Who wants to go to the movies?” Penna said.
We were finishing dinner. Eddie and Schaeffer and Cardone were still working on their stewed fruit, and we had been listening to Jay. He had been telling about a friend who had bought a chicken farm in the Berkshires, and the way Jay told it, it was a paradise in which only the chickens worked.
“What’s playing?” Eddie said.
“Eight Belles,” Penna said. “It’s a good picture. It’s about the Navy. It’s one of them musicals.”
I had seen a picture spread on it in one of the Sunday papers, and it had appeared to be about as much like the Navy as the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera was like the season at La Scala.
“I’ll go,” Schaeffer said.
“How about you, Polo?”
“If he goes, I gotta go.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“I trust him. I trust him to stop off at that bean wagon later and have four hamburgers and two Cokes.”
“You want to go?” Jay said to Eddie.
“No thanks.”
“Nothing. I just want to take a walk, and go to bed early.”
“Then I won’t go,” Jay said.
“Go ahead, Jay,” I said. “I’ll walk with Eddie.”
“I don’t know.”
“Go ahead,” Eddie said. “Frank will walk with me.”
“I’d like to see it,” Jay said. “I was in the Navy.”
“Not that kind of a Navy,” I said.
“You were in the Navy?” Penna said. “What Navy?”
“Whatta you mean, what Navy?”
“What war?”
“The World War. The First World War.”
“It must have been some war.”
“We won it, didn’t we? Wait’ll they get you in the Army or Navy. I could tell you some things about the Navy.”
“You kill any Germans, Jay? Or were you just floppin’ around on one of them South Sea islands with the broads?”
“He was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” Eddie said. “Right, Jay?”
“Some admiral,” Penna said.
“You want to go?” Jay said to Cardone.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Cardone,” Penna said. “Live it up.”
“All right,” Cardone said.
“You had it pretty good, hey, Jay?” Penna said. “You worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and lived around the corner. You get any medals?”
“I didn’t live in Brooklyn then. I lived in Harlem.”
“You lived in Harlem?” Penna said.
I looked at Barnum and Booker Boyd at the end of the table. Barnum had stood up and Boyd was getting up, but it was always impossible to tell how much of the table talk they followed anyway.
“Sure,” Jay said. “It was still mostly white in them days. There wasn’t a lot of colored people in Harlem.”
“Ain’t that right?” Jay said, turning to Barnum.
“What?” Barnum said. They had started to walk from the table.
“I was sayin’ when I used to live in Harlem years ago there was mostly whites lived up there. Ain’t that right?”
“That’s right,” Barnum said, nodding once.
“Is that right?” Penna said. “I never knew that.”
“There’s a lot of things you don’t know,” Jay said. “I could tell you a lot of things you don’t know.”
“Don’t bother,” Penna said.
Eddie and Penna played a couple of games of pinball and, when the others were ready to go, Eddie walked them out to the lobby. He handed the car keys to Penna, but Jay grabbed them out of Penna’s hand and gave them to Polo, and they left, arguing.
Eddie and I went upstairs and I got a jacket and walked into Eddie’s room, where he was putting on a new light-tan sailcloth windbreaker. I think that if he had worn a burlap sack he would have looked good in it, but perhaps that is merely the way Eddie seemed to me. I mean that the perfect proportions of that body and the skills trained into it would still, in my mind’s eye, have been there behind anything, the way the art of one or two great writers I have worshiped has made even what were called their bad books seem, to me, for that same reason, good.
“We’ll walk up about a mile,” Eddie said, “and then turn around. All right?”
“It’s fine with me.”
It had been a day of sun, but now the sky was clouding and a mist was rising from the lake. We walked across the road and started north, walking side by side on the gravel beside the blacktop until a car would come bearing down on us. Then we would step off into the gravel and walk single file as the car sprayed the trees and road and then us with its light and its sound as it rushed by.
“When I used to walk with Graziano,” I said, “he used to challenge the cars.”
“He’d what?”
“He’d stop in the road and spread his feet and shake his fists at the cars and curse and make them go around him. It used to scare hell out of me.”
“He wouldn’t let them hit him.”
“Of course not, but it used to scare me anyway. It would be before some big fight with $100,000 or maybe $200,000, in the till already. I used to think how the Garden people would die if they could see it, with some nameless guy in the night bearing down on the great Graziano at fifty miles an hour, unknowingly heading toward sudden fame.”
“Rock was a character. Why do you think he did it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe in revolt against training, against some guy making fifty dollars a week but riding in a rattletrap while he, who was going to make another eighty thousand or a hundred grand or whatever it was, had to walk.”
“I suppose.”
“Do you mind the roadwork, and the walking like this?”
“No, not any more. I used to, some, but I really don’t mind it any more.”
“What changed your mind?”
“When I started out I was a real eager kid. Good fighters were heroes to me, and I did everything Doc told me. Then, after a while, it got to be, you know, routine.”
“You won a few fights.”
“That’s right. I don’t mean I got cocky, but you know.”
“Doc would never let you get cocky.”
“You can say that again.”
“So what made you accept training?”
“That’s a good word for it, accept. That’s what you do. You have a few tough fights where you don’t think you can get out of your corner after eight rounds. I think that does something to the way you look at it.”
“It doesn’t for a lot of fighters.”
“It did for me. At one time there, maybe you remember, Doc gave me a couple of those tough ones right in a row. That does it. At least, I think that’s what does it. You’ve got it in your mind.”
“What made you want to be a fighter?”
“Everything, I guess. I always liked to fight. That was a pretty tough neighborhood, and we used to get in street fights. We had this gang, and there was this kid, Tony, and he was a little older and kind of the leader and he and I used to handle everybody. I don’t know why, but we just did. I just liked it.”
“Did you have a temper then?”
“Sure. Like my old man. What they call a Dutch temper, but I lost that, even away back in the amateurs. You fight a kid, even in the amateurs, and you’ve got no argument with him, really.”
“Fighting has cured a lot of tempers.”
“That and my old man. Like I told you, he used to blow off at me and at my mother, and make her cry. I don’t mean he was a bad guy. Afterward I could see it made him feel lousy himself. He just had that hot temper, and even before he died I made up my mind I wasn’t going to get that way. Then I started fighting.”
“How did you start?”
“Here comes a car.”
We stepped off the blacktop and waited this time. The car was probably doing fifty, but standing as close to the road as we were, with me feeling naked in its lights and resenting it, it seemed to be doing a hundred as it went by.
“Zoom,” Eddie said.
“How’d you start fighting?”
“In the PAL, and then the Golden Gloves. There was this little guy in our gang, Louie. You’ll meet him. He always comes up one day when I’m training. He owns half a poolroom now in the neighborhood, and you’ll meet him. He’s a good guy and he used to train me in the gym and handle me in the Gloves. Then, when we decided I should turn pro, he still handled me. Doc bought him out.”
“What’d he pay him? Do you remember?”
“Sure. He gave him fifteen hundred.”
“That probably seemed like a lot of money then.”
“It was, and it was a break for me. I’d had four fights. I got twenty-five bucks for the first three and fifty for the fourth. In the fourth fight I fought a guy in the Ridgewood and Doc was there and he liked something about me. I don’t know what it was.”
“It was what you are now, and he saw it way back then.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“I don’t suppose Louie knew much about training or managing.”
“Louie? No. He’s just a great little guy. Besides, after Doc took me, he took me in the gym for nine months. I mean, before he put me in another fight, and in those nine months, believe me, I found out I didn’t know anything about fighting.”
“I believe that.”
“Any fighter who thinks he knows how to fight should spend a half hour in the gym with Doc. He’d take him down.”
“There are no others like him.”
“The man’s a genius. I was scared of him, too. I was just a kid, and the night he came to our flat to pay Louie and meet my mother and sign me we were all sitting at the kitchen table, and he said to me: ‘Look, if I take you, I’m the boss.’ I said: ‘Yes, sir.’ He said: ‘I mean that. If you don’t like it say so, and I’ll get out right now. Otherwise you do what I tell you the way I tell you. You can ask questions, but when I give you the answer, that’s it. I don’t like arguments. I’ll tell you when you’re fightin’ and who you’re fightin’ and where. You just do the trainin’ and the fightin’. I do the rest.’ Then he said: ‘That is, after you learn how to fight.’
“I thought I knew something about fighting. I figured I’d show this guy. I was pretty cocky, but for nine months he had me in the gym, and no fights. ‘Step here. Step there. No. Stop. What are you tryin’ to do, make me out a liar?’ That’s always his great saying. When you don’t do something his way he says: ‘What are you tryin’ to do, make me out a liar?’ He looks you right in the eye and kind of snarls it at you, and makes you feel about as big as nothing.”
“What were you doing for dough, without any fights?”
“He was giving me twenty-five a week, for my mother, and I always ate my big meal with him. So he could watch what I ate, and talk more boxing to me, too. He really filled me with boxing.”
“A lot of people don’t know that about a good manager. All they know is that he’s cutting into the big purses after the fighter makes it.”
“Sure. Suppose I quit? Where would he be for the fifteen hundred and the twenty-five a week and the expenses? Many a time I thought to quit, too.”
“Seriously?”
“I don’t know. I’d come out of the gym some afternoons, and I’d think to myself about quitting. I mean Doc would be at me and at me, and I couldn’t seem to get it and I was hating him and the whole thing.”
“I can believe it.”
“But what else could I do?”
“That’s what makes fighters. The ones who can do something else better, do it—or should.”
“What could I do? I quit school when I was sixteen. I didn’t want that plastering, like I saw my old man. You look at the guys from my neighborhood. Good guys, but what could they do? Run a poolroom? Work loading beer trucks? Tend bar? Work on the tracks for the I.R.T.? Pump gas? That’s what they do. What could I do? I didn’t want those things.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You could do a lot of things now.”
“Sure. If I win this title I’ve always got that. When I quit fighting I can get a job representing one of those liquor companies, going around. You know? What they call good will. Ruby Goldstein and Ray Miller and Joe Benjamin and Billy Graham do it and they’re pretty good jobs. If I make some money with the title I might even invest in something, like a bowling alley. What could I do then, though, when I was a kid starting?”
“Not much.”
“You can’t do anything, so you don’t quit.”
“When do you stop thinking about quitting?”
“All of a sudden things start to come to you,” he said, stopping and gesturing with his hands. “Doc keeps telling you: ‘Do this. Do that. Throw it like this. Then step here.’ It really doesn’t mean anything to you. I mean you don’t really understand it. He gets you a few fights and you’re trying and you win, but you still don’t feel good. You’d rather fight your own way. All of a sudden—I remember the fight—you try something and it works and you try something else and, just like that, it’s like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and everything fits into place. All of a sudden, for no reason, you’ve got it. You see the meaning of everything.”
“I know what you mean. It’s that way in anything. Ralph Branca, who used to pitch for the Dodgers, once told me that about learning to pitch, and what a great feeling it was when it all came to him. He won twenty-one games that year.”
“The feeling is the greatest. All of a sudden you understand. Everything you do feels good. Your mind works good. When that happens in a fight it’s the greatest feeling you ever have in your life. I can’t explain it, but it really is.”
“I know. I think, Eddie, that everyone, no matter what he does, has felt it at least once, at some time. It’s why we all go on.”
“Then Doc takes you down,” he said, laughing. “He gives you that sourpuss, and shakes his head and goes at you again.”
“But he knew it, too, the moment you found it. He liked it as much as you did.”
“Sure, but he won’t let you know. Two days later in the gym he’s giving you something else, just as tough, but now you go along with it.”
“As you said, a great man.”
“You wouldn’t believe this, but I think I want to win that title as much for him as for myself.”
“I believe it. At his age he won’t be up there again. He won’t have another fighter like you. If he doesn’t make it now he never will.”
“He’ll make it,” Eddie said. “I’m sure I can lick this guy. I’m just as sure as we’re walking here.”