Boswell (14 page)

When I got back to Jersey City I told Alconi I would have to have more training.

He grinned. “Tough. Felix said you was tough.” I rubbed my neck sentimentally. “Rough, huh? Trip’s been rough?” “A cob, Mr. Alconi.”

“Sure. It’s the gym does it. All the time developing yourself against instruments, against metal, when what you need’s contact with human beings. Where’s the fight in a bar bell?”

“That must be it.”

“Sure,” Alconi said. “You need the old smash.” He ground his fist against his palm. “The old kaboom. The old grrr-rr-agh.” He pulled some air down out of the sky, cradled it in the crook of his right elbow, and strangled it. “The old splat cratch.” He kneed an invisible back. “The old fffapp!” He grabbed handfuls of invisible hair and gouged invisible holes in invisible eye sockets.

“With all due respect, Mr. Alconi, that’s not what I need,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been getting. What I need is to learn to protect myself against that.”

“Sure,” he said. “I understand, kid. Only I’m not your trainer, you realize. As your manager I get thirty- four per cent of your purses. As your trainer I’d be entitled to another”—he considered my bruises—“fifteen per cent.”

“Sure,” I said.

“That would still leave you with fifty-one per cent of yourself. You’d be in command.”

“Chairman of the Board, as it were,” I said.

“Yeah,” Alconi laughed. “That’s right, Chairman of the Board.”

I slept on it. The next day I went up to Alconi again. “Who’d pay expenses?” I asked. I had been paying my own.

Alconi frowned. “What the hell,” he said, “we’ll take the railroad expenses off the top, the gross. We’ll split.”

“Okay,” I said.

We signed a new contract and I went back to my hotel and renewed auld lang syne with a pharmacist I had been keeping.

In the morning Alconi called me over to his office in the gym. “Boswell,” he said, “Jimmy, you lucked out. I got a class of ladies starting Monday and I’m registering you.”

“Ladies!”

“Girls.
Female wrestlers.”

“You want me to train with girls,” I said.

“Jimmy,” he said, winking evilly, “it’s better than bar bells.”

“Sure.”

“The coming thing,” he said expansively. “Lady wrestlers. The wave of the future, Jimmy. I can foresee the time when they’ll be girl tag teams, girl midgets, interracial girl wrestling, mixed matches with men.”

“Interracial
mixed matches with men,” I said.

“Let’s go slow, Jimmy,” he said.

At first I was shy. After all, it’s an odd feeling to see the world strapped across the thick, broad shoulders of some nubile young lady, an extraordinary concept to be struggling for air nuzzled against the breast of some matronly female giant. But I got used to it, and soon began even to enjoy myself. This was frequently and embarrassingly apparent even to the young ladies. Ultimately, for everyone’s protection, Alconi’s male instructor had to put me on a private crash program. It wasn’t the same.

Training with ladies, however, even for as brief a period as I did, had an oblique side effect on my style. For a long time I was reluctant around the area of my opponent’s chest. Understanding the cause, I. attributed this to some innate though grossly misdirected sense of decency on my part, but it was noticed by the fans and their explanations leaked back to me. “He’s a chicken,” some said. “No,” said the others, “he killed a man once in Canada with a bear-hug and he’s afraid he might do it again.”

I emerged from my training somewhat better prepared for the professional knockabout I had engaged for. I had learned, as Sandusky put it, to fall. This is useful knowledge, as everyone knows.

For a year I wrestled everywhere—earning, curiously, different reputations in different parts of the country. I was too small-time, you see, for it to matter much. In the Southeast, for example—the Memphis-Nashville-Mobile-Birmingham-Little Rock-Jackson-Biloxi-Jacksonville-Tampa-Savannah-Atlanta circuit—I nearly always won. (Alconi explained why. I was, as Bogolub was to tell me later, clean-cut, a Protestant, Mr. Universe type, Anglo-Saxon all the way.) But in the coal mining Middle Atlantic states I always lost, for the same reasons that I was let win in the South. Elsewhere it was the same pattern. Here a winner, there a loser. I was earning a little more money now, though the fact that the instructor had to give me private lessons upped Alconi’s take a couple of per cent and I was no longer Chairman of the Board.

It went like that, as I say, for about a year. But at about the time I had the row with Bogolub in Los Angeles, Alconi suddenly died. He left no heirs, absolutely none, and my contract reverted back to myself. It was like having my salary doubled, and when Bogolub threatened to cut me off in Los Angeles, and perhaps wherever he had influence in the West, I stood to lose something for the first time in my life.

That’s why I had apologized.

Bogolub explained that if I assumed a new identity I could no longer wrestle on the West Coast as myself. “That’s all right,” I said. He looked at me narrowly. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Some guys mind.”

He wanted me to stay over in Los Angeles a few . more days to talk over plans, line up new matches (most of them with men I was already scheduled to meet), and sign new contracts. I had to cancel matches in Sacramento and Berkeley. Bogolub was so excited about launching a new career for somebody that he agreed to split the forfeit fee with me. When I saw him two days later he asked me if I had any ideas.

“About what?”

“About what? About the costume!”

I hadn’t thought about it, but I
remembered something Sandusky once told me about his Wild Man of Borneo days. I used that as a base and made up the rest as I went along. I tried to seem enthusiastic. I would paint my body green, I told Bogolub, and wear a monster mask. There would be fangs, and saliva could drip down from them like stuff coming off stalactites. I could call myself “The Wolf Man” and explain my complexion by the fact
that I
was raised in a cave in Bavaria until I was eighteen.

Bogolub listened to me and seemed to be considering it thoughtfully, but after a while he frowned.

“It’s no good,” he said at last. “It’s too corny.”

“Gee, I liked it,” I told him.

“Nah,” Bogolub said, “what’d happen when you sweat? The green paint. It’s no good.”

“How about an executioner’s mask? I could wear an executioner’s mask that goes all the way down to my shoulders. With big holes for the eyes and the nostrils.”

“You ain’t got the body for it,” he said professionally. “You got a young body. That’s what we’ve got to start with.”

I nodded gravely.

“Sure,” he said. “We got to work on that angle of it. We can’t make you into something horrible when you ain’t.”

“You can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse,” I said brightly.

Bogolub didn’t answer; he was lost in thought. After a while he smiled and patted his stomach affectionately.

“Have you got an idea?”

“I think so, I
think
so. How would this be? We put you in a white silk mask—like The Lone Ranger’s, only white. And you wear white trunks and a beautiful white silk cape. And white shoes. Nothing else. Very simple. You’re The Masked Playboy. You wear the mask because you’re really a millionaire’s kid and you don’t want your parents to know that you’re wrestling professional because it would break their hearts.
‘THE HIGH SOCIETY WRESTLER! WHO IS HE?’
How’s that?”

So I became The Masked Playboy. I remembered the reaction in the picture when José Iturbi played boogie-woogie. It was our instinct to applaud such acts, to wink at Carmen Miranda with Dickie Dobber when the time came. The secret handshake of the eye. Classical was only fancy, but popular was good. And when we said good we
meant
good, God’s good. Little was big and weak was strong and poor was rich. The ultimate, the crowning glory, was what I was to stand for, to demonstrate behind my silk mask—like The Lone Ranger’s, only white—that rich was poor, that alive will one day be dead. Applause. Cheers. Winks.

This was in the early days of the baroque wrestler and Bogolub’s maneuver was very successful. Now it was arranged for me to win fairly regularly. Bogolub explained the motivation. Why, after all, would a millionaire playboy like myself continue to wrestle if he lost? He would
have
to be a pretty good wrestler. Bogolub was pleased with his invention, and I began to have more and more dates on the West Coast. Once Bogolub explained to me that my masquerade was actually helping free enterprise and capitalism. There was far too much crap going around about the working classes, he said; if Americans were made to see how tough and down to earth a rich man’s son could be they would sit up and take notice and it would be good for business.

For five months I toured, climbing the country in busy, sooty eastern and central tours, a wrestler in industrial towns, a loser, comic relief for the day shift. Making the more leisurely long, low southern lope, a whipper of Wops, a Spic scourger, Hebe hitter, Polack pounder—the White Hope of God Knows What. Then the western trip. Quick—off with the horn-rimmed glasses, into the cape, the mask, the white shoes. The Capitalist’s Friend, Free Enterprise’s Prize. A Masked Playboy who didn’t need the money but beat up guys to show he was regular. Like Christ, really—who couldn’t use the death but died anyway to show he was regular.

All this was in the preliminaries, of course. Alarums and excursions without. In the anteroom of history, as it were—the man who fights the man who fights the man who fights the man who one day saves or kills the king.

Then one evening, six months after putting on the silk mask in Los Angeles, I was having dinner with a promoter in Columbus, Ohio.

“I was out with Barry Bogolub a couple of weeks ago. He came East on a scouting tour. You work for him, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, he was telling me. Seems you got this gimmick going for you in LA. Mystery Playboy or something.”

“The Masked Playboy.”

“Yeah, that’s right, he was telling me.”

“What about it?”

“Nothing. It sounds good. Next time you’re in Columbus, bring your mask.”

So, gradually, the real Boswell began to fade. Long live Boswell. I wrestled increasingly as The Masked Playboy. In hick towns there were write-ups in the paper. I gave out interviews. I’d sit in my hotel room drinking expensive Scotch, a silken ascot around my neck, my legs crossed, staring democratically at the reporter across from me.

“Yes, that’s right. Educated at Cambridge. But I told Father at the time that I shouldn’t be content with a sedentary rich man’s life. He thought it a youth’s threat, of course, and meanwhile I developed my body to what you see now.”

“Were you actually in the Four Hundred?”

“Well, not actually. There was some nasty business some years ago about an uncle in trade. If I had to place the family, I’d put it somewhere in the low Five Hundreds.”

“I see,” the reporter would say, tiredly. Then, “You’re not supporting the family now, of course—it hasn’t…”

“Fallen on harder days? No, I should think not. Otherwise I might be able to take off this damnable mask. No, no, the Van Bl— whoops, I mean the
family,
the family is monied.”

“They’ve got a lot of money,” he’d say, writing it down.

“Oh, Lord yes, I should say so. But a fellow likes to earn a bit of his own, you know.”

“Of course.”

Of course.

Articles began to appear about me in the magazines. There was an editorial in
Ring;
my sort of “showmanship” might proliferate, it warned, and bring about the further vulgarization of a once noble sport. Other magazines, the body-building books and that sort, took the story—or pretended to take it—at face value, passing it on to their readers (who
were
those people anyway? more boogie-woogie winkers, I suppose) so that it actually gained in translation. I wrestled, they said, only in those towns where I had factories or brokerage offices or banks.

I was bigger now, more important than I had ever been as myself, and the lesson was not lost on me. For the first time I began to take the wrestling seriously. As the months went by I gathered more and more of a reputation; there was even talk that one day I would be a serious contender for the championship. Which brings me back to St. Louis and my first appearance in a main event.

Bogolub had told me on the night he wanted to throw me out of wrestling that I might one day have been a contender, that he’d had his eye on me. Perhaps it was true. I doubt it, but perhaps it was. Probably he said it to add a fillip to my loss, to start in the young man’s mind the old man’s myth, “I could have been the champion—” We are instinctively ironists, tricky tragedians. But if it was not true when Bogolub said it, a year later it was.

I got a call from Bogolub one night when I was in Fargo, North Dakota.

“Boswell? Barry.”

“Yes, Mr. Bogolub?”

“Peter Laneer broke his leg in Philly last night. He was supposed to go against John Sallow in a main event in St. Louis Friday but there’s no chance of his making it. I want you to go down and take his place.”

“I can’t do it,” I said. “I’m fighting in Des Moines Friday.”

“Called off, Jimmy.”

“What about the forfeit fee?”

“Jimmy, you’re talking about peanuts. This is a main event in St. Louis I’m talking about. You’re big time now, Jimmy. Give me a call when you get to LA.” He started to hang up.

“Mr. Bogolub. Mr. Bogolub?”

“Come on, Jimmy, this is long distance. Fargo ain’t Fresno.”

“What about the arrangements?”

“Oh, yeah, in my excitement I forgot to tell you. You lose.”

“What’s that?”

“You lose. Routine number thirty-eight. Give them a show, you understand, you’re an important wrestler, but you lose. I can trust you.”

“Mr. Bogolub, the last time I was scheduled to meet him I was supposed to win.”

“He’s the next champion, Jimmy. Be a little patient, please. Give me a ring as soon as you get to LA.”

“Mr. Bogolub, I don’t want to fight him. I don’t want to fight him Friday.” I was talking to myself. Bogolub had hung up.