Of course, he didn't have a house. When he was fighting Henry Armstrong in the Polo Grounds, loading up on the booze until three or four o'clock every morning and making $25,000 in one night, more than four times what most men made then in a year, he had two houses. He had one in Sweetwater, Texas, where he came from, and one in Florida, but while he was running those LCVPs up on those beaches and his only home was that tired old LST, they sold him out of both houses.
"If I had a house," he said, "and a soldier didn't have a house, I'd give it to him. If I didn't, I'd be stealin', because he earned it. There ain't nothin' they shouldn't give a soldier if he's a soldier like in the First Division or the Thirty-Sixth or one of them."
"I know what you mean." I said.
"I see sometimes that a landing was easy," he said. "Sometimes they say that a landing was easy, and I remember some poor soldier I saw get killed. I think about how, back home, some person is goin' to be just as miserable as if our whole Army got killed. I think about that a long time."
"I know," I said. "Many times I've thought the same thing."
"When they told us we were takin' the British in here," he said, "my heart wasn't in it. You know where my heart was?"
"No."
"My heart was with the First Division here. I wanted to be with them I knew. Then I saw the Limies get killed, and then I liked them, too."
"There's no difference between any of them, Lew," I said.
"You know what got me?" he said.
"No."
"When I put the Thirty-Sixth Division in at Salerno," he said. "That's the Texas Division, and it was two or three in the mornin' and I put them on the beach and they were just mowin' 'em down. Just everybody was gettin' killed, and I'd walk up there to see who wanted to go back and they were just piled up.
"My mind and my soul was with the soldiers on the beach, and they'd load me up with wounded and I'd go from ship to ship and the medics would say, 'Take 'em away. We can't handle any more here.' There'd be men with their legs blown off and there'd be men with their sides blown open, and they wouldn't say a word. There wasn't one of 'em let out a moan, and I hid my head in my hands and I cried.
"I never did go for cryin' as a kid or nothin'," he said, "but I wanted to go and fight with them and help them, but I was afraid if I did I'd get court-martialed. I felt so cheap. My own state's men were dyin', and I felt so ashamed bein' off the beach."
He looked at me and I looked at him.
"I just prayed," he said. "I just prayed for another war to start, for me to be a front-line soldier."
I suppose it seems uncivilized, even barbarous, now that a man should pray for the catastrophe of war. Even generals who, in their secret hearts, may long for the opportunity to express and distinguish themselves in the science to which they have devoted their lives, would be loathe to admit it. Lew admitted it, and I understood when he said it and I understand now. He was not a man seeking distinction, but the expression of something else, and what that was I shall try to explain.
Then we came back off that war, and for a while I used to follow in the papers what was left of his career. He was broke, and he took a couple of small fights in New England. Then he went back to Texas, and every now and then I would see in the agate fight results at the bottom of the sports pages that he was fighting out there.
Then, one day in the winter of 1946 there was several of us out at Brown's Hotel at the New Jersey end of Greenwood Lake. Lee Oma was there getting ready to fight Gus Lesnevich in the Garden, and we were standing around there where the ring was set up next to the bar, waiting for Oma to work out, when Al Buck came off the phone. He was writing boxing for the New York Post, and he had been talking to his office.
"Do you want a laugh?" he said.
"What?" I said.
"My desk just told," he said. "Lew Jenkins has enlisted in the Army."
"What is it?" somebody said. "Is he going for that bonus they get, or is it a gag?"
I didn't try to explain it to them. There wasn't a war going on then, and they all knew him and liked him, but there were some of them who had written when Lew was champion and Freddie "Red" Cochrane knocked him down five times in a non-title fight in the Garden, that he was not only a disgrace to himself and the title he held but to the whole fight game.
They didn't know that he had three broken vertebrae in his neck after piling his motorcycle into a traffic circle in New Jersey, blind drunk at three o'clock one morning less than three weeks before the fight. They knew a lot about Lew and they put it in the papers, but what did they know?
"Here were two youngsters," Caswell Adams wrote in the New York Herald Tribune when Lew fought a fierce draw in the Garden with Fritzie Zivic who was the welterweight champ, "in perfect condition and with the sole idea of knocking the other fellow out."
Lew was in perfect condition all right, but for a drunk act. At 3 a.m. on the day of the fight he was loading up in a bar on Broadway with some Texans he had met, and he had been loaded every night for a week.
"You know something, Lew?" I said to him down at Benning, after the general had called him in, and Lew and I had walked over to the EM canteen to sit and talk. "They say in the fight game that Harry Greb was the greatest liver anybody ever saw."
While I was with him down there, he and I would sit in that canteen and drink two or three iced teas one right after the other, trying to get cool on those hot, muggy Georgia summer afternoons.
"Even Greb," I said, "couldn't have lived like you."
"People who knew Greb," Lew said, "say he was a junior compared to me."
He didn't say it as a boast but as a matter of fact, and a rather sad one at that. Lew could be very funny too, but even when he would come out with a line that would bring a laugh there was only that weak smile around his mouth, and then it would go away and there would be just that sad, puzzled expression with those deep eyes seeming to be trying to find an answer somewhere off in the distance.
There was the night he fought Joey Zodda outdoors in the Meadowbrook Bowl in Newark, New Jersey. In the third round he hit Zodda with that straight right, and down went Zodda in his own comer. As he lay there, one of his seconds reached up with the smelling salts and held it under Zodda's nose. Zodda got up, and when he did Lew moved in with another right and, as Zodda went down and out, Lew just turned and walked to his corner.
"Willie," he said, to Willie Ketchum, who trained him, or tried to, "he can give him all the smellin' salts he wants now. The man's gone."
Willie said he had to laugh. Then there was the night Lew fought Tippy Larkin in the Garden. Larkin was a picture boxer with a beautiful left hand, and his fight was to move around Lew and stab him, make him miss and tie him up inside.
"You know what I'm gonna do to that man tonight?" Lew said to Willie in the dressing room.
"What?" Willie said.
"I'm gonna knock him out," Lew said, "and pick him up by his legs and drag him to his corner."
"Listen," Willie said, "don't get heated up. With this Larkin everything has to go his own smooth way. You go out there and you jab him."
"Jab him?" Lew said. "Why do I want to jab him? I wanta knock him out."
"Jab him," Willie said, "because he won't be looking for it. He thinks he's gonna jab you."
"I think that's crazy," Lew said.
He walked out and he jabbed Larkin, though. He hit him three stiff jabs, and Larkin backed off. Lew jabbed him again, and Larkin just stood there, trying to decide what to do. Then Lew threw that right hand, on a straight line from the shoulder, and it hit Larkin on the chin. Larkin stiffened and then he shuddered, and as he started to go Lew hit him with a hook, a right and another hook, and Larkin landed on his face underneath the ropes.
When the referee started the count, Willie started up the steps. He said he was afraid that Lew would pick Larkin up by the feet and try to drag him to his corner.
"You know something?" Lew said, sitting on the rubbing table in the dressing room. "T
hat man was the most convinced knocked-out man I ever knocked out."
The newspaper men, crowding around him, laughed. That was another of those times, though, when he didn't mean it for a laugh. It was just that there was so much about people and about life that saddened Lew, because he was born into sadness.
"Nobody," he told me, sitting in that canteen, "really knows the poor people of Texas in my time."
The way he felt about the poor of Texas was the way he felt about the poor of the infantry, and he came from one and he joined the other. In between he was champion of the world and he made enough money to retire on, but all of that and his title he threw away because he had no understanding of it and it meant nothing to him. All he understood was trouble.
"The poor old private," he was saying down at Benning. "The only time he's first is when they say, 'Take that objective there.' I stand back with 'em at shows. I eat with privates. The noncoms eat together in a circle, but I eat with the privates. I always wanted to be with the underdog. They hold up."
It was that way with Lew when he was a fighter. He made his greatest fights when no one believed in him and he was the underdog, and his worst when he was the favorite. When he was a 4-1 underdog he won the title from Lou Ambers because only then did fighting have some meaning.
I am sure, you see, that he didn't enlist for Korea to win a war or save a world, but just to be a part of that misery that is the private property of the front-line soldier. He became a great frontline soldier because he came into the world in misery and because, when he was making that money and had a chance to rise above it, he felt like a stranger and was not at home in success—and so he sought his level.
"Where are you?" he was saying now on the phone, after I had flown into Oakland and checked into the motel at noon.
"I'm in the Holiday Inn near the airport," I said. "It's not far from the Coliseum."
"I know where it is," he said. "When I was drivin' the truck for the linen supply, I used to deliver there. We'll pick you up."
"I'll be in the lobby at 1:30," I said. "I guess we'll recognize each other."
"Yeah," he said, "but it's been a long time."
It had been twenty-five years, and after I left him at Benning I heard, a couple of weeks later, that he had malaria and that, while he had been running a fever of 105.6 he had been delirious and shouting that he had to get back to Korea. After that I would hear from him occasionally, the cryptic notes complaining that what he was doing wasn't really soldiering. Sometimes they would be typewritten on Army requisition forms and at other times they would be handwritten on lined pages torn from a looseleaf notebook, and they came from Hawaii and from Germany and then from Fort Ord in California, just before he got out of the Army in 1963.
"It ain't the same, old pal," he wrote once from Germany. "If you could see what's happening to our Army now it would make you sick, but I just mind my own business and I do my job until I can get out."
I was in the lobby of the motel now at 1:30, and when I didn't see him there I walked outside to stand in front and to meet them as they drove up. I had been waiting there for about ten minutes when behind me the glass door from the lobby opened and he walked out.
"I'm sorry we missed each other," I said, after we had shaken hands. "I didn't see you inside."
He was thin and looked older, of course, and with that same fighter's face. He had on a light gray suit and a dark blue knitted sports shirt buttoned at the neck and one of those narrow-brimmed, checkered plaid hats that Bing Crosby used to wear.
"I been out in back visitin' with them nigra maids in the housekeeping department," he said. "I know 'em all from when I used to deliver the linen here, and they're all my friends."
"Where's Lupie?" I said.
In 1947 he had met and married Lupie Galarza at Camp Stone-man, California. At Benning I had met her and their then four-year-old son, and I used to get Christmas cards signed by her, "Lupie, Lew, and Lew II."
"She's back in here somewhere," he said.
We found her in the lobby, dark-haired, oval-faced, and smiling, and we exchanged greetings and walked out to the car. I got into the back, and Lupie started to back the car out.
"Before we go," Lew said, "drive around here to the housekeeping department."
"The housekeeping department?" Lupie said. "Why do you want to go there?"
"So you can meet my friends," Lew said. "I want to introduce 'em to you and Bill."
"Must we?" Lupie said.
"Yeah," Lew said.
He led us into the linen room, and introduced us. Several of them seemed embarrassed, even bewildered, shaking our hands, but a couple of them smiled and kidded with Lew and seemed to understand.
"Them nigra gals are all right," Lew said when we got back in the car. "They like me, and I like them."
"You shouldn't call them nigras," Lupie said. "Nobody uses that word any more."
"Yeah, I know," Lew said, "but what difference does it make what I call 'em? I like them."
"It was the same way in the Army," Lupie said. "Your friends in the Army were colored, too."
"Yeah," Lew said.
They live in a condominium, stucco with redwood trim, in a newer residential area where the roads curve between landscaped and well-kept lawns. Lupie parked in the carport, and after they had led me in Lew took off his jacket and we sat down.
"You want a drink?" he said. "There's a bottle out there in the kitchen."
"It's still too early in the afternoon for me," I said. "Are you drinking?"
"I had a beer about a year ago, I guess," he said.
"There was a time," I said, "when that would have brought a big laugh."
"Yeah," Lew said, his face impassive as he thought about it. "Nobody would believe it then, and they'd hardly believe it now."
The night he knocked out Ambers and won the lightweight championship was the last time he was ever in shape for a fight. He won the title on May 10, 1940, and two months later they put him into the Polo Grounds against Henry Armstrong. Armstrong was one of the greatest ever of the smaller men, and once he held the featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight titles at the same time. He was still the welterweight champion, and going in they had him 9-5 over Lew. If they had known that Lew had been drinking until four o'clock every morning, Armstrong would have been 90-1, with no takers.
Lew was down seven times in the six rounds. Arthur Donovan was the referee, and at the end of the sixth he took a look at Lew gasping in his corner, and he walked out to the center of the ring and he threw his hands out, palms down.
"How'm I doin'?" Lew kept asking in the dressing room. "What round did I get him in?"
"You didn't," Hymie Caplan, who managed him, said.
"You're crazy," Lew said, his eyes firing up. "I wasn't knocked out. I wasn't hurt."
"Donovan stopped it," Hymie said.
"You mean I couldn't get up?" Lew said, and then he started to ramble. "Get me another fight. Get me another shot at him. Say, listen. Where am I?"
Two months later he fought Bob Montgomery in Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Montgomery was enough of a fighter so that, four years later, he would win the lightweight championship, but this one was over-the-weight, and Lew's title was not on the line. The fight was postponed once when one of Lew's sisters called him and told him that their mother was dying in Stillwater. Lew was sitting there in the bedroom and looking at his mother, who was unable to recognize anyone by then, when he got a phone call telling him that if he didn't come back and fight he would be fined and suspended.
Lew had a new convertible, with less than 3,000 miles on it, and he and Eddie Carroll, a welterweight, started back. They took turns driving around the clock, and in Sparta, Tennessee, Lew fell asleep in the back seat when they went off the side of a mountain. The car rolled down the slope and wedged against a tree and Lew was thrown out.
"When I come to," he was telling me, sitting in that canteen in Benning and drinking that iced tea, "Eddie was pinned
behind the motor and he was bleedin' and moanin'. There was this little old Brownie camera in the car, and I grabbed that and he was moanin' and I said to him, 'Wait a minute, you sonofabitch. Hold still. This'll make a hell of a picture."
"But there was something wrong with the camera," Lew said, and this was Lew Jenkins. "The camera wouldn't work, but wouldn't that make a hell of a picture?"
"Yes," I said. "It would."
Lew had a cut on the top of his head and a cut on one knee and there was something wrong with his hip. The next day he took a used-car dealer out to look at the car.
"Ain't that a wreck?" Lew said.
"It sure is," the other said. "I'll give you two-fifty for it."
"Make it three hundred," Lew said, "and you can have the tree, too."
When Lew got to Philadelphia he ached all over, so he reasoned that there was no sense in trying to train. He and Willie had a suite in a good hotel where there was one of those business men's gyms, and Lew was supposed to work out in the gym. He tried to go two rounds, but he couldn't, and Willie told me later that he thought that Herman Taylor, who was promoting the fight, was going out of his mind.
"He's a disgrace," he kept saying to Willie.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 39