The Harder They Fall

by Budd Schulberg

  ‘I don’t see how you figure that.’

  ‘You don’t have to see how I figure it.’ Nick was drawing in the slack of affability now. ‘Just take my word for it. You go out and plug Molina like you never plugged anything in your life. Man-Mountain Molina. The Giant of the Andes. That crap. And leave the rest to me.’

  ‘I can get him space,’ I said. ‘I can get him all the space you want, as long as he gives us something. I can alibi a loss here and there, but it’s only with consistent wins that we really get snowballing.’

  ‘We’ll have consistent wins,’ Nick said. And there was something about the flat, quiet way he said it that made me realise for the first time that Toro Molina, the Giant of the Andes, was going to have consistent wins.

  It had been done before. Not every fight, but enough to fatten up the record and put them in the money. Young Stribling had knocked out his chauffeur (known variously as Joe White, Joe King, Joe Sacko, Joe Doktor, Joe Clancy, Joe Etcetera) in practically every town in America.

  ‘But even making them look good is a big order for this barrel-lifter. No kidding, Nick, our god not only has feet of clay, the feet are size sixteens and probably flat at that.’

  ‘That gives me an idea,’ Nick said. ‘Take him down to Gustav Peterson and get him measured for half a dozen pair of special built shoes. Get ’em made up even a couple of inches longer’n he needs. Get the newspaper cameras down to shoot him trying ’em on. Now that’s the side of the street I want you to work. Leave the guy’s ring work to Danny. He’s a master, even if he hates my guts. Leave the opponent’s performances to Vince. You and I both know him for a grifter but that’s why he’s right for the job. The little guy—’ He meant Acosta. ‘Keep him along for the ride. Someone for the big guy to talk to. But lemme know if he makes any trouble.’

  ‘He’s all right. He means well.’

  ‘The hell with that,’ Nick said. ‘That don’t sell any tickets. The first time he gets in the way we put him on the boat.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Jesus, I gotta go down and try on a suit.’ He went to the door and called, ‘Hey, Killer, tell Jock to pick me up in front of the door right away.’

  ‘Okle-dokle,’ the Killer said. ‘Where we goin’?’

  ‘Down to Weatherill’s. For that fitting you was supposed to remind me of.’

  ‘Jeez, boss,’ the Killer said. ‘I always remember them things. But I don’ know, today I got a lot on my mind.’

  Nick put on his Chesterfield and winked at me. ‘Hear what he calls it, Eddie, his mind.’ He made a fake pass as if to let him have one where he lived.

  In the rear seat of the Caddy, Nick leant back against the seat and blew smoke against the roof. From the fitting he would go to the Luxor for a rub and a steam bath and then he was meeting Barney and Jimmy for ribs at Dinty’s before going up to see the ball game.

  On our way to Walker’s, where Nick was dropping me off, he said, ‘You got the pitch now. Anything else on your mind?’

  ‘We haven’t even started,’ I said. ‘How do you think I’m going to be able to sell this guy if everybody gets a line on him at Stillman’s? All you have to do is take a quick gander and you can see he is from Dixie in B flat with the emphasis on flat.’

  ‘Where you want to take him?’ Nick asked.

  ‘As far from the wise boys as possible, where the sharpshooters like Parker or Runyon don’t knock us off before we get started.’

  ‘Ojai,’ Nick said.

  ‘Where the hell is that?’

  ‘A couple hours out of LA. We had Lennert up there for the Ramage fight once. Nice quiet joint. Nobody t’ bother you. And now that I think of it, the West Coast is the place to interduce the Man Mountain. They don’t get too many good fights out there anyway. They probably won’t know the difference. They’ll go for stuff like this. They matched Jack Doyle, that Emerald Thrush, and Enzo Fiermonte, one of Madeline Force Astor Dick’s husbands. Anybody who paid to see that one will do anything.’

  ‘LA is all right,’ I said. ‘I’ve always wanted to get a look at LA.’

  ‘I’ve got a couple addresses I’ll give you out there,’ the Killer said. ‘Stock girls.’ He gave the wolf call.

  ‘Leave Eddie alone,’ Nick said. ‘He’s got to work out there.’ He put his hands on my leg just above the knee and squeezed the tendons until I jumped. It was a sign of affection. ‘You’ve got to really sock it to them out there, kid. Take a nice big cut at the ball. Spend dough. Make them sport editors so goddam sick of your Man Mountain Molina that they’ll spread him over a page to get rid of you. Make out like you can’t get an opponent for him the first month or so because nobody around there’s got the guts to get in the ring with him. You know the routine. Then bring somebody out from the East, a nice soft touch that’s never been west of the Rockies before, so nobody knows what a dog he is. Then give him the big build-up about how he’s come out to California because he’s so tough none of the name-fighters in the Garden want to have anything to do with him. Let Vince find you a bum.’

  I thought of Harry Miniff. This would be a nice way to make a couple of bucks for Harry. ‘I know a good bum,’ I said. ‘Cowboy Coombs.’

  ‘Jesus, he still alive?’ Nick said.

  ‘Harry was up at the gym trying to sell him this afternoon. He’d be very grateful to make a buck, Harry would.’

  ‘How does that Coombs look these days? Will the fans take him serious?’

  ‘The Cowboy has the most menacing scowl of any heavyweight in the business today,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, I’ll tell Vince to get Coombs for us,’ Nick said.‘Come up tomorrow afternoon and pick up the tickets.’

  ‘What tickets?’ I said.

  ‘The railroad tickets,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll get you out on the Limited tomorrow night.’

  ‘That’s kind of on the quick side, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why not the quick side?’ Nick said. ‘You tell me the smart boys will begin to catch if we let him hang around here. Then let’s make our move fast. I’ll have them tickets at four o’clock. So any last-minute business, last-minute humping or anything else you got on your mind, you better get it done tonight.’

  The shiny black Cadillac dropped me in front of Walker’s and cut through law-abiding traffic to shoot out into the clear. Nick carried an honorary badge from the Police Department, so the boys in blue wouldn’t give him any trouble.

  Things were still pretty quiet along the bar. Just the bums and the strays. The guys who dropped in for the quick ones on their way home from work and the boys who came to spend the evening would be along after a while. Now it was just me and a guy down the bar who looked as if he were studying to be his own worst enemy. The cat that occasionally walked along the bar brushed against him and he patted it absently while staring over the bar with his eyes turned inward in a lonely trance. A couple of ladies of the evening were resting their feet in one of the booths.

  Charles set me up with the usual and then slowly wiped the bar in front of me, which was his way of coming around to conversation.

  ‘Well, how are you today, Mr Lewis?’

  ‘Great, great,’ I said. ‘One more and I’ll be walking around on my knees.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you take one you don’t need,’ Charles said, which was always the way he put it when a customer anaesthetised himself beyond reason.

  ‘Celebrating,’ I said. ‘Going to California tomorrow.’

  ‘California,’ Charles said. ‘I was out there a good many years ago. Worked as helper to a bartender at the old California Athletic Club. That was before you were born.’

  He drew a couple of beers for two newcomers and came back to his story. ‘Yes, sir, the California AC. The greatest heavyweight scrap in the history of the ring was fought at the old CAC. I’ll never forget it, sir, if I live to be a hundred. Corbett and Jackson. The greatest white champion and the greatest black champion that ever drew on a glove. Fix the picture in your mind, sir. Black Prince Peter and
Gentleman Jim. Marvels of science, both of them. As fast as lightweights they were, and for sixty-one three-minute rounds they went at it that night, four hours and three minutes, enough to kill off a dozen ordinary men. When the referee finally stopped it for fear one of the men would drop dead of exhaustion before he’d holler quit, there was hardly a mark on Peter and him for ducking, slipping and catching each other’s punches. Like pieces of quicksilver they were, and neither one of them slowed down until they had fought thirty of the fastest and most evenly matched rounds anyone will ever see.’

  Charles wiped the bar shiny where my glass had left its damp imprint. ‘And all this before five hundred people for a purse of ten thousand dollars, winner take all.’ He looked at me significantly. ‘Today the same fight would draw two million dollars into the ball park. But they weren’t fighting for money in those days. All the loser got was his carfare home. It was a sport when I was a lad, Mr Lewis, a rough sport, but a sport nevertheless. None of these ring-around-the-rosie, you-hit-me-and-I’ll-hit-you affairs like these heavyweights are often having in the Garden.’

  ‘Just a minute, Charles,’ I said, ‘I just thought of something. Wasn’t that Corbett-Jackson fight a year or so before the Slavin fight you were telling me about?’

  Charles looked off vaguely. ‘I’d better see what that gentleman wants,’ he said, leaving me to ponder the problem of how Charles could have been in California a year before he left England.

  ‘Charles,’ I said, when I finally got him to answer my finger, ‘how can you lie like that? You never saw the Corbett-Jackson fight.’

  ‘It’s not a lie, sir,’ Charles insisted.

  ‘Well, what would you call it?’

  ‘A mere stretching of the truth, Mr Lewis. I did work at the CAC, in Oughty-ought. And some of the old members were still talking about that fight, arguing who’d’ve won if they had let it go the distance. One day Mr Corbett stood right up at the bar himself, when he was champion of the world, and gave me his own first-hand description. “Charles,” Mr Corbett says to me, and he’s standing there just as close to me as you are, “Jackson had everything. He could beat any heavyweight I ever saw. Try to box him and he’d outbox you. Start slugging and he’d slug you right back. He was the Master, that black wizard, the genuine Nonpareil.”’

  ‘Charles,’ I said, ‘you are the truth-stretchingest man I ever met. You stretch it out so far I forget where it started from.’

  ‘Dramatic licence,’ Charles shrugged.

  I told Charles to put the bottle away because it was beginning to catch up with me and I didn’t want to louse up my last night with Beth. I walked back to the Edison thinking about this Molina deal. My mind was already working ahead to the angles. As soon as we hit LA I’d get all the sports writers together and toss a party and fill them full of flit. Deaden their powers of integrity and self-criticism. Then slip them a little something to make their readers feel they were getting their nickel’s worth. It didn’t have to be true.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  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 halfway through it. It’s not that I haven’t found it interesting. But it was written in 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 Dmitrievna 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 kerb 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 judgement 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.