Boswell (9 page)

You can imagine, then, what the Hercules/strength equation must have meant to a man like The Great Sandusky. He could afford it, you say. Yes, but it hurt.

“He was a strong guy, sure, but could he have had better developed lumbar lats than that?” Sandusky has asked, his feet a careful nineteen inches apart, his hands locked in impossible tug-of-war behind his neck. He couldn’t have. In his prime Felix Sandusky had the biggest lumbar lats in the business. According to Sandusky, “Hercules got a good press only because the rest of your Greeks were little men. Sure, vitamins have killed the strong-man game. People are taller now, bigger in the arms, the legs, the chest. You hear a lot of talk about longevity, statistics about the average man living thirty or forty years longer than his great-grandfather, but that’s only half the story. Your trunks are vaster now. Look, it’s like anything else. It’s all contrast. Everybody has force.” (Sandusky liked to call his strength force.) “But if a guy has only a little force then a guy with just average or a little better than average force is a big deal. Hercules could probably take care of himself, but your general run-of-the-mill Greek was a guy with lousy force. So don’t tell me about Hercules! What with health foods and wonder drugs and vitamins and scientific weight training it takes a real man to stand out today. Every Tom, Dick and Harry has force today.”

Getting to meet The Great Sandusky was my first campaign.

I left Penner’s as elated as I had ever felt. Twenty- four hours before I had been broke. Since then I had earned twelve dollars and still had more than eight, which meant that I was
getting,
including expenditures, at a rate of better than seven-hundred-fifty per cent. That was very high-grade
getting
for me and quality
keeping
for anyone. Furthermore, I had made a decision which would change my life: a decision not to mess around. Herlitz helps him who helps himself.

In the gymnasium, daydreaming, just before sleep on the tumblers’ mats I had pulled down from the wall, the idea came to me: The Great Sandusky. The very name was a revelation. The Great Sandusky. We were both strong men of the world. He would help me. That he was in the city was common knowledge to all the regulars in the gym. It was Penner who had shown me the feature article on him in the paper. It said he lived now in a hotel near the river. I would write him. The Great Sandusky. Of course!

I let myself into the gymnasium office, took three sheets of stationery, and wrote:

The Great Sandusky

Riverside Hotel

2nd and Steamboat Streets

St. Louis, Missouri

Dear Sir,

I am an admirer of yours. Not simply because of your feats (which no man could gainsay), but because I am a strong man myself and know what effort was involved in the accomplishment of those feats. I should like very much to meet with you in order to discuss your achievements and to talk over with an expert certain plans of my own. Please arrange whatever appointment would be convenient to you. May I close by saluting a pioneer in strength and by remaining yours very truly, etc., etc.

I wrote it several times until it was awkward and stiff enough. Then I signed the letter and addressed the envelope. At the last moment I had an idea that would demonstrate my earnestness. I hunted around in the office until I found a couple of nails. These I bent and put into the envelope with the letter.

I supposed I would hear from him within two days. What the hell, an old man, out of condition, in a lousy water-front hotel—he would answer as soon as he got the letter. He would go downstairs and beg a few sheets of hotel stationery from the night clerk and painstakingly scratch out a reply. He didn’t. I heard nothing. On the fourth day I wrote again:

Dear Sandusky,

Perhaps you thought my last letter insincere, the work of a crank, or the teasing joke of a jealous man. I assure you neither assumption fits the case. I have the greatest respect for your feats. I know of your fabulous cow lift. A picture of you pulling the locomotive is in my wallet at this moment next to my mother’s own [with my crummy eight dollars, buddy] and I should like to assure myself that a life given over to the cultivation of strength reaps rewards in later age commensurate with the Spartan, with the
Herculean
[knew what I was doing] efforts necessary to develop that strength.

Remembering what I had read in the papers I crossed out “strength“ and wrote “force.” “I am a professional myself, sir,” I finished, and signed the letter.

Instead of two nails I enclosed a half-inch spike which I paid a professional machinist to heat and bend for me. This time Sandusky would certainly answer. When he didn’t I was more surprised than hurt. Then it occurred to me that, after all, he was now an old man. Perhaps he was dead. I called his hotel.

“May I speak to The Great Sandusky?”

“He ain’t in.”

“Please, it’s important.”

“There’s no phone in the room.”

“I don’t care what you give the cops to keep your license. I’ll see to it that Fire Chief Lesbeth hears about every one of those violations. You’ll be out of there so fast your head will spin. Get Sandusky.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Jimmy Boswell, that’s who it is.”

“Just a minute. I’ll see if he’s back.”

He went away.

“Hey, Boswell. The old man won’t speak to you. Says to tell you the spike is a cheap trick, that any jackass with reasonable force could bend a friggin’ spike.”

He hung up.

So, I thought. He had hubris, the old man. So much the better. The great are touchy folk. They are goosey. The goosey great. I give them every credit. It’s a free history, right?

I wrote a third letter:

My dear Sandusky [I began], I appreciate your reluctance to meet with outsiders, with the jackals who feed off the greatness of others. Let me be frank. I read the feature about you in the papers. It was disgusting. If I were a lawyer I would advise a suit. It made your efforts appear comical. The reporter’s insistence on your emphasis on the sub-scale of ordinary Greeks was a deliberate attempt to offset scientific observations by making them appear hobby-horsey. To provide amusement for weak, fat-ridden office workers. What does an outsider know? Has he sweated under the strain of a bench-lift; has he felt the pull of the jerk-and-press; the thrill of the curl; the back-hoist; the arm wrenching, shoulder wrecking agony of the dead lift? I am a strong man, Sandusky, and I have a legitimate historical interest in your training. If bending half-inch spikes is labor for a child then what is this?

I enclosed a twisted one-inch spike.

I received no reply, but in the mail three days later was a package for me. In it was the spike. Sandusky had straightened it.

In a hardware store I bought two pounds of iron filings. I put them in a box and sent them to Sandusky.

Two days later there was a post card addressed to me in the gym office. On the front was a picture of a sunset over some southern resort hotel. On the back was one word: “Come.”

I went to Sandusky’s hotel that same night. It was very ratty. The numerals on the control buttons in the single narrow elevator were smudges. Behind a clouded glass at the rear of the elevator was a faded picture of a rooster. “Good Morning!” it crowed. “Have Breakfast in the Wake-Up Room!” Beneath it a sign warned, “Room service is dis-continued after midnight.” Another sign said, “Laneur Hospitality Is World Famous. A Laneur Guest Is an Important Person.” Under this someone had written “Fuck you.” I read the inspection certificate. There was some very tiny print and seals and stamps and then the legend: “This elevator is authorized to carry no more than nine hundred (900) lbs. This elevator was last inspected on
April 10, 1939.”
It was signed illegibly. I looked at the heavy, raised brass OTIS medallion on the clumsy control at the front of the elevator. The control itself looked like something you drove a trolley with. I pulled the handle back and forth but nothing happened. The thick, important-looking handle slid uselessly to and fro in the wide slot.

The elevator moved slowly up to Sandusky’s floor. The cock crowed good morning. Room service warned. Laneur boasted. Guests retaliated. Authority regulated. It was a babble of silent, hopeless, irrelevancy. Inauspicious, I thought, inauspicious. The corridors on Sandusky’s floor smelled like a men’s room in a railroad station. What a masculine smell, I thought. I knocked on the door. There was something like a nervous, surprised little movement behind it, but no one answered. I knocked again.

“Who’s that?” a voice said.

I knocked.

“Who’s that, I said.”

“It’s Big Boswell,” I answered powerfully.

“No,” the voice said, “go away.”

“Sandusky, is that you?”

“Go away, I said.”

“I was invited. It’s Giant Jim. I must see you.”

“No,” the voice said. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

“You invited me, Sandusky. It’s Giant Jim Big Boswell. I have to talk to you.”

“Leave me alone, I said. Go away.”

“Is that you, Great?”

“No.”

“It is. I’ve come miles. From Idaho where I train. Where I carry trees up mountains to train. Let me in.”

“No, I said.”

“All right, Sandusky, I’ve had enough. You saw what I did to that spike. How much easier it would be for me to do the same thing to this door! I warn you.”

“Listen, you get out of here. I don’t have to see anybody.”

“All right, Sandusky. I warned you. Now I’m going to break your door. I’ll make wood shavings out of it. You could put them on a floor in a butcher shop.”

“Stop,” the voice said. “I’ll open the door.”

It opened. “Sandusky?”

“Come inside.”

“The Great Sandusky?”

“Don’t make bad jokes. Come inside.”

There was a mistake. In his pictures Sandusky was a huge man with a great shining massive skull, the famous “battering ram.” He was bulky rather than muscular, meaty, red-fleshed, faintly Tartar, a circus poster strongman in leopard-skinned dishabille, one furred strap tight across a wide and straining shoulder. He was fearful even in the photographs, like some strange wet animal. On a circus poster the man before me might have looked like the company’s advance man, nothing more. He was shorter than Sandusky could possibly have been, and if his appearance suggested that he had ever been in athletics it was because he looked so much like a vaguely seedy high school basketball coach who had known his share of point shavers, gamblers and hoods. A baggy sharkskin business suit gave him the careless, spilled-soup look of the insider, the man who breaks training. His fingers had the mustardy nicotine blotches of the revolutionary, and indeed, against the background of his hotel he looked like some out-of-date anarchist.

We looked at each other narrowly for a moment and then the man, smiling, offered me his hand. It’s a trick, I thought immediately. This was a hand which had crushed rocks. For all its shabby appearance of disuse and even disease, it would attempt to crush my own. He would break my fingers, would he? All right, I thought, we’ll see. Trying to appear as casual as he I let him have my hand. As soon as we touched I braced and squeezed first; there was no resistance, and I pressed the hand as I would a sponge. As he pulled his arm away I saw that I had made a mistake.

“Do you want to kill me? Is that the way you show your respect?”

“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly. “I was trying to impress you.”

“You would impress me better if you behaved yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me.”

It was my flaw. If I met a great athlete I tried to crush his hand; a great banker, I cashed a check. Herlitz, that magician, was right again. I was a fourth—Boswell, the world’s sad fourth, who played other people’s games by other people’s rules. A reader of labels, of directions, a consumer on the most human of levels. Vampire. Sancho. Jerk.

Sandusky, if the little man
was
Sandusky, was backing away from me and rubbing his hand. I apologized again. He sat on the edge of his unmade bed.

“I made a mistake,” I said.

“All right,” he said, “forget it.”

“It was stupid of me. I’m sorry.” I apologized some more. I saw it gave him courage.

“Three years ago,” he said at last, “I would have thrown you through the wall for that.”

“Yes.”

“I would have torn off your head.”

“Yes,” I said. “Certainly you would have.”

“I had a terrible temper.”

“I heard that.”

“I was a wild man of Borneo in a side show when I was a young man and they had to let me go I was so realistic.”

“I read that somewhere,” I said.

“I once broke a man’s back who got too close to my cage.”

“Didn’t the police—”

“The rube called me a fake and threw peanuts. What police? What could they do, put handcuffs on me?
Handcuffs?”

“They would have been like so much string,” I said.

“Yeah, string,” he said. “Crap, what does it mean? You see what happens to a man?” He held up his hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

He ignored me.

“Did you think Sandusky would be like this?” he asked. “I was hiding out. I don’t know how that reporter found me. How do they know those things? He used old pictures. I made him do that. You know what surprises me most?” He looked up at me. “Sit down.” I looked around for the first time, and noticed that except for the bed and a chest of drawers there was no furniture in the room. I had to perch on the edge of the bed with Sandusky. I sat carefully, prissily. Only roommates plop down on each other’s beds. A gentleman uses another man’s bed as he would another man’s car; it is highly personal machinery. Still, I thought, remembering my feelings when I had sat in the office with Herlitz, there is something deeply feminine in me. I thought absently of all the thank-you notes I would one day write.

“What surprises me most is the pain,” Sandusky said. “As an athlete yourself, you know that training is an accommodation to pain. That’s all. A champion is a man who has mastered pain. You’d think my training would have accustomed me to it.” He lowered his voice. “They want to throw me out of the hotel. I holler. At night. I holler.”