The Harder They Fall (10 page)

Vince came over and ran his hand over my hair.

‘Hello, lover,’ he said.

‘Balls,’ I said.

‘Aw, Edsie,’ Vince pouted, ‘don’t be that way. You’ve got it for me, baby.’ He threw his head back in an effeminate gesture, flouncing his fat body with grotesque coyness.

It was another Vanneman routine, always good for laughs. Humour was intended to lie in the margin of contrast between the fag act and Vince’s obvious virility. I used to wonder about it.

‘Seen him box yet?’ Vince said.

‘He’ll be out in a minute,’ I said. ‘Danny’s having Doc look him over.’

‘When you gonna break somethin’ in the papers about him?’

‘When Nick and I figure it’s time,’ I said.

‘Get him, get him!’ Vince said. ‘What are ya, a goddam primmer-donner? Damon Runyon or something? I got a right to ask. I’m a partner, ain’t I?’

Edwin Dexter Lewis, I mused, born in Harrisburg, Pa., of respectable churchgoing Episcopalians, nearly two years in the Halls of Nassau with First Group in English and a flunk in Greek, the occasional companion, intellectual and otherwise, of a Smith graduate and
Life Magazine
researcher, an imminent playwright, clearly a man of
breeding and distinction – if not of honour. At what point in what I smilingly refer to as my career was it decided that I was to become a business associate of Vincent Vanneman, two hundred and fifteen pounds of Eighth Avenue flotsam, graduate of Blackwell’s Island, egger-onner of beaten fighters, contemporary humorist and practical joker.

‘This isn’t a partnership,’ I said. ‘It’s a stock company. Just because we both have a couple of shares of the same stock doesn’t make us brothers.’

‘Whats’a matter, Eddie, can’t you take a rib any more?’ Vince grinned, wanting to be friends. ‘I just thought maybe when you put something in the paper you c’n drop in a line about me, you know, how it was me discovered the big guy.’

‘You mean how you muscled in on Acosta?’

‘I don’t like them words,’ Vince said.

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were so sensitive.’

‘What the hell you got on me?’ Vince wanted to know. ‘Why you always try to give me the business?’

‘Take it easy, Vince,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you a nice big write-up some day. All you’ve got to do is drop dead.’

Vince looked at me, spat on the floor, leant back on his fat rump and opened his
Mirror
to the double-page spread on the Latin thrush who beat up the band-leader’s wife when she surprised them in a West-Side hotel.

Behind me a familiar voice was saying, ‘I wouldn’t kid ya, Paul, I’ve got a bum what’ll give yer customers plenty of action. Never made a bad fight in his life.’

I looked around to see Harry Miniff talking to Paul Frank, matchmaker for the Coney Island Club. Harry’s hat
was pushed back on his head as usual and a dead cigar hung between his lips as he talked.

‘You don’t mean that dog Cowboy Coombs, for Chrisake?’ Paul said.

Miniff wiped the perspiration from his lip in a nervous gesture. ‘Whaddya mean, dog? I’ll bet ya fifty right now Coombs c’n lick that Patsy Kline who’s supposed to be such a draw out at Coney.’

‘I need somebody for Kline a week from Monday,’ Paul admitted. ‘But Patsy figures to murder an old man like Coombs.’

‘Whaddya mean, old?’ Miniff demanded. ‘Thirty-two! You call that old? That ain’t old. Fer a heavyweight that ain’t old.’

‘For Coombs it’s old,’ Paul said. ‘When you been punched around fifteen years, it’s old.’

‘I tell ya, Coombs is in shape, Paul,’ Miniff insisted, but the desperate way he said it made it sound more like a plea than a statement of fact. ‘And win or lose, he’s a crowd-pleaser. Ya know that, Paul. Kline’ll know he’s been in a fight.’

‘What about that last one up in Worcester?’ Frank said.

‘T’row that one out,’ Miniff dismissed it, reaching quickly into his coat pocket and coming up with a handful of worn newspaper clippings. ‘Sure, sure, in the record book it’s a TKO for La Grange. But read what they said about us in the Worcester papers. Coombs woulda gone for a win if he hadn’a busted his hand on the other bum’s head. Here you c’n read about it right here!’

He held the clippings up in front of Paul’s face, but the matchmaker waved them away.

‘How’s the hand now?’ Paul said.

‘Good’s new, good’s new,’ Miniff assured him. ‘You don’t think I’d send one of my boys in with a bum duke, do ya?’

‘Yes,’ Paul said.

Miniff wasn’t hurt. There was too much at stake to be hurt: five hundred dollars if he talked Paul Frank into using the Cowboy with Patsy Kline. One sixty-six for Miniff’s end. And he could improve that a little if he held out a few bucks on Coombs’ share of the purse. Miniff could use that kind of money. The Forrest Hotel, on 49th Street, had put up with Miniff’s explanations for six or seven months.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, Paul,’ Miniff said. ‘If you want to be absolutely sure that your customers get their money’s worth before Kline puts the crusher on Coombs …’ He paused and looked around with a conspirator’s discretion. ‘Come on out’n the sidewalk,’ he said, ‘where we can talk private.’

‘Awright,’ Paul agreed, unenthusiastically. ‘But cut it off short.’

Relaxed and poker-faced, Paul moved toward the wide doorway with the undersized, overanxious director of the destiny of Cowboy Coombs hanging onto his arm and talking up into his face, sweating to make a buck.

Toro had to duck his head to fit through the doorway from the locker room. Usually the boys were so absorbed in their own workouts that they hardly looked up. I’ve seen the biggest draws in the business working shoulder to shoulder with some fifty-buck preliminary boy and nobody seeming to know the difference. But when Toro came in,
everything seemed to stop for a second. He was dressed in black – long black tights and a black gym shirt which would have reached the ankles of the average Stillman boxer. In his clothes, which had been at best haphazardly fit, he had loomed to elephantine proportions. One felt overawed by a shapeless mass. But stripped down to gym clothes, the mass became moulded into an immense but well-proportioned form. The shoulders, growing out of the long, muscular neck, were a yard wide but tapered sharply to a lean, firm waist. The legs were massive, with tremendously developed calves, and biceps the size of cantaloupes stood out in his arms. The short-legged Acosta, Danny, and Doc Zigman, the hunchbacked trainer, coming out of the locker room with Toro, looked like stubby tugs escorting a giant steamer. Danny, the tallest of the three, a man of average height, only reached his shoulder.

Toro moved into the big room slowly, shyly, and again I had the impression of a great beast of burden moving along with an obedient eye on its master. Acosta looked up and said something to Toro, and he began to go through
warming-up
calisthenics. He bent at the waist and touched his toes. He sat on the floor and raised his enormous torso until his head was between his legs. He was limber and, for a man of his size, surprisingly agile, though he didn’t perform his exercises with the authority, the zip, of the boxers around him. Again I had the image of an elephant that performs its feats in the circus ring. Slowly, mechanically and with a sullen acquiescence, it executes every command its trainer gives it.

When Danny thought he had warmed up enough, Acosta and Doc prepared him for the ring. They fastened around his neck the heavy leather headgear that protected the fighter’s ears and the vulnerable areas of the brain. They fitted over his teeth the hard, red rubberised mouthpiece. With the big sixteen-ounce training gloves on his hands he climbed up to the ring; the bulky headgear and the way the mouthpiece exaggerated the already abnormal size of his mouth gave him the frightening appearance of an ogre from some childhood fairy tale. On the apron, just before climbing through the ropes, he paused a moment and looked over the hundred-odd spectators staring up at him with casual curiosity. He would never face a more critical audience. Some of them were Eighth Avenue
aficionados
who paid four bits to Curley at the door for the privilege of seeing some favourite scrapper knock his sparring partners silly. But most of Toro’s audience were professional appraisers who chewed their cigars with cold disdain and sized up the newcomers with shrewd eyes.

‘Moliner,’ Stillman said matter-of-factly, his gravel voice lost in the general hubbub, and Toro climbed into the ring. Toward the ring at a shuffling pace came big, easy-natured George, muttering one of his favourite songs:

Danny put his hand on George Blount’s heavy black forearm to give him last-minute instructions on how he wanted him to fight Toro, the different points of Toro’s style he wanted George to test. I saw the Negro nod with his warm, good-humoured smile. ‘You get it like you want it, Mr McCuff,’ George said, climbing up into the ring with the businesslike air of a labourer punching in for a hard day’s work.

The bell rang and George shuffled toward Toro amiably. He was a big man himself, six foot two and around two fifteen, but he fought from a crouch, hunching his head down into his thick shoulders to present a difficult, weaving target. He could be a troublesome fighter, though men who knew what they were doing straightened him up with right-hand uppercuts, reached through his short, club-like arms to score with stiff jabs and stopped him with a hard right-hand over the heart every time he flat-footed in for his roundhouse, haphazard attack. Toro held his long left hand out as Acosta had undoubtedly schooled him and pushed his glove toward George’s face in what was supposed to be a jab. But there was no snap to it. George waded in, telegraphing a looping left, and Toro moved as if to avoid it, but his timing was off and he caught it on the ribs. George walked around Toro, giving him openings and feeling him out, and Toro turned with him awkwardly, holding out that left hand, but not knowing what to do with it. George brushed it aside and threw another left hook. It caught Toro in the pit of the stomach, and he grunted as they went into a clinch.

Acosta was leaning against the ropes just below them,
tensed as if this was for the championship of the world and not just the warm-up round of a training workout. He shouted something up to Toro in shrill Spanish. Toro charged in, moving his body with awkward desperation, and hit George with a conventional one-two, a left to the jaw and a right to the body. George just shook them off and smiled. Despite the size of the body from which they came, there was no steam to Toro’s punches. His fists shot out clumsily without the force of his body behind them. George moved around him again, ducking and weaving in the old-time Langford style, and Toro tried his one-two again, but George easily slipped his head out of reach of the left, caught the slow right on his glove and drew Toro into a clinch again, tying him up with his left hand and his right elbow, but managing to keep his right glove free to work into Toro’s stomach.

The bell rang and Toro walked back to his corner, shaking his head. Acosta jumped into the ring, talking and gesticulating excitedly, jabbing, uppercutting, knocking George down in pantomime. Toro looked at him gravely, nodding slowly and occasionally looking around in bewilderment, as if wondering where he was and what was happening.

The second round was no better for Toro than the first. George was moving around him with more confidence now, cuffing him almost at will with open-gloved lefts and rights. Acosta cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted,
‘Vente, El Toro, vente
!’ Toro lunged forward with all his might, swinging so wildly with his huge right arm that he missed George completely and plunged heavily into the ropes.
Some of the spectators laughed. It made them feel better.

Just before the round ended, Danny caught George’s eye and nodded. George closed his gloves and crowded Toro into a corner, where he feinted with his left, brought Toro’s guard down and cracked a hard right to the point of Toro’s jaw. Toro’s mouth fell open and his knees sagged. George was going to hit him again when the bell rang. Like a man who drops his hammer at the first sound of the whistle, George automatically lowered his hands, ambled back to his corner, took some water from the bottle, rolled it around in his mouth, spat it out, and, with the same easygoing smile with which he had entered the ring, climbed out again.

Toro leant back against the ropes and shook his head in a gesture of confusion. For two rounds his giant’s body had floundered as if it had lost all connection with the motor impulses in his brain.

Acosta was at Toro’s side quickly, wiping the sweat from his large, solemn face while Doc Zigman kneaded the long thick neck with his capable fingers. Then, while Acosta held the ropes apart for him, Toro climbed ponderously out of the ring.

‘Didja see that big bastard?’ a regular behind me said. ‘Couldn’t lick a postage stamp.’

‘From one of them chile-bowl countries,’ said his companion. ‘El Stinkola, if you understan’ Spanish.’

I turned to Vince, who was quiet for a change. ‘You sure know how to pick them,’ I said.

‘Don’t jump me,’ he said. ‘Nick’s the brain and he thinks he can build ’im.’

‘If we could only get them to decide the championship
on form like a beauty contest, Toro would walk away with it. But how can a guy who looks so invincible when he’s standing still turn into such a bum when he starts moving?’

‘Danny can teach him plenty,’ Vince said.

‘Danny’s the best,’ I agreed. ‘But if Danny knows how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, he’s been holding out on us.’

‘Why don’t you try talkin’ like everybody else?’ Vince said. ‘All them five-dollar expressions, nobody knows what the futz you’re talkin’ about.’

‘In other words, you become nobody by self-appointment,’ I said. ‘You got something there, Vince.’

George was leaning against the wall near the ring, waiting to go another round with a new Irish heavyweight from Newark, just up from the amateurs. I could recognise a couple of lines of the song that seemed to play continually in his head.