She was working behind a counter in her old man’s diner in West Liberty, was where it all started. I had come into town with an alleged heavyweight by the name of Big Boy Price. Big Boy had looked so bad the referee had stopped the fight and called it no-contest, which meant we didn’t even get our money. By the time I paid the training expenses, I was so flat it looked like I might even have to go to work for a living. Unless I rightaway found myself a meal ticket and I didn’t expect to find any world-beaters in a one-mule town like West Liberty.
If I had to be stranded anywhere, though, West Liberty had its points. At least that’s the way it looked to me the night I strolled into Foley’s Diner and spotted Shirley. From that moment on I was a regular at Foley’s. Talked to Shirley every chance I got. Even walked her home a couple of times. Never got to first base, though. But those first few weeks, I wasn’t rushing things. I talked about New York City and Chicago, about all the bigtime people I knew and the important money I had thrown around—oh, they didn’t call me Windy Johnson for nothing—and I figured it was just a question of time until I wore down this little Oklahoma pigeon with my fancy patter and my big city ways. At least it looked like I had the field pretty much to myself. I didn’t see anything in pants in West Liberty that was any competition.
To make it look like even more of a cinch, I talked Indian Joe Wood, the toughest middleweight in Oklahoma, into signing up with me, and in a couple of months or so I was back in the big money again. At least big money for West Liberty. I bought myself a yellow Chrysler roadster and I told Shirley she could drive it around all day while I was hanging around the gym, keeping an eye on Indian Joe. I figured she’d get so used to that Chrysler she’d have to move in with me to keep it in the family. She still had me at arm’s length, you understand, but I’m a patient sort of a fellow, especially when it comes to Shirley. I figured she’d have to come around and it was just a question of time.
And I still think I would have been right, if it hadn’t been for this no-goodnik Billy Bonnard. Billy the Kid, they called him. Every time I get to thinking how, if it hadn’t been for me, this little louse Billy would never even have met Shirley, I get so tight inside, I need another drink.
Halfway between West Liberty and Oklagee there is a place called Dillon’s Barn, where the amateurs beat each other’s brains out every Friday night. They’re called amateurs but they’re really semi-pros because Fatso Dillon gives the winner of each fight an Elgin wrist watch which he buys back from the boy next day for twenty-five bucks. They’re just punks, sixteen, seventeen years old, and they fight for blood, nothing fancy and everything goes. Well, one of the kids is a little baby-face who looks like he should be home doing his geography lessons instead of climbing into the ring at Dillon’s to trade punches with a flat-nose who looks twice his age and has at least a ten-pound pull in the weights. Dillon never paid too much attention to how he matched ’em. As long as somebody came as close to getting killed as was within the law, Dillon and his customers were satisfied.
This Billy “The Kid” Bonnard didn’t even own a bathrobe. He just came into the ring with a torn hotel towel over his shoulders. His body looked scrawny and white and he had a face like a sweet little choirboy. I settled back in my seat to watch the slaughter.
But at the bell the choirboy rushed out of his corner like Stanley Ketchel, come back for a second try. His lips were pressed tight together, and with no blink to his eyes, the look on his face … The other guy was just big and wild and tough and The Kid moved around him with tantalizing grace. The Kid peppered the big guy with his left, threw a beautiful right, and brought his left up so fast you didn’t even see it. The bum had to be dragged away like a dead horse. The Kid had skinny arms and not enough strength in his shoulders to look like that kind of a puncher. But he was lithe and wiry and he knew how to snap his punches in.
I hurried around to the dressing room to line him up before any of the other managers could get to him. “Kid,” I said, “I’m Windy Johnson, manager of champions. You looked sensational tonight. I’m going to give you a big break and add you to my stable.”
He was a good-looking kid all right but his lips were thin and there was a hardness in him that came through the baby face. My sweet talk didn’t go to his head—he was ahead of me. “Why shouldn’t I look sensational?” he said. “I’m good. I c’n beat tomato cans like that half-a-dozen at a time.”
“Here’s half a C,” I said, handing him a crisp fifty. “That’s an advance on our first fight. A year from now I’ll have you in the big time.”
“A year!” The Kid said. “I fuckin’ oughta be there now.”
That’s the way The Kid was, cocky, impatient and not taking anything from anybody. The day of his first pro fight, at the West Liberty Arena, I took him in the diner to buy him a couple of chops before he went back to the hotel to lie down. Shirley came over to take the order. “Kid,” I said, “I want you to meet my girl.”
“Hey, Windy,” The Kid says, right in front of her, “you been holdin’ out on me. Why din’tcha tell me you knew a beautiful broad like this? Scared I’d break trainin’ or something?”
Now there wasn’t a guy came into the diner who didn’t give Shirley the eye or the line but one thing that stood out about her was the way she brushed them off. Most of the waitresses in the joints in West Liberty were the friendly type but Shirley was special. Shirley played harder to get than a first-division deb, but she always seemed to know how to let them off easy, unless she really went up against a fresh guy and then she could be mean as a mother dog. So I was ready to see her put this young punk in his place. But she didn’t put. She even smiled as if she liked it. And she was the one who had been telling me she never let the customers flirt with her. Inconsistency, thy name is woman!
When Shirley came back with the check, The Kid said, “How’d ya like to come to the arena and see me knock somebody stiff tonight?”
“Stop wasting your breath,” I said. “I been trying to take her to the fights for months. Shirley don’t like the fights.”
“I think maybe I’d like to go this time,” Shirley said.
Billy looked over at me and laughed. “See that, Windy? She’s got the hots for me!” He was really talking to Shirley.
“Well, you certainly have a high opinion of yourself,” she said. But she said it kind of smilingly.
“Why not?” he said. “Ever since I was an eight-year-old kid peddlin’ papers, the kids ran away from me and the broads ran to me.”
Then he did something that showed he was just as nervy with his hands as he was with his mouth. He reached out and patted her on her sweet little keister. Real familiar. I waited for Shirley to let him have one. Shirley just blushed and said, “Fresh!” And when she walked away, something told me she was walking for The Kid.
The opponent they put in there with Billy for his first pro fight wasn’t a world-beater but he was a real club-fighter who could take a good punch, what they call a crowd-pleaser, which means he’s the kind of pug who doesn’t spare the blood, his or the other guy’s. A target for The Kid’s fast left hand, a sucker for the straight right, but plenty of competition for a boy with no professional experience. He liked to get inside and hold on with one hand and club with the other, strictly a saloon fighter, and in the first round The Kid was getting bloodied up a little bit because he wouldn’t stay away and box the fella like I told him to.
He was a great little piece of fighting machinery, The Kid, but a know-it-all from way back and very slow to take advice. So he had to get his nose bloody and a red blotch over his kidneys before he began to stay away and make the guy fight his fight the way I wanted him to in the beginning. After that it was all ours and The Kid got a nice hand when he left the ring. He looked around for Shirley and blew her a kiss. My girl, and the first day he meets her he’s moving in!
“How you feeling, Kid?” I asked him when he came out of the shower.
“Like a million,” he said. “That bum never hurt me.”
“That side of yours looks like a slice of beef,” I said. “A clown like that shouldn’t lay a glove on you. Next time do what I tell you.”
“I c’n take care of myself,” The Kid said.
“Here’s your purse,” I said. “All I’m keeping is the fifty you owe me. The rest is all yours.”
I always do that with my boys when I’m starting them out. Psychology. Makes them feel they’re tied up with a square shooter. When they get in the big bucks is time enough to split it down the middle.
“Look, Kid, I figure we’re going to be together a long time, so don’t try to impress me with how tough you are. Save all your fighting for the ring. Now get dressed and go on back to the hotel and get a good night’s sleep.”
“Fuck sleep,” The Kid said. “I ain’t had a glass o’ beer all the time I been training. I’m going out and grab some fun. I got a heavy date.”
Why is it that the guys with no talent always obey me like I’m their father? And the kids like Billy with something special on the ball are always trouble?
“Listen, Kid,” I said. “I been in this racket since you could chin yourself on a bar rail. And one thing I know, fighting and night life don’t go, especially when the latter involves the mouse department. So as your manager, I’m telling you to get yourself over to the hotel and start pounding your ear.”
“Yeah,” he said, not looking so handsome when he was talking through his teeth, “so you c’n be sure I’m not making it with Shirley.”
“What’s Shirley got to do with it?”
“Shirley’s going to the Legion dance with me over to Oklagee,” The Kid said.
“Lovely,” I said. “I loan you dough. I get you a semi for your first pro fight. And how do you show your gratitude?”
It was hard to figure. I knew for a fact that Shirley never liked to go over to Oklagee. She thought the boys were too fresh and tough over there. And here she was going with the freshest and toughest of them all. It was a terrible blow to my pride. I would have thought a girl like Shirley would have had more sense than to give me the air for a little pug-nosed brat who happened to have a nice pair of shoulders and a waist that tapered down like a ballet dancer’s.
When I was leaving the stadium, I saw them at the curb together. He was helping her onto the back of a shiny silver motorcycle. I went over to them and said, “Kid, you got a big career ahead of you. You oughta know better than to take chances riding around on one of those things.”
“Get out of our way,” The Kid said. “We’re late.”
“The Kid’s a screwball,” I said. “He’s just as liable to wrap you and this scooter around a tree.”
“Billy is the best motorcycle rider in the country,” Shirley said. “He won a big silver cup at the fair last year.”
She had known him less than one day and already he had her sounding like him.
“I’ll bet he stole it,” I said. But the words were blown back in my face by the blast-off.
In those next few days they became the talk of West Liberty. They’d go roaring up and down the street on that damned motorcycle, Shirley holding on for dear life with her dark red hair flying out behind her. If Billy hadn’t been the best prospect I had run across in a flock of Sundays, I would have washed my hands of both of them right there. But Billy looked like an A-I meal ticket, and that’s one thing a manager just can’t afford to turn down.
What I did do, though, for Shirley’s benefit, was to try to break up this thing with The Kid before it got any more serious. I did a little checking around and what I found out about Billy was enough to discourage any girl. At least that’s the way it sounded to me. So the next day, while The Kid was doing his roadwork with his sparring partners, I slipped into the diner for a heart-to-heart with Shirley to set her straight.
“Look, honey,” I said, “it’s not just because I got the old torch out for you that I’m telling you this. It’s for your own good. I’ve been getting a line on this Romeo of yours. He’s got a bad rep. Did you know he put in sixteen months in the work farm for stealing a motorcycle? He’s a little hipped on motorcycles. He even went over the wall once and stole another motorcycle and they had to bring him back. He was head of a gang of toughs and sneak-thieves in Oklagee. A real Hell’s Angel. A real no-good.”
“Poor Billy,” Shirley said. “He’s had a very hard life. His mother died when he was five and his old man went off and left him. He never had anyone to tell him what was right. All he needs is someone to take care of him.”
So you see what I was up against? Practically a criminal we’ve got on our hands, and all Shirley is thinking about is being a mother to him.
I will say one thing for Billy, though it hurts me to admit it. Although around the gym or with the fellas there was nobody meaner—jumping all the time and full of p. and v.—when he was with Shirley even his face seemed different. The way he looked at her. I wouldn’t have thought there was that much feeling in him.
“It’s because he doesn’t feel inferior with me,” Shirley tried to explain it. “I guess he grew up hating kids because they had mothers and fathers looking after them. With me, because he’s sure of me, his real self begins to come out.”
Well, frankly, I wouldn’t know about all that shrink talk. How those dolls can dress it up when they fall but good!
Billy won his second pro fight just as easy as his first and this time we had three hundred dollars for our five minutes’ work. With a few bucks in his pocket, things sort of went to his head because all of a sudden he asked me if I would be willing to stand up for him in case he and Shirley got hitched in the near future.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Shirley has got too much brains to change her name to Mrs. Bonnard. And anyway, you haven’t heard the last word from her old man.”
I felt pretty confident that was one hurdle too many, even for my irrepressible little battler. Shirley’s old man was rough-and-tumble, a bartender at a hangout for truck drivers, and from what she had told me, he had fairly definite ideas as to the qualifications of anyone aspiring to his daughter’s hand. She had invited me home for dinner several times, but I hadn’t felt quite up to coping with him. So I had no doubts as to just what sort of a reception The Kid would get if he actually popped the question to the head of the house.
Two days before The Kid’s next fight, I had my answer, expressed in somewhat more violent terms than I would have liked. Billy showed up for his workout with a beautiful shiner. “What did you do, fall off your motorcycle?” I wanted to know.
“Naw, I got it from Shirley’s old man,” The Kid said.
“Don’t tell me you had a fight with him.” I was always warning Billy never to get in any fights that weren’t for dough. Why take the chance of breaking your hand on an amateur? And getting busted? “I’m surprised at you fighting a man his age,” I said.
“He c’n still hit you a pretty good punch,” Billy said. “When I told him Shirley and me was thinkin’ of gettin’ hitched, he said no daughter of his was going to marry a lousy pug that had done time. Nobody can talk to me like that, not even Shirley’s old man. So I poked him in the kisser. He takes a pretty good punch, too.”
I figured that was curtains for Billy as far as Shirley was concerned, that she had seen him at last for what he was, a fresh-faced little roughneck with no respect for anybody or anything. But next day when I dropped into the diner to see how she was taking it, Shirley was on Billy’s side stronger than ever. “I don’t blame Billy,” she said. “That was a terrible thing my father said to him. You see, all his life Billy’s been kicked around. He never had a decent home. So he’s naturally hypersensitive. You have to understand him.”
Well maybe Shirley knew a little more about him than I did, but The Kid struck me as being about as sensitive as a slab of reinforced concrete. When a girl like Shirley goes, though, baby, she goes. No ifs, ands or buts. I found that out to my sorrow the following day.
The Kid won his first main event that night, catching a ten-year veteran in a flurry in the first round and putting him away in a minute and a half. When I paid Billy off, he and Shirley went roaring out into the night on the shiny silver motorcycle he had made a down payment on after his last fight. I didn’t think things were any crazier than usual, until around three in the morning when Shirley’s old man called me, mad as a nest of hornets. It seems Shirley hadn’t come home at all. It looked like she’d run off with my Kid. And in the morning, when they still hadn’t been heard from, it was all too clear that that’s exactly what had happened.
It was bad enough when I thought about Shirley. But what really hurt was that The Kid had run out on me, too. I had him signed for another main go that following Friday with a jump to five hundred but he didn’t even bother to let me in on his plans. The next thing I heard he was fighting out of Oklahoma City for “Larceny Joe” Banfield, an old-time bandit disguised as a fight manager. It didn’t surprise me, a couple of weeks later, when I heard that Joe had run out on The Kid, copping the last purse and leaving The Kid stranded. Well, it served Billy right, I thought, for running out on a square-shooter who was ready to split everything down the middle with him. But I was kind of worried about Shirley. It couldn’t be much fun being stranded in a strange town with a wild man like Billy Bonnard.
I didn’t have anything better to do so I decided I’d get myself over to O.C. and see if I couldn’t talk some sense into Shirley, maybe even get her to throw in the towel and come back to West Liberty. When I picked up the papers in town the morning I got in, I got the surprise of my life. That night Kid Bonnard was meeting none other than Monk Wilson, the welterweight champ of the Middle West. That was an overmatch if I ever heard one. The Kid was a promising newcomer all right but he needed to be brought along real careful for at least a year before he could even belong in the same ring with Wilson.
I called all the hotels in town before I finally tracked them down at a ten-dollar-a-day flea-bag on the wrong side of town. I hustled right over there and found Shirley alone in a crummy little inside room that had nothing in it but an old brass bed. There wasn’t even a suitcase in the place. They had hocked that, along with everything else, when Larceny Joe took a powder on them. Shirley looked at least two years older than when I had seen her the month before. There were rings under her eyes and that beautiful young puss was full of troubles. For the last three days, she said, breakfast, lunch and supper had been donuts and coffee.
“Shirley,” I said, “here’s enough money to get you back to West Liberty.” I held out fifty bucks. “Why don’t you call it quits before this crazy kid wrecks your life along with his?”
All Shirley said was “I’ve got to stay with Billy. I’m married to Billy.”
They were going to be all right, she was sure, after the Wilson fight. That would make Billy the biggest drawing card in the state and they’d have enough money to get their things back out of hock.
“How long are you going to keep on letting The Kid sell you a bill of goods?” I wanted to know. “Billy is a comer but he isn’t good enough to stay in there with Monk Wilson. A couple of matches like this and Billy will be a has-been before he ever gets started.”
“I wish you’d handle him again, Windy,” Shirley said.
“Yeah, I owe him a lot,” I said. “First he runs off with my girl, then he jumps to another manager and leaves me holding the bag. I should do him a favor!”
Outside we could hear a racket that sounded as if an airplane was coming right through the room. Shirley jumped up and instinctively her hand went up to adjust her hair. “That’s Billy-baby,” she said.
“You mean he’s still got that friggin’ motorcycle?” I said. “He’ll hock your watch and your clothes and let you live on doughnuts but he won’t give up that motorcycle.”
“It’d break his spirit if he lost that motorcycle,” Shirley said.
“How about your spirit?” I said.
“I love Billy,” Shirley said, as if that explained everything.
The Kid came bouncing in as cocky as if he were already champion of the world, instead of a ten-to-one short-ender who couldn’t buy his way into a pay-phone booth. “Hello, Windy old cock,” he greeted me, just as if he were still in my stable and nothing had ever happened.
Well, I guess I’ll always be a sucker for anything Shirley asked me, so I swallowed my pride like a plug of chewing tobacco and handled The Kid’s corner that night. She was right there in the third row and the expression on her face was, well, there ought to be a law against a nice girl loving a bum that much.
As soon as the gong sounded, I knew Shirley should have been back in the hotel. The Kid came out swinging the way he always did, but Wilson knew too much for him. Wilson just sidestepped calmly and clipped Billy in the mouth. From the moment that punch connected, the Kid was fighting on instinct. His punches were wild and Wilson wasn’t missing. I thought the round was never going to end. There was a bad gash in Billy’s lip and his face was ashen. He was out on his feet at the bell.
I looked down at Shirley. She was holding her face in her hands. It’s a tough assignment being married to a fighter, especially when he’s a wise guy who wins a couple of easy ones and thinks he’s ready for fighters like Monk Wilson.
“Kid,” I said to Billy as I rubbed ice at the back of his head and dropped some ice cubes down into his balls to bring him around, “There’s no percentage taking this kind of licking from Wilson. Lemme throw in the towel. A year from now when you know more you’ll be ready for him.”
The Kid shook his head and mumbled through his cut lip. “I gotta win this one. I bet my whole purse on myself at five to one. Five G’s if I win and we can’t buy our way outa the hotel if I lose.”
Somehow he managed to come out for the second round. Wilson kept working on that lip. All the color was gone from Shirley’s face. It looked like both sides of the Bonnard family were needing smelling salts. And all the ringsiders around here were egging Wilson on to “work on that mouth.” I don’t see how she stood it. How either of them stood it. The Kid was down three times that round. But he kept getting up. When God put him together he must have run out of brains so he figured he’d make up for it with guts.
These days, in Vegas or the Garden, they’d stop a fight as bloodily one-sided as that, with their three-knock-down rule, et cetera, but in O.C. they played rough. Wilson kept piling it onto Billy for five terrible rounds. The Kid was down so many times I began to lose track. I don’t know which of them was taking a worse beating, him or Shirley. I could see her flinch every time another punch cut into that torn mouth.
In the corner at the end of the fifth I begged him to let me throw in the towel. I’m a pretty good cut-man but this was too deep. His lip was pouring blood and both eyes were almost closed. But he wouldn’t let me stop the fight. “I’m OK,” he whispered, “but get Shirley out. I don’t want her to see no more.”
I went over and gave her The Kid’s message. Her eyes were all red and runny. But she did as she was told.
The sixth round had just begun when Wilson hit Billy in the mouth again and he collapsed. He lay perfectly still. Monk did a victory dance in the opposite corner. A wave to a friend said, It’s all over. I’ll never understand how Billy did it—he seemed too far gone even to be able to hear the count—but at eight he suddenly rolled over and onto one knee and at nine he was back on his feet. Wilson was so surprised that he rushed in wildly to finish it with one punch. He wasn’t even bothering to protect himself. There must have been some sixth sense hidden in the fog of The Kid’s brain that told him what to do. Suddenly he put everything he had behind a right uppercut. It caught Wilson right under the chin and he started backward and The Kid hooked to the jaw and Monk fell forward and didn’t move again until they were dragging him back to his corner.
Billy had to have eight stitches taken in his lip, one eye had to be lanced to reduce the swelling and a bone was broken in his left hand. But he and Shirley had their five thousand bucks and they were going to celebrate. The doc had told him he should stay in bed for at least three days but at four o’clock that morning he and Shirley were at the Kit Kat Klub on their third bottle of champagne. But they didn’t need the wine to get a lift. They were both higher than a kite, just from love, exhaustion, and all that quick money after going in hock.
The three of us barnstormed our way east after that. The Kid was piling up an impressive winning streak and getting a national reputation. He accepted his growing fame just the way he had always accepted Shirley, strictly for granted. Of course he loved her in his own way, but it was a pretty brusque, one-sided, more-taking-than-giving way. At least that’s how it seemed to me, watching from outside the ropes. Shirley would tell it different.
I finally booked him into the bigtime, on cable from Trump’s Plaza, where the Kid became an overnight sensation by knocking out LeRoi Adams, who had lost a split decision to the champion. Billy still didn’t know much more about boxing than when he left West Liberty but his speed, ferocity and punching power had simply overwhelmed Adams. A string of consistent wins on cable and Billy was a hot ticket, the Number I contender for the title. The Kid had already pocketed a coupla hundred grand for his end and he and Shirley were living it up in a penthouse on top of a class hotel on Central Park South. The Kid had a closet full of sharp five-, six-hundred-dollar suits and Shirley had a mink coat and everything that goes with it and looked like a million bucks. The only thing they didn’t have was anything with four wheels. Believe it or not, the Kid was still faithful to his motorcycles. He had a new, shiny, custom-made silver Yamaha, and emblazoned on one side of it was BILLY THE KID and on the other, THE KO KING FROM OK. It was really something to see Billy on that motorcycle streaking through rush-hour traffic with Shirley behind him and holding on tight, her wonderful red hair blowing wildly in the wind. For a while there they were on the Manhattan merry-go-round and grabbing all the rings.
Then The Kid took the welterweight title from Ernie La Plante and things began to happen. A couple of sharpshooters from the casinos, Teddy Moran and Darney Fay, started wining and dining him and before I knew what had happened they had convinced him that I wasn’t a big enough managerial gun to handle a champion. So after working him all the way to the top, I had to sell out to a couple of con men for a fraction of what I figured to make with the title. I thought I had a case against The Kid, but mine was small-claims stuff after I heard Shirley’s. The night Billy successfully defended his championship for the first time she called me at my hotel around three o’clock in the morning. At first I thought she was trying to get me to come out and meet them somewhere and bury the hatchet. But instead she wanted me to come up to the apartment. And from the sound of her voice, I could tell something was wrong. When I got up there, I found her all alone. Her eyes looked as if she had been crying so long she had run out of tears. She had watched the fight on the TV, she said, for ever since that tough one in O.C. she had stayed away from ringside. When Billy won, she got all dolled up because he always liked to go out night-clubbing after polishing off an opponent. But this time Billy hadn’t shown up.
That was the first time it happened. I wish I could say, for Shirley’s sake, that it was the last. But Billy had a big year that year, knocking off the three leading contenders and after every spectacular win he could be found at a front table at the Waikiki Club, an expensive trap his new managers owned a piece of. Those two grifters also saw to it that he became acquainted with the ladies of the chorus. I guess it was just a case of too much happening all at once. Overnight a smalltown punk was the Big Town’s hero. His paynight for the last closed circuit was a million six. You need something special to take seven-figure money in stride.
The third time it happened I sat it out with Shirley. “Why don’t you divorce the bum?” I said. “You’ve got too much on the ball to let this little son-of-a-bitch kick you around like this.”
But Shirley shook her head just the way I had seen before, in West Liberty, Oklahoma City and points east. “No, Windy, that’s not what I want,” she said. “I’ve got to stay with Billy.”
Well, there’s only been one fighter who could hit the late spots and keep on winning, and Kid Bonnard was good but he wasn’t Harry Greb. His fourth time out after winning the title he ran into a tartar in the person of José Ribera, a young, tough Mexican who had been doing his training on Fourteenth Street while Billy was doing his in the discos. The Kid had never taken my advice to master the finer points of the manly art and up till this night youth and speed and strength and a murderous left hook had carried him through. But some of Billy’s zip had obviously been left behind in the Waikiki. By the end of the third round Ribera was giving The Kid the same kind of treatment Monk Wilson had handed him back in O.C. Only this time Billy had nothing left for an emergency. Somehow he managed to go the distance but he was out on his feet at the final bell.
No matter how many marks I had against him, it was kind of tough to have to watch The Kid slide off the stool onto the canvas after the ref raised Ribera’s hand. There was so much pride in him, so much cockiness and bounce that it just didn’t seem right to see him lying there while Ribera’s handlers carried the new champion around the ring on their shoulders. Billy’s left foot was shaking a little bit. I always hated that.
I went back to the dressing room to see if there was anything I could do. The Kid had one eye shut tight and an egg-shaped swelling over the other one. He was sitting on the rubbing table with his head bent low, a trainer pressing ice against the egg. Moran and Fay were telling him what a bum he was. They had nothing to worry about because the way they had it rigged, they would own a piece of Ribera if he won the title.
The Kid was in no mood for the Waikiki that night. “Where you wanna go?” I said. “Where d’ya think?” he said. “Back to Shirley’s.” When she took him into her arms, The Kid began to cry. She put him to bed and put cold compresses on his head to reduce the swelling. When I dropped around the next night to see how everything was getting along, The Kid was still in bed and Shirley was clucking around him like a contented hen. “Windy,” The Kid said, “Shirley wants me to go back with you again. How about getting me a rematch with Ribera? I want to win my title back.”
Well, The Kid had run out on me twice, but if that’s what Shirley wanted, I figured I’d give it one more shot. So I lined up a couple of tune-ups with tomato-cans Billy could knock over without working up a sweat, even a Billy who had lost a step or two. I saw how those bums could drop a right hand on The Kid because he wasn’t moving his head to the right when he jabbed. And when I yelled at him what he was doing wrong, instead of learning, all he did was get mad. But the last thing to go is the punch, and Billy had a left hook in a class with Raging Bull Jake LaMotta’s, if you go back that far. That, and instinctively knowing how to finish opponents once he had them hurt, put KO’s in his record that made up for the lack of finesse. A banger from the old school is what he was. A dancing master, a Sugar Ray Leonard, forget it.
Anyway, I finally signed the Ribera rematch, for a bundle. Big press conference at the Trump Plaza and all the honchos from HBO talking about the ratings and somehow Don King is in the picture too, calling it The Battle of the Little Giants. I don’t let on, but I’m a little excited too, because in all the years I knocked around this dirty business, I never had a champion before. A couple of hopefuls looked as if I might be able to build them into contenders, into the elusive come-and-go of the top ten. But I never got them up to the level every manager dreams of—managing a champion of the world.
And now that I had the tiger I had been looking for all my life, I had him by the tail, or he had me. This fight with José (Little Marvelous) Ribera was the most important in his life. So did that mean he was in the gym every day working his heart out with the best Ribera-like sparring partners I could find for him at a hundred bucks a day? Half the time Billy didn’t show up, and when he was late and I chewed him out, he’d say, “What’s the big deal? I’ll make the weight easy. That Ribera’s a bum. Last time he ran like a thief and stole the fight. This time I’ll cut the ring off, bull him into a corner and beat his brains out.”
“Vegas has it almost three to one for Ribera, and the writers at your workouts are saying you look like you’re in slo-mo.”
“Fuck the writers. I beat Ribera the first time. I was robbed.”
“Well, this is next time, Billy. And this Ribera is working like a son-of-a-bitch. Like his life depends on it. Which it does.”
“Go over to Gallagher’s, have yourself a T-bone and three or four belts, then a nice relaxing blow-job, stop worrying about Ribera, relax a little.”
“In other words train like you’ve been training,” I said.
“Look, Windy, don’t be a pain in the ass. Did you see the look on Ribera the first time I gave him that shot to the body?” He threw a furious left hook that stopped just half an inch away from my belt.
“Yeah, I saw it,” I said. “And I saw the second shot, and the third one. So what happens? Ribera gets smart, keeps circling away from the left and cops the decision.”
“Robbed,” Billy said. “Maybe fixed.”
“Well, they won’t have to fix this one,” I said. “You’re doing a pretty good job fixing yourself.”
It was even worse than I thought. That night Shirley called me and said it was almost midnight and Billy wasn’t home yet. Would I mind tracking him down for her?
Some tracking down. I cabbed right over to the Waikiki and there was our boy, living it up with a couple of hookers and the free-loaders for whom fighters like Billy have a fatal attraction, and vice versa.
“Come on, Billy, you’re comin’ home to Momma.”
“In a pig’s ass,” said Billy.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Billy, I thought you only tied one on after the fight—when you won.”
I tried to pull him away from the table. One side of me wanted to leave him there and try to spring Shirley from this little son-of-a-bitch, but the other side was a manager who saw his championship slipping away.
I grabbed him and pulled him harder. His new pals were getting up. Waiters were coming over. A mess.
“Don’t fuck with me, Windy. Go get a blow-job like I told you. Ribera is nothing. Bums I knocked out in O.C. could lick Ribera.”
“Goddamn it, Billy, you’re my one shot at a title, all my life the first shot and you’re blowing it, baby, you’re blowing it!”
I pulled him to his feet and he pulled back, then before I knew it I slapped him and he went crazy and threw a punch for real, only I know a little boxing and I slipped it, just like I tried to teach him, and he hit a pillar behind him, and I could see the pain go from his knuckles up his arm to his shoulder.
Next morning the left hand, the one I lovingly called “Jakey” for Jake LaMotta, is so swollen it looks like a sixteen-ouncer for the amateurs.
I go to the boxing mavens of HBO and plead my case, and try to get help from Don King, who drowns me in words of four and five syllables which all add up to “No way.” It’s not like the old days when an injury is an injury and you get the postponement. This is show business, showbiz with blood, but still show business. There have been promos for weeks on TV across the country, and it’s in TV Guide, and there are advertisers to worry about, it’s like a big TV special, only it’s a live fight.
So there I was, going down the aisle to the ring in Convention Hall, which should have been one of the highlights of my career, and now it felt more like I was escorting myself to my own execution. And what hurt the most was here I was with the first world champion I ever had, and also the first kid I handled in all my years I ever had to fight physically, and then sucker him into breaking the hand he may have been able to stop Ribera with, even if he has trained with all the dedication of a Harry Greb or a Maxie Baer.
Comes round one, Ribera is doing a number on The Kid, until twenty seconds before the bell, when the Mexican flash gets careless, and Billy lets the left go, whack! I can feel the pain shooting all the way up Billy’s arm, to his shoulder and into his brain. But Ribera feels the pain too, he’s down on all fours, with a silly grin on his face. He’s up at nine, barely, and has enough ring-smarts left to grab Billy and tie him up, and the ref is pushing his way between them when the bell gives Ribera a minute’s rest.
That’s all he needs, because Billy only had that one shot with his left, he’s resting it against his chest in round two, helpless now, like going into battle without a gun. He’s got a nasty cut over his left eye and his left hand is like a dead cat lying there on his knee and he’s already out of gas from not enough road work and too much Waikiki.
“I’m stopping the fight,” I told him. “Say you broke your hand on his head in round one. Save a little face.”
“You stop this fight, I’ll finish what I started in that joint.” I could barely make out what Billy was saying. I used all of Angelo Dundee’s tricks and a few of my own to close the cut, and it felt like thirty seconds instead of a full minute when the bell sent Billy back to the slaughter. Ribera knew about the left hand now, and he could see how The Kid was trying to breathe through his nose. He caught him in a five-six-seven combination, and Billy’s mouthpiece went flying, and then Ribera was all over him, and there was The Kid knocked cold for the first time in his life. The referee counted to ten, a number I never bet, on horses or casinos, and when we lifted Billy up he didn’t know the fight was over and tore after Ribera, who tried to give him the winner’s consolation hug and almost got kneed in the balls for his troubles.
In the dressing room I brought him back to his lovable self with smelling salts, and then the doc sewed up the gashes over both eyes. What a mess. His jaw was swollen and his ego was shrunk.
“Well, Kid,” I couldn’t resist saying because I really wanted to kill him, “maybe we’ll hit the Waikiki, cheer you up a little.”
The Kid made a face when they sewed him up, and a little moan went out of him when the doc barely touched the swollen left hand. When he heard what I said he didn’t think it was funny. “I go home to Shirley.”
The Kid was over the peak now and going down fast. I got him the best bone doctor for his hand, and three months’ rest, but he broke it again the first time he threw it for real. Looks like I had really fixed him, or he fixed himself, that last night in the Waikiki. But the Kid found another doctor, and tried again. He couldn’t believe it was over. They never do. He took some awful pastings while we tried to convince him that it was time to rack up. But every time he got beat he’d go right home to Shirley and she’d patch him up, make him comfortable, fuss over him and nurse him back to health.
When Billy finally hung up the gloves, back in O.C., after some new black kid out of the amateurs left him for dead, they decided to settle down there. The Kid must be crowding thirty now but he still rides that motorcycle. Actually, if you ask me, he’s living off Shirley, but to hear her tell it he’s developing a couple of comers who are about to make them a million bucks. Well, maybe so. When you’ve got that much faith and heart, I guess anything can happen. But talking to Billy, I could see his speech was a little funny. Made you wonder how he’ll be five years down the road.
The other day I dropped over to the restaurant where she’s a waitress again. “Hi, Shirley,” I said. “How’s every little thing?”
She wasn’t a trim featherweight anymore, closer to super-lightweight, but I still had the hots for her.
“Just fine, Windy,” she said. “You ought to come up and have dinner with Billy and me some night. We just moved into the cutest little apartment.”
I knew what that meant. They had dropped down a peg to a one-room flat with kitchenette. I’ve got two or three pretty good prospects, including an honest-to-God white heavyweight, which as you know is an endangered species. A white contender could put me back in the chips again, like I was with Billy the Kid. So if Shirley had stuck with me she’d have somebody looking out for her, instead of having to hustle for tips and handle the come-ons, living on lean street with a burned-out Billy Bonnard.
But the funny part of the whole deal is, even if I figure she’s winding up with a loser, who can only get worse as the years roll by, and the brain damage really getting to him by age forty—in my daydreams I see her pushing him in a wheelchair and he’s still giving her a hard time—but she’ll never see it that way. The funny part is, she’s happy.