"What money?" he said.
"All the money he made," I said. "They can't find it, and they think he may have buried it somewhere."
"There wasn't any money," he said.
He was leading me out of the elevator now, and through the lobby and out onto the street. He gave the doorman a wave, and started toward Second Avenue.
"What do you mean, there wasn't any money?" I said.
"Hey, Rock!" someone, passing us, said.
"Hey!" he said, turning and waving, and then to me, "The guy lost his money."
"He lost his money?" I said. "How do you know he lost his money?"
At the news stand near the corner he stopped and gave the dealer a quick hand shake.
"C'mon," he said to me. "We got to make this light."
We crossed the street, hurrying, and we started south on Second Avenue. He was walking with those quick strides, and at Fifty-fifth Street we turned west. Just before we reached the corner at Third Avenue, he opened the side door of P. J. Clarke's and led me in. P. J. Clarke's is an old saloon and restaurant that has been there for ninety years and looks it, and that, for the last fifteen or so, has attracted a mix of celebrities in politics, entertainment, and the haute monde, and those who want to be around them.
He led me to the small table just inside the door where his friend Phil Kennedy who, Graziano was to tell me, "sells telephones for Electronics, Inc.," was sitting, and he introduced us. Kennedy's jacket was hung over the back of his chair, and he had been making a list on a yellow pad in front of him on the red and white checked tablecloth.
"This used to be Frank Costello's table," Graziano said, as we sat down. "We get it every day. I want a beer. You want a drink?"
He waved to a waiter, shirt-sleeved and in a white apron, and he gave him the order.
"Back to Marciano," I said, and then to Phil Kennedy, "We were just talking about Rocky Marciano and . . ."
"Some fighter," Kennedy said. "I'd have liked to have seen him in there with Ali."
". . . and his family," I said, "can't find his money."
"He lost it," Graziano said.
"How do you know that?" I said.
"I was with him," he said. "Out on Long Island. A real estate deal. He signed for four hundred thousand, and the deal went bust. His name was on the paper, so it was his money."
"They don't know that in Brockton," I said.
"How can they know?" he said. "I mean they're good people up there, but what do they know about things like that? It's different around here than it is in Brockton. You know?"
"But he was so close with his money," I said.
"Yeah," he said. "Listen to this. I'm goin' to California, and when I walk through the plane to the first class, he's sittin' in the coach. The guy just retired. You know? So I say hello, and when I sit down in the first class I say to the stewardess, 'Rocky Marciano is back there.' She says, 'Rocky Marciano? He is?' So I tell the stewardess to tell the captain we got plenty of seats in the first class, and he sits next to me.
"Now we get off the plane, and I get my luggage. I say to him, 'Where's yours?' He says, 'I don't have none. I don't need luggage.' So we walk to get a cab, and I say to him, 'Where are you stayin'?' He says, 'I think I'll stay with you.' I said, 'Great!' I mean, it's good for me too.
"I'm stayin' at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the guy has just what he's wearin'. I got some nice knits, so now he's wearin' my shirts, and the guy was bigger than I was, so he stretched them so I couldn't wear them no more. He used my tooth brush."
"You're kidding," Kennedy said.
"So help me God," Graziano said, raising his hand. "Then I used to leave to go to work—I was doin' a show—and one day I come back and they call me from the desk. They say, 'You know, Mr. Graziano, your room is free here, but not the long distance phone calls. We have to pay the telephone company for those calls.' I said, 'What calls? I didn't make any long distance phone calls.' She said, 'Oh yes. There's calls to Brockton, Massachusetts, and Florida.' I said, 'Wait a minute. That's the other Rocky.' The guy must have made two hundred phone calls."
"That's almost unbelievable," Kennedy said.
"We'd make personal appearances together," Graziano said. "We'd be sittin' up there at some dinner, and he'd say to me, 'Ask if anybody's got a private plane.' He was a nervous guy. He wanted to get out. Go. Go. Half the time he didn't know where we were goin' next. It used to embarrass me, but I'd have to say, 'If anybody's got a private plane, Rocky Marciano and I want to go to our next appearance.' Then some guy would take us."
"And that's the way he went in the end," I said.
"Yeah," Graziano said. "Too friggin' bad. You want another drink."
"No, thanks," I said.
He had summoned the waiter, and he ordered another beer.
"You know," Kennedy said, nodding toward him, "this guy is very popular."
"I know," I said, "and I remember when he wasn't."
"Yeah, Bill knows me a long time," he said, "and you know somethin'? Jacqueline Kennedy was in here the other day, and she gave me three kisses and a hug. Here. Right here, in P. J. Clarke's."
"I've seen him," Kennedy said, laughing, "kiss Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Kennedy. He's very hugable."
"Yeah," Graziano said. "Everybody likes me. The black people, all over the country, for some stupid reason, like me."
"He went to Astoria one night," Kennedy said, "and he stood them on their heads. Five hundred drinking Irish cops. The Irish Archie Bunkers with badges."
"All Irish cops," Graziano said, "and I'm an Italian."
"And had your troubles with cops," I said.
"There was a collegiate poll," Kennedy said. "You know who was the most popular in the country? Ralph Nader, and this guy was sixth."
"Yeah," Graziano said. "I was never in San Antonio, Texas, in my life. I get off the plane and they throw a red friggin' blanket out for me to walk on. It just amazes me. I get in a 747 plane to go to California. The captains says, 'I'm fiyin' at such and such a speed, and we got Mr. Rocky Graziano aboard. Have a drink in honor of Mr. Rocky Graziano.' Yesterday I was sittin' down with the diplomat from Cuba, and I'm goin' there in three weeks. He invited me."
We talked for a while then, while he had two more beers, about fighters and fights we remember. When we were joined by a couple of others, and the conversation became provincial, revolving around their circle of acquaintances who are strangers to me, I got up and shook hands around the table and, when he stood up, with him.
"You got everything you want to know?" he said.
"Everything," I said.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"If there's anything else," he said, "call me at home, but call me before eight o'clock in the morning. After that I'm not there."
"I know," I said.
Out on Third Avenue sunlight bathed the now open street that, in the old days, was roofed and darkened by the El now long gone. The sidewalk was crowded with office workers, young clerical and junior executive types, in twos and threes, gesticulating as they talked and walked down their lunches, and by secretaries hurrying to get back.
At Fifty-third Street I was one block from the four-story, walk-up apartment house on the corner of Second Avenue, its exterior bricks painted a battleship gray, where my wife and I lived when I started to write sports after I came back from the war that day and my hand shook so that I had to quiet it before I could press the button in the entry. It was there that we used to battle the mice that came up the two floors from the market on the street level, and it was there that I tossed that night, so appalled by the animalism I had seen in the fighter as he had clubbed down Marty Servo whom he liked. It was there, too, that I brought all my troubles, as I tried to be somebody by being with those who were, and found that their aspirations and their problems became mine.
How many miles I had flown by now and how many miles I had driven to see those I had wanted to see again, I don't know. I had saved Rocky Graziano
for last, and I had seen them all now, and so, after all those miles, I didn't walk the last block. Are they still battling the mice? I don't know. My battle would be the same battle it has been for all the years, to try to put it all down—the way it looked and how they looked and what they said and how they said it-—and to try to get it as right as I could get it in this book.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 58