‘I guess I’m one of Nick’s boys,’ I said. ‘Oh, sure I like to read a book once in a while and I’m not so dumb I can’t see how the profit system takes the manly art out behind the bushes and gives it the business. But I’m strictly a saloon man. Every once in a while I like to pick up the cheques all around the table and I like to have enough in my kick to pay my tabs. Nick’s dough may look a little soiled but they still exchange it for nice crisp new bills at any window.’
‘What happens after California?’ Beth said.
‘Don’t know yet. We’ll have to see how things break. Probably work our way east knocking over the usual clowns.’
‘So what you’ll really be is a barker for a … circus freak.’
‘For Christ’s sakes, what do you want me to do, sell my poems on the corner of Washington Square and starve with the rest of the screwballs? For a hundred a week and a slice of the pie – I bark.’
Beth rose from the edge of the bed and said with an air of finality, ‘Okay, Eddie. But I think you sell yourself awful short. I guess you know what you want. I just wish you wanted a little more.’
Then she relaxed into her own self a little and put her arms around me and kissed me quickly. ‘Take care of yourself.’
‘You too, kid.’
‘You’re sore,’ she said. ‘I hoped you weren’t going to be sore.’
‘I’m not sore,’ I said. ‘I’m just …’
‘Write me once in a while.’
‘Sure, we’ll keep in touch.’
‘Hope everything goes the way you want it.’
‘I’ll be okay.’
We looked at each other, probably just a second or two, but it seemed longer. There is always that moment when you seem to be able to see in each other’s eyes a flash of the things that might have happened if your cards had been a little better or you had played them differently.
‘Maybe this breather is just what we needed,’ I said. ‘Maybe we can get married when I get back.’
‘Maybe,’ Beth said. ‘Let’s see what happens.’
‘Swell. Be good, coach.’
‘Goodbye, Eddie.’
‘See you, Beth.’
I stood at the window and watched her go out onto the street. I saw how the boys instinctively turned for a hinge of the gams as she went past. That trim figure of hers never quite looked as if it should belong with her bright and agreeable but untheatrical face. I stayed at the window until her rapid stride was lost in the cross-currents of human traffic sweeping over the corner.
I bought myself another drink, but it backed up on me. I lay down on the bed again and tried to get back into War and Peace, but the scene and the characters had lost contact with me and the words ran into each other meaninglessly. I went over to the dresser and looked at the other books. A Fleischer’s All-Time Ring Record Book, a two-bit copy of Pal Joey, Cain’s Three-in-One, the Runyon Omnibus and an old marked-up edition of The Great Gatsby. I picked up the Gatsby and turned to one of the passages I had marked. It was that terrible scene where Daisy, Tom and Gatsby finally bring it out into the open. One of the best damn scenes in American fiction, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it.
God Almighty, maybe Beth was right. Who was I? Who had she been sleeping with? The reader who marked and studied those lines of Fitzgerald? Or the guy who dished out the hyperbolic swill about Joe Roundheels and Man Mountain Molina? What were they to each other, the reader and the raver? Just two fellows who lived under the same skin, strangers sharing a common roof.
I threw the book down impatiently and started dressing for the street. Toro and Acosta were at the Columbia Hotel around the corner. For need of something to do I thought I’d check on whether everything was set with them for the trip tomorrow night.
The Columbia was one of those innumerable hotels in the Times Square area with the same nondescript street-front, the same lonely people drinking the same cut stuff from the same chromium bars, the same harassed-looking clientele of unlucky horse players, theatrical agents without clients, stage actors without parts and managers of derelict prizefighters like Harry Miniff. The lobby of the Columbia seemed to be full of small, shabby groups addressing themselves in sly undertones to the petty conspiracies devoted to the cause of running down a buck without physical effort.
Toro and Acosta had what the Columbia calls a suite, which was a sitting room not much larger than a phone-booth leading into a small double bedroom.
‘Ah, my dear Mr Lewis,’ Acosta said when he came to the door and did his little bow. He looked very dapper in his bow tie and black smoking jacket, with his long-handled cigarette holder and a book under his arm.
‘Disturbing you?’
‘Please? Oh, no – no, I am just passing the time studying English.’ He held the grammar out to show me.
‘This is one language I’m glad I learnt early,’ I said.
‘Yes, the verbs – the verbs are very difficult,’ Acosta agreed. ‘But you have a fine language. Not so musical as Spanish perhaps, but very virile, very strong.’
‘That’s us all right,’ I said.
He led me to the most comfortable chair and bowed me into it with the automatic deference of a head waiter. ‘Please,’ he said. From the bottom drawer of the desk he brought forth a half-empty bottle which he placed on the coffee table with a nice little flourish.
‘Please, you will have a little brandy?’ He touched the bottle fondly. ‘I bring this all the way from Mendoza.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I think I’d better pass. I’ve been on whisky all day, and this is the only stomach I’ve got.’
Acosta laughed the way men do when they don’t understand.
‘Well, how do you feel about California?’ I said.
‘Oh, I am very excite – excited,’ Acosta said. ‘All my life I have hear – heard of Los Angeles. Some say it is even more beautiful than our own Mar del Plata. And I think for El Toro it will be very good too. He will have a climate more like he is use to. Here it is so humedo. Perhaps that is why he has look so sluggish in the ring.’
I had said everything there was to say on the subject of Toro’s ability that afternoon, so I didn’t grab at this one as it went by.
‘Where is Toro, by the way?’
Acosta pointed to the bedroom. ‘Already in the bed asleep. Poor El Toro. Tonight he feel very bad. He feel he has make this afternoon a very poor showing and he has the wish to go home to Santa Maria. I try to explain to him that now with the interest of Mr Latka and Mr McKeogh he will make more money than Luis Firpo. But you know how boys are. Now and then they get the homesickness.’
‘He doesn’t really like to fight? He hasn’t really got his heart in it, has he, Luis?’
Acosta had a disarming smile. ‘The killing instinct, he does not have, perhaps no. But with a man of his strength, when Mr McKeogh has teach him how to punch …’
‘Does he get this thing very often, the homesickness?’
‘Oh, it is nothing,’ Acosta assured me. ‘In the morning after a good sleep he will be hokay. I have the same trouble with him back in Mendoza. When we have first come down the mountain from Santa Maria sometimes he just sits in the truck all day long and I know he has the homesickness very bad. I feel very sorry for him, so one day I go to the daughter of a gypsy fortune teller who has a tent down the way and I say to her, “In my truck is a young man who is very unhappy. Here is ten pesos for you if you will go into the truck and make him happy.” After that I find the two best ways to keep El Toro from this homesickness is to feed him very much – maybe five times a day – for he can eat like a lion, and to give him the frequent opportunity of girls, for tiene muchos huevos and his appetite for the muchachas is truly magnificent. It is fortunate for me I find this out, for without the girls I think perhaps it is possible that El Toro goes back to his village and closes the door on his big opportunity.’
Acosta’s shrewd little eyes glowed with self-importance. Oh, it was not so easy as you think to bring this giant
so far up the ladder, they seemed to say. I have had tremendous difficulties to overcome. I have had to use my head.
‘Since you have the charge of the public relations,’ Acosta went on, ‘there is something I will tell you of El Toro which is of course not for the publications. He comes from such a very little village where the people know nothing of the world. So El Toro in the hands of women of experience is like arcilla …’
‘Clay,’ I said.
‘Thank you. My English has improve a little, yes? To explain how little El Toro knows of the world, one day in Mendoza, when we are still with the circus, Señor Mendez is away having new shoes put upon the feet of the bareback horse. That evening just before the performance El Toro comes to me and says he must see the priest right away to confess the sin of adultery. In all his life he has never commit the sin of adultery. And now he has very much fear that he will never go to heaven. Like all the people of his village, he believes everything of the Church and would rather go to heaven when he dies than lie down with Carmelita in this present life.
‘“With whom do you commit the adultery?” I say to El Toro.
‘“With Señora Mendez,” he says.
‘“Señora Mendez!” I say. “But why do you bother with such an old one when the fairgrounds are full of willing muchachas?”
‘“I did not even want Señora Mendez,” El Toro says to me. “But she comes into the truck when I am lying down. She smiles at me and comes over and sits on the edge of my cot. She talks to me and strokes my head and before I realise what has happen, I have commit the adultery.”
‘“Do not look so sorry, El Toro,” I say. “With Señora Mendez you cannot be blame for committing the adultery. Every time Señor Mendez goes into the city for the day, Señora Mendez commits the adultery. Señora Mendez has now almost forty years, and she has been committing the adultery twice a month since she is sixteen. So if it is a sin to be a contribuidor to a lady’s five hundred and seventy-fifth adultery, it is surely nothing more than the very little tiniest sliver of a sin.”’
‘If he pulls anything like that up here,’ I said, ‘the public is off him like a shot. We like our heroes to eat wheaties, be good to their mothers and true to their childhood sweethearts.’
‘You understan’,’ Acosta said, ‘I only tell you this now because we are become like one big family.’
Just one big unhappy family, I thought.
‘I hope I have not make El Toro sound like a bad boy,’ Acosta continued. ‘He is only a powerful joven – youth with healthy appetites. But I tell you this, since you will have occasion to be with him much in public and perhaps can help to guard him against certain women he will meet who will have interest in him like Señora Mendez.’
Siamese twins pulling in opposite directions struggled for possession of my spine. The student of modern American writing, of Fitzgerald and O’Hara, had hired out as male nursemaid to an overgrown adolescent pituitary case who allows himself to be seduced by middle-aged bareback riders.
The heat of the night was heavy in the airless room and the walls were too close to each other. Suddenly I had had enough of Acosta with his ungrammatical long-windedness, his charm, which was largely a matter of teeth, and his protestations of benevolence toward El Toro. If Toro had been the victim of seduction, it was a far more radical seduction than the dallying attention of Señora Mendez.
But maybe this time Toro would make it pay. He had the size. Honest Jimmy had the connections. Nick had the money. I had the tricks. And the American people, God bless them, had the credulity. You couldn’t blame them entirely. They were a little punchy too. They had taken an awful pasting from all sides: radio, the press, billboards, throwaways, even airplanes left white streamers in the sky telling them what to buy and what to need. They could really absorb punishment, this nation of radio listeners and shop-happy consumers, this great spectator nation. Only like the game fighter who smiles when he gets hit and keeps boring in for more, they were a little more vulnerable for every encounter. Now perhaps, if the winds are favourable (and if they aren’t it may be possible to move wind machines up into the wings), they will be swept on to El Toro Molina, the Giant of the Andes, come down from the mountain heights to challenge the Philistines, like Samson, and avenge a countryman’s defeat.
‘Well, we’ll pick you up tomorrow about an hour before train time,’ I said.
‘Hokey-doke,’ Acosta said. ‘We will be very please.’
From the bedroom came a loud somnolent groan and the sound of a heavy churning of bedclothes. Acosta went to the bedroom door and looked in. I stood behind him, having a clear view over his shoulder. Toro had kicked off his covers and was lying naked on the bed. The bed was not long enough to accommodate him and a chair had been placed at the end of it to support his feet. This gave an unnatural appearance to the scene. It was as if a tremendous marionette, bigger than life, had been put away between performances. In sleep his face had the set, oversized features of a dummy’s head exaggerated for comedic effect.
And I thought, here we are planning his career, patterning his life, taking him to California, matching him with Coombs, surrounding him with managers, trainers, fixers, press agents, and yet he has never been consulted. I could induce the people of America to love him, hate him, respect him, fear him, laugh at him or glorify him, and yet I had never really spoken to him. What were his preferences, his feelings, his ambitions, his most intimate hungers? Who knew? Who cared? As soon ask Charlie McCarthy whether he would object to doing two extra Saturday performances. Toro had been put away for the night. When Jimmy and Nick and Danny and Doc and Vince and I were ready to pull our particular strings in a coordinated effort, the Giant of the Andes would be made to bend his massive torso through the ropes; another tug and his hands would go up in the stance traditional to pugilists for five thousand years; and then he would be guided through the motions calculated to please the cash customers who put their money down to see what is technically supposed to be an exhibition of the manly art of self-defence.
Restlessly Toro rolled over on his side and muttered something in Spanish that sounded like Sí, sí, Papá, ahora, ahorita – yes, yes, Father, now, right away. How many thousand miles was Toro from the Columbia Hotel? What little task had his father given him, so trivial and everyday and yet so deeply cut into the section of the brain that never sleeps, that keeps working on like an automatic furnace in a dark, sleep-ridden house?
Perhaps Papa Molina had told Toro to carry the completed barrels out and set them in front of the shop. Toro might have been sitting down to midday comida with his brothers and was wolfing his third helping of pollo con arroz, while his father, wiping the hot sauce from his mouth with his sleeve and patting his belly indulgently, was saying, ‘All right, my boys, a good meal for a good day’s work. Now back to the shop.’
Outside, the street was full of people for whom midnight is noon. Broadway was charged with their insomniac energy. Just as in a protracted visit to a hospital one often begins to feel symptoms of illness, so on Broadway in the early a.m., caught up in the restless overstimulated going-and-coming, you suddenly find your second wind and your eyes snap open in exaggerated wakefulness. So I turned west off Broadway, heading for the row of shabby brownstone houses between Eighth and Ninth Avenues where Shirley’s place was.
Shirley lived on the top floor, in one of those flats which turn out to be surprisingly comfortable after you’ve climbed the dark narrow stairs that look as if they should lead to a tenement. She had the whole floor, two bedrooms (with coy little boy-and-girl dolls perched at the head of each bed), a living room, a small barroom and a dinky kitchen. It wasn’t set up as a place where men came to have women. It was really a kind of informal call house, with the girls going out to work. Only once in a while, if he were someone Shirley had known a long time, a fellow could use the extra bedroom. The other part of Shirley’s business moved over the bar that usually kept busy until after the good people had punched in for their morning w
ork. The shades were always drawn in that little room and the lighting was so discreetly low that I still remember the oppressive sense of decadence that came over me one morning when I thought I was leaving there around four and came out to face the blinding, accusing daylight and the sober, righteous inhabitants of an 8 a.m. workaday world.
I was admitted by Lucille, the dignified coloured maid. From the barroom I could hear Shirley’s Capehart, her prize possession, playing one of her records: Billie Holiday, with Teddy Wilson on piano behind her, singing, ‘I Cried For You’. It was so dark in the little room that at first all I could see was the glow of customers’ cigarettes and Shirley behind the bar, with a drink in her hand, smoking one of her roll-your-owns. She was wearing something long, cut low in front and zipping all the way up the side that was either an evening gown that looked like a fancy housecoat or the other way around. She was singing along with Billie:
‘… I found two eyes just a little bit bluer,
I found a heart just a little bit truer.’
When she saw me she said ‘Hello, stranger,’ and gave me the big squeeze. She was feeling good tonight.
The record changer had dropped on another Holiday, the slow and easy ‘Fine and Mellow’, and Billie’s voice, lowdown and legato, belonged in the room.
‘Love is like a faucet …
It turns on and off …
Love is like a faucet …
It turns off and on …’
In the loveseat by the window a statuesque blonde with a face that would have been beautiful if it had been less frozen was trying to fit into the arms of a runty Broadway comic. Sitting on the floor with his back against a chair was a big, fine-looking Negro. In the chair, running her hands through his hair, but not getting much of a play from him, was a white woman in her late or middle thirties who looked like one of those lushes who come from very good families with plenty of lettuce. As she reached down to embrace the Negro, she brushed her drink off the arm of the chair.
The Harder They Fall Page 14