!—how it could be that Joleen and I had lived on together after Max’s passing for more years than those in which we knew him. Having set out to tell the story of the Max Baer I knew, and of the life I knew with him, at a time when my own physical well-being was in decline, I am surprised to find, as I draw near to the end of the task, that I have gained strength from the journey. It has given me great and unexpected pleasure to be able to put my memories into words, to remember experiences as if they occurred no more than a few weeks ago, and to be able to conjure up, in addition, experiences I dimly recalled, or recalled not at all until the moment I began to recount what I
did
remember.

Thus, while the strength I have gained from the task remains, I will set down one more story—a story with distinctly
un
pleasant elements, and a story I have kept to myself for nearly half a century. It may be that Joleen will judge this a story that should go to the grave with me. It is my hope, however, that she will write down what I here reveal, and it is my wish that our son, Horace Jr., thereby learn of what happened, and that it be left to him to decide whether the events I describe, as with those ancient manuscripts he ponders, are worthy of being preserved.

In the early summer of 1958, about a year before Max’s death, and Horace Jr.’s graduation from the University of California at Berkeley, I became aware that my eyesight was failing. At this time, Joleen and I were living in a house of our own in San Francisco, a house built into the side of a hill where, from our second-floor bedroom—our
only
room on the second floor—we could see, through the open spaces between homes that lay, on descending levels between our house and the Embarcadero, a vertical slice of San Francisco Bay and, rising up above it, the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge, a bridge that did not exist when we had first come to San Francisco. Our house was situated in a neighborhood that had, for most of this century, been largely Italian, but was now quite diverse. In addition to a scattering of black families and, still, a fair number of Italians, mostly elderly, there was a large population of Asians—Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—as well as substantial communities of Russians, Mexicans, and college-educated white families with young children.

Our home, built in 1916, was a simple, solid clapboard house with lovely Wedgewood-blue trim and shutters, and it suited us well. Without a basement, it had a galley kitchen and combination dining area and living room on the first floor, where Horace Jr. slept on a daybed when he was home from college, and, on the second floor, adjoining the bedroom, a fair-sized storage area. There was a narrow, thin-walled mud room at the rear of the house, and a front porch that was ample, and upon which we often sat, especially in the late afternoon or early evening, reading, or watching the changing colors of the sky.

Our needs were modest, and we had solved the problem of where to keep the many books we had accumulated by donating a large quantity of them to our local library in San Francisco while retaining one or two books each by favorite authors, along with books that had sentimental value: Horace Jr.’s childhood books, scrapbooks that chronicled Max’s boxing career (and mine), and—the largest single grouping, which we kept on wide floor-to-ceiling shelves that lined the lone doorless and windowless wall of our bedroom—religious books: several Bibles, picture books of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and books about both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles that were especially meaningful to Joleen, for she believed they had been the inspiration for Horace Jr.’s choice of vocation, and had, during her dark times, nurtured in her qualities that had kept her mind and spirit from deteriorating.

During the decade that followed the war, Max had come to spend the greater portion of his time either in Hollywood, for the making of movies and commercials, or at home in Sacramento with Mary Ellen and their children. Although I usually accompanied him on trips that took him beyond the borders of California, and though he and I continued to spar now and then, it was clear that he had less and less need for my services. At the same time, their children no longer infants, Mary Ellen was able, with help from her mother, who came to live with us in 1953 (both of Max’s parents had died before the war), to take care of the house and grounds without our assistance. Nor did she or Max ask for Joleen’s assistance in tutoring their children.

When, in 1955, the Baers sold the ranch in Livermore, our presence in the Baer household became, in Joleen’s words, decidedly redundant. It is my belief, too, though I do not know this for certain, that the decline of my intimacies with Max paralleled a similar decline in his intimacies with Joleen.

And so, one evening in the last week of July 1956, when Joleen and I had, after serving dinner to Max and his family, joined them for dessert and coffee as we were sometimes invited to do, Joleen used the occasion to announce that she had been to San Francisco the day before, and had begun a process for the renewal of her teacher’s license. In order to qualify, though, she would be required to take two additional college-level courses, which she could do in the evenings. In the interim, she would obtain employment as a teacher’s assistant. Within the next week or two, and in time for the opening of public schools after Labor Day, she could expect a provisional placement that the person who interviewed her at the offices of the board of education assured her would be forthcoming.

Ten days later, Joleen received notice of a position open to her in a school in the Mission Hill section of the city, a neighborhood that had been mostly Polish and Irish but was, more recently, becoming home to Mexican families, and she registered for the two courses she needed in order to update her credentials. At the same time, she and I began looking for a home of our own in San Francisco and, after we had found the one we came to live in and informed Max of our intention to make an offer for it, he told us that, in gratitude for the years of service we had given him and his family, he was going to bestow a gift of cash upon us that would enable us to buy the house outright.

We accepted his gift, and moved into the house in the fall of 1957, two weeks before the start of the school year. That same week Joleen received a letter of appointment to a position as a full-time fifth-grade teacher in an elementary school in the Mission Hill school where she had been working as a teacher’s assistant. Nor had I been idle. At the beginning of the summer, I had taken a part-time position at the Granelli’s Boxing Gym, performing janitorial tasks while also working with young fighters who trained there. One of them, a twenty-year-old Mexican named Luis Olmo Sanchez, a welterweight who had been a regional Golden Gloves finalist the previous year, told me that the Embarcadero YMCA that sponsored him was looking for someone to coach their boxing teams. He had already spoken to the director of the YMCA about me, and so I applied for the job and, my association with Max Baer and my own boxing career proving valuable assets, I was offered a full-time position wherein my responsibilities would be divided between being assistant youth activities director, and coach of the YMCA’s two traveling teams: one for boys above the age of sixteen, and the other, a “Silver Gloves” team, for boys between the ages of ten and fifteen.

The YMCA was located on Fillmore Street, a convenient ten- or twelve-minute walk from our house. I enjoyed scheduling youth activities within the YMCA—basketball leagues, swim meets, workout schedules, skill classes, and exercise classes—but my great pleasure lay in training and coaching the boxing teams. When the director of the YMCA put up a notice on the bulletin board in the building’s lobby about me joining “the YMCA family,” and also succeeded in getting an article in the Sunday edition of the
San Francisco Chronicle
about me—about my career with Max, and my own stint in the boxing world—a two-page spread with pictures, and the announcement that for those unable to afford membership for their children, there would be a dozen scholarships made available to worthy boys and young men, we were overwhelmed with applicants. The scholarships were named in memory of Frankie Campbell, who, I had learned from the director of the YMCA, had been a member of the YMCA’s traveling team and a national Golden Gloves light-heavyweight champion a year before he turned professional. The scholarships had been endowed, anonymously, by Max.

I invited Max to meet with my teams, which he did several times, and when he did, to the delight of everyone at the YMCA, he put on great shows: telling jokes, reminiscing about his fights, giving the boys pointers, especially about footwork, which he would introduce by performing brief tap dances that had us all handclapping. He would also spar with me, and all the while we traded jabs, feints, and punches he would chatter away about what he was doing and why, and about how lucky everyone was to have a great boxer like me as their coach.