The Harder They Fall (2 page)

‘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, insurance – 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-legged 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.’

When I am in a pub and the phone is for me I am never too happy about it. It means the natural rhythm of my day is about to be interrupted by the unexpected. Shirley had gone back to the place, ‘to make a new girl feel at home’, as she put it, and Beth had dropped in to pick me up. She was annoyed because I was slightly swizzled when she came in. Beth wasn’t WCTU or anything, but she liked me to do my drinking with her. She thought I wasted too much time shooting the breeze with Charles and Shirley and the other characters. If my job didn’t take up all my time, she said, I should plant myself in the room at the hotel and try to finish that play.

The big mistake I made with Beth was that once when I had her up to my room – in the days when I still had to impress her – I showed her that unfinished first act. Beth didn’t have too much to say about it, except for wanting me
to get it done. That was the trouble with Beth: she always wanted me to finish things. I proposed to her once in a drunken moment and I think secretly she always held it against me for not mentioning the proposal again when I sobered up. I guess she just wanted me to finish whatever I started.

When I first met her, Beth was fresh out of Smith College, where her Phi Bete key had been good for a $25-a-week job with
Life
, in their training squad for researchers. Everything she knew came out of books. Her old man taught Economics at Amherst and her old lady was the daughter of a Dartmouth dean. So when I first began to tell her about the boxing business, she thought it was fascinating. That’s the word she used for this business – fascinating. This fight talk was a new kind of talk for Beth, and all the time she was professing to despise it, I could tell it was getting to her. Even if only as a novelty, it was getting to her and I was the ideal interpreter of this new world that repelled and attracted her. That’s how I got to Beth myself. I was just enough of a citizen of this strange new world to  excite her and yet – since Beth could never completely recover from her snobberies, intellectual and otherwise – there was just enough Ivy still clinging to me, just enough Cottage Club, just enough ability to relate the phenomenon of prizefighting to her academic vocabulary to make me acceptable.

I think my talking about trying to write a play on boxing gave her a justification for being interested in me, just as it seemed to justify my staying in the game.

But this is taking us back a year and a half. It’s almost
another story. In the story I am telling here, Beth is miffed again – her impatience with me had been increasing lately – and somebody wants me on the telephone.

It was Killer Menegheni. Killer was a combined bodyguard, companion, masseur and private secretary to Nick. I don’t really think the Killer had ever been responsible for anybody’s funeral, but the legend had sprung up that the Killer would have been a featherweight champ if he hadn’t killed a man in the ring his third time out. I had looked it up, but no Menegheni, and the
Ring Record Book
almost always gives the boys’ right names in parentheses under their professional names. Nat Fleischer, that eminent historian, had never heard of him either. So you could take heavy odds that the Killer’s alleged mayhem had no resemblance to any character living or dead, as they always say.

‘Hey, Eddie, d’ boss wants ya.’

‘Now, goddamit, Killer,’ I said. ‘I’m with a lady. Can’t a man settle down to a little companionate drinking without Nick putting his hounds on me?’

‘The boss wants ya to get your ass up here,’ Killer answered. Take away those three- and four-letter essential Anglo-Saxon words and Mr Menegheni would have to talk with his fingers.

‘But this lady and I have plans for the evening,’ I said. ‘I don’t have to come running every time Nick lifts a finger. Who does he think he is?’

‘He thinks he’s Nick Latka,’ said the Killer. ‘And I never seen d’ day he wasn’t right.’

For the Killer, that was considerable repartee. ‘Say, you’re pretty sharp today,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ the Killer said. ‘I scored with that redhead from the Chez Paris last night. Just seventeen years old. Beauteeful.’

The Killer, only five-six in his built-up shoes, was always flashing us the latest news of his daily conquests.

‘You would make a good leg-man for Krafft-Ebing,’ I said.

‘I ain’t changing places with nobody. I do all right with Nick.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’re happy,’ I said. ‘Pleasant weekend, Killer.’

‘Hey-hey-hey, wait a minnut,’ the Killer said quickly. ‘This deal what the boss wants to see you about. It must be very hot. I’ll tellum yer on yer way up.’

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you can tell him for me’ – O Lord, the fear that eats into a man for a hundred bucks a week – ‘I’ll be up in fifteen minutes.’

I started back to the booth to break it to Beth. She was always turning down good things to keep Saturday night for me. Saturday nights we’d usually hit our favourite spots together, Bleeck’s and Tim’s and when we wanted music, Nick’s for Spanier and Russell and Brunis, and Downtown Café Society, when Red Allen was there, and J.C. Higginbotham. Sunday morning we’d wake up around ten, send down for coffee and lie around with the papers until it was time to go out for lunch. Beth would kick about the
News
, the
Mirror
and the
Journal
because she was a pretty hot liberal as well as a snob, but some of my best plants were picked up by the tabs and I liked to read the
Journal
for Graham, one of the town’s oldest and hardest-working sports writers.

I don’t know if it was love with me or not, but I’ll put it this way: I never slept with anybody I was so glad to see in the morning as Beth Reynolds. I’ve known other girls who were more beautiful, more passionate or more experimental, but who turned out to be a drag in the morning. With Beth, having a drink, seeing a fight, listening to Spanier, going to bed, nursing each other’s hangovers, arguing about Wolfe and getting sore at some new stupidity of some old senator’s – it was all one, all good, all close, and when you are pushing into your middle-thirties and beginning to need a slow count to get up in the morning, that outweighs the dime-a-dozen ecstasies.

Not that Beth wasn’t exciting enough, in her own way. She met you with a small, intense passion that seemed surprisingly wanton for a girl with a pretty-plain schoolteacher face, who couldn’t see very well without her glasses. I hadn’t been her ‘first man’ (Beth’s words, naturally, not mine), for that honour had been reserved for an Amherst boy from a distinguished Boston family who had been madly and incompetently in love with her. He had made such a mess of things, apparently, that she had shied away from further intimacies until I came along. I don’t quite know yet how I got her to try again. She just decided it for herself one evening. It was the night we had gone back to her apartment after I had taken her to see her first fight. I think she always distrusted me a little for helping make it so successful. That academic, puritanical background didn’t stop her from enjoying herself. It just prevented her from respecting herself for what she had allowed herself to do. That’s why when she took off her glasses and the other
encumbrances, she was wanton. For only the true Puritan can know that delicious sense of falling from grace that we call wantonness.

More than once, in my cups, I had proposed that we make an honourable girl of Beth. She didn’t approve of the way we were living, but she always preferred to wait and see if a similar offer would be forthcoming under the influence of sobriety. But somehow I could never quite muster up enough marital determination to make a legitimate proposal without the nudge of friendly spirits. The closest I could ever come was to say, with what was meant for levity, ‘Beth, if I ever marry anyone, it’s got to be you.’

‘If you insist on prefacing all your proposals with the conditional conjunctive,’ she had answered, ‘you will end up a lecherous old bachelor and I will end up married to Herbert Ageton.’

Herbert Ageton was a playwright who had written militant proletarian dramas for the Theatre Union back in the early thirties, when he was just out of college and hardly knew how to keep his pipe lit. Much to his horror and indignation, MGM had bought one of his radical plays, and brought him out to adapt it. When he got up to two thousand dollars a week he was analysed at one hundred dollars an hour by a highly successful female practitioner who made him realise that his proletarian protest against capitalism was only a substitute for his hatred of his father. Somehow the signals got crossed and he came out still hating his father but feeling somewhat more kindly toward capitalism. Since that time he had only been on Broadway twice, with symbolic plays about sex relations which all
the critics had panned and all the studios had scrambled for. They turned out to make very good pictures for Lana Turner. Or maybe I was just jealous. Herbert used to call Beth from Hollywood all the time. And every time he came to town he took her to 21 and the Stork and the other meeting places of good-time counter-revolutionists and their opposite numbers.

‘Baby,’ I said, when I got back to the booth, ‘this is lousy, but I’ve got to go up and see Nick a minute.’

‘A minute. Nick and his minutes! You will probably end up out in Jersey at his country place.’

That had happened once and Beth would never let me forget it. I had left a message for her at Walker’s, but by the time it got through she had taken an angry powder.

‘No,’ I said, ‘this is strictly business. If I’m not back in one hour …’

‘Don’t make it too drastic,’ she said. ‘If you’re back in one hour it will be the first time. You know I could have gone out with Herbert tonight.’

‘Oh, Jesus, that again.’

‘How many times have I told you not to say “Jesus”? It offends people.’

‘Oh Je—I don’t mean Jesus Christ. I just mean Jesus Ageton.’

‘He’s an interesting guy. He wanted me to have dinner at 21 and then come back to his hotel and hear his new play.’

‘What hotel? Don’t tell me. The Waldorf?’

‘Hampshire House.’

‘The poor kid. Have you ever slept with anybody in the Hampshire House?’

‘Edwin, when I get you home tonight, I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap.’

‘Okay, okay, be evasive. Sit tight, honey. I’ll go up and see what the Big Brain has on his larcenous mind.’

The office of Nick Latka wasn’t the tawdry fight manager’s office you may have seen on the stage or that can actually be found along 49th Street. It was the office of a highly successful businessman who happened to have an interest in the boxing business, but who might have been identified with show business, shirts, insurance or the FBI. The walls of brown cork were covered with pictures of famous fighters, ball players, golfers, jockeys and motion-picture stars inscribed ‘to my pal Nick’, ‘to a great guy’, ‘to the best pal I had in Miami’. On the desk was a box of cigars, Nick’s brand, Belindas, and pictures in gold-plated frames of his wife when she was a lovely brunette in a Broadway chorus, and their two children, a handsome, conceited-looking boy of twelve in a military-school uniform, who took after his mother, and a dark-complexioned girl of ten who bore an unfortunate resemblance to her father. Nick would give those kids anything he had. The boy was away at New York Military Academy. The girl went to Miss Brindley’s, one of the most expensive schools in the city.

No matter how he talked in the gym, Nick never used a vulgar word in the presence of those kids. Nick had come up from the streets, rising in ordinary succession from the kid gangs to the adolescent gangs that jimmied the gum and candy machines to the real thing. But his kids were being brought up in a nice clean money-insulated world.

‘I don’t want for Junior to be a mug like me,’ Nick would say. ‘I had to quit school in the third grade and go out and hustle papers to help my old man. I want Junior to go to West Point and be an Air Corps officer or maybe Yale and make a connection with high-class people.’

Class! That was the highest praise in Nick’s vocabulary. In the mouth of a forty-year-old East-Side hood, who had been raised in a cold-water flat and wore patched hand-me-downs of his older brother, class became an appraisal of inverted snobbery, indicating a quality of excellence the East Side could neither afford nor understand. A fighter could run up a string of six knockouts and still Nick’s judgement might be, ‘He wins, but he’s got no class.’ A girl we’d see in a restaurant might not be pretty enough to get into the row at the Copacabana, but Nick would nudge me and say, ‘There’s a tomato with class.’ Nick’s suits, tailored by Bernard Weatherill, had class. The office had class. And I remember, of all the Christmas cards I received, picking out one that was light brown with the name tastefully engraved in the lower right-hand corner in conservative ten-point. That was Nick’s. I don’t know how he happened to choose it or who designed it for him, but it obviously had class.

If Nick thought you had it, he could be a very respectful fellow. I remember once he was chairman of a benefit fight card for the infantile-paralysis fund and had himself photographed turning over the take to Mrs Roosevelt. This picture, autographed by Eleanor, hung in a position of honour over his head, right next to Count Fleet. The boys used to get a laugh out of that. You can imagine the gags, especially if you are a Republican and/or have a nasty
mind. But Nick wouldn’t have any of it. Anybody throwing them low and inside at Mrs R. was sure to get the back of his hand. And it wasn’t just because Nick’s partner was Honest Jimmy Quinn who had the Tammany connections. Mrs Roosevelt and Count Fleet belonged up there together, the way Nick saw it, because they both had class.

Nick had made a good living prying open the coin boxes of nickel machines when most of us were home reading the Bobbsey Twins and he had already escaped from the Boys Correction Farm when you and I were still struggling with first-year Latin. By dint of conscientious avoidance of physical work, a nose for easy money and constant application of the principle Do Unto Others As You Would Not Have Them Do Unto You he had worked himself up to the top of a syndicate that dealt anonymously but profitably with artichokes, horses, games of chance, women, meat, fighters and hotels, a series of commodities which in our free-for-all enterprise system could be parlayed into tidy fortunes for Nick and Quinn, with large enough chunks for the boys to keep everybody happy. But he was still a sucker for class, whether it was a horse, a human being or a Weatherill sports suit.