BETH SAID SHE WOULD probably be a little late getting away from the office. So I stretched out on the bed with my copy of War and Peace. I have been reading War and Peace since I was a high-school senior and have now succeeded in getting almost half way through it. It’s not that I haven’t found it interesting. But it was written on a large dacha in Russia before the age of electricity, motor cars or radios, and sometimes I think I will have to approximate those conditions in order to finish it. I read a couple of chapters and then can’t find time to go on. When I’m ready to dip into it again, I have forgotten who Marya Dmitrevna is and have to thumb back two or three hundred pages to pick up the thread. If War and Peace has given me trouble, it’s nothing I blame on the Count or myself. It’s more the fault of the Hotel Edison and my room which overlooks Strand’s bar and the horse players who usually assemble on the curb under my window. This is far more conducive to reading Racing Form and Ring Magazine than Russian literature.
I was lying on my bed with my shoes and socks and shirt off and a glass on the floor where I could reach it when Beth came in.
“Hello, honey,” I said.
The sweet name only brought a sour expression to her face. She never liked it.
She looked around for a cigarette and I tossed her one from the bed. She came over and reached down to me to light her cigarette from mine. I put my arm around the back of her legs the way I often did.
I could tell from the way she held herself against my arm that something was wrong. That’s the way Beth was. Her passion had its irregular tides. One evening she would come into my arms with a wanton hunger the moment the door was shut and the next evening she had to be as carefully seduced as if it had never happened between us before.
“Darling,” I said, “don’t be like that. I’m leaving for California tomorrow.”
“Oh!” Beth hesitated. “Maybe it’s a good idea.”
My hand came away from her as if it had a mind of its own. “Well, that’s a nice loving send-off.”
She sat down on the edge of my bed and deliberately snuffed out her cigarette. Beth could hold a pause longer than was comfortable. I knew I was in for it when she began slowly, “Now, Eddie, don’t get sore.”
She looked at me seriously and seemed to be debating with herself whether she should say any more. I tried to feint her into a new lead.
“Lots of writers go to California.”
“To write?” she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. “Let’s get things straight, Eddie. I think it’s just about time one of us went out to California.”
“You mean for good?”
“I don’t know yet. I haven’t thought that far. All I know is that we’re getting nowhere in New York, because, I guess, you won’t let yourself think about where you want to go. The trouble seems to be, I’m the only one who has any idea where you’re going. You’re always stopping somewhere, to have a drink, to make some soft money, to put off what you ought to do. Just starting, never finishing. This fight business …You know, when you first told me about it, I was fascinated. It seemed to have something, a force, a vitality that’s missing in so many other things. But you were in your early thirties then. Now it’s the middle thirties, thirty-five, thirty-six, come November. That’s a dangerous age, especially in your job, Eddie. A fighter’s press agent at thirty-one is kind of an interesting fella. You can see it on book jackets—newsboy, copyboy, reporter, merchant seaman, fighters’ press agent, advertising writer. You know how they always sound. But a fighters’ press agent at forty, that’s a little sad. At fifty, it’s very sad. And at sixty you’re a bum hanging around those Eighth Avenue saloons boring everybody with the names of great fighters you used to know.”
“You’ve really got my life laid out for me,” I said. “Doesn’t sound so bad.”
“You can’t laugh it off, darling. The midtown bars are full of guys like you. They come to town because they have something on the ball. Look at yourself, you’ve got some talent for writing, but you’re too lazy or too frightened or too tied up to develop it.”
“Boy,” I said, “it’s a good thing I’m pulling out of here tomorrow.”
“What’ll you be doing in California?”
I told her a little about the set-up we expected to have on the Coast, about the plans for making Molina, the Giant of the Andes, a household word.
Beth shook her head. “That’s exactly what I mean. What kind of a job is that for a guy who…”
“Who what? Who doesn’t have to go begging for assignments from the slicks? Who doesn’t want to hang around the fringe and starve a little? Who wants an easy buck—and lots of them—on the chance of salting away enough to sit down and see what he can write some day?”
“Some day! Some day! Eddie, do you want those two words for your epitaph?”
“Well, what the hell’s the difference?” I said. “So I sell Molina. Another guy works for J. Walter Thompson and sells soap. Or he writes perfume ads, telling the girls how his particular poppy juice will make every guy they meet want to lay them. Only he uses ten-dollar words like ‘enticing mystery’ and ‘bewitchment of the night.’ He probably went to Princeton too. Or Yale or maybe even Harvard. But if you peek under those beautifully starched white cuffs with the delicate monogram, just above the wrist you will definitely see the shackles. Or take that friend of mine Dave Stempel who published that little book of poems when he was still in school, The Locomotive Dream—remember, we read it together?—well, he’s out in Hollywood writing stinking Class B melodramas. Where’s the difference between that and my job with Nick?”
“But I’m not talking about the ad writer with the starched cuffs. Or Dave Stempel. I’m thinking about you. I mean I guess I’m really thinking about me. I’m a big girl now. I’m twenty-seven. It’s time I knew the man I was sleeping with. I never know whether I’m going to bed with one of Nick’s boys or someone who can think for himself.”
I looked down into the loud and garish night of 46th Street. I could see across the street where old Tommy the bartender was leaning on his elbows talking to Mickey Fabian, a gimpy little gnome who gambled his entire disability pension from World War I every month on his judgment of the relative speed of our four-legged friends. Later on, I’d probably wander over and lift a glass with Mickey and hear how they ran for him at Saratoga. They were my guys. Crumbs, some of them, touch artists and no-goods, but still my guys. Maybe that’s what Beth meant. It’s part of my racket to sit around the various joints enjoying a friendly powder with the boys. The talk is whether Joltin’ Joe has got it any more, and was the Commish justified in tying up both those bums’ purses after the waltz last Friday night. A fellow gets to like that kind of life. It’s no way to live, but he gets to thinking it is and he can’t do without it. I wanted Beth and still I wanted to be free to sit around with the boys, if that’s the way I felt. That must have been why I never got around to that proposal unless I had had a few, and after I had them and they worked their quick depressive magic, that was when she knew me better than I knew myself.
“I guess I’m one of Nick’s boys,” I said. “Oh, sure I like to read a book once in a while and I’m not so dumb I can’t see how the profit system takes the manly art out behind the bushes and gives it the business. But I’m strictly a saloon man. Every once in a while I like to pick up the checks all around the table and I like to have enough in my kick to pay my tabs. Nick’s dough may look a little soiled but they still exchange it for nice crisp new bills at any window.”
“What happens after California?” Beth said.
“Don’t know yet. We’ll have to see how things break. Probably work our way east knocking over the usual clowns.”
“So what you’ll really be is a barker for a…circus freak.”
“For Christ’s sakes, what do you want me to do, sell my poems on the corner of Washington Square and starve with the rest of the screwballs? For a hundred a week and a slice of the pie—I bark.”
Beth rose from the edge of the bed and said with an air of finality, “Okay, Eddie. But I think you sell yourself awful short. I guess you know what you want. I just wish you wanted a little more.”
Then she relaxed into her own self a little and put her arms around me and kissed me quickly. “Take care of yourself.”
“You too, kid.”
“You’re sore,” she said. “I hoped you weren’t going to be sore.”
“I’m not sore,” I said. “I’m just…”
“Write me once in a while.”
“Sure, we’ll keep in touch.”
“Hope everything goes the way you want it.”
“I’ll be okay.”
We looked at each other, probably just a second or two, but it seemed longer. There is always that moment when you seem to be able to see in each other’s eyes a flash of the things that might have happened if your cards had been a little better or you had played them differently.
“Maybe this breather is just what we needed,” I said. “Maybe we can get married when I get back.”
“Maybe,” Beth said. “Let’s see what happens.”
“Swell. Be good, coach.”
“Good-bye, Eddie.”
“See you, Beth.”
I stood at the window and watched her go out onto the street. I saw how the boys instinctively turned for a hinge of the gams as she went past. That trim figure of hers never quite looked as if it should belong with her bright and agreeable but untheatrical face. I stayed at the window until her rapid stride was lost in the cross-currents of human traffic sweeping over the corner.
I bought myself another drink, but it backed up on me. I lay down on the bed again and tried to get back into War and Peace, but the scene and the characters had lost contact with me and the words ran into each other meaninglessly. I went over to the dresser and looked at the other books. A Fleischer’s All-Time Ring Record Book, a two-bit copy of Pal Joey, Cain’s Three-in-One, the Runyon Omnibus and an old marked-up edition of The Great Gatsby. I picked up the Gatsby and turned to one of the passages I had marked. It was that terrible scene where Daisy, Tom and Gatsby finally bring it out into the open. One of the best damn scenes in American fiction, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it.
God Almighty, maybe Beth was right. Who was I? Who had she been sleeping with? The reader who marked and studied those lines of Fitzgerald? Or the guy who dished out the hyperbolic swill about Joe Roundheels and Man Mountain Molina? What were they to each other, the reader and the raver? Just two fellows who lived under the same skin, strangers sharing a common roof.
I threw the book down impatiently and started dressing for the street. Toro and Acosta were at the Columbia Hotel around the corner. For need of something to do I thought I’d check on whether everything was set with them for the trip tomorrow night.
The Columbia was one of those innumerable hotels in the Times Square area with the same nondescript street-front, the same lonely people drinking the same cut stuff from the same chromium bars, the same harassed-looking clientele of unlucky horse players, theatrical agents without clients, stage actors without parts and managers of derelict prize fighters like Harry Miniff. The lobby of the Columbia seemed to be full of small, shabby groups addressing themselves in sly undertones to the petty conspiracies devoted to the cause of running down a buck without physical effort.
Toro and Acosta had what the Columbia calls a suite, which was a sitting room not much larger than a phone-booth leading into a small double bedroom.
“Ah, my dear Mr. Lewis,” Acosta said when he came to the door and did his little bow. He looked very dapper in his bow-tie and black smoking jacket, with his long-handled cigarette holder and a book under his arm.
“Disturbing you?”
“Please? Oh, no—no, I am just passing the time studying English.” He held the grammar out to show me.
“This is one language I’m glad I learned early,” I said.
“Yes, the verbs—the verbs are very difficult,” Acosta agreed. “But you have a fine language. Not so musical as Spanish perhaps, but very virile, very strong.”
“That’s us all right,” I said.
He led me to the most comfortable chair and bowed me into it with the automatic deference of a headwaiter. “Please,” he said. From the bottom drawer of the desk he brought forth a half-empty bottle which he placed on the coffee table with a nice little flourish.
“Please, you will have a little brandy?” He touched the bottle fondly. “I bring this all the way from Mendoza.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think I’d better pass. I’ve been on whisky all day, and this is the only stomach I’ve got.”
Acosta laughed the way men do when they don’t understand.
“Well, how do you feel about California?” I said.
“Oh, I am very excite—excited,” Acosta said. “All my life I have hear—heard of Los Angeles. Some say it is even more beautiful than our own Mar del Plata. And I think for El Toro it will be very good too. He will have a climate more like he is use to. Here it is so humedo. Perhaps that is why he has look so sluggish in the ring.”
I had said everything there was to say on the subject of Toro’s ability that afternoon, so I didn’t grab at this one as it went by.
“Where is Toro, by the way?”
Acosta pointed to the bedroom. “Already in the bed asleep. Poor El Toro. Tonight he feel very bad. He feel he has make this afternoon a very poor showing and he has the wish to go home to Santa Maria. I try to explain to him that now with the interest of Mr. Latka and Mr. McKeogh he will make more money than Luis Firpo. But you know how boys are. Now and then they get the homesickness.”
“He doesn’t really like to fight? He hasn’t really got his heart in it, has he, Luis?”
Acosta had a disarming smile. “The killing instinct, he does not have, perhaps no. But with a man of his strength, when Mr. McKeogh has teach him how to punch…”
“Does he get this thing very often, the homesickness?”
“Oh, it is nothing,” Acosta assured me. “In the morning after a good sleep he will be hokay. I have the same trouble with him back in Mendoza. When we have first come down the mountain from Santa Maria sometimes he just sits in the truck all day long and I know he has the homesickness very bad. I feel very sorry for him, so one day I go to the daughter of a gypsy fortune teller who has a tent down the way and I say to her, ‘In my truck is a young man who is very unhappy. Here is ten pesos for you if you will go into the truck and make him happy.’ After that I find the two best ways to keep El Toro from this homesickness is to feed him very much—maybe five times a day—for he can eat like a lion, and to give him the frequent opportunity of girls, for tiene muchos huevos and his appetite for the muchachas is truly magnificent. It is fortunate for me I find this out, for without the girls I think perhaps it is possible that El Toro goes back to his village and closes the door on his big opportunity.”
Acosta’s shrewd little eyes glowed with self-importance. Oh, it was not so easy as you think to bring this giant so far up the ladder, they seemed to say. I have had tremendous difficulties to overcome. I have had to use my head.
“Since you have the charge of the public relations,” Acosta went on, “there is something I will tell you of El Toro which is of course not for the publications. He comes from such a very little village where the people know nothing of the world. So El Toro in the hands of women of experience is like arcilla…”
“Clay,” I said.
“Thank you. My English has improve a little, yes? To explain how little El Toro knows of the world, one day in Mendoza, when we are still with the circus, Señor Mendez is away having new shoes put upon the feet of the bareback horse. That evening just before the performance El Toro comes to me and says he must see the priest right away, to confess the sin of adultery. In all his life he has never commit the sin of adultery. And now he has very much fear that he will never go to heaven. Like all the people of his village, he believes everything of the Church and would rather go to heaven when he dies than lie down with Carmelita in this present life.
“ ‘With whom do you commit the adultery?’ I say to El Toro.
“ ‘With Señora Mendez,’ he says.
“ ‘Señora Mendez!’ I say. ‘But why do you bother with such an old one when the fair-grounds are full of willing muchachas?’
“ ‘I did not even want Señora Mendez,’ El Toro says to me. ‘But she comes into the truck when I am lying down. She smiles at me and comes over and sits on the edge of my cot. She talks to me and strokes my head and before I realize what has happen, I have commit the adultery.’
“ ‘Do not look so sorry, El Toro,’ I say. ‘With Señora Mendez you cannot be blame for committing the adultery. Every time Señor Mendez goes into the city for the day, Señora Mendez commits the adultery. Señora Mendez has now almost forty years, and she has been committing the adultery twice a month since she is sixteen. So if it is a sin to be a contribuidor to a lady’s five hundred and seventy-fifth adultery, it is surely nothing more than the very little tiniest sliver of a sin.’ ˮ
“If he pulls anything like that up here,” I said, “the public is off him like a shot. We like our heroes to eat wheaties, be good to their mothers and true to their childhood sweethearts.”
“You understan’,” Acosta said, “I only tell you this now because we are become like one big family.”
Just one big unhappy family, I thought.
“I hope I have not make El Toro sound like a bad boy,” Acosta continued. “He is only a powerful joven—youth with healthy appetites. But I tell you this, since you will have occasion to be with him much in public and perhaps can help to guard him against certain women he will meet who will have interest in him like Señora Mendez.”
Siamese twins pulling in opposite directions struggled for possession of my spine. The student of modern American writing, of Fitzgerald and O’Hara, had hired out as male nursemaid to an overgrown adolescent pituitary case who allows himself to be seduced by middle-aged bare-back riders.
The heat of the night was heavy in the airless room and the walls were too close to each other. Suddenly I had had enough of Acosta with his ungrammatical long-windedness, his charm, which was largely a matter of teeth, and his protestations of benevolence toward El Toro. If Toro had been the victim of seduction, it was a far more radical seduction than the dallying attention of Señora Mendez.
But maybe this time Toro would make it pay. He had the size. Honest Jimmy had the connections. Nick had the money. I had the tricks. And the American people, God bless them, had the credulity. You couldn’t blame them entirely. They were a little punchy too. They had taken an awful pasting from all sides: radio, the press, billboards, throwaways, even airplanes left white streamers in the sky telling them what to buy and what to need. They could really absorb punishment, this nation of radio listeners and shop-happy consumers, this great spectator nation. Only like the game fighter who smiles when he gets hit and keeps boring in for more, they were a little more vulnerable for every encounter. Now perhaps, if the winds are favorable (and if they aren’t it may be possible to move wind machines up into the wings), they will be swept on to El Toro Molina, the Giant of the Andes, come down from the mountain heights to challenge the Philistines, like Samson, and avenge a countryman’s defeat.
“Well, we’ll pick you up tomorrow about an hour before train time,” I said.
“Hokey-doke,” Acosta said. “We will be very please.”
From the bedroom came a loud somnolent groan and the sound of a heavy churning of bed-clothes. Acosta went to the bedroom door and looked in. I stood behind him, having a clear view over his shoulder. Toro had kicked off his covers and was lying naked on the bed. The bed was not long enough to accommodate him and a chair had been placed at the end of it to support his feet. This gave an unnatural appearance to the scene. It was as if a tremendous marionette, bigger than life, had been put away between performances. In sleep his face had the set, oversized features of a dummy’s head exaggerated for comedic effect.
And I thought, here we are planning his career, patterning his life, taking him to California, matching him with Coombs, surrounding him with managers, trainers, fixers, press agents, and yet he has never been consulted. I could induce the people of America to love him, hate him, respect him, fear him, laugh at him or glorify him, and yet I had never really spoken to him. What were his preferences, his feelings, his ambitions, his most intimate hungers? Who knew? Who cared? As soon ask Charlie McCarthy whether he would object to doing two extra Saturday performances. Toro had been put away for the night. When Jimmy and Nick and Danny and Doc and Vince and I were ready to pull our particular strings in a co-ordinated effort, the Giant of the Andes would be made to bend his massive torso through the ropes; another tug and his hands would go up in the stance traditional to pugilists for five thousand years; and then he would be guided through the motions calculated to please the cash customers who put their money down to see what is technically supposed to be an exhibition of the manly art of self-defense.
Restlessly Toro rolled over on his side and muttered something in Spanish that sounded like Si, si, Papá, ahora, ahorita—yes, yes, Father, now, right away. How many thousand miles was Toro from the Columbia Hotel? What little task had his father given him, so trivial and everyday and yet so deeply cut into the section of the brain that never sleeps, that keeps working on like an automatic furnace in a dark, sleep-ridden house?
Perhaps Papa Molina had told Toro to carry the completed barrels out and set them in front of the shop. Toro might have been sitting down to midday comida with his brothers and was wolfing his third helping of pollo con arroz, while his father, wiping the hot sauce from his mouth with his sleeve and patting his belly indulgently, was saying, “All right, my boys, a good meal for a good day’s work. Now back to the shop.”
Outside, the street was full of people for whom midnight is noon. Broadway was charged with their insomniac energy. Just as in a protracted visit to a hospital one often begins to feel symptoms of illness, so on Broadway in the early A.M., caught up in the restless over-stimulated going-and-coming, you suddenly find your second-wind and your eyes snap open in exaggerated wakefulness. So I turned west off Broadway, heading for the row of shabby brownstone houses between Eighth and Ninth Avenues where Shirley’s place was.
Shirley lived on the top floor, in one of those flats which turn out to be surprisingly comfortable after you’ve climbed the dark narrow stairs that look as if they should lead to a tenement. She had the whole floor, two bedrooms (with coy little boy-and-girl dolls perched at the head of each bed) a living room, a small barroom and a dinky kitchen. It wasn’t set up as a place where men came to have women. It was really a kind of informal call house, with the girls going out to work. Only once in a while, if he were someone Shirley had known a long time, a fellow could use the extra bedroom. The other part of Shirley’s business moved over the bar that usually kept busy until after the good people had punched in for their morning work. The shades were always drawn in that little room and the lighting was so discreetly low that I still remember the oppressive sense of decadence that came over me one morning when I thought I was leaving there around four and came out to face the blinding, accusing daylight and the sober, righteous inhabitants of an eight-A.M. workaday world.
I was admitted by Lucille, the dignified colored maid. From the barroom I could hear Shirley’s Capehart, her prize possession, playing one of her records: Billie Holiday, with Teddy Wilson on piano behind her, singing, “I Cried For You.” It was so dark in the little room that at first all I could see was the glow of customers’ cigarettes and Shirley behind the bar, with a drink in her hand, smoking one of her roll-your-owns. She was wearing something long, cut low in front and zipping all the way up the side that was either an evening gown that looked like a fancy housecoat or the other way around. She was singing along with Billie:
“…I found two eyes just a little bit bluer, I found a heart just a little bit truer.”
When she saw me she said “Hello, stranger,” and gave me the big squeeze. She was feeling good tonight.
The record changer had dropped on another Holiday, the slow and easy “Fine and Mellow,” and Billie’s voice, lowdown and legato, belonged in the room.
“Love is like a faucet…
It turns on and off…
Love is like a faucet…
It turns off and on…”
In the loveseat by the window a statuesque blonde with a face that would have been beautiful if it had been less frozen was trying to fit into the arms of a runty Broadway comic. Sitting on the floor with his back against a chair was a big, fine-looking Negro. In the chair, running her hands through his hair, but not getting much of a play from him, was a white woman in her late or middle thirties who looked like one of those lushes who come from very good families with plenty of lettuce. As she reached down to embrace the Negro, she brushed her drink off the arm of the chair.
Like any fastidious hostess, Shirley glared. “In about three seconds,” she said to me in an undertone the woman should have been able to hear if the flit hadn’t stopped up her ears, “I’m going to give that lush the brush.”
Leaning over the radio was a slender Latin girl with an unexpectedly beautiful face. “She’s my new girl,” Shirley said when she saw where I was looking. “Seems like a nice kid.”
We had had a talk about Latin girls once and she knew I thought they were the only ones who went into this business without losing their basic love for men or their enthusiasm for the act of love. Anglo-Saxon professionals, as a group, are a sullen, miserable lot who dispatch you with business-like efficiency or cold-blooded bitterness.
“Come here, Juanita,” Shirley said. “I want you to meet an old friend of mine.
“Isn’t she something?” she said, as we shook hands. Juanita looked down in embarrassment. She patted the girl’s hand fondly. “Have a drink, dear?”
“Coca-cola,” the girl said, making it sound Spanish.
While Juanita’s eyes were hidden in the glass, Shirley nodded toward her and then raised her eyebrows in a quick questioning gesture. I shook my head. Juanita was obviously an admirable girl, but she wasn’t what I had come for.
“How about a little gin? I’m leaving for the Coast tomorrow and I want to try and get even. This is strictly a business call.”
“Come into my parlor,” Shirley laughed. “You’re just in time to pay my bills for the month.”
I pulled the oil-cloth off the kitchen table while Shirley got some cold chicken from the icebox.
I dealt. Shirley picked up her cards and said, “Oh, you stinker.”
“Sorry dear,” I said. “I feel mighty tough tonight.”
“Want some beer with the chicken?”
“Mmmm.” My mouth was full of chicken. “Damn good chicken.”
“I fried it myself. No one else ever gets it crisp enough for me.”
Shirley played her hand skillfully and caught me with nine.
We laughed. I was beginning to feel better. I always picked up around Shirley. She generated an atmosphere of health and—yes, security. It was strange after all these years in New York that a gin game in Shirley’s kitchen with cold chicken on the table and a beer at my elbow was the closest thing to home I had found in Manhattan.
Half way through the next game, Shirley said quietly, “What gives with you and my rival your last night in town?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know. I’m loused up over there.”
“Feel like talking about it?”
Shirley seemed to be paying more attention to her cards than to my troubles, but she always had a knack of listening in a kind of detached, almost disinterested way that made it easier to go into things like these.
“I guess this Molina thing is kind of the pay-off,” I said. “She wants me to quit the business. Hell, I know it stinks. Just between us, I know Nick’s deal doesn’t smell like a rose. But at thirty-five you don’t start over so easy. I like to see the ready coming in every week.”
“How is three?” Shirley said.
“I’m dead,” I said. “Twenty-nine. That puts you over, doesn’t it?”
“A blitzeroo,” Shirley said. “Well, that’s the phone bill. Now I have to go after the rent.”
I thought she wasn’t even listening, but after she made her first discard, she went back to where I had left it, as if there had been no interruption.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Eddie, love can’t take any kind of a punch at all. If this chick of yours don’t like the fight business and you think the business is for you—well, maybe the girl is smart to knock it on the head right there.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“Don’t be too sure. This fight crowd can lead a lady a hell of a chase. Too much of this sitting around with the boys. The wives and the girl friends don’t get much of a shake. I’d never tell nobody else but you, Eddie, but this town damn near loused up Billy and me. If I hadn’t been with that sonofabitch—God rest his soul—since I was fifteen I sure in hell would have hit out for Oklahoma.”
Like everyone else, I had heard something of the highs and lows in Shirley’s relationship with the Sailor, but she had never brought it up before and I had never pressed her. But my leveling on Beth seemed to have loosened something that had been fastened tight inside her.
“You know Billy was a wild kid. He drank a lot before he started boxing serious. I guess we both did back in West Liberty. We were a couple of crazy punks. Every time I read of some kid and his babe robbing some guy who picked ’em up on the road, I think that could’ve been Billy and me. Billy wanted things awful bad. And I was so stuck on him I would’ve done anything he said. If he hadn’t turned out to be able to get things with his fists, God knows what would have happened to us.
“But one thing I’ll say for Billy in those days, he never played around. It wasn’t till he hit this town and got to be a name at the Garden and fell in with those creeps who have connections with the clubs. I felt like jumping out the window the first time it happened. It was the night of the Coslow fight that everybody said was going to be such a tough hurdle. Billy won it without even getting his hair mussed. I never went to his fights because I didn’t want to see anything happen to him, but I listened on the radio, which was almost as bad. Well, after I hear ’em counting Coslow out I get myself all fixed up because I think maybe Billy wants to celebrate. It turns out he’s got his own ideas about celebrating. He doesn’t come in till around six in the morning. He stinks of whisky and the smell of another woman is still sticking to him. Next evening when he wakes up it’s, Baby forgive me, I’ll never do it again. Six weeks later he takes the championship from Thompson in five, and I get the same shoving business all over again. After a while, I got to dreading Billy’s winning another fight. Finally he’s signed with Hyams and he won’t listen to anybody about training—tells Danny McKeogh to duck himself—thinks he can mix fighting with funning around. I guess you remember the Hyams fight. Hyams busted his nose and cut him bad under both eyes. If the referee hadn’t stopped it, he probably would’ve killed Billy. Billy was almost crazy, he had so much guts. Well, that night Billy comes home right after the fight. I keep him in bed for a week and he won’t let anybody else come near him but me, not even Danny. And he’s just as sweet and loving as a little baby.
“After that I swear to Jesus I used to actually pray that Billy would get licked. Because every time he got licked it was the same thing. He’d come home just as meek as a lamb and I’d have my Billy-baby all to myself again. I’d put cold compresses on his swellings and I’d wash the cuts and read the funnies out loud to him. I know it sounds screwy, but I swear I’d hate to see him get up out of bed.”
As she talked, something Willie Faralla told me fell into place. Willie had taken an awful shellacking from Jerry Hyams in the Garden and Willie’s state of mind was even worse than the way he looked. So he decided to drop up to Shirley’s place and have a little fun. As soon as Shirley saw him with that bad eye and his lip split down the middle, she put him right to bed. She doctored him all evening, and at last, when everybody had gone home, she had climbed into bed with Willie and let him sleep with his head on her breast. Willie stayed there for almost a week, he said. “And the funny part about it was, it was all for free.”
Willie was a good-looking kid, and he figured that Shirley just went for him in a big way. Well, a couple of weeks later Maxie Slott gets flattened in a semi at the Garden and he has heard about this Shirley deal from Willie. So he decides to try it. Now Maxie is short and chunky and has a face he could rent out to haunt houses, but Shirley takes him right to her bosom just like Willie, waits on him hand and foot and practically lives in bed with him for a week. And this, to Maxie’s amazement, is also for free. After that, any battered, beat-up pugilist who could even crawl up the three flights checks in at Shirley’s. No matter how busy she is, she always has time to bathe an ear or bring down a swollen eye. And though there isn’t a day goes by that she doesn’t get invited by the best, the only men Shirley ever goes to bed with for love are beaten prizefighters.
Not only for free, as Willie had put it, but really for love, for love of a mean little sonofabitch from West Liberty, Oklahoma, who only belonged to her when he was too bloodied and too ashamed to be seen in public. And Shirley would love him as long as she lived, though sometimes he appeared in the form of the tall, lean Faralla and sometimes in the form of the short, squat Maxie Slott.
“Hey, look at the time,” I said. “I’ve got a big day tomorrow. I mean today.”
“You can’t take any more, huh?”
“I know when I’m licked, chum. I’m throwing in the towel.”
“Okay, take another beer out of the icebox. I’ll see what this little visit cost you.”
It came to forty-two dollars. “I wish you weren’t going to California,” Shirley said. “My favorite pigeon.”
She walked me to the door. “This Molina you’re working with, he’s not exactly sensational, is he?”
“How do you know? Someone up from Stillman’s tell you?”
“No, nobody told me—not even you. That’s what made me wonder. Usually you sell your boys like you thought I was Uncle Mike.”
“Well, you’ve got to promise to keep this under your hat or down your neck or wherever you hide your secrets, but this Molina might give a third-rate lightweight a hell of a battle. But don’t say anything. Because I’m going to have him breathing down the champion’s neck.”
“All I know is what I read in the Mirror,” Shirley said.
“Thanks, Shirley, be a good girl.”
“Not too good or I’ll starve to death.” She kissed me on the cheek. “And stay away from those movie stars.”
I slapped her fondly. “I’ll say one thing for us, we have the sexiest platonic relationship in town.”