“Sure,” I said.
“But I came back. And boy did I get murdered. But I have no regrets. What’s resentment? What for?”
“I think that’s wise,” I said.
“You understand, sure. Maybe you can understand something else. Maybe it’s wrong, but you know, when that happened to your mother with that dessert, remember?”
“Yes.”
“When that happened with that dessert, I took care of everything, you know? If it hadn’t of been for me, well you know what I’m talking about. Old Sterling there, he wasn’t much help. But you know, when I was there with your mother, trying to help her face, showing the training I went through, it did cross my mind, maybe there’s such a thing as retribution.”
“I have to go out,” I said.
“Sure. Permission granted. You want the keys?”
He reached into his pocket and brought out the keys, but he didn’t give them to me. This was a way he had of prolonging a conversation. He would keep something that I needed so he could go on talking. I held out my hand for the keys but he stepped back a pace.
“I’ve fought back,” he said, “but sometimes it gets to me and I have to fight it. Do you ever have hallucinations?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ve had hallucinations. I tell you, I used to be a great guy for the morning. Morning was the best time. I’d jump out of the sack and hit the deck ready to go fifteen rounds. Now I wake up about four and just lie there. It’s pretty rough. I dread getting up sometimes. And then these hallucinations come into my room. I’ll hear a noise outside the window. Or I feel a hand on my shoulder. Men and women standing around the bed. They want to get at me. I keep the six-gun under the bed and sometimes I pick it up and wave it at them and they go away.”
“You don’t want to fire it. You want to be careful, Dad.”
“No, no, I don’t fire it. And I know they’re hallucinations. But I need something to threaten them. They usually go away when I wave the gun. I know they’re hallucinations but I have to get rid of them somehow. Puts me in a sweat. If they don’t go away they start closing in on me. Did you ever hear me screaming in the morning?”
“No.”
“Good. You’re a sound sleeper, just like I was. I slept through an earthquake when everybody thought it was the end of the world. But not any more. I’ve got to fight this thing. I know you want to shove off. You want the keys?”
“Thanks.”
“Here.”
I tore out of the driveway. I drove to Linda’s house but Marty’s car was parked outside. I drove to Jerry’s but nobody was home. I drove up into the hills past parked couples and found a lonely spot to look at the city.
Avenues of creeping headlights, strings of streetlamps, lighted houses sheltering people. All those lives, I knew nothing of them. How many of those streets had I driven, my father before me, my mother and father before me, passing unnoticed and not noticing? What if I had been born into that house or that, my father would play the violin, and would my mother sew? But he was pensioned off and she had diabetes. My father was waiting up for me. Fallen star my father, hole in the firmament, no more than a heavenly element does he know why he has fallen, meteor innocent. His telephone silent, his private number up. Maybe I could drive to San Diego and back before morning. I had two dollars. I could have breakfast at a truck stop, mingle with real people. I started off hyped up, future impatient, but by the time I got to Hermosa Beach I was tired and bored, and I turned around and went home.
We embarked on an intensive program of physical fitness. I needed to build up my strength for college, my father said, and for a man who had once appeared semi-nude on the cover of Bernarr McFadden’s Physical Culture magazine, he was out of shape. He had me feel his bicep, which was so large that I could not join the fingers of both my hands around it, and punch him in the stomach, which though bulging was invulnerable. He worried that I had become stooped, round-shouldered, and crook-backed, and that I would not be capable of standing at attention properly, when the time came for me to fulfill my obligation to my country. He told me that fame and fortune were nothing, if you hadn’t your health.
I thought I would go along. I liked the idea of being strong, and maybe we could share something, but it was punishment. He established a daily routine: up at six, a cold shower to get the circulation going, off to the Beverly Hills Club. He had been a member of this place since 1928, though he had not visited it since the war, and he was pleased that some of the locker and steam room attendants remembered him. When they asked where he had been all these years, my father said that he was not at liberty to divulge the full nature of his activities, but that he had been doing some work for the Government, including a mission to the Far East, and that we were in danger of going soft, as Americans. When millions of Chinese and other Asian peoples were subsisting on a bowl of rice a week, we had steak and potatoes every night. But as long as there were a few fellows around willing to stay up late and watch out for the rest, we might get by, if we woke up and got off our duffs. His father had taught him to live in the present. You couldn’t look back, and you couldn’t go back on life. After all the wars he had come back from, things were looking pretty downhill and shady, which was an old cowboy saying.
This was his son, Salty. Salty was still a lightweight, but he would fill out soon.
“We’re going to make a champ out of him, isn’t that right, Salty?”
I thought the prospect of my becoming so much as a ranked contender unlikely. I asked were we to swim that morning.
“We’ll leave that to Vic here,” my father said. “Vic’s the best in the business. Vic’s trained a lot of champions.”
Vic was the most ancient of the attendants. He had cauliflower ears, a damaged nose, and white hair all over his body. He never spoke, and I do not know whether he was capable of speech, but he emitted a high laugh, a sort of giggle, and my father understood him perfectly.
We began by skipping rope, then, at a signal from Vic, some work on the heavy bag, then the light bag. Of these I enjoyed most the rope skipping, which I was able to manage with some grace. But the heavy bag was too heavy for me to make any impression on it, and the light bag was too light for me to keep up with it, as it whacked back and forth in a blur, popping me in the face. Nor was I much good at the sparring. For this we wore twelve-ounce gloves, and after a minute I found it difficult to keep my hands above my waist. My father assured me that as I was left-handed by nature, I would have a substantial advantage fighting out of a right-hand stance: the strength of my left jab would be such a shock to my opponent that he would never recover from it, and I could finish him off with my right. Yet my jab proved only fair, and as I had no strength at all in my right arm, my attack had neither surprise nor reserve power to it, and I saw very early that my climb to the championship would be a long one.
The main business complete, we took to the swimming pool. While my father slipped easily up and down, using a stroke he said he had taught Johnny Weissmuller, keeping his head at all times above the surface, his great arms drawing him along, I spent most of my time underwater, saying I was practicing my breathing, in truth trying to stave off collapse. Ahead lay the steam room, which for me had all the attractions of the rack or the gibbet: shortness of breath and such instruction in the sadness of life’s course as the sight of scars, boils, and shriveled parts can provide. My father enjoyed a steam. It was necessary, he said, to prevent tightening of the muscles. We sat there sweating together.
A couple of weeks of this routine and I noticed some improvement in my stamina. I never landed a punch, but I was able to keep my hands up till the bell. My father never threw punches at me but backing away, bobbing and weaving, let me flail, as he shouted hands up, snap that jab, now the right, one two, that’s it, you’re telegraphing your punches, try the body, your head is open, on your toes. I took some pride in my left hook, though his right was always there to catch it. I would jab two or three times, the
n dip and follow a jab with the hook, my weight on my left foot, pushing off from the right foot. Sometimes my hook would land with enough force to push his glove into his face or ear. That was as close as I came to doing any damage. We talked boxing all the time, and we took in the fights at the Olympic and the Hollywood Legion Stadium. My father told me of the great fights he had seen and had been in, how a fellow hired to stage a fight with him in a picture had got smart and landed a couple, and my father had decked him in seconds with a fast combination. They printed it, and he had a lot of laughs later when people asked why the fight looked so real. I found myself dreaming of the ring. The hook would land and my father would go down.
But at school each morning I was so exhausted that I confused King Cheops with Queen Hatshepsut, I could scarcely parse a sentence, and the baseball coach inquired whether I had taken to self-abuse or was staying out all night with girls. I wanted to protest to my father that I was not yet half the man he thought I was, but as I flagged, he flourished. In a couple of months he would bring in Marshall Marshall, who was a pretty fair heavyweight, and give him the surprise of his life, because a quick little man could beat a slow big man. Look what happened to Primo Camera.
One morning he woke me half an hour earlier than usual. It wasn’t the hallucinations. Our workouts had routed them.
“Rise and shine, Salty. I’ve got something special for you. Wash the old face and brush the old hair, and don’t forget to dry between your toes. Keeps away the jungle rot.”
When I had done these things, he sat me down, brought me a cup of java, and told me to shut my eyes. Into my hands he placed a package wrapped in saved string and torn paper bags, inscribed in letters that had been gone over several times in pencil and in ink, “To My Son, Salty, Always a Champion in my Book, From His Dad, Papa-san.” Inside was a pair of boxing trunks, shiny white, with black stripes down the sides. I thanked him, and he said I could wear them this morning if I liked, because a champion ought to dress like a champion. I closed myself in the bathroom and put them on over a jockstrap he had given me for Christmas. They were much too large. The elastic waistband hardly touched me, and they smelled of mothballs. I emerged, holding up the trunks with both hands, and my father said that they looked terrific. Now I could whip anybody. I reminded him of himself when he had been light-heavyweight champ of the Pacific Fleet during the twilight hours of World War I. He had been sixteen then. He had lied about his age because he had wanted to see the world. I probably hadn’t realized it, but these trunks I had on had been his own, and now he wanted me to have them. No, not the ones he had had in the Navy, they were long gone. These had been given to him in 1930 by Blackie O’Donough, a scrappy middleweight from San Francisco, who wrote poetry and ran a café in Ferndale which we had to visit sometime.
“I wore them in a fight picture I made that year, Northside-Southside. I played a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. You know the story. I turn down a fix and beat the bejesus out of a punk backed by the Syndicate. You can wear the trunks this morning, Salty, at the Club. Wait till Vic sees you.”
When I suggested that they would not stay up, he said I could wear them with a belt, no one would notice. I said that I could not wear them, much as I appreciated the gift. I would never fit into them. I was smaller than he was and I always would be smaller. There was another thing. I could not go on with the morning routine. It was killing me.
He was hurt. He looked like he had been hit by Dempsey. He couldn’t understand me. He wanted me to avoid some of the mistakes he had made. He wanted me to be happy. Whatever I wanted.
“It’s your life, Salty.”
Then he wanted to know whether I still had Preacher Roe’s mitt. Did I remember the day Chuck Connors gave it to me? That had been a hell of a day.
“Sure I still have it,” I said. “I use it every day. I keep it at school.”
“That was a great day,” he said. “I was real proud of you. I could see that Chuck Connors could recognize a talent. You keep it oiled up, don’t you?”
“Sure I do.”
“I think I have a can of neatsfoot oil some place,” he said, “if you need it. You want to take good care of a thing like that. We had some great times, didn’t we? I guess you could say I was a pretty fair father, couldn’t you?”
“You sure could,” I said.
He continued to visit the Club on his own. He saw Ford occasionally, and Marshall Marshall. With the good weather he was at the beach, and once a week he had lunch with his confessor. I suspect they talked about me, because I had begun to miss mass, and I never went to confession any more. The priests had nothing to tell me, and I did not wish to reveal to them the lusts and devious schemes of one who felt himself a prisoner. I was trapped in a fantasy dungeon, fed memories and lies. My jailer had forgotten what I was in for but he wanted to keep me there for company, and he liked to try experiments on me, dress me in funny clothes, see what I could take. Thinking over the boxing, I compared myself to the Jews the Germans froze half to death to see if they could fuck themselves to life again. There was also the example of Serbo-Croatian children raised in boxes so they would emerge suitably crooked, worth tossing pennies at. If I were sprung, he would be out of business for good. But there was nobody out there to spring me. Certainly I could not count on my sot of a mother. She acted only for a price, and I had nothing to pay her. I could count on myself. I was getting ready to make my break. I would try to get away unnoticed.
18
LOSS
THERE GREW up between us long silences, when I would read and he would stare at the wall or thumb through his correspondence and say that it was a sign of real friendship when two fellows didn’t feel they had to say anything to each other. Or we would have words about how often I was going out and when I was coming home. “It’s your life” became his standard dictum, as though he regretted I was shooting horse but did not wish to interfere. I knew he wanted to rescue me, to be my hero, to appear at the police station at four in the morning and get me released in his custody, to payoff some father threatening a paternity suit, but he was frustrated, I stayed out of trouble, there was less and less he could do for me, except when I caught the flu. He intercepted all incoming calls, reported my temperature, and said that I was too weak to come to the phone. He had no idea when I would recover, it might take weeks. I got well as quickly as possible.
Then came the telegram from Donna Esmeralda Cordova announcing my mother’s death. The official cause was heart. I imagined that she had collapsed among the shrimp shells on the floor of a bar in Madrid, but Donna Esmeralda simply reported a collapse, and we never learned more. Mother had left her securities to Donna Esmeralda, whose husband the duke had fallen on hard times, and her body to science. My father pleaded with the American consul over the telephone, but it was too late, she had already been carved up. How often he must have wished her dead! Now that wish too had been taken away. He had purchased a family plot. He had planned to lie with her there forever; I could be tossed in later; he would get us both, eventually. All he could do now was to arrange a mass for the repose of her soul.
Leave her alone, I thought, leave her be, leave her in pieces, you are never going to put her back together, she has been gone for years. In death she appeared to me as she had not for so long, scented, smiling, East Seventies elegant. We were planning another party. We were choosing her husband. I was staying home from school to be with her one day, and we were driving out to Casa Fiesta, looking at it through binoculars from the road, wondering what the new owners were like, and we were driving on, saying it was a new life now, the two of us, our Malibu picnic, seashore sandwiches, secret love bonds laughter-promised. She did make me feel grown up. I did watch the men wanting her. I had come to wish her dead, that was something I would not escape, I was another imperfect man wanting to kill her, but she had fooled us all, she had just left. Nothing now to want from her or for her. Dead mother, drunk mother, dead mother, wrecked mother, dead mother, poor mother.<
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“We’ll pray for her,” my father said. “These things can do a lot of good. You never can tell.”
“I’m not going,” I said.
“This is no time,” he said. “She was still a young woman. God will take that into account. We owe her to make every effort.”
I felt lowed her nothing, or that I had nothing to owe her but reproaches tangled in shames tangled in regrets, and I wasn’t believing in God any more anyway, but looking at him, his worry-beaten hulk, I knew that it was no time for an adolescent-rejection-confrontation scene. He needed the mass and me with him, to make sense of these lives and this death. So what if I didn’t believe? So what if the mass was a little victory for him over her, over me? To say no to him now would be a kick square in his battered old balls. My university tuition was coming due. I would watch my step.
Dad told the priest about how Mother had lain in state in the Spanish cathedral and about the condolences he had received from Generalissimo Franco. An announcement was placed in the parish bulletin, but there were only the two of us and the usual eight o’clock weekday mass old women. We knelt front row center, stayed kneeling or standing throughout. My father must have thought she was hanging onto purgatory by her fingernails and that if we sat down, she would plunge forever. He forbore even to rest his ass against the pew’s edge, but I took that much risk. I thought of her and all her lovers, wondered which of them were loves, knew that none of them had matched the mad devotion of the lover kneeling next to me, knew that I had not, willed to love her more now, put my head down on my arms hoping that this weight I felt on me, this emptiness I felt in me, meant that I loved her.
“Trust in God, son, trust in God,” my father whispered to me. “Without faith in this life you got nothing.”
A Way of Life, Like Any Other Page 14