by John O'Hara
She went out to cover the prizefights with Doug Campbell, sports editor of the Standard. No nice women ever went to prizefights in Gibbsville, no matter what they did in New York, and Lydia’s story the next day began:
I went to the boxing match last night.
I went to the boxing match, and to be completely frank and honest, I enjoyed myself. What is this taboo that man-made convention has placed upon women going to boxing matches? Can it be that men are just a little selfish, depriving women of the fun and beauty of the boxing match? And I use the word beauty advisedly, after long and careful consideration. For there was beauty in McGovern’s Hall last night. Let me tell you about it.
To you women who cannot attend boxing matches because of the aforementioned masculine taboo that has been placed on attendance at the “fights” by women, permit me a few words of explanation. The principal contest of the evening, like all good things, is called the “wind-up” and it comes last. It follows the introductory “bouts” which are known as “preliminaries” or “prelims” I believe they were called by my friend Mr. Doug Campbell, popular sports editor of the Standard, who escorted me to McGovern’s Hall and showed me the “ropes.” In the “prelims” one sees the lesser known lights of the boxing fraternity, and it is considered a kind of obscurity to be relegated to the “prelims.” But it was in a “prelim” that I saw real beauty.
A mere strip of a lad, hardly more than a boy he was, and his name is Tony Morascho. Doug Campbell informed me that it was the début of Tony Morascho but I sincerely trust it will not be Tony’s last, for there was beauty personified, grace in every ripple of his lithe young frame, symmetry and rhythm and the speed of a cobra as it strikes the helpless rabbit. Beauty! Do you know El Grecco, the celebrated Spanish artist? Surely you do. Well, there was El Grecco, to the life….
That was how Al Grecco got his name.
He could not live the name down. The gang at the poolroom and at the gym called him El Grecco, and for a gag Packy McGovern billed him as Al Grecco on the next card. The name followed him into prison—was, in fact, waiting for him there; Lantenengo County Prison was ruled by a warden who, though no deep student of penology, believed in permitting his wards to have newspapers, cigarettes, whiskey, assignations, cards—anything, so long as they paid for it. And so when Al Grecco was sent up on the poorbox burglary matter he was not altogether unknown at the Stoney Lonesome, as the prison was called.
When Al had served his time he came out with some idea of turning square. He wanted to turn square, because he had seen so many ex-convicts in the movies who came out with one of two plans: either you turned square, or you got even with the person who got you sent up. He could not get even with Father Burns, the curate who had caught him burgling the poorbox, because it was a sacrilege to hit a priest, and anyhow Father Burns had been transferred to another parish. And so Al decided to turn square. First, though, there were two things he wanted to do. There was no one to give him money while he was in prison, and he felt he had been deprived of the two most important things you can have. He had about ten dollars, his earnings in prison, but that was not enough for a big night. He wanted twenty. So he got in a game of pool, to get his eye and his stroke back, and surprised himself by being pretty good. That gave him confidence, and he asked if he could take a cue in a money game. He lost all his money in the game and Joe Steinmetz, the crippled man who owned the place, would not stake him. Steinmetz would give him a job, he said, but no money to shoot pool with. So Al walked out of the place, wishing he had insulted Joe. Outside the poolroom, which was the next building to the Apollo hotel and restaurant, Al saw Ed Charney, sitting in his Cadillac sedan. Ed was smoking a cigar, and seemed to be waiting for someone. Al waved his hand and said, “Hyuh, Ed.” All the poolroom gang spoke to Ed, although Ed did not always answer. Now he beckoned to Al. Al made the distance to the car in three jumps.
“Hello, Ed,” he said.
“When’d you get out? Somebody spring you?” said Ed. He took his cigar out of his mouth and smiled benevolently at Al. Al was surprised and pleased that Ed Charney should know so much about him.
“No, I did my time,” he said. “I got out today.” He leaned with one arm on the rear door of the sedan. “I didn’t know you knew me.”
“I make it my business to know a lot of people,” said Ed. “How’d you like to make a sawbuck?”
“Who do you want knocked off?” said Al.
Ed glared and put the cigar back in his teeth, but then took it out again. “Don’t talk tough, kid. That don’t get you any place. That don’t get you any place except up in that jail house or else—” he snapped his fingers. “Nobody has to knock anybody off, and the sooner you get them ideas out of your head the better off you are.”
“You’re right, Ed,” said Al.
“I know I’m right. I make it my business to be right. Now if you want to make that sawbuck all I want you to do—can you drive a car?”
“Yeah. What kind? This one?”
“This one,” said Ed. “Take it out to the Gibbsville Motors or whatever you call it. English’s garage. Tell them I sent you out to have it washed and wait till they’re done with it and then bring it back here.” He reached in his pocket and took a ten-dollar bill from a roll. “Here.”
“A sawbuck for that? Do you want me to pay for washin’ it?”
“No. Charge it. I give you the sawbuck because you just got outa the can. Keep your nose clean.” Ed Charney got out of the car. “Keys in the car,” he said. He walked toward the Apollo, but turned after a few steps. “Say,” he said. “Who the hell ever told you you was a prizefighter?”
Al laughed. There was a guy for you: Ed Charney, the big shot from here to Reading and here to Wilkes-Barre. Maybe the whole State. What a guy! Democratic. Gave a guy ten bucks for doing nothing at all, nothing at all. Knew all about you. Made it his business to know all about you. That night Al Grecco did not get quite so drunk as he had planned; he waited until the next night, when he had thirty dollars from a crap game. That night he got good and drunk, and was thrown out of a house for beating up one of the girls. The day after that he took a job with Joe Steinmetz.
For three years he worked for Joe Steinmetz, more or less regularly. No one could beat him shooting straight pool, and he had great skill and luck in Nine Ball, Ouch, Harrigan, One Ball in the side and other gambling pool games. He saw Ed Charney a couple of times a week, and Ed called him Al. Ed seldom played pool, because there were only six tables in the place, and though he could have had any table by asking for it or even hinting that he wanted to play, he did not take advantage of his power. When he played he played with Snake Eyes O’Neill, the wisecracking, happy-go-lucky guy from Jersey City, who was always with Ed and, everybody said, was Ed’s bodyguard. Snake Eyes, or Snake, as Ed called him, carried a revolver unlike any Al ever had seen. It was like any ordinary revolver except that it had hardly any barrel to it. Snake was always singing or humming. He never knew the words of a song until after it was old, and he used to make sounds, “Neeyaa, ta ta ta tata, tee ta tee, laddie deetle,” instead of singing the words. He was not called Snake Eyes because he had eyes like a snake. Far from it. The name was a crapshooting term. He had big brown eyes that were always smiling. O’Neill was tall and skinny and in Al’s opinion was the snappiest dresser he had ever seen. Al counted up one time and he figured O’Neill had at least fourteen suits of clothes, all the latest cut from Broadway, New York City. Ed Charney was not a very snappy dresser. Ed had quite a few suits, but he did not change them much. His pants often needed pressing, and he often put his hat on so that the bow on the band was on the wrong side of his head. There were always cigar ashes on the lapels of his coat. But Al knew one thing: Ed wore silk underwear. He’d seen it.
In the last year before he got a job with Ed, Al frequently sat at Ed’s table in the Apollo. By that time Al was shooting such good pool that Joe cut him in on the weekly take of the poolroom, and Al had permission to use house mon
ey when he wanted to play pool for money. He was only twenty-one and thinking of buying a half interest in the place. He spent plenty, but he made plenty; anywhere from fifty to two hundred bucks a week. He had a car—a Chevvy coop. He bought a Tuxedo. He went to Philadelphia when there was a musical comedy and he knew a girl there that worked in night clubs and shows, who would sleep with him if he let her know he was coming to town. He liked the name Al Grecco, and never thought of himself as Tony Murascho. The boys who sat at Ed Charney’s table would not have known who was meant if the name Tony Murascho had been mentioned. But they knew Al Grecco for a good kid that Ed liked well enough to ask him to eat with him once in a while. Al Grecco was no pest, and did not sit at the table unless he was asked. He never asked any favors. He was the only one who ever sat at the table who had nothing to do with the stock market, and that was a big relief. All the others, from Ed Charney down, were in the market or only temporarily out of it.
Al lived then at Gorney’s Hotel, which was not quite the worst hotel in Gibbsville. He never went near his home and did not go out of his way to speak to any of his brothers or sisters if he saw them on the street. They did not try to persuade him to come home, either. When they needed money badly they would send one of the younger lads to the poolroom and Al would give the kid a five or a ten, but Al did not like this. It put him off his game. After giving away a five or a ten he would get overanxious in trying to make it up, and the result would be he would lose. He wished the old man would support his family himself. And what about Angelo and Joe and Tom; they were all older than Tony—Al. And Marie, she was old enough to get married and the other kids didn’t have to go to school all their life. He didn’t. The old man ought to be glad he didn’t have to work in the mines. Al knew that the old man would have worked in the mines, and glad to get the bigger wages, but all he could do was navvy gang work. Even so, the old man ought to be glad he had outdoor work instead of mucking in a drift or robbing pillars or being on a rock gang in tunnel work. That kind of work was hard work. Or at least Al thought so. He never had been in the mines himself—and never would, if he could help it.
One afternoon Joe Steinmetz didn’t come to work and he didn’t come to work. Joe did not like the telephone, because it interfered with a man’s privacy, and the next day when he again did not show up, Al took the Chevvy up to Point Mountain, where Joe lived with his wife. There was a crêpe on the door. Al hated to go in, but he thought he ought to…. It was Joe, all right. Mrs. Steinmetz was alone and hadn’t been able to leave the house except to have a neighbor get a doctor. Joe had died of heart disease and was good and dead by the time the doctor had sent the undertaker.
Joe left everything to his wife. She wanted Al to work for her, keep the poolroom going, and at first he thought it would be a good idea. But a few days of taking the day’s receipts all the way out to her house showed him he didn’t want to work for her. She offered to sell the good will and fixtures for five thousand dollars, but Al never had had that much money all at once in his life and there were only two ways he could borrow it: from the banks or from Ed Charney. He didn’t like banks or the people who worked in them, and he didn’t want to ask Ed. He didn’t think he knew Ed well enough to ask him for money. Anyhow, not that kind of money; five grand. So the poolroom went to Mike Minas, a Greek friend of George Poppas’s, and Al went to work for Ed Charney. He just went up to Ed and said: “Yiz have any kind of a job for me, Ed?” and Ed said yes, come to think of it, he had been thinking of offering him a job for a long time. They agreed on a fifty-dollar-a-week salary, and Al went to work. At first he merely drove Ed around on business and pleasure trips; then he was given a job of some importance, that of convoy to the booze trucks. He would follow two or three Reo Speedwagons, in which the stuff was transported. If a state policeman or a Federal dick stopped the trucks, it was Al’s business to stop too. It was an important job, because he took a chance of being sent to prison. When he stopped, it was his job to try to bribe the cops. It was an important job, because he carried up to ten thousand dollars cash of Ed’s money in the Nash roadster which he used on these trips. It was up to him to use his head about bribing the cops; one or two of them wouldn’t be bribed, but most of them would listen to reason unless they had been sent out to pinch a truck or two to make a showing. He had to be smooth in his bribery offers to some of them. Some of them would take anything from a gold tooth to ten thousand dollars, but hated to be approached in the wrong way. On the few occasions when the cops refused to be bribed, it was Al’s job to get to the nearest telephone, tell Ed, and get Jerome M. Montgomery, Ed’s lawyer, working on the case. Al never was arrested for attempted bribery. In fact he was so successful generally that Ed took him off the convoy job and made him a collector. Ed trusted him and liked him, and made a lot of money for him, or gave him a lot of money. Sitting there at breakfast on this Christmas morning Al Grecco could write a check for more than four thousand dollars, and he had thirty-two one-thousand-dollar bills in his safety deposit box. For a kid of twenty-six he was doing all right.
Now Loving Cup suddenly was standing at his table. “On the phone, you,” said Loving Cup.
“Who is it? Some dame?” said Al.
“Don’t try and bluff me,” said Loving Cup. “I know you’re queer. No, it’s a party I think they said the name was Jarney or Charney. That was it. Charney.”
“Wise guy,” said Al, getting up. “I’ll cut your ears off. Is it Ed?”
“Yeah,” said Loving Cup, “and he don’t sound like Christmas to me.”
“Sore, eh?” Al hurried to the telephone. “Merry Christmas, boss,” he said.
“Yeah. Same to you,” said Ed, in a dull voice. “Listen, Al, my kid got his arm broke—”
“Jesus, tough! How’d he do that?”
“Oh, he fell off some God damn wagon I bought him. So anyhow I’m staying here till he gets the arm set and all, and I won’t be down till I don’t know when. Annie is all hysterical and yelling her head off—shut up, for Christ’s sake, can’t you see I’m phoning. So I’m staying here. Now listen, Al. Do you have a date for tonight?”
“Nothing I can’t break,” said Al, who had no date. “I had a sort of a date, but it can wait if you want me to do anything.”
“Well, I hate to ask you, but this is what I want you should do. Drive up to the Stage Coach and stay there till they close up and keep an eye on things, see what I mean? And tell Helene I’ll be there if I can make it, but you stay there anyhow, will you kid? There’s fifty bucks in it for you on account of lousing up your date. Okay?”
“Kay,” said Al. “Only too glad, Ed.”
“Okay,” said Ed. “Just stick around and keep an eye on everything.” He hung up.
Al knew what he meant. Helene was not a teetotaler by any means. In fact Ed encouraged her to drink. She was more fun when she drank. But she was liable to get drunk tonight, because it was Christmas, and Ed didn’t want her to become reckless with the spirit of giving.
3
Anyone in Gibbsville who had any important money made it in coal; anthracite. Gibbsville people, when they went away, always had trouble explaining where they lived. They would say: “I live in the coal regions,” and people would say, “Oh, yes, near Pittsburgh.” Then Gibbsvillians would have to go into detail. People outside of Pennsylvania do not know that there is all the difference in the world between the two kinds of coal, and in the conditions under which anthracite and bituminous are mined. The anthracite region lies roughly between Scranton on the north and Gibbsville on the south. In fact Point Mountain, upon which Gibbsville’s earliest settlement was made, is the delight of geologists, who come from as far away as Germany to examine Gibbsville Conglomerate, a stone formation found nowhere else in the world. When that geological squeeze, or whatever it was that produced veins of coal, occurred, it did not go south of Point Mountain, and coal is found on the north slope of Point Mountain, but not on the south side, and at the eastern face of Point Mountain is
found Gibbsville Conglomerate. The richest veins of anthracite in the world are within a thirty-mile sector from Gibbsville, and when those veins are being worked, Gibbsville prospers. When the mines are idle, Gibbsville puts on a long face and begins to think in terms of soup kitchens.
The anthracite region, unlike the bituminous, is a stronghold of union labor. The United Mine Workers of America is the strongest single force in the anthracite region, and under it the anthracite miner lives a civilized life compared with that of the miner in the soft coal regions about Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and the western states. The “coal and iron” police in the anthracite region have been so unimportant since the unionization of the mines that they seldom are mentioned. A candidate for governor of Pennsylvania cannot be elected without the support of the U.M.W.A., and the Pennsylvania State Police never are called “black cossacks” in the anthracite region. A candidate for any political office in the anthracite counties would not think of having anything printed without getting the typesetters’ union label on his cards and billboards. The union is responsible for the Pennsylvania mining laws, which are the best in the world (although not yet the best there could be), and labor conditions, so far as labor strife was concerned, were all right in 1930, and had been all right since the disastrous strike of 1925. At that time the union called a strike which lasted 110 days, the longest strike in anthracite history. There was no violence beyond the small squabble, and there was no starvation among the miners. But anthracite markets disappeared. Domestic sales were hurt permanently; the oil burner was installed in thousands of homes. Anthracite is practically smokeless, and was satisfactory to home owners, but they could not get anthracite during the strike, and when the oil burner was installed there was no point in going back to coal. And so, as a result of the 1925 strike, the anthracite industry went back to work without nearly the demand for the product that there had been when the strike was called 110 days before. There had been another long strike in 1922, and the two strikes taught consumers that the industry was not dependable. The feeling was that any time the union felt like it, it would call a strike, shutting off the supply of anthracite.