True Confessions

by John Gregory Dunne

“You always were a fucking petunia, Tom.”

  “How’s it going, Polo?”

  “Good, Tom, good.” He motioned toward the crap game. “I got the game. I hear things, I get a little down now and then.”

  “Who’s going in the water tonight, Polo?”

  “Anyone goes, it’s the negrito in the semi.” Polo looked at Corinne. She smiled at him tentatively. Tom Spellacy made no effort to introduce them. “You want a ticket? Give you two for a dollar. They’re two-fifty each at the box office.”

  “Swell, Polo,” Tom Spellacy said. He gave him a dollar and took the two tickets. Polo limped off toward the crap game.

  “He’s scalping for less than they cost,” Corinne said.

  “To last week’s fight,” Tom Spellacy said. He tore up the tickets. “A big night, he gets away with it.” He shrugged. “Other nights, his friends help him out.”

  They walked into the auditorium. It smelled of piss and liniment. The walls of the arena were covered with faded tinted photographs of old-time strongmen and wrestlers and fighters and announcers.

  “Then he’s a friend of yours,” Corinne said.

  “In a way,” Tom Spellacy said. “He took me out in the fourth round one night at Legion Stadium in El Monte.” They stopped in front of a tinted photograph of a welterweight skipping rope in trunks and a tank shirt. The identification marker said, “The Ever Popular Enrique ‘Polo’ Barbera.” There was no scar tissue over his eyes. “He didn’t even work up a sweat.”

  They made their way through the jostling crowd. Their seats were at ringside, on the aisle in the second row. On the other side of the ring, George Brent was signing autographs.

  “I thought sure he was going to get the shot in the ball park, Polo, the night he beat that colored guy here. The one it was like punching fog, trying to hit him. Mercury. Mercury Johnson. He punched his ticket, Polo. He was a great fighter that night.”

  Corinne said, “What happened, he didn’t get it?”

  “He was supposed to go in the water, it turns out. There was a lot of money riding on it. He just got carried away, Polo. And a lot of people got burned.”

  “And?”

  “They broke his knees with a baseball bat.” George Brent was wearing a camel’s hair blazer and a white shirt and a yellow ascot. He wondered if he could ever dress that way. “You’ve got to wait your turn. He should’ve known that, Polo.”

  Corinne sucked in her breath. “I’m glad you’re out of that,” she said.

  “You’re seven-seven-and-two after sixteen fights, you don’t have much choice, you still got your brains left.” He ordered two beers from a vendor and handed one to Corinne. “You don’t get a main event in Yankee Stadium with seven-seven-and-two.”

  The fighters in the first four-round preliminary were shuffling down the aisle toward the ring. The ropes parted. They scuffed their feet in the resin. Bantamweights. Romero and Napoles. Each seemed lost in his robe. The gloves dwarfed their caved-in chests. They met in the center of the ring. The referee gave his instructions in English, then in Spanish. Romero had a tattoo of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on his right arm. Napoles had acne. The pimpled whiteheads spread over his back. Each fighter crossed himself in his corner.

  The bell rang.

  He remembered his first fight. A four-rounder at Ocean Park. He got twenty-five dollars and a pasting from Jackie Ahearne. He knocked out Jackie two years later in San Bernardino when the syphilis was eating away at his brain. The truth of the matter was he couldn’t fight worth a shit. He was always the first to say it. It made it a little easier. He never laid it on his bad hands. He just said, I couldn’t fight worth a shit, and let it go at that. It was his cousin Taps Keogh who put him in the ring. And his mother. He had never told anyone that. Taps had a grocery store picked out. The two of us could knock it over easy, Taps said. No job, no money, why not. He had always wanted to tell the old lady that God had intervened. In the person of the old lady herself. Nutty as a fruitcake ever since the old man went to sleep on the trolley tracks. It was Holy Thursday and like always she climbed up the stairs on her knees, saying a rosary every step. Except this year she fell and broke her hip. He had to take her to the hospital. Taps went alone. The beat cop caught him in the cellar. They sent him away for two years. He had to do something after Taps went away, so he went in against Jackie Ahearne. No job, no money, the old man dead, the old lady crazy and Des in the sem. He would’ve murdered Des, Jackie Ahearne, even with the syph.

  There were no knockdowns in the first preliminary. When the four rounds were over, he put his arm around Corinne. “Who’d you pick?”

  The ring announcer was collecting the judges’ cards.

  “The Sacred Heart,” she said.

  “No, it’s Pimples easy.”

  The boy with acne was squeezing a whitehead. The announcer lifted his arm.

  “Another beer?”

  “I’d love one.”

  “I like the way you lick the foam.”

  She stuck her tongue in his ear. The featherweight champion of Yucatan was climbing into the ring. A long wait. Then the two-fisted slugger from Bakersfield was announced. The two-fisted slugger from Bakersfield was wearing a robe lettered The Modesto Kid. The robe made Tom Spellacy smile. The Modesto Kid must have backed out. He ran over the possibilities. Knife fight. Drug overdose. Something like that. The Modesto Kid wouldn’t miss a paynight for a cold. Or a broken arm, if he could get away with it. Leave it to Marge. She could always find a replacement. Marge Madragon was the matchmaker at the Figueroa. Large Marge. A 257-pound lesbian. She was too fat to drive, which was why he always took her parking place. Her friend Skinny Minny Esposito had failed her driving test fourteen times. Minny was nervous. Minny was also the bookkeeper at the Figueroa. They always took cabs, Marge and Minny.

  The replacement from Bakersfield went down thirty seconds into the first round. He was up at the count of eight, legs wobbly.

  “He looks like he’s going to die,” Corinne said. “He can hardly move. He must be forty years old.”

  The replacement from Bakersfield began bleeding from a cut over his right eye. He tried to hold on in the corner directly above them. A left and a right splattered blood over the spectators at ringside. The crowd was howling for more. The bell rang and the cut fighter slumped on his stool. Blood spurted from the gash above his eye.

  “Why didn’t he go down?” Corinne asked.

  “He wants his hundred, he’s got to go at least three,” Tom Spellacy said. “She drives a hard bargain, Marge.”

  “She must like the sight of blood.”

  “That’s why she cuts the ring.” Corinne stared at him for explanation. “It’s only eighteen-by-eighteen here. It’s twenty-by-twenty normally. She doesn’t like to see anybody running from anybody, Marge. She’d put them in a telephone booth, she could.”

  Corinne clutched his arm through the next two rounds. The replacement from Bakersfield was systematically pounded, but he refused to go down. The beer brightened Corinne’s eyes. After every sip, Tom Spellacy erased her foam mustache with his finger.

  Twelve seconds into the fourth round, the replacement from Bakersfield was counted out. The Modesto Kid’s robe was draped around his shoulders and he danced around the ring as if he had won.

  “HI guess he’ll get his hundred now,” Corinne said.

  “You’re learning,” Tom Spellacy said. He glanced around the arena. Marge Madragon waved at him from her box in the mezzanine. He waved back. It was Marge who gave him his first job after he quit. Corinne looked at him, then at Marge. At her gym downtown. Stretching people. On a rack. He smiled at the astonished look on Corinne’s face. Ten dollars a shot. Four to him, six to Marge. Mainly shorties an inch or two shy of the five-five regulation height required by the police and fire departments. A belt around the ankles, another under the armpits, then crank away until he thought something would break inside. The stretch only lasted an hour. If there was a long line for the department phy
sical, they had to come back the next day and get pulled apart all over again.

  “Why did they do it?” Corinne said.

  “It was the Depression, Corinne. These guys were pushing pencils on street corners. This was a steady job with a pension at the end of it.”

  “It’s a wonder no one ever died of internal bleeding.”

  “Marge always said with all the guys I helped get into the department, I was a cinch to beat the sneezer, anyone checked out.”

  He felt someone tap him on the shoulder. Minny Esposito knelt in the aisle. She was stick thin. There was a pencil stuck in the raggedy bun of her hair. She looked away when he turned around. Minny never looked directly at anyone. “Marge wants to see you.”

  He looked up. Marge Madragon was beckoning him to the mezzanine. The fighters were being introduced. He shook his head.

  “Go on, Tom,” Corinne said. “I’ll be all right. I’m enjoying myself.”

  Marge Madragon’s box was in the first two rows overlooking the ring. The seats in the first row had been removed for a wooden table on which was an adding machine, a pair of binoculars, a carton of Hershey bars, a box of tacos and a bucket of gua-camole. Marge’s seat in the second row had been specially molded to fit her huge frame. She motioned Tom Spellacy down next to her, peeled back the wrapping of a candy bar and dipped it into the guacamole.

  The two fighters in the ring were feeling each other out.

  “Polo said the colored one’s going in the tank,” Tom Spellacy said.

  “Polo should keep his fucking mouth shut, he knows what’s good for him,” Marge Madragon said. “I give him the game in the lot, I can take it away from him, I want.”

  “Marge can take it away from him, she wants,” Minny Esposito said. Tom Spellacy looked at her quickly, but she was too fast for him. She had already turned away before their eyes could meet. She busied herself with the adding machine.

  “It’s a gold mine, that game,” Marge Madragon said. “I told him I wanted a piece of it. He told me to go fuck myself.”

  “He told Marge to go fuck herself,” Minny Esposito said.

  “He told me he’d fuck Minny before he gave me a piece of the game,” Marge Madragon said.

  “He told Marge he’d fuck me before he gave her a piece,” Minny Esposito said.

  “Shut up, Minny,” Marge Madragon said.

  The Negro fighter below was backpedaling fast.

  “The ropes weren’t there, he’d be on his way to Tijuana,” Tom Spellacy said. He looked down at Corinne, chin in her hands, intently watching the action. Marge Madragon was also staring down at Corinne. The thought of Corinne imprisoned between Marge’s barge-like thighs made him wince.

  “What happened to the Modesto Kid?” he said suddenly, trying to draw Marge away from Corinne.

  Her eyes remained fastened on Corinne. “Cut last night at the Casa Mazatlán.”

  “You kept his robe.”

  She looked at him. “He’s got no use for it. DOA at County General.”

  Tom Spellacy shrugged. “That was some replacement you got.”

  “The bartender at Casa Mazatlan.”

  He laughed. The bell ended the first round. Minny leaned over the railing and shouted, “Hit him with a coconut.”

  “Shut up, Minny,” Marge Madragon said. “Fucking bartender wanted new gloves. A record of 1-13-1 and he wanted new gloves. Main eventers get new gloves, I tell him, not preliminary boys. He beat a main eventer once, he says. Vinny Avila. I say, You beat him in the parking lot at the Casa Mazatlán. And you hit him with a hammer. And he says Vinny had the hammer, he had a tire iron. So I give him the new gloves.”

  “You’re all heart, Marge.”

  “Tom says you’re all heart, Marge,” Minny Esposito said.

  Marge Madragon picked up her binoculars and surveyed the house. The second round was beginning in the ring below. Someone shouted, “Hit him, you bum, you got the wind with you.” Tom Spellacy knew the fix was in, but still he was absorbed. In his mind, he picked off punches, looked for openings. He wished he had been able to fight better. He could taste the rubber mouthpiece, feel the salve rubbed into the cut above his eye, the balls of cotton pushed into his nose to plug the bleeding, taste the globs of bloody mucus leaking into his throat from the nosebleeds.

  “You shouldn’t’ve done that, Tom,” Marge Madragon said. Her eyes were still glued to the binoculars. She seemed to be focusing on a refreshment stand across the arena.

  Her voice startled him. “What are you talking about?”

  The crowd suddenly roared. The Negro was on his back on the canvas. The referee was counting.

  “I could hear the splash up here,” Minny Esposito said.

  The Negro was on his knee, then on his feet. The referee wiped his gloves. The fighters began moving around the ring. He was no longer watching. Marge Madragon avoided his eyes. He knew there was a reason that she wanted to see him. He had a feeling what it was. At least it would get her mind off going down on Corinne.

  “You shouldn’t fuck around with Jack, Tom. You embarrassed him with your brother. You shouldn’t’ve done that. He did you a big favor once.”

  He wondered how many other people knew that Jack Amsterdam had paid someone off so that he wouldn’t be indicted. Brenda. Marge. He did not really want to know who else. Mary Margaret was the only one he was certain didn’t know. He could have diagramed it for her and she still wouldn’t have understood it. May Dalton’s uncle Slats Shugrue is in the bag business, she would say. At the A&P. A grand bagman he is, May tells me. A regular breadwinner.

  Corinne. He did not want to think about that. Better she knew that Mary Margaret was coming home than that he used to work for Jack.

  “This your idea, Marge, or his?” He knew that Jack Amsterdam held the mortgage on the Figueroa.

  “He deals with important people now, Tom,” Marge Madragon said.

  “He has a tuxedo,” Minny Esposito said.

  The crowd was on its feet. The Negro was curled on his side. The referee picked up the count. Eight. Nine. Ten.

  “He own that coon?” Tom Spellacy said.

  “Sixty percent,” Minny Esposito said.

  “Shut up, Minny,” Marge Madragon said.

  “Him and his tuxedo and his important people, he still tells some jigaboo to take a dive,” Tom Spellacy said.

  “He’s got too much to lose now, Tom. Don’t cross him.”

  “Tell him to go fuck himself, Marge.”

  “He can be dangerous, Tom.”

  For an instant the thought crossed his mind that there had to be something else Jack Amsterdam must be worried about. Not just an altercation at lunch. He could not think what it was. Something that would smear shit on his tuxedo.

  “Ask Polo,” Marge Madragon said.

  “So Jack was responsible for his legs being broken,” Tom Spellacy said.

  Marge Madragon unwrapped another Hershey bar. She did not reply.

  “One thing I always wondered, Marge,” Tom Spellacy said finally. “You do it to Minny or she do it to you?”

  The crap game was still going on in the parking lot when they left the arena. Polo Barbera was nowhere to be seen.

  ’The white one, got knocked out, the heavyweight, I liked him best,” Corinne said hesitantly.

  Tom Spellacy kept walking and did not reply. He got into the Plymouth and started the engine and waited until she got into the other side. Even before her door was shut he gunned the Plymouth out into the traffic. He did not look at her nor did he speak.

  Two blocks up Figueroa, Corinne said, “Let’s get something to eat.”

  Tom Spellacy scratched a match lit with his thumbnail and put it to the cigarette in his mouth. He exhaled a stream of smoke but said nothing.

  Corinne stared out the car window for a moment, then tried again. “We could go to the Trocadero.”

  “We could go to the Cotton Club, too,” Tom Spellacy said. “If I stuck up a gas station along the way, pay
the cover charge.”

  “The Windsor, then.”

  “Check my gun, see if it’s loaded, so when I say, ‘Stick ‘em up,’ they know I mean business.”

  Corinne leaned her back against the car door so that she was facing him. “Look, Tom, what happened back there.”

  “Nothing happened back there.”

  “Okay, have it your way. Nothing happened back there. So let’s have some fun. Let’s go to the Troc. We can afford it. We’ve got two incomes.”

  He braked to a halt in the middle of the block. Cars screeched to a stop behind them and then horns began to scream. Tom Spellacy turned and stared at her, as if oblivious to the jam he was causing. “Next thing you’re going to tell me is two can live cheaper than one.”

  She blurted the words out, so softly that the car horns almost drowned her out.

  “Next thing I’m going to tell you is I’m pregnant, I think.”

  Twelve

  He took it better than she expected. His eyes flickered for a moment and his hands tightened on the steering wheel, but beyond that nothing. She had been waiting for the moment to tell him for three days, but now she wished she could take the words back and lock them in a box along with all her other devils.

  The car drifted out toward the center divider. She lifted her hands to ward off the blinding headlights of the oncoming cars, and for an instant, she thought he was trying to kill them both. A horn screeched and he shouted, “Go fuck yourself!” and then he eased back into the center of his lane. He drove out Sixth and then crossed over to Melrose and it wasn’t until he stopped at a red light at Highland that he spoke.

  “You’re sure.” It was a statement, flat and unemotional. He tapped his fingers on the wheel waiting for the light to change.

  “Pretty sure.” She forced herself to look squarely at him. “Very sure. The rabbit died.”

  The light changed and he turned right and headed toward Fountain. She couldn’t tell him it was a matter of self-preservation. She worried, but then she always worried. She was thirty-four years old and a two-time loser. He had called her that one night when she tried to ask him about Mary Margaret. “For a two-time loser,” he had said, “you give out an awful lot of advice about other people’s marriages.” He had tried to laugh it off, but sometimes when he was in bed with her, he would caress her and say, “My little two-time loser.” It was Tom’s way of keeping her at arm’s length, she knew that. And didn’t care. That was what she was, there was no getting around it. Not that she wanted to try marriage a third time. But she didn’t want to lose Tom either. The question she did not wish to consider was whether it was out of love or fear of being alone.